Richard Eaton – Islam in India

well thank you sam it's a great pleasure to be here at yale and and to be with all of you fellow teachers and we're all in this kind of the same thing together um and yeah i mean the connection with india sam mentioned this or i mentioned that sam says i might remind all of you if you don't happen to know yale university was established by elihu yale who was the governor of madras india in the early 1600s around 1638 something like that he establishes yale universe named it after himself uh shamelessly uh after having spent a career of kind of milking the profits out of india from east india company to kind of a tone for that i think he established a university so there's a connection with yale and india that goes back several centuries and that itself is fascinating um the but the the story of islam in india which is what uh my particular interest is as sam mentioned i i live two years in the peace corps in iran and uh i made a a a very important lucky trip to india while i was in iran i had already learned persian and so i was already kind of and i already spent a year living in tabriz iran and i became kind of sensitized to islamic culture persian culture and i go to india and i thought india was all hindu that's all that was my sense i just all the textbooks kind of said that's what i i didn't expect to find uh such a profound influence of both iranian and islamic influence in south asia and in a sense my whole career has been trying to kind of work that out you know how did islam become so deeply invested in and sink such deep roots in this very different culture this hindu buddhist culture this is back in the 60s when i made that trip 63 to be exact and i look around and i see this architecture this clearly looks like isfahan you know anyone who goes to the taj mahal bang and you realize these were persian architects you look at the script of urdu it's persian script you listen to music yeah you look at the clothing you look at you begin to learn vocabulary it's all persian not all of it but a lot of it and so this whole connection between iran and india these two powerful civilizations and the religious component islam and the hindu buddhist giant traditions of south asia and how they interact has been a fascinating question that i'm still kind of trying to sort out um just to kind of heads up a couple of major books that i want to i wrote them on the board i don't have any handout i apologize for that but here are some books i think that are really leading books give a general survey of islam in south asia francis robinson an englishman has got a number of books his book islam and muslim history in south asia is a is a classic oxford 2000. carl ernst writes a lot on sufism and i know you've been reading and hearing a lot about that major story here uh a book entitled eternal garden uh mysticism history and politics at a south asian sufi center it's a it's a very important and very accessible study uh all these are i hope i edited a book called india's islamic traditions came out in 2000 and that's a series of essays written by scholars coming from different perspectives who are collectively uh trying to understand you know what what kinds of traditions literary artistic uh historical legal uh there's a whole range of of things that that one can talk about and uh that is historically oriented from 7 11 to 1750 and then finally anna marie schimel uh islam in the indian subcontinent she the german scholar uh one of the uh leading scholars of of south asian islam um and that again a very accessible book there so what i'm going to do is kind of give up hopefully about a 45-minute overall presentation here but uh i invite questions if they are of you know to clarify a point that may not be clear but don't don't be bashful about asking and then afterwards i will have about 20 minutes or so 15 20 minutes of general questioning to kind of move into more a more substantive nature now where to begin well i always begin with a map and this map is loaded with important information because it what it does it's based on the 1931 census now the 1931 census was the last really good census the british did in india you know they started these decennial censuses in the in the 1800s i think 18 uh 71 was the first they did and every 10 years they they did the census of india to find out who who was here and uh this and the 31 was the last really good one 1941 of course england was otherwise preoccupied to put it mildly uh and so we don't really have a they weren't because they were fighting the war uh that's not really all that good a a census and then of course after that's you have independent south asia in 1951 you have india and pakistan but you could already see the map of pakistan and bangladesh kind of present even before the two states emerge because you have a predominant muslim population in eastern bengal but not western bengal western punjab but not eastern punjab and where's my pointer here's what i gotta yeah this is great i think this is it here in the india yeah there you go this is all the punjab west punjab is predominantly muslim you get up to what 75 percent 50 60 70 80 muslims in the western majora but not the east and conversely in in bengal the eastern portion is mainly muslim but not the western very few muslims in the heart of the highlands of central india but then the deccan you get in the south you get some more so one of the questions that's always kind of animated my own research is how do you explain this uneven distribution of muslims in south asia especially given the fact that south asia is home to one-third of the world's muslim population that's more more muslims are in south asia than there are in the middle east that's a shocking not but not by much it's a it's a close race but it's amazing to think about that you know after indonesia which is the world's largest muslim population uh the next two india uh next three india pakistan bangladesh and they're all very close very similar population somewhere around three or four hundred million each one of them you add those together and you begin to realize that south asia in terms of demography really is the center of gravity of the muslim world this is a jarring fact because we've always been taught to believe that you know the middle east is somehow the the heartland of islam historically of course that's obviously true but the area where it sunk its roots demographically in terms of muslim population it really is south asia and so this is the and then then you look at the map and you ask why is it that the western the northwestern and the far eastern bengal and some extent the deccan how is it that those areas became most receptive to islam i'm going to try to present some some answers to that this morning as