9 Islam in India

Saidalavi P.C.

In this module, we look at the rise and spread of Islam in India. It is suggested that unlike popular belief that Islam was imposed on the population of India, the actual history reveals that there were diverse traditions of Islam that came into India at different points of time and it is incorrect to think of the entire Muslim population in India as constituting one single homogenous religious community. In this module, we show how Islam came to South India and Eastern India at different points of time and got assimilated into the local cultures of these regions overtime becoming an integral part of Indian culture. This module is divided into several sections; in the first section, we look at the early spread of Islam in India, in section two, we consider the anthropology of Islam focussing on the bewildering complexities and diversities of beliefs and practices among Muslims in different parts of India, in the third section, we look at the social organization of Muslims in India with a view to understanding the relationship of the Muslim population to the caste system in India, finally, in the last section, we look at the development of Muslim political identity in India.

Islam is believed to have reached at least in certain parts of India, especially in the south-west coast of India during the time of Prophet Muhammad in seventh century. It spread across India initially through trade links, various sufi networks and various other modes. This historical reality actually refutes the popular imagination of Islam being an imposed religion from outside especially through political oppression. The varied process of the dissemination of Islam has brought about Muslim communities of diverse nature in terms of beliefs, practices and identities. This module aims to throw some light on such processes and formations by concentrating on debates the manner of conversions, anthropology of Islam, the social organisation of Muslims, the debates around modernisation and Muslim political identity in India.

Islam reached in various parts of India through diverse modes and procedures. Contrary to the common understanding of coercive nature of conversion to Islam, historical records not only belie such claims but also project multifarious forms by which Islam spread across the continent. In the context of sixteenth century Bengal, Richard Eaton (2003) argues that there developed both a folk Bengali variant and a variant practiced by urban dwelling Ashraf classes (elite among Muslims who claim descent from foreign lands or beyond Bengal). Though Muslim regimes had ruled over Bengal at least from thirteenth century, it was not until well into the sixteenth century that noticeable Muslim community of cultivators emerged in the eastern half of the Bengal delta. In fact, Muslim rulers in Bengal employed a hands-off policy in converting people to Islam. Then how did Islam spread across Bengal from the sixteenth century? According to Eaton, the principal form in which Islam spread in Bengal revolved around the figure of the enterprising cultivators. The eastern delta was a heavy forested region. Unlike earlier Muslim rulers who had their capitals in north-western delta, the Mughal rulers who descended on Bengal in the sixteenth century established their capital in the eastern half of Bengal. This region underwent rapid economic and political changes under the regime. Concerned with bringing political stability and inculcating loyalty, Mughal rulers granted favourable and tax-free tenures of land to pioneering individuals who were expected to clear the forest and begin the cultivation. This policy was undertaken with a view to creating communities that would be productive and loyal. Every recipient of such grants was required to support his clients and pray for the longevity of Mughal rule. One of the conditions for obtaining the grant was to build a temple or a mosque in the land to be supported in perpetuity out of the wealth produced in the land. While grants made to Hindu institutions (brahmottar, devottar, vishnottar, sivottar) integrated local communities into a Hindu-oriented cultural universe, grants made to Muslim pioneers resulted in the construction of Islamic-oriented cultural universe. Since majority of the pioneers were Muslims, the dominant mode of piety that evolved on the eastern frontier was Islamic.

Stephen Fredrik Dale (2003) notes a different mode of diffusion of Islam in the south-west cost of India. He argues that Islam grew on the Malabar Coast through conversion, at least initially, through the interaction of an egalitarian mercantile community with an exceptionally conservative Hindu caste society. The conversion was largely a steady and prosaic one with the figure of the merchant at the centre of the process. The Muslim community on the Malabar Coast was formed mainly due to intermarriages between the Arabian merchants and women of the locality, and in the nineteenth century mainly due to conversion from the lowest rung of Hindu society. The way Islam spread across the subcontinent is varied and there cannot be a single causal explanation for such a process.

