Richard M. Eaton

Human settlement and colonization in the Sundarbans, 1200–1750

The Sundarban forest in southern Bengal was for many centuries a frontier zone—an economic frontier for communities of wet rice farmers who brought with them technologies and forms of social organization from points further to the west; a political frontier for large centralized states expanding from North India; and a cultural frontier for the worldwide community of Muslims. This paper investigates the forces that, between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, lay behind the transformation of Bengals natural forest into rice paddy, a transformation that was accompanied by conversion to Islam, state formation, and the evolution of new land tenures.

Conversion to Christianity among the Nagas, 1876-1971

Acknowledgements: I am indebted to Professors Robert E. Frykenberg of the University of Wisconsin and Christopher R. King of the University of Windsor for arousing my interest in Christianity among the Nagas. I am especially grateful to Prof. Frykenberg for introducing me to the officials at the Bethel Seminary Archives, where many of the missionary papers used in this paper are preserved. I also wish to thank the Seminary officials for kindly allowing me to make use of their valuable records. The entire history of India may be viewed, from one perspective, as a somewhat constant attempt by settled agrarian populations of the low-lying plains to extend their political and ecological frontiers into the outlying jungles which, at one time, covered the entire subcontinent. Thus it was a

Warfare on the Deccan Plateau, 1450–1600: A Military Revolution in Early Modern India?

According to conventional understandings of the Military Revolution, the introduction of firearms in early modern European warfare yielded wide-ranging consequences that were by no means confined to the realm of military affairs. This essay examines the earliest known introduction of firearms technology in India, with a view to evaluating how its consequences there compared or contrasted with those claimed to have occurred in early modern Europe. We further ask: Why did cannon appear in the dry, upland plateau of peninsular India, Known as the Deccan, before anywhere else in India? Within the Deccan, how can we explain the different responses to the advent of gunpowder technologies? What effects did new military technologies have on the Deccan’s architectural landscape, and on its society at large?

Shrines, Cultivators, and Muslim ‘Conversion’ in Punjab and Bengal, 1300–1700

This article discusses the growth of predominantly Muslim populations in two regions of South Asia—western Punjab and eastern Bengal. No evidence supports conventional understandings that Islamisation in these areas resulted from a desire for social liberation on the part of the lower orders of the Hindu caste system. Nor should Islamisation in these regions be characterised as instances of ‘conversion’, a term embedded in the nineteenth century Protestant missionary movement and thus, inappropriate for reconstructing religious processes in medieval Bengal and Punjab. Rather, transformations of religious identity in these two regions appear to have been gradual and unselfconscious in nature. They also appear to have been part of larger socio-political and economic changes that were occurring in the regions, in particular the diffusion of settled peasant agriculture.

Firuzabad : palace city of the Deccan

In the heart of Indias Deccan Plateau lies the ruined city of Firuzabad, the royal palace and second capital of Sultan Firuz Shah Bahmani (r.1397-1422). Built in the early years of the fifteenth century, the city displays a remarkably unified conception of Indo-Muslim architecture. But Firuzabad slipped into oblivion shortly after the death of its patron, and has since remained virtually unnoticed by archaeologists and art historians alike. In the present volume art historian George Michell and Indian historian Richard Eaton have collaborated in producing the first detailed architectural and historical analysis of this fascinating but little-known legacy of Indo-Muslim culture.

Rethinking Religious Divides

Notwithstanding the considerable body of scholarship on South Asian history that has appeared over the past several decades, we still live with the image of a monolithic and alien Islam colliding with an equally monolithic Hinduism, construed as indigenous, and from the eleventh century on, politically suppressed. Such a cardboard-cutout caricature survives in much of Indias tabloid media, as well as in textbooks informed by a revivalist, aggressively political strand of Hinduism, or “Hindutva.” Though useful for stoking primordial identities or mobilizing support for political agendas, this caricature thrives on a pervasive ignorance of South Asias past. Removing such ignorance is precisely the endeavor to which academic institutions, and scholarship more generally, are properly committed.

