Modern South Asia (5th ed, 2023) PDF

 MODERN SOUTH ASIA The fifth edition of Modern South Asia draws on the newest historical research and scholarship in the field to interpret and debate key developments in modern South Asian history and historical writing, covering the diverse spectrum of the subcontinent’s social,...

 MODERN SOUTH ASIA The fifth edition of Modern South Asia draws on the newest historical research and scholarship in the field to interpret and debate key developments in modern South Asian history and historical writing, covering the diverse spectrum of the subcontinent’s social, economic and political past. Jointly authored by two leading Indian and Pakistani historians, this definitive study offers a rare depth of historical understanding of the politics, cultures and economies that have shaped the lives of more than a fifth of humanity. This new edition on the 75th anniversary of independence and partition brings the narrative up to the present day, discussing recent events and addressing new themes such as the capture of state power in India by the forces of religious majoritarianism, economic development in the context of the ‘rise’ of Asia and strategic shifts occasioned by the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and China’s increasing role in the region. Providing fresh insights into the structure and ideology of the British raj, the meaning of subaltern resistance, the refashioning of social relations along lines of caste, class, religion and gender, the different strands of anti-colonial nationalism and the dynamics of decolonization, this is an essential resource for all students of the modern history of South Asia in an Indian Ocean and global context. Sugata Bose is Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University, USA. His books include A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (2006) and His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle against Empire (2011). Ayesha Jalal is Mary Richardson Professor of History at Tufts University, USA. Her books include Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia (2010) and The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times, and Work across the India– Pakistan Divide (2013).  MODERN SOUTH ASIA History, Culture, Political Economy Fifth Edition Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal  Cover image: The Diwan-i-am (Hall of Public Audiences) in the Red Fort, Delhi, India. © Ian Dagnall/Alamy Stock Photo Fifth edition published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal The right of Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Routledge in 1998 Fourth edition published by Routledge in 2017  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bose, Sugata, 1956- author. | Jalal, Ayesha, author. Title: Modern South Asia : history, culture, political economy / Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal. Description: Fifth edition. | Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022017654 (print) | LCCN 2022017655 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032124230 (hbk) | ISBN 9781032124186 (pbk) | ISBN 9781003224488 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: South Asia--History. Classification: LCC DS340.B66 2023 (print) | LCC DS340 (ebook) | DDC 954--dc23/eng/20220429 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022017654 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022017655 ISBN: 978-1-032-12423-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-12418-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-22448-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003224488 Typeset in Sabon by MPS Limited, Dehradun FOR KRISHNA BOSE AND ZAKIA JALAL  CONTENTS List of figures List of maps Preface to the fifth edition Preface to the fourth edition Preface to the third edition Preface to the second edition Preface to the first edition Acknowledgements 1 South Asian history: an introduction 2 Modernity and antiquity: interpretations of ancient India 3 Pre-modern accommodations of difference: the making of Indo-Islamic cultures 4 The Mughal empire: state, economy and society 5 India between empires: decline or decentralization? 6 The transition to colonialism: resistance and collaboration 7 The first century of British rule, 1757 to 1857: state and economy 8 Company raj and Indian society, 1757 to 1857: re-invention and reform of tradition 9 1857: rebellion, collaboration and the transition to crown raj 10 High noon of colonialism, 1858 to 1914: state and political economy 11 A nation in making? ‘Rational’ reform and ‘religious’ revival, 1858 to c. 1900 12 A nation in making: Swadeshi nationalism and internationalism, 1905–1918 13 Colonialism under siege: state and political economy after World War I 14 Gandhian nationalism and mass politics in the 1920s 15 The Depression decade: society, economics and politics 16 Nationalism and colonialism during World War II and its aftermath: economic crisis and political confrontation 17 The partition of India and the creation of Pakistan 18 1947: memories and meanings 19 Post-colonial South Asia: state and economy, society and politics, 1947 to 1971 20 Post-colonial South Asia: state and economy, society and politics, 1971 to c. 2000 21 South Asia in the twenty-first century 22 Decolonizing South Asian history: a 75th anniversary perspective Glossary A chronological outline Select bibliography and notes Index  FIGURES 2.1 The Presence of the Past. A Hindu village in Punjab, Pakistan. © Ayesha Jalal 2.2 India in Pakistan: An Ashokan Pillar in Lahore Museum. © Sugata Bose 2.3 Descent of the Ganges. Pallava era seventh- to eighth- century wall relief, Mamallapuram. © Ayesha Jalal 2.4 Kali. Chola bronze sculpture, tenth century, in Chennai Museum. © Sugata Bose 3.1 Islam in India. The Qutb Minar, Delhi – a thirteenth- century monument to the Sufi saint Qutbuddin Kaki started by Qutbuddin Aibak and completed by Iltutmish. Print from drawing by William Daniell exhibited at the Oriental Annual, 1834, in the private collection of Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal 3.2 Islam in Kashmir. The Jamia Masjid, Srinagar, originally built in 1400. © Ayesha Jalal 3.3 The Feminine Dimension of Islam. Tomb of Bibi Jiwandi in Uchh Sharif, Punjab, present-day Pakistan. © Ayesha Jalal  4.1 The Rajput Arm of the Mughal Empire. Gateway to the palace of Raja Mansingh of Amber. © Sugata Bose 4.2 Mughal Memory. Jahangir’s Tomb, Lahore. © Ayesha Jalal 4.3 Mughal Piety. The Badshahi Mosque, Lahore, built under the patronage of Aurangzeb. © Ayesha Jalal 7.1 The Church of England in India. St Mary’s Church, Madras, the oldest seventeenth-century British building in India. © Sugata Bose 8.1 Colonial Conquest. A tiger hunt by colonial officials mounted on elephants. Print from drawing by William Daniell in the private collection of Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal 8.2 The First Steps of Western Education. The main staircase of Presidency College, formerly Hindu College, Calcutta. © Sugata Bose 8.3 Colonial Calcutta. Sculpture in front of the Marble Palace, a nineteenth-century Calcutta mansion. © Ayesha Jalal 10.1 British Majesty. The Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, started under the patronage of Lord Curzon. © Sugata Bose 10.2 Royal Railways. Victoria Terminus, Bombay, inaugurated on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, 1887. © Ayesha Jalal 10.3 Royal Welcome. Gateway of India, Bombay, erected on the occasion of the visit of King George V in 1911. © Ayesha Jalal 11.1 The Face of Subaltern Resistance. Birsa Munda, leader of the Munda ulgulan of 1899–1900. Courtesy of the archives of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi 12.1 Lal, Bal and Pal. Lala Lajpat Rai of Punjab, Balawantrao Gangadhar Tilak of Maharashtra and Bipin Chandra Pal of  Bengal. Courtesy of the archives of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi 12.2 Bharatmata by Abanindranath Tagore. By kind permission of the Trustees of Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata, India 15.1 The Nationalist Leadership. Mahatma Gandhi, Subhas Chandra Bose, Vallabhbhai Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru (standing) at the Haripura session of the Indian National Congress, February 1938. Courtesy of the archives of the Netaji Research Bureau, Calcutta 16.1 Famine. A starving woman during the Bengal famine of 1943. Courtesy Sugata Bose from his film Rebels against the Raj: India during World War II (original footage in the archives of the Netaji Research Bureau, Calcutta) 16.2 An Army of Liberation. Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army in Singapore, 1943. Courtesy of the archives of the Netaji Research Bureau, Calcutta 17.1 Parleys prior to Partition. The Simla Viceregal Lodge, venue of the failed talks of 1945. © Ayesha Jalal 17.2 Prime Minister in Waiting. Jawaharlal Nehru as head of the interim government, 1946; seated on his left are Sarat Chandra Bose and Rajendra Prasad. Courtesy of the archives of the Netaji Research Bureau, Calcutta 17.3 Walking for Peace. Mahatma Gandhi in Noakhali. Courtesy of the archives of the Netaji Research Bureau, Calcutta 17.4 A Tired Vote for Partition. Jawaharlal Nehru raises his hand to vote for partition, June 1947. Courtesy of the archives of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi 17.5 Announcing a Birth. M.A. Jinnah about to make a radio broadcast, June 1947. Courtesy of the Information  Division, Embassy of Pakistan, Washington, DC 17.6 The Pity of Partition. Mahatma Gandhi in a pensive mood just outside Calcutta, May 1947. Courtesy of the archives of the Netaji Research Bureau, Calcutta 19.1 Jai Bangla. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman addressing a rally in Dacca, March 1971. Courtesy of the archives of the Ananda Bazaar Patrika, Calcutta 20.1 Aristocratic Populists. Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto at Simla, 1972. Courtesy of the archives of the Ananda Bazaar Patrika, Calcutta 20.2 A Secret Ballot. A woman votes in the Indian general elections of 1991 in Madhubani, Bihar. Courtesy of Sugata Bose from his film Mandir, Masjid, Mandal and Marx: Democracy in India 21.1 Voters. An Election Rally in West Bengal in 2014. © Sugata Bose  MAPS 5.1 Map of India in 1765. Source: C.A. Bayly, The Raj (1990), courtesy of National Gallery Publications 9.1 Map of India in 1857. Source: C.A. Bayly, The Raj (1990), courtesy of National Gallery Publications 15.1 Map of India in 1937. Source: Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman (1985), courtesy of Cambridge University Press 17.1 Map of the proposal for a Federal India, 1946. Source: Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman (1985), courtesy of Cambridge University Press 20.1 Map of South Asia in 1972. Source: Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia (1995), courtesy of Cambridge University Press  PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION OF MODERN SOUTH ASIA: HISTORY, CULTURE, POLITICAL ECONOMY Modern South Asia first appeared on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of South Asian independence and partition in 1997–98. A second edition was published in 2004, a third in 2011, and a fourth in 2017. This revised and expanded fifth edition is being published on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the subcontinent’s independence and partition in 2022. Our narrative has been brought up to date to the present with a new chapter on South Asia in the twenty-first century. The new chapter addresses the challenges to democracy in South Asia with the rise of religious majoritarianism and authoritarianism. We consider the extent to which contemporary crises are rooted in states of exception written into colonial and post-colonial legal regimes. This has entailed a fuller treatment of constitution-making processes discussed in earlier chapters. Second, we have included new scholarship that has emerged from the research of a younger generation of historians on the early modern and modern periods of South Asian history. The occasion of the 75th anniversary has enabled us to offer fresh insights into the history of partition, its enduring legacy, and ways of transcending its borders in historical scholarship.  