Religion Compass 2/6 (2008): 10441061, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00110.

Making Sense of Sufism in the Indian

Subcontinent: A Survey of Trends
Nile Green*
University of California, Los Angeles

Abstract

This article provides a summary of developments in recent decades in the study

of Sufism in South Asia (referred to here as the Indian subcontinent). Beginning
with the highly influential formulation of Sufism as Islamic mysticism, it analyses
the serious shortcomings of this category, before moving on to assess the impact
of anthropological, socio-historical and post-structuralist approaches to Sufism in
the subcontinent. A final section considers issues surrounding the roles of the
Sufis in the relationship between Islam and Hinduism. In pointing to areas that
have not been investigated as well as those that have been, the article aims to be of
use to graduate students seeking research projects as well as undergraduates and
scholars from other disciplines seeking an overview of the field.

The Dilemmas of Definition

One of the perpetual dilemmas of scholarship is the creation of descriptive
or analytical categories to define the phenomena that scholars observe in
their data. When such categories are accurate and pertinent, they enable
us to understand quickly and holistically the phenomena to which they
apply and to relate these phenomena to features of the world around them.
The opposite is also true: inaccurate or impertinent categories conceal
aspects of what they are meant to elucidate and confuse us when we try
to understand the connections of the phenomena in question to their
surroundings. In the study of religions, a good example of this is the
category of Sufism, a term first used by such British soldier-scholars as
Sir John Malcolm and James William Graham in the early 1800s (Ernst
1997, pp. 818) and today by academic and increasingly non-academic
commentators on the Islamic world. This article looks at how scholars
have used this category in recent decades and at the problem of relating
it to the phenomena that it does, does not and at its weakest cannot
explain. In doing so, it also offers a survey of the different ways in which
Sufism has been studied by scholars working on India since the midtwentieth century as an overview of the academic literature on Indian
Sufism for those new to the field.
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Making Sense of Sufism in the Indian Subcontinent 1045

Without dwelling too long on the matter, it is important to recognise

the degree to which scholars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
laid emphasis on explaining the origins of Sufism. Indeed, the most controversial question in the study of Sufism among scholars trained before
around 1950 concerned the sources from which Sufi traditions developed,
as though solving this question would help explain the later relationship
of Sufism with the wider body of Muslim tradition. To put the matter in
its simplest terms, there were two basic strands to the debate, one pointing
towards an origin inside Islam and one arguing for the external origins
of Sufism. As academic and political sensibilities changed, various models
were put forward to explain these alternatives, ranging from racial theory
(mystical speculation characterized Aryan races like the Persians rather than
Semitic peoples like Arabs) to the quest for influences that characterised
the school of comparative religion (similarities between Vedantin and
Sufi doctrines suggested the impact of one on the other). Thus, in her
reconstruction of the Christian monastic milieu of the Fertile Crescent in
the early Islamic era, the comparatist Margaret Smith (1931) presented
evidence for the transference of Eastern Christian ascetic techniques and
doctrines into early Sufism, while three decades later another comparatist
R. C. Zaehner (1960) reframed the arguments of Max Horten (1927
1928) to claim an Indian origin for pantheistic Sufism through the
somewhat flimsy evidence for the existence of an Indian teacher instructing
the early Sufi Abu Yazid Bistami (d. 875). Opposing this trend which
in origin at least had more than a little of the tendency to belittle the
creativity of the Arabs and their austere religion of the desert the
distinguished French Islamicist Louis Massignon (1922) used a refined
method of historical philology in an attempt to prove that Sufi doctrines
had emerged organically from the Quran by means of meditation on and
the subsequent semantic expansion of its vocabulary. As the twentieth
century wore on, for many scholars the debate seemed to have run out
of steam, not least with the decline of traditional Orientalist patterns of
scholarship in which the identification of origins and classical formulations
of religious or cultural forms had been prioritised. In recent years, several
scholars have returned to the debate, most thoroughly in the case of Julian
Baldick (1989), who has leaned towards a moderate version of the external
influence argument, particularly with regard to Eastern Christianity, and to
a limited extent, also with regard to Shamanistic and Sanskritic traditions.
One of the most influential scholars to argue for an Islamic source for
Sufism was the Cambridge academic A. J. Arberry. A key element in
Arberrys defence of the internal origins of Sufism against the diffusionist
models of the comparatists was the model of Sufism as an Islamic expression
of universal mystical experience. This formulation has proven the most
enduring definition of what Sufism is, its very effectiveness coming partly
from its ability to side-step the earlier debates over the specific origins of
Sufism by pointing towards multiple points of origin in an innately human
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1046 Nile Green

