ABSTRACT

Until recently, Anglophone scholarship on South Asian cultures suffered from a stark epistemological apartheid. Historians specialized in the ancient (Hindu) period, medieval (Muslim) era, or modern (British and post-independence) time. Sociologists and anthropologists researching in the Subcontinent often chose between Hindu or Muslim groups of communities. Meanwhile, historians of religions steered their graduate students to specialize in a single tradition: Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism, etc. Each of these came with prerequisite languages and a prescribed literature: Sanskrit and a vernacular language for Hinduism; Arabic, Persian, and probably Urdu for Islam.1 Through a Darwinian process of natural selection by the academic environment, job candidates whose linguistic training differed from these expectations often found their applications shelved by department search committees.