Modern South Asia has always presented to students and the general reader the cutting-edge historical research on the subcontinent. Successive editions have incorporated fresh contributions to the formation of regional identities in South Asia, the connections of the subcontinent to a larger Indian Ocean inter-regional arena, and methodological innovations in the study of the history of political and economic ideas emanating from South Asia. We hope the fifth edition will be considered worthy of the 75th anniversary observance of South Asian independence. We wish to record our deepest gratitude to our undergraduate and graduate students at Tufts University and Harvard University. Their responses to our lectures have helped us immeasurably to improve our text. Several of our PhD students have by now become illustrious colleagues in the historical profession. The five editions of Modern South Asia provide a remarkable record of the advances in modern South Asian history and historiography over a quarter of a century. Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal February 2, 2022  PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION Modern South Asia first appeared on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of South Asian independence and partition in 1997–1998. A second edition was published in 2004 and a third in 2011. This revised and expanded fourth edition is being published on the seventieth anniversary of the subcontinent’s independence in 2017. This edition takes account of the new developments in South Asian history and historiography in the last twenty years. The post-colonial era gets more detailed coverage. There have been significant political and economic developments since our last revision of 2010 that are placed in the context of longer-term trajectories discussed in earlier chapters. Among the themes that have received attention are the capture of state power in India by the forces of religious majoritarianism and their tussle with regional political currents; economic development in India in the larger context of the ‘rise’ of Asia and in comparison with China; and strategic shifts in India and Pakistan occasioned by the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Modern South Asia has always presented to students and the general reader the cutting-edge historical research on the subcontinent. New books have appeared on the ancient, medieval and early modern periods that have led us to refine the interpretations offered in the first three chapters. The last six years have witnessed the publication of outstanding new research monographs on modern history by younger scholars, some of whom have been our own graduate students. These works have consolidated the trend we noted in the third edition of placing South Asia in larger inter-regional and global contexts. The fourth edition, therefore, highlights the best of comparative and connective historical scholarship in South Asia. This 70th anniversary edition is dedicated to our mothers – Krishna Bose and Zakia Jalal – who have lived through the era of independence and partition to the contemporary moment with grace and dignity. Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal February 2017  PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION The inexorable march of history necessitates periodic revisions and new editions of general works of historical scholarship. The changes that need to be taken account of are primarily of two kinds. First, significant recent events need to be assessed in the context of longer-term structures and processes. Second, new knowledge generated by cutting-edge research deserves to find a place in any major work of synthesis and interpretation. Modern South Asia was first written on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of South Asian independence and partition in 1997 and a second, revised edition appeared in 2004. During the six years that have now intervened crucial developments have taken place both in terms of historically significant events and innovative historical scholarship. We had argued in the first edition that the idea of changeless tradition in South Asia was always a myth. While certain structures of material life may be slow moving over time, nothing is a simple ‘given’ from the past. Traditions with deep roots in the past are always in the process of being reinterpreted. If we consider what might be called a medium-term conjuncture from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth, South Asia can be seen to be going through a world-historical transformation. In many ways, the region is recovering the global position it had lost in economic, political and cultural terms at the onset of British colonial rule. So far as the history of events is concerned, South Asia has witnessed more than its due share of dramatic assassinations and insurgencies as well as changes of regimes. The trend that we had noticed in the second edition of new historical scholarship on the formation of regional and religious identities gathered further momentum in the last few years with the publication of insightful first books by younger scholars, some but by no means all being our own former graduate students. The theme of the intricate relationship between religion and politics has engaged our own scholarly interest, as is evident from Ayesha Jalal’s Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia published in 2008. South Asian history has been placed creatively in the wider context of the inter-regional arena on the Indian Ocean as well as connections of a global scope. Our involvement in the writing of new connective histories is exemplified in Sugata Bose’s A Hundred Horizons: the Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire that came out in 2006. South Asian historiography has been enriched of late by a renewed interest in the history of economic and political ideas in a transnational frame. Our own work in this field and that of our many colleagues and students find reflection in this revised third edition of Modern South Asia. Our leaves from Harvard and Tufts in the spring semester of 2010 enabled us to complete this work of revision, expansion and refinement of our text. We have put together the third edition in Calcutta and Lahore and we wish to thank our mothers Krishna Bose and Zakia Jalal for their support. We hope the new edition will continue to be the book of choice of teachers and students of modern South Asian history as well as interested non-specialists in the subject. Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal Summer 2010, in Calcutta and Lahore  PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION The first edition of Modern South Asia had been published some six years ago on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the subcontinent’s independence and partition. We have been gratified by the enthusiastic response it has received from teachers, students and non-specialist readers with an intelligent interest in South Asia. There are primarily three reasons for publishing a second, revised edition at this stage. First, the strength of Modern South Asia lies in its use of the newest and the most sophisticated historical research and scholarship in the field. In the past six years there has been some excellent new work, particularly on the formation of religious, regional and national identities in South Asia, which is reflected in the new edition. South Asian historiography in this area is moving beyond the dichotomy between statist, ‘secular’ histories and communitarian, ‘subaltern’ histories towards a subtler understanding of the place of religion in the public sphere. The second edition of Modern South Asia aspires to convey to a general readership the current and cutting-edge state-of-the-art. We are grateful to our former PhD students, now colleagues in the academy, for spurring us to do so. Second, Modern South Asia in its first edition had narrated the subcontinent’s history up to 1997. Key developments since that date – not least the 1998 nuclear tests, the rise of the BJP to power in India, yet another military regime in Pakistan and new twists and turns in India–Pakistan relations – all suggested that the story needed to be brought up to date in purely chronological terms. Third, we have now had occasion to rethink some of the key issues discussed in the first edition and have received sufficient feedback from our colleagues and students to engage in a chapter by chapter revision. For example, we have rewritten the introduction and shifted the more difficult discussion of historiography to the beginning of the bibliography. In the chapter on the eighteenth century or India between empires we may have leaned a little too far towards the thesis about decentralization rather than decline. We seek to restore the balance somewhat in the second edition on the relationship between region and religion. The chapters on the colonial state have more to say on the raj without losing the general focus on Indian society. We have a few new insights into Gandhi’s thought and practice, at variance with existing interpretations, which we bring into play in the chapter on the 1920s. We have added material on Muslim society and politics throughout, including the discussion of partition, and updated chapters 18, 19 and 20. A chronology of key events is supplied at the end of the book. We wish to record our gratitude to our mothers, Krishna Bose and Zakia Jalal, for their support. We hope that the second edition, like its predecessor, will help generate discussion and debate about South Asian history. Modern South Asia combines a narrative with synthesis and interpretation. We trust that in an improved second edition it will continue to be the book of choice for teachers, students and non-specialist readers searching for the one authoritative and enjoyable book on South Asian history. Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal April 2003  PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION Times of commemoration can occasion fresh ways of rethinking the past. And 1997 seemed as good a moment as any other to bring together the myriad threads of modern South Asian history, pause and reconsider, while taking account of the more important findings of recent historical research. The shifting parameters of scholarly debate on South Asian historiography with the unfolding of the process of decolonization of the mind need to be placed before a broader audience. In deciding to put together a general history of the South Asian subcontinent, the audience we had foremost in our minds was the younger generation of South Asians and students interested in South Asia. That is why we have chosen to dedicate this book to our nieces and nephews and through their hands to the next generation. We hope of course that our book will engage interested non-specialists of whatever generation curious about South Asian history. Our deepest debt in writing this book is to our students at Columbia University and Tufts University who heard earlier versions of our arguments in the form of lectures. Their queries as well as occasional incomprehension has greatly helped to sharpen and clarify our interpretation of complex historical processes and events. Interactions with our graduate students, Ritu Birla, Semanti Ghosh, Farina Mir, Mridu Rai, Shabnum Tejani and Chitralekha Zutshi, have militated against over-simplification. Farina Mir and Shabnum Tejani at Columbia and Semanti Ghosh and Chitralekha Zutshi at Tufts have served as our teaching assistants and contributed to the finer points of our text. We are grateful to a number of our colleagues for reading the manuscript in whole or in part and making invaluable comments. Kumkum Roy cast an eye over our chapter on ancient India while Muzaffar Alam and Mridu Rai scrutinised the three chapters dealing with the period from c. 700 to c. 1800. Christopher Bayly did a critical reading of the entire manuscript and made a number of apt suggestions. David Washbrook also read the manuscript through and toasted its success even before it was published. We benefitted from the comments on our proposal by the four readers of Routledge. The two anonymous readers for Oxford University Press made perhaps the most astute comments on the pages of an earlier version of the manuscript. We would not have got our manuscript ready if not for the prodding encouragement of Rukun Advani of OUP-Delhi who has published some of the best research on modern South Asian history in the last two decades. The enthusiasm of Heather McCallum at Routledge was a source of confidence while Bela Malik at OUP-Delhi competently attended to the editorial task of getting the manuscript ready for the printers. Once more we have to thank our families for their continued and warming support of our scholarly endeavours. We would like to thank each other for choosing the path of negotiation rather than war when it came to addressing disputes and disagreements in the course of writing this book. It is our hope that this work will encourage more dialogues across the great divide of 1947. Our contribution to the fiftieth anniversary of independence and partition will have been made if it enables the opening of an intellectual and cultural corridor stretching from Lahore to Calcutta. Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors and publishers would like to thank the following for granting permission to use copyright material in the volume: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (Figures 11.1 and 17.4) Netaji Research Bureau (Figures 15.1, 16.1, 16.2, 17.2, 17.3 and 17.6) Ananda Bazaar Patrika (Figures 19.1 and 20.1) Information Division, Embassy of Pakistan, Washington, DC (Figure 17.5) Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman (Cambridge University Press, 1985) (Maps 15.1 and 17.1) Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 1995) (Map 20.1) C.A. Bayly, The Raj (National Gallery Publications, 1990) (Maps 5.1 and 9.1) The Trustees of Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata, India (Figure 12.2) “Partition,” copyright © 1966 by W.H. Auden; from COLLECTED POEMS by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Copyright © 1966 by W.H. Auden, renewed. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. All rights reserved. Faiz Ahmed Faiz poem ‘Freedom’s Dawn’ (August 1947) in Poems by Faiz, translated by V. G. Kiernan, India: Oxford University Press, 2000 While every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge ownership of copyright material used in this volume, the publishers will be glad to make suitable arrangements with any copyright holders whom it has not been possible to contact.  1 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY An introduction DOI: 10.4324/9781003224488-1 The very idea of India, and not just its wealth and wisdom, has been the site of fierce historical contestation. G.W.F. Hegel, the famous German philosopher, gave a not untypical nineteenth-century description of India as an object of desire: From the most ancient times downwards, all nations have directed their wishes and longings to gaining access to the treasures of this land of marvels, the most costly which the Earth presents; treasures of Nature – pearls, diamonds, perfumes, rose-essences, elephants, lions, etc. – as also treasures of wisdom. The way by which these treasures have passed to the West, has at all times been a matter of World- historical importance, bound up with the fate of nations. He added approvingly, ‘the English, or rather the East-India Company are the lords of the land; for it is the necessary fate of Asiatic Empires to be subjected to Europeans …’. In the early twentieth century Gandhi lamented in his tract Hind Swaraj:  the English have not taken India; we have given it to them. They are not in India because of their strength but because we keep them … Recall the Company Bahadur. Who made it Bahadur … it is truer to say that we gave India to the English than that India was lost. The battle to win India back was waged not only on the political plane but also in the realm of ideas. A turn-of-the-century Indian nationalist Bipin Chandra Pal, in his book The Soul of India, delved back into ancient history in attempting to question the Western definition of India: ‘… while the stranger called her India, or the land of the Indus, thereby emphasizing only her strange physical features, her own children, from of old, have known and loved her by another name … that name is Bharatavarsha’. This name deriving from the ancient king of kings Bharata, Pal claimed, was ‘not a physical name like India or the Transvaal, nor even a tribal and ethnic name like England or Aryavarta, but a distinct and unmistakable historic name like Rome.’ India may have been a name given by foreigners, but its emotive appeal came to be internalized by many inhabitants of this land. The ancient Persians and Arabs referred to the land beyond the river Sindhu or Indus as Al-Hind or Hindustan and the people inhabiting that land as Hindu. The words India and Indian were simply Greek, Roman and finally, English versions of the old Persian terminology. It was only gradually that the term Hindu came to be associated with the followers of a particular religious faith as a matter of convenience since the ‘Hindus’ did not deploy a single term to define their religion. The leading twentieth-century Muslim poet writing in Urdu had no difficulty celebrating Hindustan as his own. Muhammad Iqbal in his ‘Tarana-i-Hindi’ (The Anthem of Hind) of 1904 extolled the virtues of his homeland: Sarey jahan sey achhaa, ye Hindustan hamara Hum bulbulen hain iske, ye gulsitan hamara (Better than the whole world, is our Hindustan We are its singing birds, it is our garden of delights) Iqbal later became one of the foremost proponents of a homeland for India's Muslims. On the eve of partition in 1947, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, widely acknowledged as the founder of this homeland, wrote indignantly about ‘the wholly unwarranted assumption that Pakistan would be an area seceding from the Indian state’, arguing that there could be no union of India without the Muslim-majority areas of the subcontinent. In the seventy-five years since independence and partition the political and ideational contests among its own people for proprietorship over the soul of the subcontinent have, if anything, greatly intensified. It is not unusual for peoples burdened by history in their own contexts to be transformed into peoples without history in others. Given the tendency towards the ‘essentializing’ of India by Western orientalists over the past two centuries, it is no surprise that in the Western popular consciousness the Indian subcontinent tended to evoke two contrary images until the late twentieth century. On the one hand, it was lauded as an ancient land of mystery and romance, extraordinary wealth and profound spirituality. On the other, it was denounced for its irrationality and inhumanity and derided for its destitution and squalor. Even after the maharaja of old had been reduced to a caricature in the advertisement of India's loss-making and now privatized national airline, television audiences in both Britain and the United States were entranced since the 1980s by the nostalgia of India's final fling with the British raj. Yet one had only to switch from the channel showing the soap opera to the news to find the coveted jewel in the crown portrayed as a veritable crucible of calamity, confusion and chaos. Stark poverty replaced the vision of India's grandeur, religious strife rudely disturbed the calm of other-worldly meditation, and fierce violence unleashed by both man and nature seemed to make a mockery of the peaceful messages of a Buddha or a Gandhi. Both images, whether optimistically fanciful or pejoratively stereotypical, stemmed from an inability to understand or comprehend, far less explain, the enormous complexities of South Asia. The dawn of the twenty-first century witnessed the rise of a new set of contradictory images. Dynamic economic growth, the emergence of a number of high-profile billionaire entrepreneurs and a booming consumer culture in urban areas, especially but not only in India, seemed to portend ‘a rise’ alongside China after two centuries of poverty and relative economic decline. By contrast, a Maoist insurgency spreading ominously across India's tribal heartland, coupled with stories of sporadic farmers’ agitations and suicides, suggested that the problem of inequities and gross disparities had been further compounded in the contemporary phase of globalization. Meanwhile, the turbulence in Pakistan's tribal frontier acquired menacing proportions in the two decades following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the USA and the American military retaliation in Afghanistan. The violence spilled into the metropolitan cities, often in the form of ghastly suicide bombings. The chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 enhanced the risks and uncertainties facing the region. The stage of the United Nations continues to witness Indian and Pakistani leaders trading charges of human rights violations and cross-border terrorism. Caught as always in the vortex of global opportunities and conflicts, South Asia finds itself seven and a half decades after independence at one of the more significant milestones in its history. The subcontinent defies piecemeal approaches much the same way as the proverbial elephant confounded the blind men in the famous story by the Muslim Sufi poet, Jalaluddin Rumi. When made to touch the different parts of the elephant's anatomy, each of the blind men described it according to the part of the body his hands had touched. So to one blind man the elephant appeared like a throne, to others like a fan, a water pipe and even a pillar. No one could imagine what the whole animal looked like. This book promises to present a view of India and South Asia with the blindfolds off. Recourse to history is indispensable in order to broaden perspective and sharpen focus. A single volume on the complex history of the subcontinent can only offer a glimpse of its richness and nuance, but with a good angle of vision it could be a penetrating and insightful glimpse. What then is this Indian subcontinent – or South Asia, as it has come to be known in more recent and neutral parlance – whose history will be interpreted in this book? Both South Asia and India are in origin geographical expressions. South Asia is a more recent construction – only seven and a half decades old – which today encompasses eight very diverse sovereign states of very different sizes: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan, Bhutan and the Maldives. Some would also include Myanmar, which as Burma was a province of British India until 1935. The term India, as we have seen, is of much older origin. What South Asia lacks in historical depth, it makes up for in political neutrality. The terms South Asia and India refer in the first instance to a vast geographical space stretching from the Himalayan mountain ranges in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south and from the valley of the Indus in the west to the plains of the Brahmaputra in the east. This huge geographical expanse has become home to a teeming population of well over a billion people, who account for over a fifth or, to be more precise, 23 per cent of humanity. The subcontinent carries the weight not only of its people but also of their ancient history stretching back at least five millennia, and a modern history encompassing the experience of British colonialism compressed in tumultuous developments within the past couple of centuries. It is a commonplace in any introduction to South Asian history to expound on the cliché about the region's unity in diversity. It may be more appropriate to characterize South Asia and its peoples as presenting a picture of diversity in unity, indeed of immense diversity within a very broad contour of unity. The geographical boundaries drawn by the highest mountain ranges in the world and encircling seas and oceans set the whole of the subcontinent apart from the rest of the world. Yet within these boundaries there is great diversity in natural attributes – imposing hills and mountains, lush green river plains, arid deserts and brown plateaus. Peoples inhabiting such a clearly defined, yet diverse, region have evolved a shared cultural ambience, but at the same time are deeply attached to distinctive cultural beliefs and practices. Over the millennia the peoples of the subcontinent have engaged in many cultural exchanges with the outside world and worked out creative accommodations of cultural difference within. The peoples of South Asia speak at least twenty major languages, and if one includes the more important dialects, the count rises to over two hundred. A panoply of very diverse languages and language families, South Asia has made enormous contributions to world literature from ancient to modern times. It has achieved major accomplishments in the arts and maintains distinguished musical traditions. Adherents to every major world religion are to be found in the subcontinent. It is the source of two of the world's great religions and the home to more devotees of a third than either the Middle East or Southeast Asia. Hinduism, with its ancient roots, modern transformations and multiple interpretations, plays a vital part in the culture and politics of the subcontinent. Hindus form the majority of India's population, but are distinguished along lines of language and caste. While the formal adherents to Buddhism may have dwindled in the land of its birth, it continues to flourish in Sri Lanka and the Himalayas as well as in East and Southeast Asia. Some of the greatest cultural and political achievements of Islam have taken place in the subcontinent, where more than half a billion of the world's 1.9 billion Muslims live today. Each of the three most populous countries in South Asia – India, Bangladesh and Pakistan – has over 200 million Muslims, next only to Indonesia as the largest Muslim countries in the world. South Asia also has significant Jain, Zoroastrian, Christian and Sikh minorities. South Asia today is strategically a vital part of the world that has large implications for the international order at the beginning of the new millennium. With the testing of nuclear devices by India and Pakistan in 1998, the continuing conflict in Kashmir, and the long drawn US war in Afghanistan and its aftermath fanning into Pakistan's northwestern tribal areas, the subcontinent attracted more than the usual dose of media attention. The location of one of the most intractable international problems of the past seventy-five years that could still trigger a catastrophic war, South Asia demands a depth of historical understanding. Since the early 1990s South Asia, especially India, has undergone crucial shifts in economic policy, making it important to assess the region's linkages to the global economy, along with an examination of its persistent problems of poverty and inequality. Genuine prospects of peace, democracy and cooperative development vie with disputes such as Kashmir to place South Asia at a decisive crossroads in its history. Flourishing electoral democracy coexists in the region with deep strains of authoritarianism, often within the same country. In spite of very strong and persistent, often localized, traditions, the notion of changeless ‘tradition’ in South Asia was always a myth, but perhaps never more so than at the present moment, as South Asians negotiate their place in an arena of global interconnections in the throes of rapid change. How do we begin to address the long and complex history of the peoples of this subcontinent? Over the millennia South Asia developed rich and complex layers of culture, which during recent centuries had a dramatic historical encounter with the West. This is a book on modern history, concentrating on the problem of change in society, economy and politics from c. 1700 to the present in subcontinental South Asia – mainly but not exclusively present-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Three background chapters unravelling the more important features of India's pre-colonial history set the stage for the detailed treatment of British colonialism in India and its aftermath. A focus on the colonial period does not entail missing out on South Asia's pre- colonial heritage, since much of India's ‘tradition’ was recast, if not re- invented, during the colonial era, a process analysed in some detail in this book. But in order to grasp the issue of continuity and change under colonialism the book shifts the emphasis away from the concerns and imperatives of the imperial masters. Colonial initiatives in and of themselves cannot encapsulate the complex and at times largely autonomous and certainly contested dynamics that moulded relationships in Indian society, economy and polity. Colonialism as an agency of historical change is placed in its appropriate social context and studied in its interplay with the culture and politics of anti-colonial resistance. The enormous difficulty in fashioning a balanced yet insightful approach to the study of modern South Asia is reflected in the yawning gap between a few general histories and the large number of research monographs and scholarly articles published over the last four decades. Most of the general works that do exist are no more than one-dimensional sketches of the metaphorical Indian elephant, while more rigorous and sophisticated research has dissected discrete parts of its complex anatomy. The challenge before us is to find a good perspective for a multi-dimensional, high- definition overview of modern South Asian history in the pages of a single book. South Asian historiography has achieved a remarkable level of depth and sophistication in recent decades. This book is a work of synthesis and interpretation covering the entire spectrum of modern South Asian history – cultural, economic, political and social – that seeks to take full account of the striking new developments in the field. A number of major themes have emerged in recent historical research. These need to be placed within a general context. Among these have been the role of intermediate social groups in the construction of the British raj and that of ‘subaltern’ social groups in anti-colonial resistance; the part played by the colonial state in the re-invention of ‘communal’ and caste categories; the refashioning of social relations of class by the linking of Indian economic regions to wider capitalist systems; and the impact of the interplay between national, communal and regional levels of politics on the process of decolonization. Various works on these themes have differed in their relative emphasis on the affinities or contradictions of class and caste, religion and language, nation and region, community and gender, economics and politics, and so on. The ‘subaltern studies’ group, for instance, began with a political conception of class before going on to stress culture and consciousness over economics and politics as explanatory variables. The twenty-first century has seen valuable contributions in at least three areas of South Asian historiography – the formation of regional and religious identities going beyond the dead-end debate between secular statist and subaltern communitarian perspectives; the place of South Asian economy and culture within larger inter-regional and global arenas of interaction; and the articulation and global circulation of economic and political ideas emanating from South Asia. The more insightful contributions of not only schools of historiography but individual scholars need to be weighed and placed into a broader and more meaningful framework for the study of modern South Asian history. A meaningful framework for conceiving the history of modern South Asia on a subcontinental scale may be provided by the twin dialectics of centralism and regionalism and of nationalism and communitarianism, so long as there is a keen awareness of the historically shifting definitions of and relationships between centre, region, nation and community. This is of the essence if we are to establish the contours of both the idea and the structure of India or South Asia on the basis of an analysis of the relationship of its constituent parts to the whole. Once this is done it becomes possible at the central and regional levels, and within the arenas of nation and community, to probe the relations of power along lines of class and gender. As the different parts and the whole of South Asia became more organically linked to a wider capitalist world from the early nineteenth century, critical alterations took place in social relations within the subcontinent. These occurred not only along the axis of class but were also refracted through myriad social and cultural relationships, including those of caste and community as well as gender and generation. These social and cultural relationships were not only inheritances from the past but were in the process of constant renegotiation and reformulation during the colonial era. Religious strife in contemporary India, for example, has little to do with any supposed ancient religious divide between Hindu and Muslim and cannot be explained without accounting for the invention of communally defined political categories in the early twentieth century and the historically dynamic dialectic between communitarian and provincial as well as religious and linguistic identities. The history of South Asian nationalisms has unfolded within larger transnational contexts. The interplay of nationalism and universalism is a subject that has received nuanced treatment in recent historical studies. Both the temporal thresholds and spatial boundaries of the subcontinent are in the process of being re-evaluated by historians. How does our own location in what has been termed the post-modern era shape our perspectives on modern history? Despite our firm rejection of an uncritical celebration of the ‘fragment’ inherent in a particular brand of post- modernism, we believe it is important to recognize that the march of history has left some of the certitudes of high modernism by the wayside. A modern history of modern South Asia would have confidently tracked the unilinear emergence of the nation-state in the political domain, the teleological path of capitalist (or socialist) development in the economic sphere and the slow but sure triumph of modernity over anachronistic, traditional social bonds and values. The cracking and crumbling of the modern nation-state system, the disintegration of the socialist alternative and the disillusionment with the false promises of capitalism, and the resurgence of redefined social identities thought to have been obliterated by the steam-roller of modernization have all rendered interpretations of the modern era in South Asian and world history much more complex. Along with a greater sensitivity to difference and distinctiveness, the spotlight had been shifting in the late twentieth century towards the fragmentary parts rather than the monolithic whole of modern social, economic and political structures. Yet the intellectual breakaway from modernist dogma may have swung a little too far towards the fissures and away from the fusions which formed an equally important aspect of the historical process. The ties of the subcontinent to the Indian Ocean inter-regional arena and the global context are being freshly recognized as historically significant. A recourse to South Asian history, where the dialectic between union and partition, centripetal and centrifugal tendencies, territorial nationalism and extra-territorial universalism, the secular and the religious are so dramatically played out, may well enable a much-needed decentred balance in our current disoriented scholarly predicament.  