Author: David Gilmartin
Bruce B Lawrence/
Editor: David Gilmartin/ Bruce B Lawrence
Publisher: India Research Press
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 354
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8187943343
Description
This collection challenges the popular presumption that Muslims and Hindus are irreconcilably different groups, inevitably conflicting with each other.
Invoking a new vocabulary that depicts a neglected substratum of Muslim-Hindu commonality, the contributors demonstrate how Indic and Islamicat world views overlap and often converge in the premodern history of South Asia.
The term Islamicate refers to the broad expanse of Africa and Asia influenced by Muslim rulers but not restricted to the practice of Islam as a religion, while the term Indic evokes the breadth of premodern South Asian norms beyond Hindu doctrine or practice. Both Islamic and Indic suggest a repertoire of language and behavior, knowledge and power, that define expansive cosmologies of human existence. Neither term denotes simply bounded groups self-defined as Muslim or Hindu.
This collection stresses the constant interplay and overlap between Islamicate and Indic world views, rather than the Muslim-Hindu conflicts which many take to be symptomatic of all life in the subcontinent.
EXCERPTS FROM REVIEWS
A presentation of the most recent scholarship on the nature of Islamic Institutions, practices, and beliefs in precolonial India, the volume breaks free from the polemics of present day politics and historicist distortions that have seeped into most standard texts. The achievement of this project has been to set the stage for a rewriting of nearly a thousand years of history to create new understandings of the nature of cultural encounters. This volume shows how the discipline of historical scholarship can help overcome the limitations of the present and, perhaps, even play a therapeutic role in setting to rest a host of false and divisive misunderstandings.
-David Lelyveld, Cornell University
Contents
List of Figures, Maps, and Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction
SECTION 1: LITERARY GENRES, ARCHITECTURAL FORMS, AND IDENTITIES
1. Alternate Structures of Authority: Satya Pir on the Frontiers of Bengal
2. Beyond Turk and Hindu: Crossing the Boundaries in Indo-Muslim Romance
3. Religious Vocabulary and Regional Identity : A Study of the Tamil Cirappuranam
4. Admiring the Works of the Ancients: The Ellora Temples as Viewed by Indo-Muslim Authors
5. Mapping Hindu-Muslim Identities through the Architecture of Shahjahanabad and Jaipur
SECTION 2: SUFISM, BIOGRAPHIES, AND RELIGIOUS DISSENT
6. Indo-Persian Tazkiras as Memorative Communications
7. The Naqshbandi Reaction Reconsidered
8. Real Men and False Men at the Court of Akbar: The Majalis of Shaykh Mustafa Gujarati
SECTION 3: THE STATE, PATRONAGE, AND POLITICAL ORDER
9. Shari'a and Governance in the Indo-Islamic Context
10. Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States
11.TheStory of Prataparudra: Hindu Historiography on the Deccan Frontier
12. Harihara, Bukka, and the Sultan: The Delhi Sultanate in the Political Imagination of Vijayanagara
13. Maratha Patronage of Muslim Institutions in Burhanpur and Khandesh
Glossary
List of Contributors
Index