Organizer: Tony K. Stewart, North Carolina State University
Chair and Discussant: Norman Cutler, University of Chicago
For the last two centuries scholars, politicians, and poets alike have used the categories of "Hindu" and "Muslim" to describe components of the religious landscape of India. Yet it is well-known that those categories are themselves of late construction, construed perhaps as early as the 15th century, but gaining currency only in the 19th, with the great reification occurring in the first colonial census in 1872. Today these categories have become political identities, predicated on the assumption of clear boundaries of mutual exclusion. With this assumption, interpretations of the religion and culture of the precolonial period routinely read back these categories only to find that they do not fit. In order to explain this "failure," scholars have resorted to theories of religious encounter that "mix" the two entities into some "unnatural" or "hybrid" character. The theories of "influence," "borrowing," and "syncretism" are most often invoked. