‘South Asian Islamicate Futures and Pasts: Sources and Possibilities for Emic Literary Theory and Criticism’

Building on the work of scholars such as Eaton and Ernst, recent scholarship in South Asian Islam has begun to call for the retrieval of insider and ‘emic’ perspectives from Indic texts and traditions (Nair 2020). This panel aims to carry this agenda further, reimagining non-modern objects of academic inquiry as sources of theory, hermeneutics, and philosophy. Attending to the creative and interpretive practices in historical texts allows us to study the Indic Islamicate on its own terms. Beginning in the thirteenth century Delhi Sultanate, Ilma's contribution takes Khusraw seriously as a theorist, reading him as a source of emic methods of evaluating Indo-Persian literary works. Raihan's work on the sixteenth century Konkanī figure al-Mahāʾimī invites us to reconfigure our concepts of reading and interpretive practice. Further South still, Mackenzie’s examination of vernacular hagiography, and emic historiography of religious syncretism, enriches our comprehension of cultural exchange. Turning toward the Mughal era, Aman's paper invites us to reconsider the motivations of Hindu-Muslim encounters, with an eye toward understanding the crucial role played by Indic and Islamicate philosophical systems in constructing a reading of the (religious) ‘other.’ Glistening like a pearl: Exploring Indo-Persian Literary Hermeneutics through Khusraw’s Dibāchāh While Amīr Khusraw (d.1325) is deeply revered for being a literateur, in Anglophone scholarship, his work has largely been studied for mining historical facts, or court politics, with little or no attention paid to an in-depth study of his theory of poetics. Drawing from various literary, intellectual, and religious tradition (s)–prosody, logic, philosophy, Qur’ān, Ḥadīth, and Persian and Arabic rhetoric (‘ilm al-balāgha), Khusraw creatively synthesizes these streams to develop a distinct Persianate literary criticism in South Asia. Taking Khusraw as a literary theorist, this paper seeks to focus on Khusraw’s Dibāchāh-i dīvān-i Ghurrat al-kamāl (Preface to The Full Moon of Perfection). Offering ‘emic’ literary hermeneutics, in addition to introducing new rhetorical devices that Khusraw ostensibly invented, Khusraw also brings forth not only a method of interpreting and analyzing poetry, but also the rigorous training and qualifications that ‘form’ a good poet and a reader. Hindu in one step; Muslim, the other: Consideration of Religious Identity in the Nandiyāgamalīle Koḍekallu Basava (c. 15th century) is remembered as a merchant, warrior, miracle-maker, reincarnation of the Prophet Muhammad, and poet-saint of the Kannada Vīraśaiva, or Liṅgāyat, tradition. His tomb-shrine in Koḍekal attracts veneration from Hindus and Muslims alike, and in Kannada hagiography he is considered at once Śaiva and Chishtī. Whereas famous examples of contested poet-saints (eg. Kabir) rebuke religious labels, Koḍekallu Basava seems to freely inhabit each in turn. In this paper, I attend to the literary and narrative strategies of an early 17th century Kannada hagiography of Koḍekallu Basava—the Nandiyāgamalīle of Vīrasaṅgayya—as a novel example of religious identity fashioning that frustrates our modern conceptions of Hindu and Muslim, Indic and Islamicate. In particular, Vīrasaṅgayya expands on the trope of place in Vīraśaiva hagiography (figuring Koḍekallu Basava as re-creating a “final Kalyāṇa”) by his inclusion of Koḍekallu Basava in a pan-Indian, Sultanate and Deccani history. The example of Koḍekallu Basava complicates the existing scholarly perception of the limited influence of Persianate literary, political, and popular Sufi cultures on South Indian Hindu devotion (bhakti) and offers what can be understood as an emic understanding of religious syncretism. “Hermeneutics as Soteriology, Philosophy as Liberation: How to Read Mahāʾimī’s Reading in the Khuṣūṣ al-niʿam” The task of examining South Asian figures in the globally networked historical tradition of committed interpreters of Ibn ʿArabī’s (1240 CE) work is only just moving beyond prior historiographical dichotomies rooted in the overemphasis of later concerns, such as the question of the priority of witnessing (shuhūd) or existence (wujūd). Examining the work of the Konkanī 15th century commentator on Ibn ʿArabī ʿAlā al-dīn al-Mahāʾimī (d. 1431 CE), I argue that a more fruitful tack for intellectual historians is to treat the texts of these figures as a source of interpretive theory. In the afterlife of earlier debates in Rasulid Yemen, Mahāʾimī’s commentarial practice on Ibn ʿArabī’s Fuṣūṣ shows the vitality of an Indian Ocean Akbarianism in which creative philosophical hermeneutics takes on a function which carries a soteriological function: reading the text in the absence of the Sufi master provides a presence that is actualized in the process of commentary. Undermining the sharp distinction between theory and practice, seeing reading as the cultivation of a hermeneutical habitus opens a new horizon both for understanding the activity of the subjects, including texts, thinkers, and writers, as well as for understanding the activity of the academic historiographer self-reflexively. “Hindu Wisdom Through Muslim Eyes: Abū-l Fayz Fayzi’s Engagement with Islamicate and Indic Philosophy” Scholarship on Hindu-Muslim encounters has covered an extensive breadth of ‘modes’: humanistic, literary, imperial (Taneja, 2017; Behl, 2012; Alam, 1998; Truschke, 2011). However, following the lead of recent scholarly interventions (Nair, 2014), I argue that by centering the question of how Sufi worldviews shaped the motivations of the interlocutors involved in the encounter(s) and the ‘translation’ process contained in it, we may begin to see Mughal-era literary and philosophical production in a different light: as emic, indigenous frameworks for hermeneutics and metaphysics of the self and its relationship to the (religious) ‘other.’ In that spirit, this paper centers the Mughal poet-laureate (malik al-shu ‘arā’), philosopher, and diplomat Abū-l Fayz Fayzi (d. 1595) and his text on Indian ‘wisdom’ (ḥikmat), The Illuminator of Gnosis (Shariq al-ma‘rifah). Fayzi extols the virtues of Krishna worship and the importance of Yoga as a spiritual path but does so within a broader dialogue between Islamicate and Indic philosophical systems, namely Waḥdat al-Wujūd in the school of Ibn ‘Arabī (d. 1240), Illuminationism as articulated by Persian philosopher Suhrawardī (d. 1191), and [Advaita] Vedānta. Situating Fayzi and his text as a source of comparative religious philosophy enriches our understanding of how the encounter between Islam and Hinduism transformed not only the subjects involved in the encounter, but also injected novel interpretive possibilities of meaning and praxis into the philosophical systems articulated by both Hindus and Muslims.