Religious Cultures in Early Modern India

New Perspectives

Rosalind O'Hanlon, David Washbrook, Rosalind O'Hanlon, David Washbrook

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138349773
• eBook ISBN: 9781317982876
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Religious authority and political power have existed in complex relationships throughout India's history. The centuries of the 'early modern' in South Asia saw particularly dynamic developments in this relationship. Regional as well as imperial states of the period expanded their religious patronage, while new sectarian centres of doctrinal and spiritual authority emerged beyond the confines of the state. Royal and merchant patronage stimulated the growth of new classes of mobile intellectuals deeply committed to the reappraisal of many aspects of religious law and doctrine. Supra-regional institutions and networks of many other kinds - sect-based religious maths, pilgrimage centres and their guardians, sants and sufi orders - flourished, offering greater mobility to wider communities of the pious. This was also a period of growing vigour in the development of vernacular religious literatures of different kinds, and often of new genres blending elements of older devotional, juridical and historical literatures. Oral and manuscript literatures too gained more rapid circulation, although the meaning and canonical status of texts frequently changed as they circulated more widely and reached larger lay audiences.

Through explorations of these developments, the essays in this collection make a distinctive contribution to a critical formative period in the making of India's modern religious cultures.

This book was published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

The debate within: a Sufi critique of religious law, tasawwuf and politics in Mughal India

Muzaffar Alam

Department of South Asian Languages and Civilisations, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

This essay is an effort to understand the position taken by the celebrated seventeenth-century Chishtī Sufi ‘Abd al-Rahmān Chishtī in his Mir’āt al-Asrār, a hagiographical dictionary (tazkira) of past Sufi holy men. I have read this tazkira together with ‘Abd al-Rahmān’s other writings but focused in particular on his long preface to this work in which he elaborates his definition of tasawwuf and asks what the real religion of the Sufi should be. ‘Abd al-Rahmān also undertakes a far-reaching reassessment of key elements in the wider traditions of Indian Islam. Drawing on a range of Indian and Middle Eastern influences, he rejects the narrow law-centred formulation of the Naqshbandīs and offers a distinctive vision of Chishtī spiritual support at the heart of the Mughal political order. His work opens up for us the wider landscape of religious debate and contestation that characterized Indian Islam during the Mughal era, which later generations of historians have overlooked in their preoccupation with more ‘conservative’ strains of Muslim thought.

If a prophet had been sent to this community

[Muslims], he would have practiced the Hanafī law.

Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindī, Maktūbāt

The Sufi has no mazhab.

Abd al-Rahmān Chishtī, Mir’āt al-Asrār

In the development of Indian Muslim religious learning and Sufi thought, seventeenth-century Mughal India occupies a special position. Several important Sufi orders flourished: the Naqshbandī, Suhrawardī, Qādirī and Chishtī. Arriving from Central Asia alongside the Mughal regime, the Naqshbandīs established an especially important branch in India, known as the Mujadiddī, by one of the best known Indian Sufi and religious thinkers, Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindī (d. 1624). This Indian branch eventually spread far beyond the subcontinent to nearly the entire Islamic East. The period also witnessed the rise of another well-known religious thinker, Shaikh ‘Abd al-Haqq Muhaddis Dehlavī (d. 1642), one of the few Indian Muslim scholars to visit Hijaz and receive training in advanced religious learning. Upon his return to India, Dehlavī established his own institutions to disseminate religious learning, to which his own particular contribution was his rejuvenation of the science of hadīs. A member of the Qadirī order, Dehlavī’s Akhbār al-Akhyār, a tazkira of South Asian Sufis, is amongst the oft-cited Sufi texts.¹ These two figures dominate the history of seventeenth-century Muslim religious culture in India.

This essay, however, will take as its starting point an oft-overlooked religious discourse initiated by a Chishtī shaikh. Much as Sirhindī revitalized the Naqshbandī order in the seventeenth century, the Chishtīs also rearticulated their ideology in significant new ways, partly in reaction to the formulations of the Naqshbandī order. Integral to this discourse is the problem of the Sufi’s relationship to a specific religious jurisprudential school (mazhab). In this debate, the Chishtīs not only reacted to their political and religious environment but also re-read and redefined the Islamic past and Muslim religious traditions. Yet, this train of seventeenth-century thought is practically untouched by modern South Asian scholarship. Indeed, one of our best authorities projects the Chishtīs during the Mughal era as virtually inactive, reviving only later in the eighteenth century.² Even for the Naqshbandīs, scholarship has been largely confined to the Naqshbandī reaction to Akbar (d. 1605).

Our primary source for the Chishtī view of this period comes from the writings of Shaikh ‘Abd al-Rahmān (d. 1683). Hailing from Awadh, ‘Abd al-Rahmān was a major Shaikh of the Sābirī branch of the Chishtī silsila with close family connections to two eminent saints of the Chishtī Sābirī order, Shaikh Ahmad ‘Abd al-Haqq of Rudauli (d. 1434) and Shaikh ‘Abd al-Quddūs Gangohī (d. 1537).³ ‘Abd al-Rahmān was thus a prime spokesman for his order and presents a lucid view of the Chishtī position.

Shaikh ‘Abd al-Rahmān Chishtī’s Mir’āt al-Asrār

‘Abd al-Rahmān wrote prolifically, with five of his books bearing the word Mir’āt in the titles.⁴ Here, we will discuss primarily his Mir’āt al-Asrār, one of the most comprehensive biographical dictionaries of the Sufis written during the seventeenth century, covering about a 1000 years from the time of the Prophet down to the date of the completion of the compilation (AH 1065/AD 1654), which took about 20 years (AH 1045/AD 1635–AH 1065/AD 1654). Bruce Lawrence has analysed this text focusing on its Indo-Persian flavour.⁵ The book reads like a definitive statement on the legitimacy of the Chishtī ideology and pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: religious cultures in an imperial landscape
• 1. The debate within: a Sufi critique of religious law, tasawwuf and politics in Mughal India
• 2. The four sampradāys: ordering the religious past in Mughal North India
• 3. Theology and statecraft
• 4. Advaita Vedānta in early modern history
• 5. The Brahmin double: the Brahminical construction of anti-Brahminism and anti-caste sentiment in the religious cultures of precolonial Maharashtra
• 6. Speaking from Siva’s temple: Banaras scholar households and the Brahman ‘ecumene’ of Mughal India
• 7. A tale of two temples: Mathurā’s Keśavadeva and Orcchā’s Caturbhujadeva
• 8. Replicating Vaisnava worlds: organizing devotional space through the architectonics of the mandala
• Index