ABSTRACT
The chapter provides the background to understand modern Qur’an commentaries and hermeneutics in British India. It focuses on the earlier historiography of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu tafsīr tradition in South Asia. In addition, by making the works of Shāh Walī Allāh (d. 1762) as the central point to periodize this intellectual history, the reader is made familiar with the complex ideas of Qur’anic hermeneutics as they were evolving in the pre-modern and early modern periods in South Asian region. Through the study of how historians of tafsīr and translation of the Qur’an in South Asia have written a narrative of exegetical history, we develop a sense of varied intellectual currents that ultimately had a bearing on the ways Qur’anic hermeneutics evolved in British India after the Mutiny.