impulse. In the opening page of the introduction to his influential textbook

Sufism, first published in 1950, Arberry offered what by the middle of the
twentieth century he felt could be regarded as an uncontroversial definition
of Sufism as the name given to the mysticism of Islam (Arberry 1950,
p. 11). For many commentators this still serves as their definition of
choice today. The problem is that as Islamic mysticism the category of
Sufism relies for its explanatory power on another category that is no less
problematic: mysticism. As Arberry saw the matter, mysticism is essentially
one and the same, whatever the religion professed by the mystic . . .; even
though it possessed variations influenced by the different religious systems
in which it was based, mysticism is undoubtedly a universal constant
(Arberry 1950, pp. 11, 12). Again, many people would be inclined to agree
with this today, begging the question why mysticism is so problematic a
category as to undermine the explanatory power of Sufism. The problem
lies in the fact that the concept of mysticism is not nearly as universal as
Arberry and others would have it. Indeed, its origins scarcely stretched
further back than a century before Arberry himself was writing, and insofar
as there was a one and the same involved in mysticism, it was that the
people discussing and defining it were other ecumenically minded European
intellectuals very much like himself (Christmann 2008). Certainly, there
were also non-Europeans who joined in the polite chatter. Quite a number
of Muslims as well as Hindus and Buddhists (many from parts of the world
exposed to European ideas through colonialism) voiced their agreement
that, despite the apparent strangeness of their traditional beliefs and practices,
at heart the teachings of their traditions were one and the same as those
that the European professors promoted as the highest endeavour of religion:
an individual, unmediated experience of the divine typically experienced
as a feeling of unity and commonality with all creation. In a word,
mysticism.
The problem is that the category of mysticism is at heart a theological
one and, we might choose to add, an ideological one as well. It is theological
in the sense that it takes as its premise the existence of a primordial entity
(whether god, being, love or primordial experience), which it uses to explain
ideas and actions in the human world. It is ideological in the sense that
it is a truth claim that posits certain attitudes or actions towards the
surrounding world, such as tolerance of difference, the creation of certain
forms of social organisation (inter-faith meetings, a World Parliament of
Religions) or even the radical politics of utopianism. For those of us who
would prefer to live in a harmonious and tolerant society, the promotion
of these theological or ideological attitudes is probably something to be
grateful for. But the scholar or student of religion is not someone whose
training is primarily aimed towards the hastening of the Age of Aquarius.
On the contrary, the scholar of religion is trained to analyse the phenomena
of religion as it is (or was). With its focus on the individual, on experienced
(as opposed to mediated) religion and on the lofty ideas, sentiments and
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Making Sense of Sufism in the Indian Subcontinent 1047

motivations of an elite cadre of mystics rather than the literalism and

superstition of the orthodoxy and the masses, the mystical subcategory
of Sufism fails to explain many of the phenomena brought under its label.
As a result, the existence of collective and kin-based Sufi organisations,
the huge popularity of dead Sufis acting as saintly mediators and the more
general fact that by the medieval period this form of Sufism had become
the religion of the Muslim masses found themselves pushed into the
marginal conceptual order of popular Sufism.
This failure of explanation brings us to the key problem with mysticism
as a category and of Sufism conceived as a subcategory thereof. For
when confronted with data about the actual mystics or Sufis who were
presumably meant to embody the elevated ideals of mysticism and Sufism,
the paired categories run into trouble. When Europeans first discovered
Sufism in the nineteenth century through reading Arabic and Persian
texts, they were faced with the perplexing contradiction that the living
Sufis they were introduced to in India and Persia seemed to display anything
but the humble, generous and ecumenical characteristics of the genuine
mystic. On the contrary, the men to whom they were introduced (and
they mostly were men) were wealthy land-owners haughty with the
admiration of their followers who were in many cases of anything but an
ecumenical disposition towards their new Christian rulers or else they
were the semi-literate beggars and fakirs European travellers denounced
as charlatans. When such Sufis failed to live up to the elevated sentiments
described in the writings of their medieval forbears, European scholars
came up with what seemed to them a convincing explanation: Sufism
had clearly declined from its medieval apogee. The explanatory power of
this picture of decline was strengthened by its harmony with a colonial
agenda in which the decline of Asian institutions helped justify the rule
of Europeans (who were in contrast seen as entering their civilisational
zenith). When Muslim intellectuals in India and elsewhere sought to explain
the ease with which their societies had fallen under European control,
decline theory also proved useful to them, especially when it could be
linked to a remedial call for renaissance or renewal (nahda, ihya, tajdid),
usually along lines directed by the Muslim intellectual in question. These close
connections between the conceptions of Christian (particularly Protestant)
Orientalist scholars and Muslim reformers are also seen in the other key
implication of the mysticism and decline model, that the whole gamut
of cultural phenomena from miracle stories and shrine veneration to the
biological inheritance of Sufi gnosis and the high pomp of the Sufi orders
could be interpreted as something fundamentally different from the
essential or original nature of Sufism. According to the agenda or
inclinations of the observer, such phenomena were instead classed as
superstition, reprehensible innovation (bida), folk religion or (in a halfhearted attempt to use the insights of Max Weber) as the routinisation of
charisma through the institutionalisation of the Sufi order. Through this
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1048 Nile Green