2 MODERNITY AND ANTIQUITY Interpretations of ancient India DOI: 10.4324/9781003224488-2 Rabindranath Tagore, modern India's most celebrated poet, wrote to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in 1939 that he could identify only two ‘modernists’ among India's national leaders. Even these two rare embodiments of ‘modernism’ were deeply attached to their country's ancient heritage. In his book The Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru took solace in ‘the continuity of a cultural tradition through five thousand years of history’ which made the 180 years of British rule in India seem like ‘just one of the unhappy interludes in her long story’. And on the opening page of The Indian Struggle Subhas Chandra Bose emphasized two features critical to an understanding of India: first, its history had to be ‘reckoned not in decades or in centuries but in thousands of years’; and second, only under British rule India ‘for the first time in her history had begun to feel that she had been conquered’. The mission of an independent India, therefore, should be to deliver to the world a rich ‘heritage’ that had been preserved from past ages. A ‘heritage’ more than five millennia old, containing multiple layers and strands of cultural influence and assimilation, was bound to be a very complex one and open to many interpretations. There were many individuals and social groups other than the ‘modernist’ national leaders ready and eager to offer their versions of India's lengthy and intricate past. Among them were British orientalists and Indian traditionalists and revivalists, Hindu as well as Muslim, each possessing an implicit if not explicit political agenda. Occasionally there were unlikely convergences, as was exemplified by the shared view of some nineteenth-century European scholars like Henry Maine and Gandhian utopians of self-sufficient and happy village communities somewhere in the subcontinent's lost golden age. The plethora of theories and fanciful evocations of tradition undoubtedly complicate the modern historians’ task of interpreting South Asia's pre-modern history. The best that can be done is to carefully sift the extant evidence and be alert to the uses made of old evidence by earlier interpreters. What can be discarded straightaway is the undue and ahistorical privileging of religion in the periodization of Indian history adopted by historians of the colonial era. There are no grounds for branding the ancient, medieval and modern phases of the subcontinent's long and complex history as Hindu, Muslim and British periods. It may have served James Mill's purpose in the early nineteenth century, as he set about in his History of British India to buttress his theory of an ascending order of civilizations. But his lengthy, uninformed digression into India's pre-colonial past as a justification of British colonial rule has by now long outlived its limited utility. Figure 2.1 The Presence of the Past. A Hindu village in Punjab, Pakistan. Source: Photograph © Ayesha Jalal. It was in the twentieth century, in 1922 to be exact, that a millennium and a half were suddenly added to the age of Indian history. Archaeological excavations unearthed the ruins of a quite stunning civilization in the Indus valley region with two key urban centres at Harappa and Mohenjodaro. The archaeologist Alexander Cunningham had written a preliminary report on the Indus valley settlements in 1875, but it was during the next half a century that the exciting process of finding these forgotten cities unfolded. The location of the key Indus valley cities in present-day Pakistan has placed the onerous responsibility of preserving the remains of a heritage dated to at least c. 3000 on a state seven and a half decades old. More recent excavations at Mehrgarh in Baluchistan suggest a dating that may be as old as 6000. Drawing subsistence from the rich agricultural tracts of the Indus river, the people of Harappa and Mohenjodaro had achieved a highly sophisticated level of urban culture. The immaculateness of their urban planning of streets and drainage might put some of the modern cities of South Asia to shame. Artefacts found at the excavation sites indicate the existence of long-distance trade with that other great ancient civilization – Mesopotamia in modern-day Iraq. The Indus valley possessed a literate culture. But scholars are still struggling to decipher the script that was used. Images recovered suggest that the people may have worshipped the mother goddess and venerated the bull – both powerful symbols of fertility. Although both these icons reappear in later phases of Indian civilization, no unbroken line of continuity with the Indus valley era can be traced. The prosperity of the region came to an apparently calamitous end well before the civilization of the Vedic age struck roots in the plains of that other great Himalayan river – the Ganga. Although there is substantial archaeological evidence of Neolithic and Chalcolithic cultures, especially in central India, relatively little scholarly attention has been given until very recently to the original inhabitants of India outside the Indus valley region until the age of the so-called Aryans, beginning around 1500. The nineteenth-century ethnic definition of the Aryans has been effectively debunked by recent scholarship. They are now more accurately seen to be a linguistic rather than a racial group, whose speech adhered to the common core of Indo-European languages. Clues about the society, economy and politics of these Indo-Aryan settlers are to be found in the Vedas. The first and most important of the Vedas – the Rig Veda – was composed before 1000. The great epics – the Ramayana and the Mahabharata – may contain some references to historical events that occurred between 1000 and 700 , but since the versions available to us are dated to the Gupta age (the fourth and fifth centuries of the common era) they need to be cross-checked against other, especially archaeological evidence. It was during the Vedic period that the Indo-Aryans appear to have made the transition from nomadic pastoralism to settled agriculture in the Gangetic plain, even though settled agriculture was practised in different parts of the subcontinent even earlier. The political organization of the early Indo-Aryans appears to have had a strong democratic element, with popular assemblies known as sabha and more select gatherings known as samiti. Even after the Vedic age republican forms of government seem to have been more pervasive than kingdoms. But with the expansion of political scale there was a noticeable drift towards monarchical forms. Kingdoms arose in the Gangetic heartland, while republics proved to be more resilient along the outer rims of Indo-Aryan settlements. Vedic society developed and elaborated upon an inherited Indo-European model of a tripartite social structure consisting of warriors, priests and a third large group comprising agriculturists, traders and cattle-raisers. The first mention of the famous or infamous caste system that has mesmerized generations of Indologists is to be found in a single reference in the Rig Veda which lists four varna, literally meaning ‘colour’, but having an applied meaning closer to social orders. The four castes in order of hierarchy were the Brahmans (priests or the sacerdotal elite), the Kshatriyas (warriors), the Vaishyas (originally encompassing both agricultural and merchant groups) and the Shudras (providers of menial labour). The Purusha Sukta verse in the Rig Veda describes the emergence of the Brahmans from the face of Purusha, the cosmic man, the Kshatriyas from his arms, the Vaishyas from his thighs and the hapless Shudras from his feet. In time only the traders and richer landowners could aspire to Vaishya status, while the bulk of the working peasantry fell into the Shudra rank. Caste by varna merely provided a theoretical scaffolding to peg different strata of social status. In reality caste by jati, literally ‘birth’, which included numerous sub-castes originally classified by occupation, was more relevant to social practice. Recent research has suggested that the origins of caste in south India did not quite fit into the varna-jati scheme elaborated in the north. Early mobility between occupational sub-castes was soon restricted, however, and the Upanishad, the teachings appended to the end of the Vedic texts around the eighth and seventh centuries , provided an eschatological justification of the rigidity of caste status in the doctrine of karma. Caste in the present life was determined in this scheme of things by the quality of actions in a previous incarnation. The colonial decision in the nineteenth century to enumerate and rank-order castes gave the Indian caste system a modern rigidity and salience that it may have lacked before. On the issue of gender, Indo-Aryan society tended to glorify womanhood in theory but cast women into an inferior role in social practice, generally excluding them from the public domain. There appears to have been a further deterioration of women's position after the Vedic period. In the great epic the Mahabharata the main female character, Draupadi, is portrayed as a possession, if not a pawn, in the conflict between two male-dominated clans – the Pandavas and the Kauravas. Only a few passages, including a forceful speech delivered by Draupadi when she escapes humiliation through the divine intervention of Krishna, suggest that there was some consciousness as well of the inequity and injustice to which women were subjected. In the Ramayana, too, the kingdom of Ayodhya is depicted as a patriarchy and Rama's wife Sita, who had been abducted by the demon-king Ravana, finally has to ask Mother Earth, after being rescued, to take her back into her womb to save her from further humiliation by the king's subjects. Both epics are amenable to an environmental interpretation depicting the tension between the peoples inhabiting the agricultural plains and the forests. The Vedic religion was at one level a sophisticated version of animism. Its pantheon consisted of powerful natural forces – Indra, a thunderbolt- wielding warrior being the king among them – who were all elevated to the status of gods to be placated by mere mortals. But the Vedic texts also had at the very end a mystical and metaphysical section – the Upanishad – which clearly enunciates the notion of a Supreme Being, referred to as Brahma. The Upanishadic theory of salvation or moksha expounds on the merging of the individual soul, Atman, with the oversoul, Brahma, a merger that also signifies release from the cycle of rebirths. This philosophy was quite distinct from the much later mythology about the triumvirate – Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer of this universe. The teachings of the Upanishad passed into the realm of high philosophy and became divorced from day-to-day religious and social practices. The Indo-Aryan social order dominated by the Brahman caste came under serious and widespread challenge from the sixth century. Gautama Buddha and Mahavira, founders of the Buddhist and Jain faiths respectively, launched two of the most influential social and religious movements of this era. Both had belonged to the Kshatriya caste and came from republics on the periphery of the Gangetic plain. Buddhism and Jainism questioned caste, especially Brahmanical social orthodoxy, and shunned elaborate Vedic rituals. Buddhism, which later spread far and wide from India to other parts of Asia, called for a new ethical conception of human affairs. In the Buddha's view, human life was full of suffering. The only means to escape this suffering was to follow the eightfold path consisting of right views, resolves, speech, conduct, livelihood, effort, recollection and meditation, which together constituted the middle way or a balanced and harmonious way of life. Perfection along this path would finally lead to release from the cycle of