Anthropology of Islam

The kernels of Islamic faith are conceived to be codified in a single scriptural source, Koran and are understood to be strictly adhered to by Muslims across the world. This assumption reinforced the belief that the study of the religious faith is the domain of the theologians and their understanding would be accurate and valid owing to their expertise in handling the textual materials. However, the normative thrust of this approach forestalled the appreciation of the bewildering complexities and diversities of beliefs and practices among Muslims in different parts of the world. It also prevented any enquiry into the ways in which Islamic faith adapted to different cultural traditions and the adjustments it made during its traversal from the West Asian heartlands. Sociologists and anthropologists are concerned not with the philosophical and theological aspects of the faith but with the concrete forms the faith showcases in actual lives of the people in varied contexts. In other words, the analysis here focuses on a holistic analysis of how people make sense of the supernatural and how they live their faith in their lives.

The transposition of Islam from its provenance to India at once raises a number of questions and sociologists and anthropologists in India have responded to this scenario in many interesting ways. Muslims in India subscribe to the fundamental Islamic practices like daily prayers, fasting during the month of Ramadan, pilgrimage to Mecca and giving the tax on one’s wealth (zakath). This adherence gives the Muslims a sense of belonging to a universal brotherhood of Muslims across the world. However, apart from the philosophy of basic practices, Imtiaz Ahmad (1978) argues, Islam in India is heavily influenced by elements drawn from larger living environments. So, Islam in India has simultaneously local and scriptural dimensions. Such local flavours of Islam may sometimes contradict the fundamentalist notions of Islam. These local elements of Islam, under the influence of pre-conversion cultural features, exist alongside with the fundamentalist interpretations and ways of life in Islam without much conflicts and contradictions. Muslims do not see these two aspects as mutually contradictory but as complimentary, thereby engendering a greater degree of pluralism with respect to beliefs and practices. Ahmad also notes that the integration of the local and the formal into a single religious system must have been borne as a result of the constraints on Islam to survive in an alien environment. The resilience shown by the indigenous traditions and practices encouraged Islam to fashion them to its own beliefs and requirements by putting an Islamic content to it. In short, Islam as a religious tradition in India is far more pluralist than commonly understood it to be.

This framework of the multi-culturalist thrust of Indian Islam has been questioned by various scholars. For instance, Francis Robinson (1983) argues that the analysis of Ahmad gives too much emphasis on actual behaviour and practice that are apparently similar to Hindu practices at the cost of underlying shifts in religious orientations in terms of meaning and understanding over time. People often maintain old customs and practices but ascribe different meanings to them at different times. Even the supposedly unique feature of Indian Islam—coexistence with Hindu practices—is not an idiosyncratic feature of India; rather it is as true of any Muslim society in any parts of the world. Both the local and the scriptural could be observed in the beliefs and practices of Muslim societies across the world. Snapshot view of certain practices and rituals to study Islam in India proscribes a historical dimension to the analysis of Islam in India. We can understand the relationship between a particular society and Islam comprehensively only in a long term view. Such long term view of Indian Islam illustrates a pattern of perfection in Indian Islam. Many practices that were considered un-Islamic at specific times have been expunged from actual Islamic behaviour. This pattern of perfection is contained in Koran, the traditions of the Prophet and Sharia. The non-Islamic practices prevalent in many Muslim societies across the world are merely temporary anomalies and they are superseded over time by the pattern of perfection contained in the conception of ‘true Muslim’. There is a clear disjunction between the law and what is achieved in real life. This pattern of perfection has been preserved down the ages and disseminated by holy men and ulama, those learned men in Koran, traditions of the Prophet and Sharia. But the propagation of the idea of true Islam, in other words, Islamisation, is painfully a gradual process, sometimes stretching over centuries.