implied dichotomy between high and low, elite and popular, the old
paradigm of mysticism and decline was perpetuated by transforming the
chronological into the diachronic: decline did not occur at a certain
moment in time because high and low forms of religion were characteristic
of all periods. Although scholars of religion have disassociated themselves
from the old dichotomies of high/low and popular/elite, in practice the
gap between a Sufism of poetry, texts and high theory and one composed
of miracles, rituals and filthy lucre continues to characterise the study of
the Sufis of India and elsewhere. Even if the gap is no longer reified as a
dichotomy, its legacy remains as a hole in the middle of our understanding
that prevents us from gaining a more holistic picture of the phenomena
of Sufism.
Through its reliance on an abstract ideal of mysticism that few if any
real historical people could live up to, the category of Sufism had allowed
theology to serve as the judge of history. To make matters worse, the
perception of a Sufi decline became self-perpetuating, as the concentration
of research on the classical age meant that the Sufis of later centuries
were by-passed because they had nothing new to say; and because these
later Sufis were by-passed there was little evidence found to counter the
model of decline. Even in 1950 with a wealth of earlier scholars work
behind him, Arberry was able to end his survey of Sufism in 1273 with
the death of the Persian poet Jalal al-din Rumi. He only referred to later
Sufis in a final chapter entitled The Decay of Sufism in order to demonstrate
how as soon as legends of miracles became attached to the names of the great
mystics . . . the cult of the saints . . . promoted ignorance and superstition
(Arberry 1950, p. 119). With its virulent antagonism towards miracles and
sainthood, not only was Arberrys account of Islamic mysticism a theological
reading of the past, it was also a decidedly Protestant one. Once again, this
reflected the ideas of Muslim modernists and reformers, whose gradual
reformation of Islam into a rational and disenchanted religion was to
strongly influence twentieth-century Indian Muslim scholars, whose
presentation of Indias Sufis has long been characterised by a focus on
classical medieval figures and on materials showing them as teachers and
intellectuals rather than superstition-mongers and miracle-workers. Scholarship
thus abounds that focuses on the great Sufis of medieval Delhi and on the
idea of the authentic malfuzat (recorded conversation) genre as representative
of the modernist Muslim ideal of the teaching (rather than miracle-working)
shaykh. Again, this was a tendency shared by European and American
scholars, shaping the perceptions of even those trying to advance the study
of the Sufis in historical terms. When J. Spencer Trimingham published
his highly influential The Sufi Orders in Islam in 1971 in an attempt to
better contextualise the evolution of Sufi thought and practice in the
times and places of history, the thirteenth century was still regarded as a
turning-point towards decadence and decline. Still, for all its problems as
a sophisticated exercise in history-as-decline, Triminghams Sufi Orders has
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Making Sense of Sufism in the Indian Subcontinent 1049