rebirths and the attainment of nirvana. The Buddhist concept of nirvana is subtly different from the Upanishadic concept of moksha. The Buddha made no mention in his teachings of God or a supreme being. So, while moksha represents union with Brahma or a supreme being, nirvana is simply a blissful transcendental state beyond human rebirths. The Buddhist aversion to individual personality was later qualified when followers of the faith split into two major schools some six hundred years after Buddha had passed from the world. The Theravada or old school, also referred to as Hinayana (the lesser vehicle), was more orthodox and true to the original teachings of the Buddha. The Mahayana (the greater vehicle) school of Buddhism began to venerate the individual personality of the Buddha and also a number of Bodhisattvas, who could be loosely defined as Buddhist saints. The Bodhisattvas were those who had so perfected their lives that they were eligible for nirvana but stopped short at its threshold to reach out a guiding hand to suffering humanity. With the establishment of the Mahayana school, images and statues of the Buddha and Bodhisattvas were made for the first time in the Gandhara region of northwestern India. Theravada Buddhism eventually took hold in Sri Lanka, Burma and Thailand, while Mahayana Buddhism spread from Kashmir to China, Japan and northern Vietnam. The political history of the centuries following the rise of Buddhism and Jainism saw the emergence and consolidation of powerful regional states in northern India. Among the strongest of these was the kingdom of Magadha, with its capital at Pataliputra (near the modern city of Patna). The Magadhan kingdom expanded under the Maurya dynasty in the fourth and third centuries to become an empire embracing almost the whole of the subcontinent. Chandragupta Maurya founded the dynasty in 322 , just a few years after Alexander the Great's brief foray into northwestern India. The Maurya empire reached its apogee under the reign of Ashoka (268–231 ). Early in his reign Ashoka made far-flung military conquests. Legend has it that after a bloody war against Kalinga – present-day Odisha – Ashoka underwent a change of heart and, if Buddhist sources are to be believed, became an ardent Buddhist. He accepted the principle of non-violence, denounced caste and banned Brahmanical rituals. Kings of earlier times generally held an elaborate ceremony known as the Ashwamedha Yagna, involving the sacrifice of horses in a ritual advertisement of their power. Ashoka abolished animal sacrifice and instead chose his patronage of dhamma, an ethical way of life, to be the legitimating glory of his empire. A reading of Arthashastra by Kautilya, a leading courtier of Ashoka's grandfather Chandragupta, as well as contemporary Greek sources, might suggest, on the face of it, that the Maurya empire developed a centralized bureaucracy and an intricate network of spies and informants. Arthashastra literally means ‘science of wealth’, but reads more like a manual for kings, in the same way as Machiavelli's Prince, in so far as it is an amoral analysis of the exercise of power. The Arthashastra is no longer regarded by historians of ancient India as a unitary text, and in any case was largely prescriptive and may never have been implemented. Moreover, it is clear that Ashoka was deeply concerned about morality and, especially, the question of imperial legitimacy. His edicts were inscribed on pillars and rocks in all the different regions of his vast empire. While some of his edicts propagated the message of Buddhism, much of his dhamma was more universal, preaching the values of mutual respect and tolerance. Ashoka was clearly interested in commanding loyalty from the outlying parts of the empire through means other than coercive control from the centre, but he was not above threatening the forest tribes with the use of force if they proved recalcitrant. His was clearly an agrarian empire drawing revenues mainly from the land. The degree and nature of state intervention, however, was quite different in the Magadhan core and the provincial peripheries. Ashoka's messages had a long afterlife and many of the symbols of his ancient monarchy were adopted by the modern Indian republic. Figure 2.2 India in Pakistan: An Ashokan Pillar in Lahore Museum. Source: Photograph © Sugata Bose. Not long after Ashoka's death the great Maurya empire underwent a process of decentralization. After the passing of this far-flung empire the fragmented character of Indian polities lasted about five centuries, from c. 200 to c. 300 , even though new settlers established quite strong and prosperous states, such as the Shaka and Kushana kingdoms in western and northern India. The Satavahana dynasty, probably of indigenous tribal origin, consolidated its hold on the northwestern part of the Deccan. During the second century a politically disparate India appears to have enjoyed a good deal of economic prosperity and cultural glory. The centuries prior to 300 witnessed a thriving coastal trade and long-distance trade with the Roman empire and Southeast Asia, as well as the quiet and peaceful assertion of Indian cultural influence in places like modern-day Thailand and Cambodia. The process of empire building from the Magadhan base was renewed by the Gupta dynasty, which lasted from 320 to the early decades of the sixth century. The early emperors, Chandragupta I and Samudragupta, undertook the conquests, while the consolidation of the empire and the major cultural achievements took place during the reign of Chandragupta II. The structure of the Gupta empire was looser than that of their Maurya predecessors. The Guptas did not even attempt to impose centralized control over the distant parts of their domains, even though a marriage alliance between the Guptas and the Vakatakas supplied a north–south linkage. The legitimating glory at the centre stage of the Gupta empire, which was the symbol of their power, was unquestionably Brahmanical in character. Vedic rituals were revived and the horse sacrifice again became an indispensable imperial spectacle. Caste hierarchies once more became rigid and a number of social customs placed renewed emphasis on the inferior status of women. The Bhagavad Gita, which represented something of a departure from the Vedas, was quite influential by the Gupta age. Revolutionary and inspirational in its exposition of the way of love and personal devotion to reach the supreme being, its philosophy of niskama karma or disinterested action and its message of strength, the Gita was not, however, particularly egalitarian in matters to do with caste and gender. As Krishna says at one point in the Gita: ‘If those who are of base origin, such as women, Vaishyas and Shudras, take refuge in me, even they attain the highest end.’ The revival of Brahmanical legitimation and dominance notwithstanding, the Gupta rulers were tolerant towards other religious and social beliefs and practices. Fa-xian, a Chinese Buddhist pilgrim who visited the Gupta domains early in the fifth century, found Buddhism to be in a very healthy state. The high Brahmanical tradition appears to have coexisted with a more diffuse and popular Shramanik tradition. Historic Hinduism, as we know it today, took recognizable form by about the fifth century. This Hindu religion was at one level a polymorphic monotheism with three major cults – of Shiva, Vishnu/Krishna and the Mother Goddess (Durga or Kali). In the sophisticated Hindu view, the supreme being was one but could be worshipped in any of these three major forms of manifestation, according to the devotee's preference. Yet in the coexisting Shramanik tradition there could be a much greater multiplicity of deities and enormous variation in beliefs and practices. Hinduism as it evolved historically was, as Romila Thapar puts it, ‘not a linear progression from a founder through an organizational system with sects branching off’; it was rather ‘the mosaic of distinct cults, deities, sects and ideas and the adjusting, juxtaposing and distancing of these to existing ones, the placement drawing not only on beliefs and ideas but also on the socio-economic reality’. The greatest strength of the Gupta age, often regarded as a ‘classical’ era, was a measure of political, social and religious flexibility, despite the resurgence of Brahmanical orthodoxy in certain spheres. The Gupta emperors, of course, could afford such a breadth of outlook. This was at least partly because of general economic prosperity based on an expanding and thriving agriculture and a lucrative long-distance trade across the Arabian sea with Rome and the Mediterranean world and across the Bay of Bengal with Southeast Asia. A politically secure and economically prosperous Gupta centre presided over a great literary, scientific and cultural efflorescence. The greatest literary figure of this time was Kalidasa, whose works included the play Shakuntala and the poem Meghaduta (The Cloud Messenger), the latter renowned for its breathtaking evocation of the natural splendour of India. Aryabhatta, a great mathematician and philosopher, was noted for his scientific achievements, including remarkably accurate calculations of the value of ‘pi’ (3.141) and the length of the solar year. Of course, he suffered the same sorts of scepticism from the ranks of religious orthodoxy as Galileo and Copernicus were to face much later during the European renaissance. In the fine arts an example of the brilliance of the Gupta era can still be seen in the cave paintings of Ajanta in western India. The Gupta empire came under various stresses and strains from the early sixth century. Defence against a number of Hun invasions in northwestern India drained the treasury. Evidence of an economic crisis can be noted in the debased coinage of the later Guptas. The trend towards imperial decentralization, if not disintegration, during the sixth century was briefly reversed in the first half of the seventh century under Harshavardhana, the founder of another short-lived empire in northern India between 606 and 647 CE. A record of Harsha's reign is available in his biography, Harshacharita, one of the finest expositions of Sanskrit prose, by his court historian Bana Bhatta. The great Buddhist university at Nalanda, founded in the fifth century, was flourishing in the seventh century when the Chinese scholar-pilgrim Xuangzang came to visit. The great mathematicians Brahmagupta and Bhaskara lived further to the west at this time. Some historians have identified the seventh century as the beginning of the early medieval era in India. Underlying the oscillation between the forces of centralization and decentralization, there was a noticeable drift, if not a clear long-term trend, in early medieval India from tribe to caste as the basis for the emergence of regional polities. From the eighth century onwards many of the new developments in both the higher historic and popular forms of Hinduism, including commentaries, exegesis and fresh departures in the form of cults, occurred in southern India and the peripheral areas of the north. The best-known Hindu philosopher of this later period was Shankaracharya, who lived in the ninth century and propounded the doctrine of maya or the illusoriness of human life. Sixty- three Shaivite saints, known as the Nayanars, and twelve Vaishnavite saints, called the Alwars, had already launched the devotional bhakti movement in Tamil Nadu as early as the sixth century. The teachings of the eighth and ninth-century leaders of the Shaivite devotional cults were compiled as the Tirumurai, hymns calling Brahmanism into question and celebrating the direct communion of devotee and God. Several women saints came into prominence, notably Andal, who sang in praise of the god Vishnu. Figure 2.3 Descent of the Ganges. Pallava era seventh- to eighth-century wall relief, Mamallapuram. Source: Photograph © Ayesha Jalal. Politically, too, it was the south that saw the rise of powerful new kingdoms in this period. The most famous of these was