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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. In these essays there is a concern, explicit or implicit, with the dynamics of metropolis-frontier relations. For example, the religious demography of South Asia shows that Islam took root much more readily in Bengal or the Punjab, than in Upper India, the area with the deepest tradition of Indo-Muslim rule and patronage. The essays also challenge the image of Islam as a fixed or monolithic essence.
An attempt has been made in the first group of five essays to place the study of Islam and Indian history in a larger historical framework. The last essay in this group shifts the historical focus to recent scholarly trends in the analysis of Indian history, with particular reference to subaltern studies, and tries to explain how the destruction of Babri Masjid affected what subalternists, post-modernist and post-colonialist historians thought about the history of pre-modern India. The next group of essays in Part Two deal with case studies that explore ‘permutations’ of Islamic history and society in three South Asian regions - the Deccan, Punjab and Bengal.
Though most of the essays in this collection are quite interesting and illuminating, the two that are of considerable importance are Chapter 4, ‘Temple Destruction and Indo-Muslim States’ and Chapter 11, “Who are the Bengal Muslims: Conversion and Islamisation in Bengal”. The first one is a timely topic, especially in the backdrop of the destruction of the Babri Masjid. It tries to examine the available evidence of temple desecration and in the process asks such questions as, what temples were desecrated in India’s pre-modern history, when and by whom, how and for what purpose, and finally, in this context, to find out the relationship between religion and politics in pre-modern India. Significantly, Eaton holds that it is through selective translations of Persian chronicles along with a selective use of epigraphic data that the Hindu “nationalists” have sought to find the sort of “irrefutable” evidence that would demonstrate a persistent pattern of villainy and fanaticism among the Indo-Muslim conquerors and rulers.
He suggests that the original data associate instances of temple desecration - he has identified 80 such instances whose “historicity appears certain” in the five centuries between the 12th and 18th, as opposed to 60,000 claimed by some Hindu nationalists’ - with the annexation of newly conquered territories held by enemy kings whose domains lay on the path of moving military frontiers. Desecration of temples also took place when Hindu patrons of prominent temples were associated with acts of treason or disloyalty (as in the case of Viswanath temple at Benares whose patron Jai Singh was suspected of treason and the Kesava temple at Mathura which was destroyed following a Jat rebellion, both during the reign of Aurangzeb). Otherwise temples lying within Indo-Muslim sovereign domains, viewed normally as protected state property, were left unmolested.
The last essay in the book examines
the evolution of Bengal Muslims between the 16th and 18th centuries, and
explores why and how Islam became the dominant religious tradition in Bengal,
and not in upper India, the epicentre of Indo-Muslim political culture,
and in, the eastern, not western, part of the Bengal delta. In this context
it is interesting to note that unlike early Sultans of Bengal, Mughal officials
did not patronise Islam as a state religion. The Mughals maintained a strictly
non-interventionist position in religious matters, despite pressure from
local mullahs and sufis. One consequence of this hands-off policy was that
Mughal officials refused to promote the conversion of Bengalis to Islam.
But the paradox is that although Muslim regimes had ruled over Bengal since
the early 13th century, a noticeable community of Muslim peasants did not
emerge there until the late 16th century, and that too under a regime,
that did nothing to encourage conversion. What made this possible was that
in the Mughal period, Bengal’s agrarian and political frontiers coalesced
into one. This was achieved by land grants by the state aiming at the agricultural
development of forested hinterland, most of whose recipients were petty
mullahs, pilgrims returned from Mecca, charismatic pirs, etc. These men
oversaw, or undertook to oversee, the clearing of forests and construction
of mosques or shrines, which in turn became the nuclei for the diffusion
of Islamic religion and ideals along the frontier. Above all, the local
communities that fell under the economic and religious influence of these
institutions do not appear to have perceived Islam as alien because it
absorbed so much local culture and became so profoundly identified with
the delta’s long-term process of agrarian expansion.
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