a great deal to recommend it and in its recognition of the contributions

of Indian and African Sufis and of the Sufi revival movements of the
eighteenth century it was a book that was in many ways ahead of its time.
Placing the Sufis into Society
As the Victorian locomotive of mysticism ran out of steam in the 1970s,
there emerged a new approach to the study of Sufism. This change had
its roots in the prestige of the social sciences among academics of the
1960s generation and its effect was to reconfigure the study of Sufism as
an exercise in either social anthropology or social history. Rather than
deplore the institutionalisation of Sufism into orders (turuq, sing. tariqa)
and cults of the Sufi saints (awliya, sing. wali), it now appeared important
to understand the work that such activities accomplished in the societies
where they flourished, even (or especially) if this meant substantially
rejecting the notion of Sufism as mysticism. Among the anthropologists,
it was North Africa rather than India that was the main testing-ground
for this new way of looking at Sufism and it was there that two of the
most important of these early works, Clifford Geertzs Islam Observed (1971)
and Ernest Gellners Saints of the Atlas (1969), were based. When Gellner
came to summarise his ideas about Muslim societies in the early 1980s,
he was able to entirely eschew the mystical paradigm and declare with
regard to the origins of Sufism that the most important factor, at least
sociologically, seems to be the inescapable requirement of religious organisation
and leadership (Gellner 1981, p. 103). For in the absence either of the
urban infrastructure required to promote the Islamic law schools or of a
strong state, Sufism provides a theory, terminology, and technique of
leadership (Gellner 1981, p. 103). For Gellner it was neither here nor
there whether the hereditary saints of the Atlas mountains taught their
followers a direct way to experience God. What was more important was
that they and their equivalents in other parts of the Islamic world provided
their surroundings with the order and organisation that allowed them to
function as societies. While the methods of both Gellner and Geertz have
been criticised, in their use of the techniques of the social sciences to make
sense of practices that earlier scholars could only dismiss as popular religion
or superstition they broke the new ground in which others would in turn
sow new seeds of interpretation. Since the 1980s, the anthropological
study of Sufi practice and of Muslim practice in the subcontinent more
generally has become well-established and a good sample of the range of
questions anthropologists address can be found in a recent anthology that
prioritises the ethnographic observation of actual Muslim practice over the
prescriptive tendencies associated with the older prioritisation of mystical
criteria (Ahmad & Reifeld 2004). The ethnographic focus on the external
playing out of religious practice has opened up new perspectives on the
dynamism of every aspect of Sufism, whether through the study of saint
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1050 Nile Green

cults at the level of the Indian village (Assayag 1995) or of the transformation
of Sufism by trans-nationalism and globalisation (Werbner 2003). Nonetheless,
perhaps the most successful attempt to relate popular practices in the
subcontinent and elsewhere to an Islam of writing and theory was
the phenomenological reading that, through her unrivalled knowledge of the
diversity of Indo-Muslim and particularly Sufi traditions, Annemarie
Schimmel (1994) was able to give in her Deciphering the Signs of God. If it is
a book that was wilfully out of step with anthropologising or historicising
fashions, it remains a valuable attempt to synthesise the plurality of popular
Muslim practices into a dignified and coherent set of patterns.
The insights developed by anthropology and sociology into the decadent
or popular practices that were marginalised by the mystical school bore
rich fruit in other fields of the study of religion by also helping scholars
re-imagine the past in new ways. The most influential of these was not
an Islamicist at all but a historian of Christian Late Antiquity, Peter
Brown, whose reading of Ernest Gellners account of the Muslim Saints
of the Atlas helped him to formulate a radical new interpretation of the
early Christian saints, now dubbed as holy men. Brown re-envisaged the
social world of such holy men as Simon Stylites (d. 459) as the Roman
administration crumbled as comparable to that described by Gellner in the
Atlas mountains of Morocco in which a holy man could act as an arbiter
in the public disputes that inevitably characterised such fractured societies.
Here holiness was seen in sociological terms as being born from the holy
mans position as a social outsider that allowed him to intervene in everyones
business with apparent impartiality (Brown 1971). The revolution that
Browns work set off in the socio-historical study of Christian saint cults
(institutions that were themselves long marginalised as the cultural nadir
of post-classical Europe) gradually made its influence felt in the study of
Sufi saints and holy men. Whether the stories of a Sufis miraculous
powers bore any relationship to mysticism now did not matter: what
was more important was that they served social (or, later, cultural)
purposes that scholars could investigate. In terms of the study of the
Islamic world, this new recognition of the uses of superstition opened
up vast new areas in which social historians could work. With Sufis now
freed from being tested on a scale of compliance to the authentically
mystical, a new generation of historians was able to assess the other
activities in which these figures were involved when they were not pursuing
union with God (if indeed they were at all). Although the social was
sometimes interpreted in terms of the narrowly political, this approach
proved extremely influential among historians of India, reinvigorating an
older school of social history that had tended to mine hagiography for
steely facts rather than the subtler stuff of mentalities and meanings (however
for valuable examples of this older trend, see Nizami 1961; Askari 1976;
Islam 2002). The most original early example of this new trend was Richard
M. Eatons Sufis of Bijapur, which extrapolated a series of social roles that
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Making Sense of Sufism in the Indian Subcontinent 1051