the Chola kingdom that flourished from the tenth to the twelfth century. Based in peninsular India, the Cholas made military forays into the north and cast their political, economic and cultural influence over Southeast Asia. Rajaraja I conquered Sri Lanka near the end of the tenth century, while his son Rajendra I launched a great northern campaign during 1022–23 which fetched the temples and palaces of the southern kingdom a vast quantity of jewels and gold. Yet Rajendra, an aspirant to universal kingship, desired legitimacy as much as wealth. Having defeated the Pala king, he ordered the princes of Bengal to carry the holy water of the Ganga to his new capital called Gangaikondacholapuram at the mouth of the river Kaveri. In 1026 his navy defeated the forces of the great Southeast Asian empire Srivijaya. More important, despite this episode of military conflict, the Cholas furthered economic and cultural exchange between southern India and Southeast Asia. Indian society, economy and politics from ancient times until the twelfth century displayed a great deal of dynamism that does not accord well with stereotypical images of India's changeless tradition. The very cultural assimilation of influences emanating from a succession of new arrivals – Aryans, Greeks, Scythians, Parthians, Shakas and Huns before the eighth century, as well as the Arabs, Persians, Turks, Afghans and Mongols between the eighth and the twelfth centuries – was a vital and dynamic process. Indigenous tribal groups also played a creative role in processes of state formation. Politically, phases of imperial consolidation were followed by periods of decentralization. But even the empires, far from being centralized despotisms, were typically loosely structured suzerainties. Economically, instead of closed and static village communities, there was mobility and commercial exchange. For long stretches of time the subcontinent played a central role in a vast network of Indian Ocean trade and culture. Socially, there were unique institutions such as caste; but contrary to the stereotypes of hierarchy propagated by scholars trapped in the rigid mould of caste, there was much in Indian society that emphasized equality as a value and in practice. Buddhism, and after the eighth century Islam, represented, at least in part, egalitarian challenges, but even within Hinduism the high Brahmanical tradition was more than counterbalanced by the popular Shramanik one. There were undoubtedly many instances of conflict and even internal colonization. But it was the ability to accommodate, if not assimilate, an immense diversity within a very broadly and loosely defined framework of unity that has given Indian cultural tradition its durability and appearance of unbroken continuity. It is to the greatest and most challenging of the many creative accommodations forged in the subcontinent's long history – the fashioning of an Indo-Islamic social and political universe – that we turn in the next chapter. Figure 2.4 Kali. Chola bronze sculpture, tenth century, in Chennai Museum. Source: Photograph © Sugata Bose.  3 PRE-MODERN ACCOMMODATIONS OF DIFFERENCE The making of Indo-Islamic cultures DOI: 10.4324/9781003224488-3 It was in the seventh century, 610 to be precise, that Muhammad, a Meccan merchant given to austere tastes and solitary meditation, had a grand vision which led to the founding of a new world religion in the Arabian peninsula. The first person to accept Muhammad's message as prophetic revelation was his wife, Khadija, giving her a position of pre-eminence in what was to soon become a very large community of the faithful. The role of women in the construction of the community of Islam is quite crucial, but scholars are only now turning their attention to uncovering that veiled reality. The historical spotlight has remained on the spread of the Islamic doctrine through a dramatic expansion of Muslim political power. By the fifteenth century Muslims either ruled or lived in all known corners of the world, presenting one of the greatest challenges to earlier established religions and cultures. But, contrary to stereotypical distortions of Islam as a religion of the sword and of Muslims as unbending fanatics thriving on hatred and violence against non-believers, the Prophet Muhammad's teachings allowed for tolerance and assimilation of regional and local cultures. One of the most spectacular of these processes of accommodation was the fashioning of an Indo-Islamic cultural tradition in the South Asian subcontinent. Both military conquest and religious conversion in the medieval period need to be understood in historical context. The first wave of Arab political expansion reached the subcontinent when the Makran coast in northwestern India was invaded in 644, towards the end of the caliphate of Umar. Although this and a second raid, during the reign of Ali (656–61), were repulsed, Makran was finally subjugated under the first Ummayid caliph, Muawiya (661–80). The eastern frontier of early Islam was reached when Muhammad bin Qasim conquered Sind in 712. So the Islamic belief in one God and in Muhammad as the final prophet struck very early roots in at least one region of northwestern India. From the eighth century onwards, Arab traders also settled on the western coast of India, but they were primarily interested in profits and did not attempt to bring about any large-scale conversions to Islam. There was no further expansion, political or economic, by peoples professing Islam until the Turkish and Afghan invasions from the turn of the eleventh century onwards. Between the seventh and eleventh centuries in politically decentralized northern India the high Brahmanic and more popular Shramanik traditions continued to coexist, with the latter being more pervasive. Far from being a dark age, this was another period in Indian history that saw the consolidation of regional kingdoms presiding over new economic initiatives and cultural achievements. The Tomaras, formerly feudatories of the Pratihara overlords, founded the city of Delhi in 736. The magnificent architecture and sculpture of the Khajuraho temples were executed under the patronage of the Chandellas in the tenth century. The great Central Asian scholar Al-Beruni, who visited India in 1030, wrote: The Hindus believe with regard to God that He is One, Eternal … this is what educated people believe about God … if we now pass from the ideas of the educated people to those of the common people, we must say that they present a great variety. Some of them are simply abominable, but similar errors also occur in other religions. In making this comment Al-Beruni was not simply giving a Muslim view but echoing the Hindu elite's position on monotheism and polytheism. There is little agreement among historians of medieval India about the extent to which the coming of Islam to the subcontinent fomented new processes of cultural accommodation and assimilation. At one extreme is the view that there was a clear distinguishing line between Islamic civilization and the pre-existing corpus of ‘Hindu tradition.’ This argument is dented not just by the sheer scale of the conversions to Islam among lower-caste Hindus but also by the contiguity of peoples belonging to different religious faiths, which meant that Islam in the subcontinent could not but develop local Indian roots. On the other hand, recent research on Islam in a variety of regional settings has emphasized variants of an argument about ‘syncretism’ that tends to obscure the issue of religiously informed identity. For example, Richard Eaton's portrayal of Bengali peasants as a ‘single undifferentiated mass’ with a uniform ‘folk culture’ neatly erases the problem of difference. With the major historiographical challenge conveniently out of the way, a fanciful cultural argument can then be erected on quicksand-like material evidence from Bengal's agrarian frontier. Conversion was a statement of difference even though it did not entail rejection of religious and cultural inheritances from the past. Any historical interpretation of the spread of Islam in the subcontinent needs to be attentive to regional specificities in the domains of economy and culture as well as the great variety of Muslims – Turks, Mongols, Persians, Arabs, Afghans and so on – who came from abroad. Taken together, these factors not only explode the myth of a monolithic Islamic community in India but also call into question any general model of Muslim conversions based on a limited understanding of rather scant evidence from one regional economy and culture. What the available sources do permit is a plausible argument to be advanced that not only were creative Indo-Islamic accommodations of difference worked out at various levels of society and culture, but also that India or al-Hind became the metropolitan centre of an Indian Ocean world with a distinctive historical identity that stretched from the Mediterranean to the Indonesian archipelago. Figure 3.1 Islam in India. The Qutb Minar, Delhi – a thirteenth-century monument to the Sufi saint Qutbuddin Kaki started by Qutbuddin Aibak and completed by Iltutmish. Source: Print from drawing by William Daniell exhibited at the Oriental Annual, 1834, in the private collection of Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal. The emergence of India as the hub of an integrated Indian Ocean economy and culture by the eleventh century preceded the fashioning of Indo-Islamic accommodations within the subcontinent's society and polity in the fourteenth century. ‘Monsoon Islam’ on the Malabar coast of south India, and the socio- cultural life of the first communities of Muslims in Gujarat were gently shaped by the Indian Ocean environment inhabited by merchants and mystics. Early conversions to Islam in north India were more gradual than sudden, a process carried over a period of time but generally facilitated in regions where a weak Brahmanical superstructure overlaid a much stronger Buddhistic substratum, as was the case in Sind in the eighth century and in Bengal after the eleventh century. While military action undoubtedly took place in the conquest of these regions, capitulation and submission was the usual norm, followed by the laying down of terms of loyalty and dependence. This was in accordance with the overall theory and practice of conquests in India at the time and explains why wars did not lead to significant political change. In the words of the ninth-century merchant-traveller Sulaiman: The Indians sometimes go to war for conquest, but the occasions are rare … When a king subdues a neighbouring state, he places over it a man belonging to the family of the fallen prince, who carries on the government in the name of the conqueror. The inhabitants would not suffer it otherwise. Eighth-century Sind was a typical Indian polity in which sovereignty was shared by different layers of kingly authority. The Chachnama, the early thirteenth-century text that serves as the principal source of information on the Muslim ‘conquest’ of Sind, elaborates a royal code that demands sensitivity to the fluidity and shifting nature of the real world of politics. This is in contrast to Kautilya's ‘classical’ and largely theoretical text Arthashastra, which advises princes on ways to avoid the dilution of absolute and centralized power. The pardoning of a fallen enemy, described by the Chachnama, provided a quick route to legitimacy by renegotiating a balance between different hierarchically arranged layers of sovereignty. The Arab ‘conquest of Sind’, instead of representing a sharp disjuncture, can be seen as a form of adaptation to pre-existing political conditions in India and the wider Indian Ocean arena. A 2016 reinterpretation of the Chachnama deftly dismantles the dominant origins myth that simplistically portrays Islam's encounter with India as a conquest. Figure 3.2 Islam in Kashmir. The Jamia Masjid, Srinagar, originally built in 1400. Source: Photograph © Ayesha Jalal.  