well as some remarks about the nature of islamic piety and how it differs or compares with islam elsewhere in the muslim world and again feel free to raise any questions as we move along historically we go back to the 7th century i know that dick bullet has already uh talked about the umayyad and the abbasid periods so suffice it to say that this is the period that where islam first encounters western india sinned in particular the province of sin where the indus river empties into the arabian sea and it happens in actually in 7-eleven is when muhammad bin qasam uh who is a general under the umayyad caliph conquers the lower indus area which is now karachi area in southern pakistan and that's a very important moment in terms of the interaction with islam in south asia this is the arab dial these are the vehicles that were and they have by the way these haven't changed in about a thousand years i actually sailed on one of these across the arabian sea they still make these things in india as well as east africa these were the vessels that have traditionally been used connecting the middle east at least the maritime connection between the middle east and south asia and you can't really understand the settlement of muslims in along the western coast of india without understanding the trade routes which undergird the contact between the the the persian gulf area and in india okay so here is a map showing you what basically happens as i said in the year 711 sinned is conquered by this by a muslim general who establishes their area very briefly several important legacies i want to just briefly mention juridically in terms of law very significantly muhammad bin qasim the the conqueror of of sindh ruled that hindus and buddhists will be treated as zimmi's which is to say people of the book now that might be jarring itself because we think you know islam understands itself as you know a religion of the book the book being obviously the the torah and the gospels as well as the quran the quran is simply a restatement of these earlier attempts to get god's message through the people so it's easy to imagine how jews and christians are already included in this larger category of people of book but what do we say about hindus and buddhists the ruling that indians would be juridically defined as people of the book means that already there is a stretching of the idea of book which is to say administrators governors the very first governor muslim governor arab governor in india was was accommodating himself to the reality that uh that we i mean we're a thin ruling class we need to uh we need to accommodate ourselves to the fact that the to rule these people we need to include them in this larger category which had already been uh worked out by uh jurists and uh with a tradition of a liberal juridical understanding of india from the very beginning also brahmanas the priests of india were kind of reconfirmed as the elite community by muhammad bin qasim and uh so there was no effort in other words to upset or transform the social order rather the first muslims in india uh were there they understood their mission as being to kind of confirm the existing social order which is to say to confirm the caste system all this is important because subsequent regimes muslim regimes in india look back to this first founding encounter as a precedent for how in the real world uh indians can be governed uh because obviously muslims were as a ruling class a very thin tiny minority among a vast sea of non-muslims um and there's a brief comment about agriculture which is always fascinating to me to think that you know we always hear about the the so-called colombian exchange of of uh plants and animals across the atlantic ocean since columbus crossed it but there was an earlier agricultural exchange across the indian ocean when the arabs conquered india they brought back with them a whole range of crops which totally transformed the the uh agricultural landscape of the middle east uh cotton lemon lime orange sugar uh all of these of course are are either arabic or sanskrit and the words come from that they tell us their own story but much more for certain strands of wheat and rice were transplanted in the middle east from monsoon asia so the the diet of the roman world and the byzantine world more precisely was radically transformed as a result of this encounter with with india the abbasid period sees a kind of a withdrawal uh beyond the indus river uh from 1750 to 1250 uh uh eight um the real encounter with islam in india happens not by arabs but by turkic groups who had been migrating from east asia into the west along the silk road connecting china with the eastern mediterranean and the area that is particular interest is this area of horizon in central asia right up here in the um where i put the circle bohara these areas in the oaks river region this area in the 10th and 11th centuries was undergoing a dramatic um cultural renaissance in the sense that you had the iranian peoples conquered by the arabs in the mid 7th century and about 300 years later that submerged iranian culture kind of bubbles up to the surface and when it reappears it reappears uh in a form that has assimilated itself with uh with uh with arab culture sort of the arabic script now replaces the old persian script many arabic words loanwords are assimilated into the persian language in fact modern persian derives from this moment it's also this place in this time that political ideas the status of the sultan as a non-religious leader emerges in this persian renaissance period of the 10th and 11th and 12th centuries in horison this area that i'm circled the kf of islam is becoming progressively weaker in the in the 10th 11th and 12th centuries and as that happens the sultan uh kind of replaces the caliph at least as a as a political uh leader and this is important because the idea of the sultan acquires a certain notion of of someone who is above religion he's a ruler of all peoples because horus-san this area was not just muslim it was of course there were shees there were sunnis but there are also buddhists there a large jewish population very large christian population and historian christians were there shaman turkish population in other words you had a variety of different peoples in khorasan in the 9th 10th and 11th century uh kind of cooking up this this idea of a of a secular islamic regime where religion and state are have a de facto separation um and of course persian languages as i said invented at this time it's always struck me it's fascinating that you know we always talk about how english language emerged about 300 years after the norman conquest of 1066 you get 300 years later you get chaucer another couple hundred years you get shakespeare uh where english and