Sufis played in the South Indian sultanate of Bijapur between 1296 and
1686. Alongside such well-known activities as moralising and writing
books, the most controversial of these roles was that of fighting in the
armies of the sultan. Eaton had brought the figure of the mystic full
circle: from the ecumenical friend of all faiths he had become the violent
slaughterer of unbelievers. Given the role that, ever since the publication
of Thomas Arnolds The Preaching of Islam (Arnold 1896), the Sufis had
played in the modern Indian imagination as peaceful, singing proselytisers
of a gentle Islam, to many the idea of a warrior Sufi was both anathema
and oxymoron (Nizami 1979).
Around 15 years later, Eatons evidence was tested in a work that tried
to bring the techniques of the social historian together with a recognition
of the literary turn among the cultural historians of the 1980s that was
demanding scholars pay greater attention to the rhetorical strategies of
their sources. In his study of the Sufi circles of Khuldabad, some way to
the north of Bijapur, Carl W. Ernst (1992, pp. 95105) argued that Eatons
source materials are much later than the events that they supposedly
describe and so reflect less actual events than later re-imaginings of the
spread of Islam written under the influence of the Mughal empire.
Whichever side of the argument one comes down on, Ernsts approach
was part of a wider academic shift towards the more careful location of
Sufi writings within the discursive no less than social contexts that had
produced them. From now on, it would no longer be enough to lift ones cap
to the interplay between religion and politics (categories that dominated
the work of K. A. Nizami 1961 and his many followers) but rather to see
how the phenomena previously denominated by these categories were
intrinsically bound together, seeing Sultans and Sufis as competing for
control of the same symbols, and behind these symbols, for the same
limited pool of legitimacy and power (cf. Ahmad 1962; Alam 2004).
In some respects, Ernsts special interest in the actual teachings of the
Khuldabad Sufis was a continuation of the emphasis on doctrine that
characterised the older mystical school. But instead of assuming that the
Sufis were trying to give voice to an experience that was essentially one
and the same as that of other mystics in other times and places, Ernst
emphasised the distinctive characteristics of the Khuldabad Sufis. And
instead of seeing their promotion of an organised Sufi order and their
connection to the courtly personnel of the Delhi sultanate as symptomising
incipient decadence, he presented the Sufi as a moralist, unable to escape
the murky realities of his social existence but perpetually anxious to avoid
being compromised by them. Here as in other writings, Ernsts emphasis
on the ethical dimension of Sufism helps bridge the gap between doctrine
and social practice that has long separated scholars of the mysticism and
social history schools, for the etiquette and ethics (adab and akhlaq) with
which so many Sufis were concerned in both writing and living form the
point at which the ideal and material dimensions of their lives intersect.
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By not losing sight of the religious dimensions of the Sufi tradition (as
the functionalism of certain anthropologists and social historians was wont
to do), while at the same time placing the Sufis in their political contexts,
Ernst and his collaborator Bruce Lawrence (2002) have been able to paint
a picture of the Chishti tradition of Sufism as a credibly fallible human
project handed down in a recognisably real world.
The Return to the Text
The greater attention towards the rhetoric of Sufi writings shown by
Ernst and Lawrence has been reflected in a number of other studies since
the 1990s. After the social historical fashions of the 1970s and 1980s, a
particular characteristic of this return to the text was the new degree of
attention given to hagiographical works. The legacy of the old mysticism
and decadence approach meant that scholars had long neglected such
texts, whether from India or other parts of the Islamic world. Since the
production of such hagiographies (tazkira, tabaqa, manaqib) often outnumbered
that of books of doctrine, vast numbers of neglected texts were (and still
are) available for either fresh study or reappraisal. Although the ascendance
of social history had already led a large number of scholars most notably
Simon Digby (2004) and K. A. Nizami (1961) to carefully sift such
hagiographies for information on the Sufis relations with wider society,
it was now the texts themselves that were of interest. A new wave of literary
studies used hagiographical as well as poetical works to address such processes
as identity formation, memory and the creation of hybrid religious forms
(Hermansen 1988; Shackle 1999; Hermansen & Lawrence 2000; Stewart
2001). The re-evaluation of long-neglected genres in turn allowed historians
to use such texts to look in fresh ways at socio-religious practices like
pilgrimage (Digby 1983; on Egypt see Taylor 1999), while on the more
literary side interesting work (Behl 2005) has also been produced addressing
narrativity as a broker of the syncretism more frequently encountered in
anthropological studies. In other cases, the textual turn has itself come full
circle, with a growing number of scholars attempting to see Sufi writings
as part of the process of history, by asking what such texts did in the
social world, whether as the hardware of memory or as the portable
coffers of tradition (Rinehart 1999; Green 2006).
This trend reflects wider developments in the study of South Asia more
generally, in which a twin attempt to historicise texts and textualise
history is being made in many different sub-fields as part of the effort to
work out what exactly it is that our written sources tell us (Inden 2000).
In time, we can hope that this approach might reassess the longstanding
shibboleth of the pervading influence of the Sufi doctrine of the Unity
of Being (wahdat al-wujud) in shaping the beliefs and practices of Indian
Islam. Until we can map how this doctrine spread from the treatises and
commentaries written by scholarly Sufi to the ordinary people, then the
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Making Sense of Sufism in the Indian Subcontinent 1053