The Court and the Dargah in the Seventeenth Century Deccan

Studies of Sufis and Sufism in medieval India have shed much light on the nature of the relationships between Muslim mystics and secular courts. An excellent example of such an inquiry is Professor Aziz Ahmad’s article, &dquo;The Sufi and the Sultan in Pre-Mughal India.&dquo;’ Little attention, however, has been given to the relations between medieval Indian rulers and the network of social institutions that grew up around the tombs, or dargahs, of these same Sufis. It is the aim of this paper to’ examine such relations with reference to the Deccan kingdom of Bijapur and one of the best known dargahs of India, the Banda Navaz dat-gih of Gulbarga. In India or Pakistan today one can readily see that Sufi dargahs constitute immensely important centres of folk religion. Over time, the Sufis buried in these tombs acquired reputations as saints, while the dargahs themselves became objects of great reverence and pilgrimage for rural Hindus as well as Muslims. One writer has even suggested that &dquo;inanimate objects such . as these graves appear to have played a more important role in conversions [to Islam] than the early saints themselves. 112 As these dargahs became centers of popular devotionalism the family descendants of the Sufi buried thereknown as pirzadas, &dquo;sons of a pir&dquo;-acquired a great deal of social prominence and constituted, as one writer phrased it, the &dquo;Brahmins

Love’s subtle magic: an Indian Islamic literary tradition, 1379–1545, by Aditya Behl

papereality, the state came to be produced as such and seen as a sometimes coherent, occasionally incoherent, shaping. Some of these spaces are bureaucratic: the cutcherry (administrative office), the various offices that dealt with revenue, and those that dealt with the adjudication of evidence such as law courts (adalat), police and the tahsil and some which were involved in pedagogies such as the village school, the mission schools and the orphan school. The chapters on pedagogy are bracketed by measuring and attesting, both vested with the production of truth value, the fraility of a command to truth and the concomitant, attendant and necessary failure to arrive at it. Document Raj opens with pymaish survey, which took over from earlier formulations but now ‘rendered the topography of entitlements and produce shares into a new template of rent, tenancy and landless wage work by abstracting labour [in the new imaginary of the number] from hierarchical reciprocity’ (p. 16), a ‘dense semiotics’ (p. 72) attended by surveyors, collectors and modalities of recordkeeping, examining and inspecting reporting that had to account for the failure of information gathering enterprises. Document Raj closes with investigations into a ‘bureaucracy of letters’ (p. 146) that encompassed attestation practices which consolidated the importance of a signature associated with a single person (rather than with collectives), the folding of the signatory into the writer of the document that also produced an entire bazaar devoted to document production, both ‘real’ and ‘forged’. This section includes evidentiary practice insinuated into adalat courts (p. 151) and finely grained descriptions of the rise of sincerity and propriety (the proper ways to appeal) as incipient in emergent resignifications of the petition (arzi), the primary medium through which supplicants were often viewed as corrupt and mendacious, and who were also called upon to craft a sufficiently credible story, could come before the state with their grievances. All in all, Document Raj is a very fine book. The task that Bhavani Raman has set up for herself in the book, the exploration of an entire habitus, is daunting, but she is very successful at accomplishing it. This reviewer’s one small wish for it is that one might have wanted a bit more than Raman has already given on the emergence of the statistical states outside India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and their resonances with colonial ventures at the production of legible, recordable and usable ‘data’. But that desire does not take anything away from what Raman has accomplished. Readers should peruse Document Raj from cover to cover; it is so replete with newly fashioned nuggets of information, and so methodologically rigorous.

Indo-Muslim Traditions, 1200-1750: Towards a Framework of Study:

India was severely shaken nine years ago when religious activists demolished the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, U.P., built in 1528 by the first Mughal emperor. This act, which had no precedent in anodern history, dramatically brought late twentieth century Indians face to face with their pre-colonial past. As Shahid Amin wrote four years later, ’We all live today in a 1026-1528-1992 present, and not in the 1757-1885-1947 of the past.&dquo; In other words, the critical reference points for thinking about South Asian history were no longer the British colonial period, but

Book Reviews : Rajat Datta, Society, Economy and the Market: Commercialization in Rural Bengal, c. 1760-1800, New Delhi, Manohar, 2000, pp. 376

In transliterating Persian words, Haidar does not appear to have followed a uniform style and some of the styles she has followed are not quite close to the Persian word formation. Sometimes she follows the old style double hyphen system such as in the title, Mukatabat-i Allami, and elsewhere such as in Shari’at-i-Muhammadi, Mirat-i-Ahmadi, Bahar-iA jam, etc. (pp. 2,17); on other occasions, the zer is added to the first of the two words which are then joined together with a hyphen, such as mirihajj, Khani-Khanan (pp. 3, 21). Both styles are defective. But this is a