For the Muslims of Hindustān: Unsettling the Indic in Early Modern South Asia

This paper follows the figure of Prāṇnāth (c. 1618-1694), the preeminent religious preacher of the Praṇāmī order (sampradāya). Straddling Kṛṣṇa-centered Vaiṣṇavism and Nizārī Ismā‘īlism—as well as a range of courtly spaces from Shahjahanabad/Delhi to Panna (Bundelkhand)—Prāṇnāth fashioned himself into a Mahdī, or messiah, in the line of Kṛṣṇa, Muḥammad, and Christ. In my paper, I closely examine a Hindavī text from the Praṇāmī scriptural corpus expressly addressed to the Muslims of Hindustān. I study the text’s (and more generally, Prāṇnāth’s) incorporation of Qurʾānic eschatology into Vaiṣṇava cosmology, as well as its social purport of transcending orthodoxies and immiscible sectarian differences. Indic sampradāyas, this paper aims to argue, often encountered Islam in ways that were neither fleeting nor so exogenous as to be incapable of transforming those very traditions. In the main, I hope to revisit prevailing heuristic habits of treating the ‘Indic’ and the ‘Islamic’ as separable civilizational matrices intersecting only under asymmetrical conditions.