purported scale of its influence must remain conjecture. A good start has
been made here in a short article by William Chittick (1992), but much
work still remains to be done that must bridge the gulf that still separates
the elite realm of philosophical doctrine from the popular realm of most
of Indo-Muslim society (Green 2006). Apart from the eighteenth-century
dars-e-nizami syllabus (Robinson 1993a), we still know far too little about
the reading habits and book collections of Indias Muslims in general, let
alone of the Sufis. The problem here is that with a few notable exceptions
(e.g. Seyller 1997), book history has yet to really make an impact on the
study of Islamic India, despite the recent advances made for other regions
of the Islamic world (Messick 1993; Bloom 2001; Hanna 2003). Until we
are able to clarify such basic issues as the relative costs and availability of
manuscripts, levels of literacy, and access to the languages (like Persian and
Arabic) in which premodern Sufis largely wrote (except for poetry), then
we will remain unsure as to exactly whose world our sources allow us to
enter. A related problem has emerged from the old emphasis on medieval
classics, which led to the training of generations of scholars in the classical
or Islamic languages of Arabic, Persian and to a lesser extent Urdu in
preference to the wide range of other languages that Sufis have used.
While the Sufi contribution to poetry in the vernaculars was championed
in the many pioneering studies of Annemarie Schimmel (see, for example,
Schimmel 1975), work on Sufi prose writings in such languages as Bengali
(Cashin 1995), Marathi (Dek 2005) and Dakani (Suvorova 2000) suggests
that other very different Sufi lifeworlds remain to be explored. In recent
years, this change of linguistic emphasis has certainly been under way, and
in some respects the shift towards the vernacular has undercut the study
of the classical languages by younger scholars working on India, such that
Indian Arabic works now ironically receive less attention than Muslim
writings in Gujarati.
Neglected Centuries: Sufis from 1700 to 1900
A similar pendulum swing can be detected in the move from the old
concentration on the classical Sufis of the medieval period towards the
study of Sufi movements from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
With the longstanding interest of the colonial period to scholars in both
the subcontinent and the West, it was only a matter of time until the
interest in the Muslim revivalist and modernist movements trickled down
into an interest in the less famous Sufis of the nineteenth century. The
two major movements Deobandi and Barelwi that mark the main
parameters of religious reform as it related to the Sufis have been particularly
well-scrutinised (Metcalf 1982; Sanyal 1996). But while reform and the
response to it continues to dominate the academic agenda for this period
not least as a result of the paper trail left by the reformists embrace of
the printing press (Robinson 1993b) there are still important areas that
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1054 Nile Green

remain obscure. In an important study of colonial Sufis from outside the

spotlight, Art Buehler (1998) has examined in detail the rise of what he
posits as an ascendant institution in this period, that of the mediating
shaykh. But many other questions remain: what happened to the antinomian
faqir and qalandar Sufis during this period, for example, and in what ways
were Sufis able to re-organise themselves in Indias new industrial cities?
In what remains the only attempt at a comprehensive history of Indian
Sufism (Rizvi 1978 & 1983), coverage of developments after 1700 is very
uneven and after 1850 almost non-existent. What studies do exist of the
nineteenth century tend to foreground the impact of colonialism and
while British rule undoubtedly ruptured many areas of Indo-Muslim life
there remains work to be done on the Sufis who continued to be patronised
in the independent princely states as well as the survival of Sufi networks
connecting Muslims in colonial India with Iran, Afghanistan and Arabia.
In comparison to the nineteenth century, coverage of the eighteenth
century is more patchy. Having fallen between the catchment areas of
medievalists and modernists, the eighteenth century was always a neglected
area in Islamic and Indian studies, though the fact that the eighteenthcentury witnessed the careers of several influential Sufis means that we do
have important studies of such individual figures as Shah Wali Allah (Rizvi
1980; Baljon 1986) and of Khwaja Mir Dard of Delhi and Abd al-Latif
of Bhit in Sind (Schimmel 1976) and of the Deccans Sufis who flourished
under the late Mughals and Nizams of Hyderabad (Green 2006). But even
in the best attempts to position the Sufis of the eighteenth century into
their wider intellectual and social contexts (Umar 1993), as with the study
of the nineteenth century the geographical focus has largely remained on
Delhi and Lucknow. Even for any period, we still know startlingly little
about the Sufis of such major cities as Peshawar, Lahore and Ahmadabad,
let alone those of the more routinely neglected cities of the southern and
eastern regions of the subcontinent.
The Physical Dimensions of Spirituality
We have already discussed one trajectory of the influence of what we can
broadly term as postmodernism in the greater emphasis given to textuality,
but another (and in the Indian case more recent) trajectory has emphasised
the physical dimensions of Sufi practices as ways of disciplining the body
or embodying the abstractions of doctrine. This trend was first apparent
among anthropologists (Basu & Werbner 1998), but more recently has also
been taken up in different ways by those working with Sufi texts (Kugle
2007; Green 2008). This focus on the physical dimensions of Sufi tradition
has also joined up with research on such areas as traditional medicine and
healing (Burkhalter Flueckiger 2006), work that has helped out-step the
older and more static paradigm of ritual. Nonetheless, valuable work still
continues to be produced with regard to Indian Sufi practices, not least
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Making Sense of Sufism in the Indian Subcontinent 1055

