Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia

This collection challenges the popular presumption that Muslims and Hindus are irreconcilably different groups, inevitably conflicting with each other. Invoking a new vocabulary that depicts a neglected substratum of Muslim-Hindu commonality, the contributors demonstrate how Indic and Islamicat world views overlap and often converge in the premodern history of South Asia. The term Islamicate refers to the broad expanse of Africa and Asia influenced by Muslim rulers but not restricted to the practice of Islam as a religion, while the term Indic evokes the breadth of premodern South Asian norms beyond Hindu doctrine or practice. Both Islamic and Indic suggest a repertoire of language and behavior, knowledge and power, that define expansive cosmologies of human existence. Neither term denotes simply bounded groups self-defined as Muslim or Hindu. This collection stresses the constant interplay and overlap between Islamicate and Indic world views, rather than the Muslim-Hindu conflicts which many take to be symptomatic of all life in the subcontinent.