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

Against narratives of conflict and animosity, historians of premodern South Asia have foregrounded histories of interreligious exchange and syncretic assimilation, both as the defining socio-religious paradigm of the time as well as a political summons from the contemporary. When wedded to the concept of syncretism, this, we now know, runs the risk of transforming liminal interstices into concrete, anachronistic boundaries (Stewart 2003); that is its primary consequence. My paper is concerned with a second, though relatively understudied consequence: its disproportionate moral economy. Scholars have proffered vignettes of premodern interreligious or inter-sectarian interaction that were far from oppositional, but almost exclusively by way of Muslim engagements with ‘Indic’ texts and traditions—and rarely their reverse. The Indic, in so doing, becomes an incorporative empire, implicitly foreclosing ‘Hindu’ or even loosely Indic appropriations of Islam. The guiding question of my paper is therefore this: if we jettison Islam’s purported intransigence, how does our view of religion and religious boundaries in premodern South Asia change? 

To that end, I follow 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 this 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. I also limn book-historical cues from within the text and associated hagiographical literature to illustrate the contextual surround of its composition and performance in Mughal Delhi. Although some recent scholarship has drawn our attention to reifications (of) and homiletic addresses to Muslims in Indic religious literature, this paper aims to argue that Indic sampradāyas 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.