Sir Sayyid’s public sphere: Urdu print and oratory in nineteenth century India
Sir Sayyid’s public sphere: Urdu print and oratory in nineteenth century India

Summary/Abstract: Many years ago Jürgen Habermas warned that the concept of a public sphere “cannot be abstracted from the unique developmental history” of Britain, France and Germany, especially since the eighteenth century; “nor can it be transferred, idealtypically generalized, to any number of historical situations that represent formally similar constellations”. He was careful to restrict his definition to a narrow “literary character of a public sphere constituted by private people putting reason to use”. In the market economy of early industrial capitalism, this realm of the public interposes itself between the bureaucratic state and the new domestic privacy of the nuclear family and claims autonomy in the formulation of cultural values and political goals for the society at large. Like Gramsci’s analysis of the role of intellectuals, ideology, and civil society in modern Italy, Habermas’s work was concerned with the content and social location of formal, discursive speech and writing in relation to dominating concepts of power and authority in particular times and places. Intended to undermine the authority of such utterances, both Habermas and Gramsci claimed that there is a real authority to undermine. And for Habermas, as opposed to Gramsci, there was more than a hint of nostalgia for the era when intellectuals counted for something, before the evil day when the culture industry and the capitalist welfare state absorbed the democratic potentiality inherent, however ambivalently, in the public sphere.

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