french have kind of merged after 300 years after that conquest same thing happens with persian about 300 years after the arab conquest of iran uh this synthesis of arabic and persian takes place and it happens in this area then turks begin to move into north india and they carry this hybridized culture with them in the 10 30 is the the is the date of the mahmoud of ghazni a turkish general who makes these raids and these arrows are indicating raids of india he's sacking temples in order to acquire wealth to mobilize uh to create a larger sultanate to the west because this the horizon this area to the west was what was kind of the prize india was only used as kind of a source of wealth uh in the in the 11th century it's not till the 12th and 13th century that we begin to get settlement of of turks moving down these migration corridors and that's the term i would use to describe uh these these these roots oops sorry let me go back ah what am i doing go back here yeah the term i would use is a migration corridor these are actually uh roots old trade routes bringing horses and silver into india india has always been deficient in two things uh horses don't do well in india because it is a competition for land uh by peasant population uh plus the there's no grassland uh that as you have in central asia so there's a constant need to to import war horses by all dynasties of india and secondly there's no silver mines in india so india's has an old history of exporting textiles importing uh silver and war horses and so these roads that connect samarkand and bohara and central asia with south asia are basically trade routes moving down into lahore from lahore to delhi and from delhi east down the gangetic plain toward bengal as well as south into gujarat and from there into the declan plateau and these migration corridors while they're commercial they are also um let me go back to that oh yeah they are also important because they they facilitate the migration of of large populations who are being moved out of central asia because of the mongols and when this happens uh now we get a true um turco or turkish kind of muslim population migrating into into india delhi becomes filled up with populations of transplanted immigrants who are fleeing the terror of the mongol invasions of of central asia and when they come they arrive with a sense of authority that's already been kind of worked out in that persian uh renaissance this very crude kind of mapping is what you see on coins that were minted in this period where you have a statement of the credo of islam there is no god but but allah and muhammad is his prophet uh and then the name of the caleb will be on one side of the coin the sultan will be on the other side of the coin and the son of the sultan is often times as well on that coin so you have this kind of downward flow of authority uh that has become already established in the way coinage was was made by the 13th century but when the first turks actually conquer north india i'm going to show some coins here to illustrate again this theme of accommodation i mentioned already how muhammad bin gasem ruled that hindus and buddhists of sindh were people of the book that's basically coming reckoning with the reality uh that we we need to accommodate ourselves to this this large non-muslim population so what do we do we call them people the book when the first turkish conquerors take north india they basically take over the existing format of coinage so here are indian coins that go back to the mid 1700s under the hindu shahi dynasty where you have on one side a horseman on the left with a spear in his hand and on the other side of the coin you have a bull so you have this bull and horseman established a formula of coinage by hindu dynasties that had been already been around for for hundreds of years before the turks arrived the first coins of muhammad of gore who's the first ruler of india follows exactly the same format you'll notice there's no arabic no persian what you have is a a a horseman on the left and a bull on the right uh extraordinary example of how the the turkish rulers are of necessity having to accommodate themselves to the existing reality that bankers money lenders will only accept coins which they recognize if you throw up a coin at them with with arabic on it which nobody can read anyway at this early stage it's not going to be accepted so what you do is you mint coins which will be accepted the point i'm trying to make is that muslim rulers again were having to adjust themselves to this reality uh here is another coin a rajput coin the chohana rajputs were the last great indian dynasty of north india before turks conquered them and their coins had on one side this image of the goddess lakshmi a famous goddess of wealth uh and and you see her there uh uh the kind of indian beauty of the of the 12th century on the left and on the right you have the name of the the chohana rajputs in devanagari script the indian script and then what happens when muhammad al-gore shows up behold all you've heard about you know muslims not having images on their on their coins forget that this is reality we are accommodating to the reality we need to have coins which the indian bankers will accept we need to have coins that are already familiar otherwise uh what are we doing here so muhammad agora starts minting coins with lakshmi on one side and with his name in sanskrit dave inaugury script on the opposite side pragmatism is overcoming ideology quite obviously uh and yet look at this double game that muhammad agor the first turkish ruler of north india is playing he's ruling both afghanistan and north india the coins that are mended for circulation at afghanistan follow the traditional classic arabic formula and you'll find this this would have circulated anywhere in the muslim world and it has all the formula i talked about earlier where you have god caliph sultan son of sultan downward authority all in arabic there's no imagery no images nothing like that at all but the same sultan at the same time is minting these coins in india so i i think this is a fascinating point uh illustrating this whole idea of of the need to accommodate uh politically with this reality the turks were uh ruling this area in north india in the in the uh 13th century this is more or less the extent of their rule but you can see they swept very quickly down the gangetic plain uh knocking over these these rajput houses the chandelas the paramaras and so forth in in central and northern india and then they establish the delhi sultanate the delhi sultanate was the first ruling house of north india and you can see in these this map uh the territorial extent under the founder muhammad of ghor and his slave successor ibec uh his name is up there at the very