in connection to the mahfil-e-sama or formal musical gathering, as

demonstrated in a recent collection of essays examining sama in different
periods (Huda 2007). In the field of ethnomusicology, other investigators
have explored the performative aspects of Sufi musical traditions and their
relationship with issues of gender (Qureshi 1986; Abbas 2002). Greater
attention towards the physical aspects of Sufi life has also begun to pay
dividends through the study of Sufi material culture, though given the vast
potential for research in this field it is surprising how little work has been
done. Jrgen Frembgens pioneering survey of dervish paraphernalia
(Frembgen 1999) does, however, contain a good deal of material from the
subcontinent and we can hope that greater recognition of the importance
of objects to the world-renouncing mystics will enrich future textual no
less than ethnographic studies. In terms of the study of the Sufi shrines
that number thousands in India, there are two edited volumes of note
(Troll 1989; Currim & Michell 2004). But the legacy of the shrines
association with decadent saint-worship through the routine neglect of
this area means that many scholars still study Sufism with only the haziest
notions of the physical environments in which its practitioners operated.
Compared to the careful architectural surveys and documentary analyses
that have been carried out for Sufi buildings and other Muslim shrines
elsewhere (Golombek 1969; Fernandes 1988; McChesney 1991), this area
of research is still in its infancy in India. The private archives held by
scores of such shrines across the subcontinent offer vast potential for such
architecturally grounded histories of Sufi practice.
Sufis Between Muslims and Hindus
Finally, no survey of the study of Indias Sufis would be complete without
addressing the question of syncretism and the Sufis role as mediators
between Muslims and Hindus. Perhaps more than with regard to any
other aspect of Indias religious culture, our understanding of the processes
at work here has been distorted by the gravitational pull of the weighty
ideological bodies that surround the matter. The combined influence of
monolithic nineteenth-century formulations of religion, the neat (but often
anti-historical) distinctions of the World Religions model and the assertions
of difference made by both Hindu and Muslim religious nationalists has
allowed stark modern formulations of religious identity to be seen as a
permanent fixture of the Indian past. Scholars of Hinduism have shown
with considerable success that the notion of such a single pan-Indian
religion was an invention of the nineteenth century (Fitzgerald 1990), and
a result the study of Hindu religious history is now buzzing with discoveries
of the distinct temporalities and localities that shaped the Hindu religions
(Saberwal & Varma 2005). In the case of Islam, we have yet to reach the
critical mass of scholarship needed to assess how in the different times and
places of Indias past those whom we call Muslims (and in so doing
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1056 Nile Green

foreground a monolithic religious identification) did actually identify

with the body of ideas and practices that we call Islam. The ideological
influence of pan-Islamism on Muslim and non-Muslim minds continues
to encourage a unitary and uniform perception of Islam that is difficult
to think around. There is, however, much evidence to suggest that the
more common Indian use of the term Musulman in place of Muslim
actually referred to something more like a kinship or caste-like identity, so
that it was quite possible to be a Musulman and a Yogi without experiencing
the kind of clash of categories that would present itself to the modern
observer. Here the work of Richard Eaton (1993) on the transition
between religious identities in Bengal and of Dominique Sila Khan (2000,
2003) on liminal and localised religious identity and activity offer exciting
possibilities for deconstructing the old paradigm of Islam as a monolithic
World Religion.
However, much of the work in this field is based on ethnography and
as such presents problems for those interested in the earlier history of such
patterns of behaviour and identification. Because so little of the real sociohistorical groundwork has been done, the old model of syncretism (i.e.
of two distinct entities meeting) on which so much research has been
predicated means that we may have long been getting the horse before the
cart, asking how was it that Hindus and Muslims could come together
when the people we label under these terms had perhaps not yet come to
see themselves as apart in the first place, at least in terms of a doctrine and
practice model of religion (Green & Chatterjee 2008). As anthropological
commentators have recognised for some years (Stewart & Shaw 1994), the
model of syncretism prioritises and even primordialises the existence of
distinct social groups or religious entities (here, Hinduism and Islam) whose
existence may not have been recognised by the actual people concerned.
Since self-identification with a trans-regional religious community has
certain historical preconditions (not least access to the communication and
knowledge systems that afford awareness of such distant and so by definition
imagined communities), it is by no means clear whether the majority of
people in Indias past identified themselves primarily or at even all in these
monolithic, binary or uniform religious ways. In this case, as a heuristic
device we may as well throw the model of religion to one side and look
instead at region, language, kinship, economy or even technology as more
efficient ways to understand what we tend to automatically think of as
religious phenomena. Thus, when investigating the popularity of a given
Sufi, we may do better to interpret his success among Muslim and
Hindu followers as a reflection of his ties to particular kinship groups,
who think in a local language world in which Hinduism and Islam
(or even religion) do not exist as concepts and in which the Sufi in
question is a major landholder whose family shrine acts not only as the
market-cum-pilgrimage centre of the region but also as the provider of
the technology of written documents and the medicine of talismans. The
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Making Sense of Sufism in the Indian Subcontinent 1057

