Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India
Monday, April 21, 2025 12:15pm
About this Event
Central Campus
Talk by Amanda Lanzillo, (History, University of Chicago)
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, laborers across northern India found themselves negotiating rapid industrial change, emerging technologies, and class hierarchies. In response to these changes, Indian Muslim artisans asserted the relationships between their religion and their labor, using the increasingly accessible popular press to redefine and reclaim Islamic traditions “from below.” In this talk, Amanda Lanzillo shares stories from her recently published book, Pious Labor, that reveal how Muslim artisan workers in India claimed the centrality of their own embodied and textual knowledge to the colonial industrial economy. The talk focuses especially on the trades of tailoring, print work, and stonemasonry. It draws on Urdu-language technical manuals, community histories, and poetry that circulated among workers in these fields. Through these texts, the talk explores how Muslim laborers contested their marginalization within colonial-era hierarchies of technical and religious knowledge through claims on Islamic pasts and practices.
Amanda Lanzillo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. She is a historian of labor, technology, and religion, and is the author of Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India (University of California Press, 2024). Amanda is also a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, researching a second book project about Afghan migration and labor in British India and the Indian Ocean world. She has published in peer reviewed journals including Modern Asian Studies, South Asia, the Journal of Social History, and the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, among others. Amanda also frequently writes about South Asian social history for the popular media, including in a series on artisan and laboring histories in The Wire co-authored with Arun Kumar.
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