top rules this very this this heartland of upper india and then his successor il another turk another turkish slave actually uh is is takes this much larger area so this north india becomes the the heartland of uh muslim rule uh in by the 13th century when the delhi sultana is established architecturally we begin to see uh spectacular monuments this is a minaret it's often been thought of as kind of a victory tower because obviously if a mozin is doing his call to the prayer at the top of this thing nobody's going to hear him this is before microphones uh and loudspeakers uh and so it's oftentimes thought this is really a art historians dispute exactly what this tower was all about it's clearly a statement though of occupation nothing like this had existed in india prior to the to the turkish arrival this is the very first architectural muslim indo-muslim monument in india the the great kutub binar it's still the tallest minaret i believe in the world uh extraordinary monument in in is part of this mosque complex here's a close-up of it uh you can see uh juxtaposing uh white marble with red sandstone uh and and the writing on it is not only arabic but also devanagari uh indian workmen made this they used local workmen and we actually find on this tower invocations not to allah and not only to allah but also to the the patron god of uh craftsmen among the hindus so it's a remarkable kind of monument it's not just to islam but also uh to the to to the workmen who were who were building it it was made of recycled columns from either jain or hindu temples stacked end on end to give them greater height you can see there's one column here and then a second one is stacked above it so you have these large very high um enclosures for prayer halls uh in this mosque and uh but behind all this is the larger story that i want to just just briefly touch on is the mongols were really the force that were pushing all this process in india the mongols of course have swept across from china in the 13th century of course they succeed in conquering china they never conquer india they can't get beyond the the hindu kush uh area and that's important genghis khan himself uh was knocking at the door of india in 12 21 or 1231 when he was there uh but didn't make it through the fact that the mongols were unable to conquer india meant that india became understood by all these migrants who were pushed out of central asia fleeing the mongol terror they began to see india as the true heartland of islam especially after the mongols proceeded to demolish baghdad and overthrow the caliph indeed abolish the caliphate so with and of course that was would be tantamount to having rome uh totally destroyed by the vandals which of course partially did happen uh but and and christianity thereby understood as uh literally wiped off the map so for these people who are fleeing the mongols india became a refuge zone uh for them pagan did not really mean hindu it meant mongol and all the rhetoric in early indo-muslim literature of the 13th to 14th century really is inspired by that fact that it's the mongols who are the true uh uh who who are the pagans who are the infidels the kafirs so india then becomes an area as i said earlier of of filling up through these following these migration corridors of large numbers of people fleeing the north india and the delhi sultanate becomes at least in north india well established by the 13th and 14th century last all the way down to the mid to the early 16th century the deccan in the south is never conquered it's conquered but they can't hold it so this is this long divide between north india and the deccan uh that uh that exists but behind all that uh underlined and red are the mongols who as i said earlier do not succeed in conquering india but they they have driven all this this persianized turkish population into south asia who now begin to see india as the the true home of islam given the fact that baghdad has been destroyed in 1258 the caliph has been executed the office has been abolished and so the sultan of india becomes the focus of many pious muslims who are now looking for spiritual direction even though the sultan doesn't have a spiritual bone in his body uh most of these guys are are turkish slaves who have no genealogical connection with with aristocracy whatever uh yet they're built up by their ideologues by their their their uh uh their propagandists as these these this focus of muslims um as i said briefly south india was conquered at least down pretty far south uh two capitals were established in the in the 14th century in delhi and also in dolatabad here's delhi uh this is a 13th century delhi which still still looks like this today these are the ramparts of of what they called uh and delhi now becomes identified as the capital of india from this point on any dynasty that has pretensions of ruling india has to control delhi this is true all the way down to the 20th century when the british need to establish themselves as the natural rulers of india they moved their capital in 1911 from calcutta to new delhi they did the same thing that muslim dynasties had been doing for the previous millennium building another city of delhi not occupying the same palaces that the predecessors had done but alice is nearby or building new palaces uh so there's another delhi in in the region that's and in the south in the deccan dholadabad was this co-capital that the the sultans built and ruled from there as well uh here is the the great mosque in dullarbad the same idea stacking uh hindu temples and on end hindu columns i should say and on end to give greater height to the prayer hall here you see exactly what i just described uh in in the south but there's a there's a memory of the north india uh here we have the corner of the dalatabad mosque in in the south and it it is kind of a visual reminder of the kotovinar in delhi so these migrants they've already migrated from central asia to north india now they're migrating from north india to the south but they're carrying with them this reminder of north india that the the kotov nara has kind of become the icon of hindu in of indo-muslim presence and we see that echoed in this corner engaged corner tower in in the dalatabad mosque so here's our here's our migration corridor that i mentioned earlier following those ancient trade routes horse trade routes from central asia into south asia moving on down to bijapur we see monuments that are built carrying with them a central asian visual aesthetic you see you see domes you see minarets you see arches pointed arches these become the elements kind of the architectural vocabulary of of mosque building in the 16th century uh when this deccan sultan down there is established and then from bijapur if we look at kerala which