best and earliest example of this kind of approach is Richard Eatons

(1984) study of the shrine of the great Punjabi Sufi, Baba Farid (d. 1265),
though here too it is Islam that dominates the conceptual picture.
Such perspectives suggest that what we understand by the term Sufism,
whether in terms of doctrines, books or the search for enlightenment,
may have little to do with the success of a given Sufi, whose social
identity among his followers may have been conceived in a variety of
other ways. As Carl W. Ernst (1997, p. 18) has noted, in Arabic and Persian,
there are dozens of terms for Muslim mystics with distinct and sometimes
conflicting meanings, all of which are subsumed by the English word
Sufism. This diversity of names, and as such of identity markers, was still
more abundant in the linguistic multiplicity of the subcontinent. In a great
many cases in India even today, those whom outside observers would label
Sufis are termed simply as baba (father) by both their Hindu and Muslim
followers, such that their identification with a reified or abstract system of
Sufism or Islam is not given precedence and may not even be recognised.
By the same token, until the nineteenth century Hindu Yogi masters were
widely addressed with the Persian Sufi title pir. To turn back to the issue
of categories with which this article began, the moral of the tale here is
that we need to be extremely careful about projecting the neatly packaged
categories like Sufism (or even Islam or religion) onto other times and
places. What looks to the outside observer like a Sufi Muslim (with all
that that implies) may have been conceived by his followers as simply a
baba, a supernaturally protective father-figure or patron, in the same way
that what looks like a Yogi Hindu may have been conceived as a pir and
as such a man of supernatural power with more in common with other
(Muslim) pirs than with ordinary Hindus. Here religion is less the theological
system of dogmas shared between adherents of ultimately global World
Religions than it is the product of small-scale allegiances based on the
face-to-face reciprocity of protection and devotion. From a universalising
Sufism based on written theories of mystical abstraction, we have come
to a localizing Sufism based on human bodies in emotional contact.
Conclusions
Over the previous pages, we have looked at many though by no means
all of the patterns that have directed academic understanding of Indias
Sufis during the past half century. It is important to recognise that most
of these trends are still alive and well: academic approaches rarely disappear
entirely but just slip from the spotlight, from where they continue to
interact with those currently on centre stage. As in any other area of
academe, there are also important regional traditions or schools and in an
article commissioned to point towards English-language sources it is inevitable
that Anglo-American perspectives have dominated the discussion. Hopefully
though, what we have provided is an overview of the different ways in
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1058 Nile Green

which Sufism has been studied, as well as some of the areas that remain
open for graduate students and scholars from other areas beginning new
research projects.
Short Biography
Nile Green is an Associate Professor in the history department at UCLA.
He was previously Lecturer in South Asian Studies at the University of
Manchester and Milburn Research Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford
University. His research focuses on the history of Islam in South Asia,
particularly on the social and political history of Indian Sufism. However, he
has also written on Indo-Islamic reform, the history of objects, Muslim
travellers, oral and subaltern histories, the ethnogenesis of the Afghans,
the history of dreaming, and the politics of meditation. In addition to
many articles and book chapters, his publications include Indian Sufism
since the Seventeenth Century: Saints, Books and Empires in the Muslim Deccan
(London & New York: Routledge, 2006), a co-edited (with Mary SearleChatterjee) collection of essays entitled Religion, Language and Power
(New York: Routledge, 2008), and Islam and the Army in Colonial India
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Note
* Correspondence address: Nile Green, Department of History, University of California, Los
Angeles, Bunche Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1473, USA. Email: green@history.ucla.edu.

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