Book Reviews 89

doi:10.1093/jhs/hit004
Advance Access Publication 19 March 2013

Indo-Muslim Cultures in Transition. Edited by Alka Patel & Karen Leonard.

Leiden: Brill, 2012. ISBN: 9789004212091, pp. vi, 279. E99 (hardback).

The edited volume Indo-Muslim Cultures in Transition stands in a lineage of schol-

arship over the past few decades that contests the homogenisation of Muslim
identities in historic South Asia. This growing genre has cleared the path for
rethinking the nature of social interactions, religious norms, and cultural products

Downloaded from http://jhs.oxfordjournals.org/ at Bodleian Library on May 8, 2013

from South Asian Muslim and Hindu communities. Indo-Muslim Cultures particu-
larly focuses on the later Mughal period and its inheritance in South Asian elite
culture. The articles span the sixteenth through twentieth centuries, though high-
light the cosmopolitan art, architecture, and literary production of the eighteenth
century onward. This serves to belie the claim, common to both European and
Indic accounts, of cultural decline during that period.
The studies concern Northern and Deccani regions, centring on the Mughal,
Hyderabadi, Bijapuri, and Lucknavi states. Though treading familiar scholarly
ground with the North Indian Mughal focus, the volume also adds to much-
needed studies on Deccani history. In particular, Keelan Overton, Heidi Pauwels,
and Alka Patel demonstrate the interrelationship between the two regions, mani-
fest in cultural exchanges that produced prominent Indo-Muslim identity markers,
such as the Urdu language. These exchanges transported architectural and artistic
styles between both urban and regional centres in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Delhi,
Lucknow, and the Deccan. The editors especially emphasise the presence of trans-
regional networks of merchants, artists, and artisans, as well as the role of mer-
cantile patronage in production of art and architecture, taking off from Chris
Bayly’s scholarship. In their analysis of the plurality included in this Indo-
Muslim culture, they further Tony Stewart’s critique of ‘syncretism’ and ‘hybridity’
as adequate descriptors.
Patel and Leonard argue that ‘Indo-Muslim’ is a more precise alternative to
‘Islamicate’, for describing public culture in Islamic-governed regions of historic
India. At times there is some confusion over whether ‘Indo-Muslim’ includes any-
thing not already contained in ‘Islamicate’. However, Marshall Hodgson did de-
velop the term specifically for Persian and Arabic cultural regions. The linguistic
and cultural diversity of Islamicate society in South Asia—with its increasing
prevalence of Urdu and other vernaculars and its distinctive art, architectural,
and religious styles—indeed seems more precisely defined by foregrounding its
Indic context. As shown from the Mughal architecture of Shahjahan’s Delhi to mer-
chant-banker architectural styles in nineteenth-century Hyderabad, the articles
cast light on how local Indic elements were fused with Perso-Islamicate cultural
inspirations.
90 Book Reviews

Patel and Leonard’s volume is marked by its art historical focus, with the ma-
jority of articles containing sustained studies of art and architectural history. This
provides a welcome balance to the poles of textual studies and ethnography
tending to dominate research on South Asian Islam. Yet this focus also highlights
the need for scholars working within diverse disciplines to collaborate in under-
standing a fuller context of their subjects. Further interdisciplinarity coupled with
the comparative study of South Asian traditions could yield rich insights. For
instance, through the themes foregrounded in Sunil Sharma’s discussion—female
ascetics in Mughal and Deccani paintings, the role of the jogi as an object of love in
pre-modern literature, and shahr@sh+b poetry—one sees an intertwining of mar-
riage and the beloved jogi akin to that in Mirabai’s corpus. Suddenly the common-