is off the roots now we're talking about coastal malabar coast this was not settled by migrants coming from the north uh along those migration corridors kerala muslims are muslims who would sail the cross on those arab dials and they have a very different sensibility their their connection is not with north india it's not with turkish or persian culture they don't speak or do or or any of the north indian languages they speak malayalam which is the native language of of the malar coast and what's striking is when we look at their architecture you do not find arches pointed arches you do not find domes uh or minarets of the kind of standard vocabulary of north india but rather you find these wooden roof uh kind of layers like a wedding cake which in fact imitates the same vocabulary of hindu temples so you notice here what's happening another theme of accommodation once you move off that corridor that migration corridor and look at kerala you see that islam has accommodated itself visually and architecturally with the local culture that's a very important theme because we begin to understand now that islam is extremely flexible in terms of how it accommodates itself to indigenous cultures in south asia and this is something you can oh question please just if we could get the name of the previous the previous slide yeah this is the the mishka mosque built in 1510 it's been rebuilt uh many uh uh but this is a basic design of it and calicut now calicut is a city on the coast the malabar coast this is where vasco da gama arrives when europeans first connect europe through maritime routes in 1498 is when vasco de gama succeeds in doing what christopher columbus failed to do which is to reach india six years later he does it of course and calacut is a major center of the pepper trade and this was where and cardamom and all these spices of south india were flowing out into the indian ocean world through the port of calicut uh it was major metropolis and this is the great mosque of calicut and as i said this is their the the the architecture basically is using the same vocabulary that was already familiar to the people of kerala uh if we talk about never mind carol let's go to bengal bengal is also an area that's very far from these roots uh this migration corridor uh now we're for the the very end of this this endogangetic plane in far eastern india and what we find here is mosques appearing uh with distinctive characteristics you have terra cotta uh panels on on the on the walls you have a a curved cornice uh which is the classic design of the uh the bengali village hut our word bungalow is derived from the word bengal which is the bengal style which is a curve made of thatched and and bamboo uh it's it's curved so that rain the monsoon rain which is very high in bengal uh will will will drain off so this idea of a curved cornice is a very bengali phenomenon uh as well as the the terracotta panels on the front it's all brick there's no marble or granite or hard stone in bengal you build everything a brick and what's extraordinary about this monument is if we compare it with temples of bengal lo and behold we find the same architectural vocabulary we have terra cotta uh panels on the front we have the curved cornice which is derived again from this kind of vernacular vocabulary of village bengal and uh so that in in bengal as in kerala what we see is that that the form in which the mosque appears is thoroughly invested in local culture the bengalis have borrowed from the bengali vocabulary bengali muslims are using the same vocabulary in eastern india and again in kerala the same kind of thing operates for there i could make the same statement about the tamil area in in the southeast coast uh in orissa uh the point is that when we move away from this kind of central this migration corridor going down the spine of south asia then we see much more combination to indigenous culture tamerlane invades india in 13 um 98-99 he dies in 1405. he does not stay to rule uh india but his base is at summercon the timor is but he shakes up north india in the sense that he destroys delhi delhi had been the capital of of of north india the successive dynasties in the delhi sultanate for for several centuries and now what happens after after tamerlane is that north india becomes um it loses its focus delhi is no longer the the center of uh of uh indian indo-muslim polity and he brings with them a central asian sensibility here we have the the tomb of of of of timor himself in semicond uh you see all these very extraordinary elements high drums uh vaulting techniques that allow you to just soar up to the sky this is all nude ideas uh glazed tile covered all over the surfaces of central asian uh mosques uh and they're freestanding and the overall effect then is to is to is to be able to be seen from afar i mean timor himself uh introduces into islamic architecture uh this idea of uh kind of over-the-top uh extravagant uh visual statements that you see and all of this is carried into india uh by the next great conqueror of north india these this this kind of glazed tile techniques which of course is babur b-a-b-u-r babur uh and you can see from this painting this is not babur but this is this faint of the family in the early 16th century it's very central asian you can just see from the facial characteristics that these are not indians these are people who have already who have come from central asia but a very cosmopolitan central asian style is brought to north india by babur who's depicted here founding a garden uh it says in persian that he's establishing uh he's planting he's directing the planting of pomegranates uh in in his garden so we begin to get now uh with 1526 babur sweeps away the last dynasty of delhi sultans in north india and establishes the mogul empire which is the largest muslim empire in the world larger even than the ottomans or the safavids in in the middle east although the three were roughly contemporary uh and i'm sure you've already been hearing a lot and reading a lot about the safavids and the ottomans so babur brings to south asia a similar central asian aesthetic a similar central asian sensibility idea of politics idea of power is all established during his reign 1526-1605 you can see how the moguls are repeating what the dallas sultans had done several centuries earlier take over the central heartland of north india and then move out and conquer gujarat in the west bengal in the east and what's extraordinary about the moguls is that not babur but his grandson akbar in order to rule north india he departs from the policy of of earlier uh rulers which was to always keep the rajputs at arm's length try to conquer the rajputs the rajputs were the the hindu ruling class of north india before the the turks arrived