Another social anthropologist, Veena Das contests both these conceptions argues that Islam in India be better understood by a framework of folk-theology and theological anthropology. She argues that both the above-mentioned ideas about Islam derive from a single understanding, i.e. normative Islam constitutes a single whole with a unilinear pattern of perfection and an unchanging essence. Though the core of Islam is supposedly contained in a single scripture, Koran, there is no consensus of opinion over if it reveals a single pattern of perfection. Moreover, the Koran has been reinterpreted and commentaries have been by various scholars in every century. To write a new commentary on a text implies that existing commentaries are inadequate and it in turn illustrates that there is a plurality of meanings inherent in any act of interpretation. Robinson believes that different interpretations are matters of degree and in fact there are minor differences. Ahmad and his associates label certain practices and rituals such as saint worship as non-Islamic without delving into the structures of beliefs that underlie such practices. The approach to study Islam in India should follow a middle-path where we should be able to see both text and practice constituting a whole rather than binaries like Islamic/non-Islamic, orthodox/heterodox, great/little traditions.

Socio-historical Formation

The dominant ways in which Muslims in India became a site of enquiry have indeed been historical whereby their historical formation (majorly Mughal), political identity and intra-communal relations directed the debates. In such narratives, Barbara D. Metcalf (1995) argues, India was already a politically bounded entity with two clearly defined religious communities. Hindus were considered as the original inhabitants of the land and Muslims as foreigners. Muslim rulers were the foil against which the British defined themselves: by proclaiming that Muslims were oppressive, lecherous and incompetent and on the contrary the British were enlightened, competent and disciplined. The British colonial officials and historians constructed a historical narrative where India’s (the idea of a unified India itself was colonial construction) past was divided into three phases: a golden Hindu rule, an ‘intolerant’ Muslim interlude and the era of the British. In this narrative, the Hindus lived in a pristine state before the arrival of Muslims. The Muslim period were imagined to be one where Hindu idols and temples were destroyed, forcible conversions and marriages occurred. The British fought against Muslim rulers and brought India back to its earlier golden times. Since the British was the one who compensated for the injustices meted out to Hindus at an earlier period and restored Hindu pride, they were naturally justified to maintain the order and rule India. The objectives of such narratives were to justify the British rule in India.

Many Indian nationalist leaders found such a construction of the past very useful. The idea of a golden past and a presumed oppression by Muslims was used to inculcate self-pride and the need for takeover in the context of anti-colonial struggles. Like the colonial narratives, even the nationalist narratives revolved around the idea of self-conscious communities of Hindu and Muslim. Such narrative constructions have resulted in creating an impression of a monolithic, homogeneous notion of Islam and Muslims in India. Moreover, such assumptions also engender a common sense whereby varied practices and loyalties of actual Muslims are subsumed under a single, causal variable of Islam.

Social Organisation

Social organisations of Muslims in India have been a topic of discussion in sociology for a long time. The pioneering study in this regard has indeed been undertaken by Imtiaz Ahmad in his edited volume Caste and Social Stratification among Muslims in India (1978). He contends that the term caste can be applied to communities other than Hindus if we take it to be both structural and cultural phenomena. This adds two aspects to the conception of caste proposed by Ahamd: one, it has structural features that can be compared in many religions and communities anywhere else. Second, though certain structural features could be seen as similar, there are ways in which it cannot be said to differ completely, and therefore still needs the label caste. Thus he goes on to see the Hindu caste system as the referent on which his idea of caste among Muslims in India is established. He characterises four features for Hindu caste system and analyses whether these features correspond to the system stratification existing among Muslims in various parts of the country. They are: endogamy, occupational specialization, hierarchical ordering and ideological, religious philosophy undergirding the system.

