ABSTRACT
In a recent anthology of writings on Muslim South Asian culture and history,1 Barbara Metcalf discusses South Asia’s frequent casting as ‘marginal’ to the historical and cultural centres of the Islamic world. According to her, as opposed to being slotted as an appendage to the heartland of Arabia and Arabic-speaking Islam, South Asia
Though this reflection is doubtlessly essential for understanding South Asia in the context of Islamic and global history, it begs the question of power, marginalization and hegemony within South Asian Islam itself. The history of Islam in South Asia is not only contemporaneous with the broader historical development of Islam but also deeply tied to the historical development of modern regional, linguistic and political change in South Asia. Just as the history of Islam in South Asia is not a mere outlier to the history of Islam in its birthplace, expressions of and practices within South Asian Islamic traditions are not separate from, but rather are embedded within the various regional, linguistic and political histories of South Asia. With this perspective, research uncovering intra-South Asian practices of hegemony, cultural confidence and diffidence, and marginalization vis-à-vis the classical traditions in Persian, Arabic and Urdu languages assumes the utmost importance. In addition to accumulating a more precise empirical vision of the Islamic world in languages such as Tamil, Bengali and Malay, the articles in this volume ask whether methodological innovations may be found by looking outside the ‘canons’ of Islamic South Asia. How does the vast archive of lived experience in non-canonical languages and traditions of Muslim South Asia complicate the concept of an ‘Islamicate’ South Asia?