what akbar does is he engages with the rajputs he brings them into the ruling class and he marries rajput princesses which is very important because it means that biologically each successive generation of the mogul ruling house is less and less turkic and more and more indian you look at the facial characteristics of the rajputs now here we have jahangir who is the son of of akbar akbar was it was a of pure turco persian blood but akbar's wife was a pure rajput princess who's brought into the mughal harem and so that means that jahan gear is biologically half rajput jahangir in turn marries other rajput women princesses of course these are all political marriages much like europe knew roughly the same time uh i mean that's how you cement uh political relationships you you you marry into the same families it's exactly what's happening now with the moguls and i i would argue that this is extremely significant because it means that that just as jahangir was one half rajput his son shah jahan builder of the taj mahal his old is is three quarters rajput because jahangir has also married a rajput woman so that the element of turkic biological content of the ruling mogul house is becoming progressively less turkic and more rajput more indian they don't even use turkish language anymore they've forgotten that persian is still patronized as the language of of rulership but in at home they're speaking uh what we would now recognize as hindi or hindi urdu that's the space same thing different script but the point is that the what was known as hindavi or the local indian language was now assimilated into the court so did the mughals we can call them muslim but really they are becoming north indian they it's another example of accommodation to north indian culture and his son jahangir's son shah jahan builds of course the most spectacular monuments that are familiar to to many of us any visitor to india i mean this is the most extraordinary building in new delhi in old delhi i should say shah jahanabad means the city of shah jahan king of the world um and this is of course the building from which jawaharlal uh read off the the declaration of of independence for india in august of 1947 standing up there in the top so this has become again the symbol of indian rulership i mean delhi had always as i mentioned earlier been the the center of muslim power um in india and uh and now it's interesting even though the british had already built new delhi only five miles away from this monument nehru is announcing the the proclamation of independent india from this monument meaning he's identifying himself not with the british but with the bogels who had already become indian uh where the british never did of course in ways the british couldn't do so shah jahan then is the patron of these monuments which we all identify uh as kind of the classic statement of of of india itself the icon of india as i mentioned earlier uh a perfect transplant of iranian architecture again delhi is on that and this is agra of course just 100 miles southeast of delhi but it's on that corridor that that corridor of of persian architecture that migration corridor from central asia uh into the heart of india so we hear we see here an exact replica of the finest persian aesthetic reflected in the taj mahal but not just the taj mahal but other great monuments of the north the great mosque in lahore again sandstone and white marble red sandstone uh in in the south of the deccan we get uh t murad or central asian uh motifs again the glazed tile you see here the glazed tile uh the the the fall the minarets are really this could appear anywhere in central asia again these are essentially transplants from central asia into india unlike those bengali or kerala mosque that i showed earlier sufism i know you've read a lot about that because this goes back to the question of how islam accommodates itself to india the quran here's a central paradox the quran unit uno was written in arabic in fact there's a famous ayah in in or statement in the quran where allah says we have created a arabic quran so that you might understand the assumption behind that statement is that the koran is addressing an arabic speaking population and of course for centuries and centuries there was a kind of a prohibition against translating the koran out of arabic into any other language so the question becomes and we go back to the central paradox how does india where arabic is not spoken how does the quran communicate how is the quran mediated to a non-arabic speaking population and i want to close with this these few comments here about how that paradox is overcome because it really goes to the heart i think of understanding islam in in south asia how does islam why is it that south asia is the is the demographic heartland of the islamic religion not middle east but south asia when this is a non-arabic speaking area that's the central paradox one of the answers is that whereas the bible of course is freely translated out of hebrew and greek into latin into all the vernacular languages with the reformation this does not happen with koran so we need to redefine our understanding of translation we do not find a word by where translation is not just a word by word uh translation of meaning from arabic into other languages rather the word translation needs to be understood in a much broader kind of metaphorical sense you have commentaries of the quran which are written in vernacular languages you have histories of the prophet muhammad and the other prophets of the quran written in vernacular languages and it's these bengali or tamil or kashmiri commentaries on the quran or histories of the prophets these are written in local languages and each one of these becomes a way of transmitting islamic ideas into vernacular culture so even though the quran is not translated word by word into vernacular bengali or hindi or kannada or telugu or any of the other languages it is through other media that islamic ideas are mediated into a non-arabic speaking people one mechanism is through the great sufi shrines that are built in the punjab now this is in moltan now in pakistan uh in in the great province of punjab the sultans in the 14th century of delhi would patronize popular sufi shakes for simple political reasons these sufi shakes are already popular uh their shrines are great kind of like magnets attracting hundreds and thousands of people both hindus and and muslims so what the sultan does in order to kind of curry the favor of local populations is to build these magnificent monuments over the gravesites of very popular shakes you know it's like american politicians going to hollywood and incurring the favor of movie stars uh you need to to sink your roots in the local population you identify who are the