ABSTRACT
I am grateful to the editors for letting me move rather far past the boundaries of probably anyone’s definition of ‘South Asia’. Though I have worked on the changing identities of a Hindu/Muslim saint and his shrine in central India intermittently since 1992 (Hayden 2002; Hayden and Valenzuela 2014), for the past 30 years most of my professional work has focused on the Balkans. As the historian Maria Todorova has argued convincingly (Todorova 1996), the concept of ‘the Balkans’ itself is a heritage of the centuries of Ottoman rule in Southeastern Europe, Balkan being Turkish for ‘mountain’, and the Balkans are certainly that, mountainous. However, various cultural and linguistic connections can be easily seen in the region roughly defined as between Bosnia in the west, and Bengal in the east, Bijapur in the south, this last as a surrogate for all of the Muslim kingdoms of the Deccan. These connections reflect the centuries in which Muslim polities ruled most of this vast expanse. All of this territory was and is outside the Arabic-speaking world, and in all of it, Muslims of various definitions have lived intermingled with non-Muslims: Roman Catholics, eastern Christians (also known as Orthodox Christians), Hindus of varying communities, Sikhs, Buddhists, to name only a few. That there was a sense of a common cultural and religious world among Muslims in this vast region can be seen in the continuities in the architectural, artistic and literary traditions of the larger area. Of course, speakers of Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, Albanian and Greek who go to South Asia are struck by the cognates in those languages and in Hindi-Urdu, derived from Persian, Turkish and Arabic, words from this last often as mediated by one or both of the other two. Indeed, if one looks at the continuities in this larger range of Muslim polities from Bengal to Bosnia until the nineteenth century, the utility of the concepts of ‘South Asia’ on the one hand, ‘the Balkans’ on the other, becomes suspect, diverting attention from the cultural similarities by the presumption of inherent difference.