The social groups among Muslims are largely endogamous, and occasionally, marriages occur between groups at higher levels. In most of the cases, such marriages are hypergamous where those belonging to the higher castes may take women from those just below them but will not send their women in marriage to those castes. Various reasons have been furnished for the occurrence of endogamous marriages among Muslims. While some scholars argue that such marriages happen due to a concern for matching spouses in terms of economic background religious and cultural traditions, some others argue that endogamy is underscored by a notion of purity of blood as among Hindus. Family genealogy is often asserted as a means of emphasising ritual purity of blood and bone and each family maintains and proclaims its descent and marriages as proofs of purity of blood. This notion is accompanied by an idea of pollution as a result of intermarriage. Even in terms of occupational specialization, a close link exists between social groups and their assigned jobs. In most of the cases, a close correspondence exists with reference to Hindu caste system whereby locally dominant castes serve as the nucleus of the exchange of goods and services. However, there is a degree of difference in correspondence between social groups and occupation at various levels of hierarchy. Such links are apparently stronger at the lower levels of hierarchy than the higher. But this pattern does not enunciate a departure from Hinduism because even among Hindus the correspondence between caste and occupation is greater at the lower levels rather than the higher. Moreover, occupational association should not be seen not in terms of who is engaged in what occupation but the way occupation is hierarchically graded and thereby affects the status of the people traditionally associated with such jobs.

There are notions of hierarchy among various social groups among Muslims though the criterion of ranking among them does not strictly correspond with caste among Hindus. Among Hindus, caste hierarchy is based on the idea of pollution which is elucidated by relations between the notions of pure and impure. While some scholars argue that in most of the Muslim communities in India, the hierarchy is part and parcel of a deference structure which emphasised inequality of status, some others anchor hierarchy, among other things, also to the conception of purity and pollution. In such cases, those belonging to the higher castes refuse any commensal relations with the lower castes and refuse to take food or water from them. However, the notion of purity and pollution among Muslims is not as elaborated among Hindus. The status is more often based on various other characteristics like hypergamy, deference, privilege and descent.

One of the difficult problems in comparing Muslim social organisation with Hindu caste system arises from the applicability of religious philosophy for rationalising social divisions. The ideas of karma and dharma are foundational to the notion of caste among Hindus. Dharma enjoins one to his caste as a moral obligation and therefore not to violate or question it. Karma professes that one is born into a caste because he deserves to be born into that and the actions he performed in the previous incarnation called for such a reward or punishment as the case should be. Such elaborate ideological justifications do not exist in Islam. Moreover, such explicit social evaluations are out rightly rejected by Islam. However, there are alternative ideologies in among Muslims by which social groups rationalise and propagate social distinctions and inequality. These alternative ideologies are, in most of the cases, locally determined but nevertheless ratified by certain Islamic notions of deference, descent and purity. Ahmad concludes that the social divisions among Muslims are similar to social divisions among Hindus and thus it can be termed caste, though an exact replica cannot be found. Since the majority of Muslims in India are converts from the lower and intermediate castes among Hindus, they would have maintained their cultural practices even after assuming Islam. But if caste among Muslims owes itself directly to the acculturative influence of Hinduism, the constant Islamisations would have eliminated such practices. However, majority of works done on various Muslim communities across India shows that Islamisation has actually reinforced such social divisions and inequalities rather than destroying them.

Ritual, Religion and Reform

In recent years, debates around issues like how Muslims organise their everyday socio-religious practices, how to understand seemingly un-Islamic practices among Muslims and how do we place Muslim communities in modernisation debates have become important in understanding Muslim communities empirically. Francis Robinson (2008), one of the historians of Islam in South Asia, notes that Muslim communities have experienced periods of renewal at various times in history, and especially after eighteenth century this process has become intense, prolonged and spread to various parts of the world. This renewal has meant in the modern period both a reformation of individual behaviour and communities and a reorganisation of Islamic knowledge, practices and institutions in the light of western models. If the urge of the renewal came from inner compulsions to make their faith live to the world, it was formulated in the context of a changing material world with which it constantly interacted. Robinson (2008) emphasises five aspects that characterises Islamic reform in the modern era: (1) attempts to make revelation and tradition significant for the present and the resultant loss of the authority of the past; (2) a renewed emphasis on human will in a world without political power; (3) a growing self-affirmation, individualism and self-reflectiveness achieved through willed-activity and self-transformation; (4) formation into an ideology by a rationalisation of Islam from scripturalism; (5) a process of secularisation with two aspects of disenchantment and re-enchantment. The process of reform is not limited to this or that religious group; rather it is a process by which every religious group among Muslims in India sought to adapt and reformulate their notions of Islam in the contemporary times. Such a notion also questions the binary-making whereby religious groups are branded either as modern or traditional.