Downloaded from http://jhs.oxfordjournals.org/ at Bodleian Library on May 8, 2013

ality of a trope across literature and art in South Asian history comes into focus.
The volume also underscores the transregional nature and diverse participants
in Indo-Muslim culture. As both Leonard and Patel describe, this Indo-Muslim
context included a religious and ethnic plurality, with commingling and shared
networks of patronage at its core. Consequently, as demonstrated by Patel’s work
on merchant-banker architectural styles, the conventions of Indo-Muslim culture
have been maintained not only by Muslims but also by various groups for diverse
secular reasons. This extends to encompass Hindu, Jain, and European partici-
pants, as in Overton’s analysis of Ibrahim-era Bijapuri painting and Heidi
Pauwels’ study of Rekhta/Urdu in the Krishna bhakti poetry of the Rajput,
Savant Singh. These examples demonstrate that Indo-Muslim culture is dynamic,
multifaceted, and an important part of the history of South Asian communities
broadly—not simply Muslim South Asians.
Cross-cultural interactions within the Indo-Muslim milieu also produced trajec-
tories of mutual influence between South Asians and Europeans, among others.
Sunil Sharma notes how Mughal imperial documentation of ethnographic diversity
served as a precursor for later European ethnographic accounts of India (p. 32).
This furthers understanding of how Mughal precedents in both governing and
conceptualising India informed later British ones. Additionally, Yuthika Sharma
demonstrates the mutual influences in cartography and mapping techniques be-
tween Mughal India and Europe. These studies problematise any lingering tenden-
cies to divide Indian history into a tripartite sequence of Hindu, Islamic, and
British, by showing the many continuities throughout changes in political power.
Carlo Coppola closes the volume with a study on 20th-century interactions of
Indo-Muslim culture with Marxism. Tracing the early years of the Progressive
Movement in Urdu literature, Coppola’s subject provides a sharp contrast to the
earlier articles. Yet, in juxtaposition, one can see that this cosmopolitan context—
although innovative in its content—was in continuity with the patterns of mutual
influence between India and wider regions throughout the Mughal times. Indo-
Muslim culture has thus never been entirely self-contained or self-referential.
The ‘Indo-Muslim’ in most of these studies is specifically Mughal—elite, rarified,
and Persianate. One advantage of elite histories is their ability to show that shared
 Book Reviews 91

participation in Indo-Muslim culture was conscious, voluntary, and a mark of

public noble culture. However, it will be left to other volumes to fill out non-
elite Indo-Muslim cultural forms in this historical period. Finally, along with the
development of studies on Indo-Muslim culture in the Deccan, one hopes that the
cultural histories of the Southern and Eastern regions of the subcontinent will
garner increased scholarly focus in coming years.

Claire Robison
University of California, Santa Barbara

Downloaded from http://jhs.oxfordjournals.org/ at Bodleian Library on May 8, 2013

doi:10.1093/jhs/hit005
Advance Access Publication 22 March 2013

One Religion Too Many: The Religiously Comparative Reflections of a Comparatively

Religious Hindu. By Arvind Sharma. Albany, New York: SUNY, 2011. ISBN: 978
14384 3248 9, pp. vi, 164. $23.95 (paper), $65.00 (cloth).

Arvind Sharma is one of the most prolific scholars of Hinduism today, who in his
long career has published numerous books and articles. Among his wide range of
publications, this one is rare and unique. I would call it a religious autobiography
of a Hindu scholar. These are his personal reflections and experiences of being
Hindu as he encounters world religions. We receive vivid comparisons between
and within Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and Buddhist traditions. This is not
a work of systematic comparative theology or philosophy, but poignant moments
of comparative insight and honest deliberations from an Indian-born Hindu, in-
formed by a variety of traditions: Advaita-Ved@nta, British India, North American
culture, and the world’s religions he has studied and taught. This is a global con-
versation between a variety of religious traditions, rooted in Sharma’s Hindu ex-
perience but not dictated by it. This is definitively a cosmopolitan book in its most
rich and vibrant sense.
Part I retells Sharma’s discovery of fundamental Hindu beliefs, for example how
as a child he understood karma when his family found themselves frequently on
the precipice of death. Later, after having discovered Ved@nta (from a Frenchmen
in India!), Sharma’s discussion of death looms large, but is enriched by notions of
m@y@ and the guru-śis.ya relationship.
Part II examines specific nodes in Sharma’s adult life, bringing intra-Hindu and
inter-religious comparative issues to the fore. I focus on a particularly illuminating
discussion in a chapter entitled, ‘Religions of India and China: Caught in the
Middle’. Sharma notes that when Xuanzang returned to China in 645 CE after a
prolonged visit to India, he encouraged the emperor to translate Sanskrit texts
into Chinese, though Chinese texts were not translated into Sanskrit. Despite the