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Book reviews

Lanzillo, Amanda. Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India

Azeem Ahmed
Bibliographical reference

Lanzillo, Amanda. 2024. Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India. Oakland: University of California Press.

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  • 1 Amanda Lanzillo is a historian and an Assistant Professor in the Department of South Asian Language (...)
  • 2 They were known as the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh after 1902.

1In her first book, Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India, Amanda Lanzillo1 shows how Muslim artisans challenged and negotiated colonial capitalism and social hierarchies in urban North India. Lanzillo argues that Muslim artisans drew on the narratives of “laboring Islamic pasts” and “distinctively Muslim identities” to make sense of the changes brought about by the transition to a colonial economy since the mid-nineteenth century (p. 2). She achieves this through a creative reading of sources written by metalsmiths, stonemasons, tailors, boilermakers, carpenters, and press workers across the North-Western Provinces and Oudh2 as well as Punjab in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

2Pious Labor uses the previously unexplored Urdu language archives of technical manuals and community histories written by artisans. She reads them alongside colonial archives characterizing Muslim artisans as “less orthodox than their elite counterparts” (p. 5), being resistant to technological change (p. 80), and writings of elite Muslims who felt the need to “purify” the religious practices of the artisans (p. 5). Most of these artisan archives were discovered by Lanzillo in small regional public libraries, such as the Raza Library in Rampur and the Khuda Bakhsh Library in Patna, where they are often not adequately maintained or catalogued. These manuals and community histories typically range from six to 60 pages, printed by local publishers on inexpensive paper to keep the price low and make them accessible. Many of these texts were heavy on verse, expected to be read aloud, and memorized for circulation among the artisan communities with low literacy levels. Lanzillo reads them not just as a source of technical descriptions of trade but also for the introductory poems, marginal notes, and utilization of metaphor to contextualize their intended use among the artisans. She begins each chapter by introducing one of the texts analyzed, familiarizing the reader with the context of the trade discussed in the chapter.

3While the scholarship on Urdu print culture has primarily been dominated by elite understandings of culture, religion, theology, and modernity in colonial India (Dubrow 2018; Lelyveld 2009; Rahman 2015; Robb 2021; and Robinson 1993), Pious Labor centers on narratives by artisans. The book demonstrates that artisans participated in the rapidly growing print culture through reading, writing, and listening to manuals, community histories, and periodicals within and outside their workshops. In doing so, Pious Labor contributes to growing scholarship on non-ashrāf Muslim communities by scholars such as Papiya Ghosh (2009), Mohammad Sajjad (2014), Soheb Niazi (2024), Santosh Kumar Rai (2012), Ashish Koul (2017), and Michael O’Sullivan (2023), who have challenged elite-centric and homogenous narratives of Muslim identity in South Asia by foregrounding the contestations of social mobility, political assertions, and social hierarchies of the non-ashrāf castes.

4The book is divided into three parts, each comprised of two chapters and organized by trade. The first part examines how Muslim artisans in colonial India engaged with new technologies while asserting their religious and occupational traditions. The first chapter emphasizes the role of Muslim scribal and nonscribal workers in the lithographic print economy and shows how they negotiated technological and social changes in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries. Lanzillo brings together two seemingly unrelated events—the publication of Daftar-i khat̤t̤āt̤ (The Book of Scribes) in 1885 and the Lahore press strike of 1935—to contextualize the creation of class solidarity among Muslim scribal and nonscribal press workers, contrary to the attempt by Muslim press owners to foster religious solidarity. The second chapter examines how Muslim metalsmiths interacted with new industrial technologies, such as electroplating, by situating them within Islamic traditions of alchemy (kīmiyā) through the circulation of technical manuals. Lanzillo demonstrates that these manuals empowered artisans to claim status within industrial modernity, situating electroplating as part of a continuum of plating practices prevalent among artisan metalworkers in North India and alchemists in Islamic traditions.