Muslim Political Identity in India

Though Muslims have been living in India for centuries along with Hindus and other religious groups, their identity and loyalty to the nation has always been questioned in various ways. While Muslim assertion in pre-independence period led to constructing an imagined homogeneous Muslim community and the creation of Pakistan, in post-independence India, they are considered as ‘other’, not as quite Indian as others. Such narrative constructions are part and parcel of mainstream nationalist discourses today. Gyanendra Pandey (1999) argues that constructions of a nationalist mainstream—the essential, natural soul and the minorities as the foil against which the mainstream is constituted have been central to nation-state formation in India. It is through the processes of demarcating the boundaries within the nation that some become natural citizens and others as qualified citizens (as in the usage of ‘Indian Muslims’). Even the idea of ‘minority’, as used predominantly to refer to Muslims, assume an intermixing of an electoral vocabulary with a socio-religious group subsuming all their religious-cultural practices and thereby signifying a particular politically defined place for them. What Partition and Independence did was to fixate these identities on religious groups. The tag of ‘minority’ fell upon Muslims, though Christians, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists were of course minorities, though it all did not matter much since their numbers were very less. Muslims were ‘minority’ in descriptive sense even in districts, taluks where they were in a majority demographically. They were the minority that had asked for Pakistan and now they were required to show the sincerity of their choice of being part of the political entity, India. The Hindus were the majority even though the majority of them did not have access to what are considered to be Hindu sacred texts and traditions.

Though on the political level, such reified constructions of identities prevailed, on the everyday level, Muslims, Hindus and other religious groups were part of pluralistic and syncretic universes. Their lived experiences actually crossed such naturalised constructions of identities to form friendships, neighbourhoods, communities and even political parties.

Reference bibliography

• Ahmad, Imtiaz (Ed.) (1978) ‘Introduction’, Caste and Social Stratification among Muslims in India (pp. 1-29). New Delhi: Manohar, (first print, 1973).
• Ahmad, Imtiaz (Ed.) (1981) ‘Introduction’, Ritual and Religion among Muslims in India (pp. 1-20). New Delhi: Manohar.
• Dale, Stephen F. (2003) ‘Trade, Conversion, and the Growth of the Islamic Community in Kerala’. In Rowena Robinson (Ed.) Religious Conversion in India: Modes, Motivations and Meanings (pp. 54-74). New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
• Das, Veena (1984) ‘For a Folk-theology and Theological Anthropology of Islam’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 18 (2) (July-December): 293-300.
• Eaton, Richard M. (2003) ‘Who are the Bengal Muslims? Conversion and Islamisation in Bengal’. In Rowena Robinson (Ed.) Religious Conversion in India: Modes, Motivations and Meanings (pp. 75-97). New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
• Metcalf, Barabara D. (1995) ‘Presidential Address: Too Little Too Much: Reflections on Muslim in the History of India’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 54 (4) (November): 951-967.
• Pandey, Gyanendra (1999) ‘Can a Muslim be an Indian?’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 41 (4) (October): 608-629.
• Robinson, Francis (1983) ‘Islam and Muslim Society in South Asia’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 17 (2) (July-December): 185-204.
• ______ (2008) ‘Islamic Reform and Modernities in South Asia’, Modern Asian Studies, 42 (2/3) (March-May): 259-281.
• Robinson, Rowena and Sathianathan Clarke (Ed.) (2003) ‘Introduction’, Religious Conversion in India: Modes, Motivations, and Meanings (pp. 1-21). New Delhi: Oxford University Press.