people that are locally understood as charismatic and powerful we're going to get on their side so as a political statement what the sultans of delhi are doing is by patronizing these great sufi shrines uh in in western india they are plugging into an existing uh a network of piety uh namely sufism and so throughout pogba present-day pakistan we find these extraordinary monuments i mean look at the tile again it all echoes central asian aesthetic that i already showed you can see that reflected here very clearly but look at also what you see here these are all graves of people who want to be buried near the site where this particular shake uh was was buried which is of course the the heart of the whole monument so in western india you what you have is a phenomenon of these great shrines uh that are kind of like magnets uh patronized by sultans they're the ones who paid who write the checkbook uh they support it they they they pay the bills uh and so you have this kind of connection between local piety and political power visually very dramatically seen in these these shrines these are shrines of the deccan same idea the sultans would have patronized these these monuments uh in uh again in the punjab you have these these these large shrines made of pure marble again patronized by the sultans of delhi uh here is a nighttime celebration at one of these these shrines and i'm you've already studied soupism you understand that you know these are the every thursday night is when you have these large gatherings at uh at the shrines of uh in the punjab uh this particular one of pakpatan here's the grave site of one of these shrines uh muslims saying prayers over them uh here is another uh the tomb of of asha in in in sin and i just want to draw your attention the one thing about this uh which is the the presence of of this object here which of course you can easily recognize as a crown the crown symbolizes the fact that in sufi thought the real sovereigns of the world are sufi sheikhs who simply kind of designate sultan's to be their caretakers who do the messy business of revenue collection administering justice raising armies taxation they do all that but the real sovereigns of the universe are sufis who quote unquote appoint the sultans to rulership and so there's this fascinating kind of tense relationship between political power sultans and sufi shakes they both claim sovereignty but in different ways the sultans are out there fighting their their battles collecting taxes and all the rest of it but they also used sufis many times to serve as the in in their coronation ceremonies it's sufi shakes who actually put the crown on their head because it's understood in the sufi discourse that sufis are the real sovereigns of the world and you see that echoed here in this tomb where we have a we have an actual crown and of course many sufis bear the name shah which means king in persian this particular one shah mardan shah he's got the word twice in there king shahinsha king of kings so there is that connection so we go back to this this this map which i began with and i want to simply make one quick point about again trying to explain why it is that the eastern bengal and the western uh punjab are the areas where we have the predominant muslim population if we look at a distribution of muslims in bengal as of the first census 1872 we can see it it's the eastern half which has the highest population up 70 80 percent as high as 90 and above in in the eastern delta whereas the western delta which is where the calcutta is is the western side uh it's mainly hindu and if we look at the distribution of mosques on the other hand they're all over the delta but the real heartland is in the west along the old gangetic ganges river somewhat more sparse in the east so you have this kind of paradox where the predominant muslim population is in the east but the majority of the mosques are in the west now my own research was really trying to understand how do you resolve that apparent contradiction what i found in squirreled away in record rooms in in what is now bangladesh eastern bengal were these 17th and 16th century persian records which basically transferred virgin jungle land forested thick forested land to developers who were required to cut the jungle bring the land into cultivation rice cultivation wet rice and as a condition for doing that they had to build either a temple or a mosque which then became the kind of nucleus of of new communities in a region where uh the population was neither hindu nor muslim already they were practicing kind of local bengali religious cults in the 16th and 17th centuries these mod these documents of which i found hundreds of them speak to the gradual transformation of land from jungle to rice paddy because they would actually have pictures of these bengali mosques and again you see the curved cornice now this is not some spectacular monument that would have appeared in inscriptions somewhere they're made of bamboo and thatching very simple but they performed a very important role as being kind of the nucleus of new communities because there would be a moazin and the leader of prayer akhatib who delivers the sermon and all this was paid for by the developer who got the grant who was given the land uh and as a condition for getting rent-free land uh he had to build these mosques or temples but if a developer happened to be a muslim it would be a mosque like this or like that so that you can see beginning in the 1720s the distribution of these they gradually increase each dot indicates where one of these mosques were built and they get thicker as we move into the 1740s and 1750s what's quite dense this really is the story of the growth of of islam in bengal this particular series of maps are based on contemporary european maps of bengal the point of it being that if we look closely the first map drawn by a portuguese cartographer shows if i can do it here we go the ganges emptying down by present-day calcutta sat down as here so the the ganges river basically flowed in the western part of the delta by uh 1615 it splits half of it goes down the west the other half goes into the eastern delta by 1760 it's abandoned its old channel down by satgown which is calcutta here and the major part of is going into the central delta by 1779 the the ganges has linked up with the great brahmaputra which goes through east bengal the point being that the river system of bengal has moved from the west to the east the center the epicenter of civilization moves with the rivers uh and calcutta and the western the old part becomes progressively abandoned calcutta is today a dying city because the old ganges river has basically abandoned it whereas the eastern delta gets more and more fertile because it's getting more