Culture and Power in South Asian Islam by Neilesh Bose

Author:Neilesh Bose [Bose, Neilesh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138059269
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

New thoughts or old conventions? Erasing the history of textual cultures

Perhaps the most striking aspect of many discussions of Islamic texts produced in South Asian languages is the curiously ahistorical nature of the arguments. It seems to be assumed that vernacular Islamic texts from South Asia arose from a situation in which authors were actively creating the terminology and imagery they were utilizing. As mentioned, Stewart claims that the texts he was investigating were ‘historical witnesses to the earliest attempts to think Islamic thoughts in the local language, which is to say, to think new thoughts for Bengali, ideas that had never previously been explicitly expressed’.42 Similar ideas have been expressed for Tamil. The anonymous Ceytakkātinoṇṭināṭakam has been described as ‘an attempt to develop a vocabulary appropriate to the context’.43 The specific vernacular Islamic text in question is highlighted as an unmediated encounter between Muslim thought and non-Muslim vernacular literary tradition, in which the individual poet is credited with innovatively creating or developing the specific Islamic instantiation of vernacular vocabulary and imagery.

These claims are ahistorical in so far as they result in two erasures with rather problematic consequences, both of which are encapsulated in the term ‘encounter’. An ‘encounter’ suggests, firstly, that two or more entities come into sudden contact where there was no contact before. And secondly, an encounter implies a singular event, not a process. The first consequence of perceiving vernacular Islamic textual cultures as the outcome of an ‘encounter’ is to erase the simple fact that by the time these texts came into being, Muslims and non-Muslims had long lived cheek by jowl in the cities and towns of South Asia. Communities of Muslims speaking a specific South Asian language often came into being a substantial amount of time before the first text on an Islamic topic was written down in that language. For example, inscriptions in Tamil referring to Muslim places of worship date back to the times of the Pāṇḍya-dynasty in the twelfth and thirteenth century, while the first known literary text was composed only in 1572.44 To claim, then, as Stewart has done, that any written text is a first attempt to think Islamic thoughts in a South Asian language sounds difficult to believe. How did Muslims talk about their religion in a local vernacular if the terminology for that would only be developed by some poet writing centuries later? Even in those cases where Muslims were fundamentally involved in actually creating the idiom in which the texts were written down, as for example in the case of the Avadhi premākhyāns, these texts emerged into a world where Muslims had been part of wider society for generations.45

The second consequence is to ignore that the texts we are talking about did not exist in isolation, though significantly, this is how they are usually presented to us. When Umaṟuppulavar composed the Cīṟāppurāṇam around 1700, not only was it not the first attempt to think Islamic discourse in Tamil, it was not even the first attempt to write such discourse down.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.