What can the life of one relatively ‘minor’ intellectual reveal about language, belonging and democracy in modern India? For historian Razak Khan, the answer begins with Syed Abid Husain (1896–1978), an Indian Muslim intellectual, educator and translator whose life connected Bhopal, Berlin and Delhi, and whose work moved across boundaries of language, religion, and nation.
Khan, a research fellow in global history at Free University-Berlin, was the featured speaker for the CSAS’ 2026 Kavita Datla Memorial Lecture. His lecture, “Minor Cosmopolitanisms: Islam, Urdu, and Secularism in Postcolonial India,” used Husain’s intellectual journey to reconsider whose lives and ideas become central to histories of modernity.
At the heart of Khan’s presentation was the idea of “minor cosmopolitanisms.” Rather than understanding cosmopolitanism primarily through European histories of travel, modernity and globalization, he asks what becomes visible when we begin with people and places conventionally considered peripheral. The ‘minor,’ for Khan, is not simply the opposite of the dominant. It describes what happens when ideas move, when people from the Global South encounter, translate and transform intellectual traditions that originated elsewhere. “It’s precisely through a translation of a European category by the minor figure that it acquires a new meaning,” Khan said.
Husain is that example. His intellectual life moved between German and Urdu languages, and Europe and South Asia geographically. His translation work brought in major threads of German thought and literature, including Kant and Goethe, into Urdu, placing a language too often understood through the frame of religious or national identity within the history of intellectual exchange.
Khan did not initially expect Husain to become such a substantial research project. What began with books given to him by an Urdu writer connected to Husain grew into a decade of research. He followed Husain through family papers and translations, his friendships with German and Jewish intellectuals, his work at Jamia, and his connections to international institutions and scholarly networks. “It started as a very minor case,” Khan said. “By the end of the book, which I’ve completed now, I realized that this very small story from Bhopal to Berlin is a very global history.”
That approach also created an intellectual bridge to Kavita Datla, the late University of Michigan historian whom the annual lecture commemorates. Datla’s scholarship challenged narrow associations between Urdu and a single religious or national identity, examining instead the language’s role in producing and circulating modern knowledge. Khan extended that inquiry through Husain’s movement between Urdu and German intellectual worlds.
Urdu’s encounters with European thought, Khan argued, did not simply make the language more European. Translators drew upon Arabic and Persian as well as Indic languages and English to create vocabularies capable of expressing new philosophical and scientific ideas. “In that sense, Urdu … is a much more cosmopolitan language,” Khan said.
For Khan, recovering this history also opens a larger question: What does it mean to think from a minority position? Minority, as he uses it, is not simply a demographic category. It is a way of thinking about power, representation and the relationship between those at the center and those at the margins. Husain himself occupied several such positions: a Muslim intellectual in India, a Shia within a predominantly Sunni institutional environment, and a translator moving among linguistic and intellectual worlds. That history has a striking contemporary resonance.
Democracy, Khan argues, contains an inherent tension. It operates through majorities, yet its strength ultimately depends on the place it makes for minorities. “Although politically and structurally democracy is a majoritarian form,” Khan said, “its success, in fact, relies on the minority.” It is perhaps the clearest connection between the historical world Khan reconstructs and the present. The ‘minor,’ in his telling, is not peripheral to history. Sometimes it is precisely where a larger history comes into view.