and more fresh water now this is important because the the area is politically integrated with the moguls at the same time that these rivers are shifting to the east meaning that east bengal becomes the area of uh agricultural as well as political development a question please what what is what's the influence of people's use of the land around where the river flowed to influence the rivers move east okay is the question why are they moving east okay that's a geological question and and the geologists i have two theories and i'm not gonna get into that i have no dog in this fight one theory is uh it's tectonic that there's there's a there's a fault line geologically in the east which is gradually causing the eastern side of bengal to cave to the this way for you cave downward uh you know having to do with continental uh drift uh and that that's one theory is when the other theory is that all of bengal basically is a flat pancake it's it's the whole bangladesh today is about 30 40 feet above sea level and and uh and so all what these rivers are doing are building bringing silt down into the bengal delta the whole area is basically silt that's been transformed transferred from the himalaya mountains topsoil gets moved down to this area so it's very rich because the ganges and the magna and the brahmaputra all these rivers are bringing huge loads of silt down and the as a consequence the delta keeps getting pushed further and further south into the bay of bengal this whole area therefore is remarkably fertile because of the because of what the rivers are doing so as the rivers move to the east the east becomes progressively more fertile and the west becomes less fertile that's reflected in population figures population is higher in the east than it is in the west and this is also reflected in the pattern of of development of of of villages so these records i showed you these persian manuscripts which documents which what they're really showing you is that the land is being transformed from jungle to rice paddy and that means that rice paddy supports a lot more people than jungle can uh obviously so all this is happening at the same time that there's an agrarian transformation at the same time that people are being introduced for the first time to a world religion that islam is identified with forest development and one of the things that's unique about sufism in eastern bengal is that sufis are typically identified with not just preaching islam but with preaching agriculture they're identified with the people who first brought the the technology of rice cultivation to the east so the muslims of notions of islamic piety today are associated with agriculture you talk to peasants in bangladesh and they will say that we peasants are the true muslims because we're doing what god told abraham told adam to do that adam was instructed to take the plow and to master the earth by plowing the earth whereas those folks in the city who are not plowing the land are not really as good muslims as we are so they've internalized this idea this connection between agriculture and islamic religion in ways that are fascinating because many textbooks you read about islam repeat this old idea that islam is somehow of an urban religion you know it's a middle eastern idea it might work for baghdad you know and damascus and the all the the famous centers of islam in the middle east uh but when you move into the indian subcontinent which is monsoon there the whole thing is inverted and that that islam is now understood as an agrarian phenomenon and these saints these sufis are associated with people who who bring islamic pie to bengal so i'll close with this image the punjab was settled again primarily by transplanted uh uh persianized turks who have been pushed out of central asia by the mongols and they bring with them a very central asian aesthetic sensibility so that the sultans who are ruling from delhi will patronize monuments which could easily have appeared in central asia in samarkand in bohara any of the great cities of central asia uh here you have these powerful sufi sheikhs who are loaded with barakah or charisma who are seen as kind of conduits between us humans and allah so people want to be buried there uh they go there with pilgrimage they they have hugely important uh festivals that take place at these these great shrines uh in the punjab and so these these become the magnets uh for local populations of uh of people who were not yet hindu um they're kind of on the way to becoming hindu but they're not quite there yet in the 12th century and uh and so the punjab has a very different kind of uh entree into islam than bengal in bengal you don't have these great monuments what you have are simple thatched and bamboo huts which become the earliest mosques as i've tried to suggest we see that already in those documents earlier on and those are the kind of important ways in which islam is mediated to a very different population in in bengal from punjab one of the reasons that pakistan broke up in 1971 you know in 1947 you have two wings a a west and an east even though bengal is more populated than than uh than west pakistan uh east pakistan was uh was always looked down upon as not really being muslim these these bengalis they ate fish and rice instead of wheat and meat like us punjabis uh and and we we see the aesthetic style of bengal and punjab also very different so bengal breaks away from pakistan in 1971 and establishes bangladesh because islam no longer was understood as a sufficient glue holding together these two separate provinces of the state and i would argue as you can see here reflected in architecture that the whole sensibility of bengali muslims and punjabi muslims is very different uh as as as understood in terms of how they relate to their shakes and and their mosques now i know that we're getting late on time sam so i i wanted to we we have we can take a look we have a 20 minute break so we can cut into it a little bit so we can take maybe 15 minutes yeah that's exactly what i want to do is that this is kind of gives a an overall kind of um introduction to the whole story kind of historical background and why don't we do that why don't we take questions and and i'd be happy to kind of start this discussion

Channel: YaleUniversity

Views: 153,544

Rating: 4.530488 out of 5

Keywords: Yale, PIER, Teaching, Teachers, Worlds of Islam, Muslim World, History, Islam, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Muslims, Dehli, Sufis, Richard Eaton, Institute

Id: romOBHXl8yE

Length: 68min 22sec (4102 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 05 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/nlitened1]

this is another good video

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-HyWUu6US0