Although there were no additional military conquests in India from the northwest until the eleventh century, the India trade became vital to the Islamic world during the eighth and ninth centuries. India's export surplus attracted a steady flow of precious bullion and made it the centre of an Indian Ocean world-economy with West Asia and China as its two poles. It was the prosperity in India and the relative decline in West Asia that provided the context for the next wave of Ghaznavid invasions into the subcontinent, beginning in 997. The accumulated treasure in the palaces and temples of northern India was a prime target of a series of raids (997–1030) by Mahmud of Ghazni into northwestern India that, interestingly enough, were roughly coterminous with and not too dissimilar from Rajendra Chola's northern campaigns from his south Indian base. On one of his raids Mahmud of Ghazni looted and smashed the idol in the famous temple at Somnath in Gujarat. The looting raids of this period were motivated as much by hard-headed economic and political motives as by an iconoclastic zeal fired by religion. In the case of Mahmud, a great patron of the letters and the arts, it was partly a need to finance his imperial ambitions in Central Asia that led him to devastate well-endowed religious places of worship in India. The colonial re-interpretation of Mahmud's attack on Somnath stressing religion rather than economics and politics can be traced to the period of the first Anglo- Afghan war of the early 1840s. Mauled in Kabul, the British forces retreated to India via Ghazni and dismantled the doors of Mahmud's tomb, which they mistakenly believed had been taken from Somnath. It was a similar combination of economic and political imperatives that led Muhammad Ghauri, a Turk, to invade India a century and a half later, in 1192. His defeat of Prithviraj Chauhan, a Rajput chieftain, in the strategic battle of Tarain in northern India paved the way for the establishment of the first Muslim sultanate, with its capital in Delhi, by Qutubuddin Aibak. The Delhi Sultanate lasted from 1206 to 1526 under the leadership of four major dynasties – the Mamluks, Khaljis, Tughlaqs and Lodis. These Turkish and Afghan rulers exercised their sway primarily over northern India but the more powerful sultans, like Alauddin Khalji (1296–1316) and Muhammad bin Tughlaq (1325–51), made incursions into the Deccan. Southern India in this period boasted two powerful kingdoms – the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagara founded in 1336 and the Bahmani kingdom founded by a Muslim governor who revolted against the sultan in 1345.  The Turkish, Persian and Afghan invasions of northern India from the eleventh century onwards injected the Turko-Persian content into the formation of an Indo-Islamic culture. The roots of this variant of the emerging Indo-Islamic accommodations actually preceded the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate and can be traced to the occupation of the Punjab by the Ghaznavids between 1001 and 1186. Lahore was the first centre of a Persianized Indo-Islamic culture until Delhi rose to political pre-eminence and almost became a replica of the ancient Sassanid court of Persia. The symbols of sovereignty, which had been wholly absent in the far more austere Arab Islam of the preceding centuries, became much more ceremonial and ornate. Persian cultural influence was balanced by a strong Turkish slave element in the composition of the nobility and the ruling classes during the first century of the Sultanate. Slavery went into decline in India during the fourteenth century. From the beginning of the fourteenth century onwards, the Turkish Mamluks, or slave aristocracy, were steadily replaced by a new aristocracy of Indian Muslims and Hindus as well as foreign immigrant Muslims of high status. So it was in the fourteenth century that a true Indo- Muslim culture was forged based on Hindu–Muslim alliance building and reciprocity. While northern India witnessed accommodations with the Turkish–Persian variant of Islam, the Arab imprint continued to be indelible in the Malabar coast of western India as well as coastal south India and Sri Lanka. So we find at least two different variants of the Indo-Islamic accommodations in the subcontinent, one straddling the overland belt from Turkey, Persia and northern India to the Deccan and the other bridging the ocean from the Arabian peninsula to coastal southern India and stretching across the Bay of Bengal to Java and Sumatra. The state structure constructed by the Delhi sultans was based on experiments carried out in West Asia but also elaborated on pre-existing forms in India. While upholding the supremacy of the Islamic sharia, the rulers desisted from imposing it on their predominantly non-Muslim subjects, who were allowed to retain their customary and religious laws. A series of imperial edicts complementing the sharia underpinned the day-to-day administration of justice, especially in the domains of criminal and civil law. Modelled on Ummayad and Abbasid rule, the intermeshing of religious and secular law was an intrinsic feature of the pact of dominance established by Muslim sovereigns in India. It had the merit of keeping the ulema or Muslim theologians at bay without straining the legitimacy of Muslim rule among the non-believers. The Delhi Sultanate drew its revenues primarily from the land, and its many flourishing towns depended to a large extent on the agrarian surplus. Some of the land revenue was paid directly into the state coffers but most of it was channelled through iqtadars or land-grant holders. The iqta was a non-hereditary prebendal assignment of revenue devised especially to suit the imperative of paying relatively stable state salaries in the highly monetized and fluctuating economic context of the Indian Ocean world- economy. Generally, iqtadars and provincial governors known as muqtis enjoyed a fair amount of autonomy from the Delhi sultan. A few sultans attempted a greater degree of centralized control for brief spells. Alauddin Khalji, for instance, made drastic changes to existing iqtas with a view to reordering the bonds of loyalty between the centre and the provincial peripheries. The southern kingdom of Vijayanagara drew revenues from land, but was also closely integrated with the broader economy and civilization of the Indian Ocean. Merchants from the Vijayanagara domains engaged in profitable trade with both West Asia and Southeast Asia. The Vijayanagara centre was the repository of considerable wealth and glory, but, according to Burton Stein, the state structure was segmented to provide for a substantial division and devolution of powers. After going through a number of vicissitudes the Vijayanagara kingdom recovered its glory under the great ruler Krishnadeva Raya (1509–29), whose reign saw impressive achievements in temple architecture and Telegu literature. In addition to the broad-based sultanates and kingdoms of the north and south, independent sultanates had emerged by the fifteenth century at the extremities of northern India – Kashmir, Bengal and Gujarat – each forging wider contacts of its own. After Taimur's attack on Delhi in 1398 even Jaunpur and Malwa emerged as independent sultanates. The fifteenth century ought to be seen as a period when there were several regional sultanates, since even Delhi was reduced to the status of one of the regional sultanates of north India. During the era of the Delhi Sultanate – its expansion and attrition – northern India developed a distinctive Indo-Islamic culture. Society consisted of three broad classes: the nobility, artisans and peasants. The nobility was drawn substantially though not exclusively from Turkish, Afghan, Persian and Arab immigrants. The great majority of Muslim artisans and peasants were converts from lower-caste Hindus to whom Islam's egalitarian appeal had held an attraction. Some recent works on early Islam in India have sought to underplay this dimension on grounds that Muslim conversions were more numerous where inequalities within the social structure were not as great as elsewhere. Yet this hardly invalidates the case about an egalitarian appeal, since it is entirely logical that societies with a history of valuing equality would be more amenable to its attractions. The egalitarianism of Islam did not, however, extend equally to women. Both Muslim and Hindu women of the upper social strata were largely restricted in this period to the private domain and were expected to be in purdah or behind a veil. One early Delhi sultan of the Mamluk dynasty – Raziya Sultana – succeeded in becoming the first Muslim woman ruler in the subcontinent. Acknowledged to have been a capable ruler, she was assassinated by male rivals. The Sunni and Shia sectarian division, which had occurred over differences of opinion on Muhammad's successor to the Khilafat, was reflected in Indian Muslim society. A great majority of Indian Muslims were Sunnis. In parts of Sind and southern Punjab, Multan in particular, Shias had become influential. But they seemed to be at a disadvantage in northern India during the period of the Sunni Delhi Sultanate. Yet in a sense the most influential of Muslims in India were the Sufis, who represented the mystical branch of Islam – which had achieved prominence in Persia since the tenth century. Members of the Chishti and Suhrawardy orders carried out many of the conversions to Islam after 1290. The Chishti order made its mark in the environs of Delhi and the Ganga–Jamuna Doab, while the Suhrawardy order developed a strong following in Sind. It was in the Islamic mystical tradition that women played a decisive role. One of the first mystics of Islam was a woman, the chaste and pure lover of God Rabia, who lived in Basra during the eighth century and won the admiration of fellow male Sufis. The names of famous women Sufis are to be found throughout the Islamic world. In all the Muslim-majority regions of the subcontinent, especially Sind and Punjab, there are shrines of women Sufi saints. So the feminine dimension in Islam, closely associated with spirituality, played a part in the peaceful spread of Muhammad's message. Evidence of the Sufi role in facilitating Islam's accommodation with its Indian environment can be seen in the very special mystical appreciation of the feminine in their poetry. While in Persian, and also Arabic, the metaphor of mystical poetry is predominantly male, the imagery is altered in Indian Sufi tradition into a love of the divine in the form of a woman devotee. Drawing upon the Hindu traditions, the soul is described as that of a loving woman seeking union with God, the ultimate Beloved. There was much in common between the bhakti strand in popular Hinduism and the Sufi strand of Islam. Both sought union with God through the way of love and revered pirs and gurus as spiritual leaders and mediators. The Sufi Islamic influence gave a powerful impetus to the bhakti movement in India, strengthening the Shramanik tradition and promoting a few syncretistic cults. Among the prominent leaders of the bhakti devotional movement were Kabir (1440–1518) in northern India and Chaitanya (1486– 1533) in Bengal, while the stream led by Guru Nanak (1469–1539) culminated in the foundation of the new Sikh religious faith in Punjab. Both Kabir and Nanak rejected the caste system and sought not so much to integrate Islam and Hinduism as to offer alternative views of the Creator. Kabir, when he did not deny the Hindu and Muslim conceptions of God, sought to equate them in eclectic fashion. He claimed himself to be the child of Allah and also of Ram. Nanak went much further in the direction of negating specifically Hindu and Muslim ideas of God while drawing on the mystical strands within both. The more resolute negation of the rituals of Hinduism and Islam by Nanak contributed to the emergence of Sikhism as a distinctive and separate religion after his death. Nanak's teachings were compiled in the Adi Granth and were disseminated by nine Gurus who came after him. Most leaders of the bhakti movement preferred to communicate in regional langua