Narrative Pasts

Description

This book explores the narrative power of texts in creating communities. Through an investigation of genealogical, historical, and biographical texts, it retrieves the social history of the Muslim community in Gujarat, a region with one of the earliest records of Muslim presence in the Indian subcontinent. By reconstructing the literary, social, and historical world of Sufi preceptors, disciples, and descendants from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, Jyoti Gulati Balachandran highlights the role of learned Muslim men in imparting a prominent regional and historical identity to Gujarat. The book reveals how distinct forms of community and association were created and shaped over time through architecture, shrine veneration, and most importantly, textual redefinition.

Narrative Pasts demonstrates that Gujarat was not only an important hub of maritime Indian Ocean trade, but also an integral part of the historical and narrative processes that shaped medieval and early modern South Asia. Employing new and rarely used literary materials in Persian and Arabic, this book brings new life and vitality to the history of the region by integrating Gujarat’s sultanate and Mughal past with the larger socio-cultural histories of Islamic South Asia.

About the Author

Jyoti Gulati Balachandran teaches history at Pennsylvania State University, USA.

Reviews

“Narrative Pasts is a carefully researched social history of the making of a Muslim community in Gujarat through the 15th–17th centuries, a subject that has challenged historians methodologically and conceptually. Gujarat is a region rich in important Persian and Arabic literary materials still inadequately studied. Jyoti Gulati Balachandran uses these materials diligently and creatively to explore processes of settlement, the reproduction of Islam, the organisation of Muslim communities and their modes of reflection on their pasts. Social histories are discordant and messy and Balachandran’s valuable study brings literary materials and history into a critical dialectical relationship so that we can understand modes of appropriation and forgetting, teaching and congregational assemblies, social relationships and politics, memories and history. This important intervention provides insights into the processes through which Islam and the Muslim community can be historicized—in Gujarat certainly—but more universally through the questions it raises to its sources.” --- Sunil Kumar, Professor in the History of Medieval India, University of Delhi

“Although Sufis in premodern India often made a virtue of staying aloof from worldly politics, Gujarat possessed two Sufi lineages whose fortunes were closely linked to those of its sultans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Jyoti Gulati Balachandran’s outstanding book brings to light the dense web of relationships – of power, kinship, and memory – that constituted Gujarat’s politics then and later. Teased out from little-read Sufi memorials and keenly informed by politics and architecture, the book will be essential reading for anyone interested in precolonial India, South Asian Islam, or the history of textual transmission.” --- Samira Sheikh, Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies, Vanderbilt University, USA

Table of contents

List of Figures ix

Acknowledgements xi

Note on Transliteration xvii

Introduction 1

1 From Inscriptions to Texts: Locating the History of Muslim Migration and Settlement 35

2 State, Settlement, Texts: The Beginnings of Community and History Making in Gujarat 63

3 Texts and Tombs: The Creation of a Sacral Geography 95

4 Networks of Community Formation 129

5 Seventeenth-Century Historiographical Resolutions: Aḥmad Khattū and the Suhrawardi Contemporaries in Ṣad Ḥikāyat 164

Conclusion 192

Appendix: Shaykh Aḥmad Khattū and His Suhrawardi

Contemporaries in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Taẕkirāt 199

Bibliography 205

Index 219

About the Author 227