Conquest and Community tells the story of the Indo-Turkic warrior saint Ghazi Miyan and his influential cult in the Gangetic plains. A purported nephew of Mahmud of Ghazni, Ghazi Miyan was supposedly martyred in holy war against Hindu kings near Bahraich, in modern-day Uttar Pradesh, in 1034 CE. Conspicuously absent from contemporary Persian chronicles about his famous uncle, he is, nevertheless, the subject of glowing hagiographies from the seventeenth century onwards, as well as an oral folkloric tradition which thrives to this day. His cult continues to draw pilgrims of varying castes, both Muslim and Hindu, from all over northern India to his shrine in Bahraich. Shahid Amin studies the history and growth of this cult and its manifestations in the tales people tell, the ballads they sing, the shrines they visit and the hagiographies they have written. He also addresses the disquiet and criticism the cult has provoked in both orthodox Hindu and Muslim quarters, for Ghazi Miyan is a complex, sometimes troubling figure, an amalgam of different traditions and tropes that do not always coexist easily. He features in text and folklore both as a pious iconoclast who smashes Hindu idols and also as a staunch protector of cows and cowherds, a putative brother to Hindu women, and a connoisseur of things Indie, from pån to the humble mahua tree.
In studying the Ghazi, his cult and its reception history, this book offers an astute perspective on the ways in which the Turko-Islamic invasions of India, c. 1000-1200 CE, have entered historical and popular memory. By considering the role of religious conflict in the building of the multi-religious cult of Ghazi Miyan, it also sheds new light on the nature of syncretism in the subcontinent.
This work, a new kind of subaltern history, will interest historians, both medievalist and modern, anthropologists, folklorists and students of popular culture, religious studies and historiography.
SHAHID AMIN is former Professor of History at the University of Delhi, and author of the award-winning Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922-1992.
istories of conquest are written primarily as sagas of victory. Heven when tempered with doubt about their ability to persuade Decimation or siring of métissage populations; supplanting of or accommodation with pre-existent beliefs; devaluation of native knowledge, forms and aesthetics; acculturation or racialisation: state formation and novel norms of rule and control-shorn of particularities, these are the tropes that order the history of events, post-conquest, when, after the fact, the chief antagonist has surrendered and the last rebel has been accounted for.
The conqueror as hero and the opponent who dies, or fights shy of battle, as in the case of Alexander the Greek and Darius the Persian, are chosen subjects of (victorious) chroniclers and subaltern myth- making Far removed in time and space, Americo-Indian views of the historic clash with the conquistadors, for their part, are not purely adversarial; memories of past events are inflected with dramatic reversals and counterfactual folklore.' That spectral world where promiscuous accounts of the past are variedly embraced by victors and conquered alike is not amenable to unalloyed certitude; it is best explored by sidestepping the hubris of History.
With the martyred Turkic-Indian warrior hero Ghazi Miyan, who fell in battle against local chiefs 350 miles northeast of Delhi in 1034 CE, some two centuries before the establishment of a Sultanate at that imperial city, there are additional imponderables. Hagiographical literature maintains that he was the sister's son of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, but that sultan who invaded India seventeen times during the early eleventh century had no such nephew: contemporary chronicles are clear on this score. Yet the combined weight of folklore and a seventeenth-century text has had the effect of displacing the ruthless conqueror from Ghazni, Afghanistan by the virtuous nephew-the saintly warrior Salar Masud or Ghazi Miyan, as he is referred to in the Gangetic plains. What does this radical displacement mean for the multi-religious devotees of this youthful Turkic commander fighting 'infidel' Indian rajas and for a history of conquest? How are memory and history, the transmitted and the inscribed, juggled in the career of this ambiguous Ghazi over the longue durée, from the early thirteenth century to the present?
This book eschews definitive explanations-the big why questions-that in a commonsensical view are requisites for all historical accounts. It is not a perverse desire to undercut the ground from under Clio's feet, but the recognition, after Carlo Ginzburg, 'that a new field of investigation alters not only the method but also the criteria of evidence of a given discipline' that has motivated the manner of writing of the story of Ghazi Miyan. And so, instead of documenting precisely why a particular Sufi scholar wrote a hagiographical account of the Warrior Saint at the time that he did, or offering a compelling reason for why Hindu castes have felt no compunction in installing a Muslim warrior on their domestic altar, I attempt to narrate both the manner in which the hagiography of Salar Masud has been written and the ways in which popular assent is generated across religious divides. This has required a close reading of textual, folkloric and archival material in the several languages and dialects of Hindustan. I have also sought to capture the sense of, say, a ballad about the warrior hero recorded over a century ago in a contemporary performance and its resonance in the world of kin and quotidian relations, and to map the contours of historically grounded beliefs by engaging with present-day devotees at the Fair of the Ghazi.
Book's Contents and Sample Pages
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