ABSTRACT
Those who work on Islam in South Asia often come to face the realization that while Islam can be studied and taught without India, India cannot be studied and taught without Islam. This contradiction of an understated India in Islamic history and an overstated Islam in Indian history reminds one of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s observation in Provincializing Europe about how historians of the non-West must keep Europe as a silent referent in their work, but not the other way around. Middle Eastern Islam, similarly, remains a silent referent in the scholarship on Islam in South Asia. The anxiety this generates is shared today, to a degree, between the scholars of South Asia and the peoples and cultures they study. Several among the articles included in this volume and the papers presented in the original conference grappled with this disquiet. Below, I present some thoughts on the issue, which were inspired by the work of three scholars, Mohammad Afsar, Torsten Tschacher and Dennis McGilvray, who spoke during the conference on peninsular Indian and Sri Lankan Islam.1
