ABSTRACT
Given the magnitude of its role in history, the qasbah as a theme has barely been covered in existing scholarship. Despite almost a millennium-old history and widely acknowledged significance, it remains on the margins of academic inquiry. Beginning as early as the twelfth, and even eleventh century, as Muslims began to settle in north India and advanced beyond Delhi, they made home semi-rural areas which later developed as
qasbahs, in different parts of the country but in the regions of Rohilkhand and Awadh in particular. Qasbahs were neither urbanized nor completely rural, neither far away from urban centres nor distant from villages and farmlands where the majority of the population resided. Many of the early settlers, including several Sufis, served as magnets that attracted more Muslims from around the Islamic world. Their numbers steadily went up, gradually giving these small towns a distinct character which may be defined as what Marshall Hodgson would call ‘Islamicate’, societies that ‘would refer not directly to the religion, Islam, itself, but to the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims, both among Muslims themselves and even when found among non-Muslims’.2 Apart from Sufis, landholders, revenue-free grant (madad-i-ma’ash) holders, and judges (qazis) were the first ones to have settled during the reign of the Delhi sultans. Subsequent governments – including the Mughals and the British – followed suit, and stationed their officials in these locales convenient for purposes of revenue collection and aiding with crop distribution.
