Making Space: Sufis and Settlers in Early Modern India

This volume provides a comprehensive view of the social transformation in early modern India between 1500 and 1750 by studying various Sufi movements. Tracing how different Muslim communities located their sense of belonging, it reveals how religious resources were deployed to create new spaces of memory on Indian soil through the interplay of architecture and narrative. The book explores how Afghan, Mughal and Hindustani Muslims constructed new homelands while remembering distant places of origin. Central to this process were migrant Sufis and the hagiographical texts and architectural territories through which they preserved memory over time and anchored it to new spaces of settlement. The book offers bold new insights into Indian, Islamic and comparative early modern history.