Essays on Islam and Indian History

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Spanning twenty-five years of research and writing, the essays in this volume focus on historiography and Indo-Islamic civilization. The author begins by exploring the place of Islam in world history, religious conversion as a world historical theme, and the historical significance of the city of Calicut. He then investigates the history and historiography of temple desecration in pre-colonial India, and also throws light on the evolution of India's Subaltern Studies Movement and its implications for the study of the subcontinent's pre-colonial history. Eaton also discusses how, between the thirteenth and twentieth centuries, Islamic culture took root and flourished in three South Asian regions-the Deccan, Punjab, and Bengal.

This book will be an engaging read for scholars and students of Islamic studies, medieval Indian history, sociology, as well as the interested general reader.

I made my first trip to South Asia in the mid-1960s, travelling by train from Iran across the Baluchistan desert and Sulaiman Mountains, down through the Bolan Pass until the fertile, green strip of the Indus Valley hove into view. Karachi, Bombay, Hyderabad, Madras, Calcutta, Benares, Delhi, Lahore at first these great cities seemed utterly un- familiar. But gradually, perhaps because I had spent the previous year living in Iran, I began to recognize much of what I found in the subcontinent. Persian architectural forms, seventeenth century miniature paintings, qawwali music, the Urdu language, Islamic tomb-cults all of these appeared refracted through the prism of Iran, brushed with the turquoise patina of Perso-Islamic civilization. After all, how can anyone who has visited Shiraz or Isfahan see the Taj Mahal without feeling a shock of recognition? Similarly, a glance at the family names listed in a Delhi telephone directory at once reveals deep connections, whether real or imagined, between north India and the peoples and cultures of Central Asia and the Iranian Plateau.

The long encounter between Islamic and Indic civilizations, I came to realize, had stirred remarkably creative energies among peoples of the subcontinent, producing one of the most vital centres of Islamic culture in the world. But how did this happen? Why did the Perso-Islamic encounter with India give rise to such greater cultural florescence than, say, the Arab-Islamic encounter with Europe? How did it happen that, worldwide, more Muslims came to live east of Karachi, than west of that city? Even within South Asia, how can one explain the extraordinarily uneven distribution of Muslims, where their numbers would dominate in some regions but not in others?

The essays in the present volume address these and related issues and are subdivided into two categories: historiographical essays, which examine how historians structure and answer the questions they choose to ask of the past, and case studies on the history of particular Indian communities.