5The second part analyzes the exchange of trade knowledge and traditions among artisans in the early twentieth century. In the third chapter, the author focuses on the contestations over what it meant to be a Muslim tailor in colonial North India between colonial ethnographers like William Crooke, who saw Muslim tailors as “insufficiently Muslim” (p. 78), and middle-class Muslim institutions and its teachers like Shabihunnisa, who rejected the centrality of male tailors (p. 84). Through an analysis of Risālah-yi Idrīsiyah (The Treatise of Idris), a community history written by a tailor (1909), she explains how tailors placed their trade at the center of an Islamic past and contemporary piety in order to contest how colonial and Muslim elites defined their work and religiosity. The fourth chapter focuses on the exchange of trade knowledge and religious traditions among migrant Muslim woodworkers and carpenters in the rapidly industrializing urban centers of Kanpur and Lahore. Based on a book titled Lakṛī kā kām sikhānewālī kitāb (The Educational Woodworking Book), published anonymously in 1910, Lanzillo demonstrates that migrant workers exchanged material practices and narratives about religiosity, contributing to the development of Muslim political identities and class-based solidarities in workshops and technical training schools.

6The third part examines how artisans negotiated technical trade when they were being pushed lower in the hierarchy of technical oversight, increasingly dominated by upper-caste Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, and Anglo-Indian technical intermediaries and engineers. The fifth chapter focuses on the relationship between the communities involved in boilermaking as well as the maintenance and use of steam engines. Through a manual on steam engines titled Kalīd-i ṣan’at (The Key to Industry), published in 1890, Lanzillo demonstrates that the alienation of Muslim artisans from technological oversight prompted them to emphasize labor solidarities by forming organizations and publishing periodicals. The sixth chapter focuses on how the stonemasons and master builders negotiated a conception of pious work with their princely patrons and technical intermediaries employed by these patrons. Based on a treatise on construction titled Tazkirah al-aiwān (Compendium of Buildings) written by a master builder and lead mason from Lucknow in 1875, Lanzillo shows how stonemasons diverged from Muslim princely elites’ conceptions of “religious architecture” (pp. 152-53) and asserted the pious nature of their work, where architecture was “rendered Islamic through the practice and piety of the workers” (p. 160) and not because of its association with Islam.

7Lanzillo uses the concept of “pious laborto show how artisans referred to their technical skills as a form of Islamic ethical practice. They understood their work as part of piety, which was informed by a wish to inscribe their occupations within Islamic history and thus claim their work as an Islamic practice. For these Muslim artisans, their work was inseparable from their religion. In a sense they did not just claim to be pious Muslims, but also claimed their work to be pious, emphasizing the physical labor involved in their work as a “distinguishing, pious practice” (p. 173). The author calls these claims about the piety of the work “artisan Islam.” Pious Labor concludes by demonstrating how artisanal Islam influenced the twentieth-century laboring class identities of Muslim artisans. The conception of artisan Islam is based on the worlds of male artisans involved in “masculine” trades (p. 15), and the experiences of women artisans who worked in these occupations are missing from the archives Lanzillo used. As she rightly notes, this absence is not incidental, but reflects a “purposeful masculinizing of trades” (p. 15) by male artisans, who increasingly faced challenges while asserting their religious and technical authority.

8While the discussion of piety and religiousness among the Muslim artisans is insightful, it could be inscribed within a broader tradition of islāh (reform) in South Asian Islam. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Islam in North India was practiced through various interpretations of maslaks (schools of thought), which included Deobandi (Metcalf 1982), Barelvi (Sanyal 1996), and Ahl-i-Hadith (Pearson 2008). By the 1920s, the Tablighi Jamaat was also active in parts of North India, focusing on “inculcating correct and devoted religious practice among Muslims” (Metcalf 1993). At the same time, Muslim caste organizations were involved in the process of islāh (reform) at the caste level, as the ongoing discourse in the Urdu public sphere opened up opportunities for social mobility by making genealogical claims (Niazi 2020). In this socioreligious context, when Lanzillo talks about piety, which of these interpretations is being referred to? While she provides a good account of the intellectual history of artisans through technical manuals and community histories, contextualizing the social history of these artisans’ lifeworlds would have further enriched the discourse on Islamic reforms within artisanal communities.

