ABSTRACT
The wider question of how to make sense of the ‘Indic’ or even ‘Hindu’ terminology and imagery encountered in Muslim vernaculars of South Asia has inspired discussions about the ‘accommodation’, ‘rooting’, and ‘localization’ of Islamic traditions in many local South Asian contexts. Earlier scholarship had responded to the presence of the ‘local’ in vernacular South Asian Islamic texts with the idea of syncretism. Islam, in this perspective, had become ‘permeated by indigenous elements’ in India,2 elements that were assumed to be often in conflict with ‘orthodox’ Islam. The result appeared, depending on the observer, either as a skilful blend of two separate traditions or as a dilution of ‘pure’ Islam. Conveniently, the idea of ‘syncretism’ could be applied to literary culture as much as to ritual practice or kinship patterns. Yet in the last two decades, this notion has increasingly been seen as untenable and new models have begun to develop. The most sophisticated models that have been formulated so far have come from translation theory.3