9Despite these limitations, Pious Labor brings together the study of South Asian Islam with histories of technology, placing lower-class (and usually lower-caste) Muslim artisans at the center of technological and religious change in colonial India. More importantly, it foregrounds the artisans’ voices and documents their contestation of the social hierarchy produced and cultivated by Muslim elites, specifically the upper caste ashrāf. It also points to a new direction for the study of South Asian artisanship by decentering weavers, who have dominated the category of “artisan” in contemporary South Asian historiography, and including other occupational, non-ashrāf castes in the category of artisans. This book should be of interest to anyone who wants to understand the history of South Asian Islam and technology from a non-elite perspective.

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Bibliography

Dubrow, Jennifer. 2018. Cosmopolitan Dreams: The Making of Modern Urdu Literary Culture in Colonial South Asia. Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press.

Ghosh, Papiya. 2009. Muhajirs and the Nation: Bihar in the 1940s. New Delhi: Routledge.

Koul, Ashish. 2017. “Making New Muslim Arains: Reform and Social Mobility in Colonial Punjab, 1890s-1910s.” South Asian History and Culture 8(1):1–18. doi: 10.1080/19472498.2016.1260348.

Lelyveld, David. 2009. “Sir Sayyid’s Public Sphere: Urdu Print and Oratory in Nineteenth Century India.” Cracow Indological Studies 11:237–67.

Metcalf, Barbara D. 1982. Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Metcalf, Barbara D. 1993. “Living Hadīth in the Tablīghī Jama’āt.” The Journal of Asian Studies 52(3):584–608. doi: 10.2307/2058855.

Niazi, Soheb. 2020. “Sayyids and Social Stratification of Muslims in Colonial India: Genealogy and Narration of the Past in Amroha.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 30(3):467–87. doi: 10.1017/S1356186320000358.

Niazi, Soheb. 2024. “Towards a History of Non-Ashrāf Muslims.” Economic & Political Weekly 59(33).

O’Sullivan, Michael. 2023. No Birds of Passage: A History of Gujarati Muslim Business Communities, 1800–1975. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Pearson, Harlan Otto. 2008. Islamic Reform and Revival in Nineteenth-Century India: The Tarīqah-i-Muhammadīyah. New Delhi: Yoda Press.

Rahman, M. Raisur. 2015. Locale, Everyday Islam and Modernity: Qasbah Towns and Muslim Life in Colonial India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Rai, Santosh Kumar. 2012. “Muslim Weavers’ Politics in Early 20th Century Northern India.” Economic & Political Weekly 47(15): 61-70.

Robb, Megan Eaton. 2021. Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life in Colonial India. New York: Oxford University Press.

Robinson, Francis. 1993. “Technology and Religious Change: Islam and the Impact of Print.” Modern Asian Studies 27(1):229–51. doi: 10.1017/S0026749X00016127.

Sajjad, Mohammad. 2014. Muslim Politics in Bihar. Changing Contours. New Delhi: Routledge.

Sanyal, Usha. 1996. Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and His Movement, 1870-1920. Delhi, Oxford: Oxford University Press..

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Notes

1 Amanda Lanzillo is a historian and an Assistant Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.

2 They were known as the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh after 1902.

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References

Electronic reference

Azeem Ahmed, Lanzillo, Amanda. Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial IndiaSouth Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal [Online], 34 | 2025, Online since 25 August 2025, connection on 21 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/10243; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/14mh6

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About the author

Azeem Ahmed

Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi

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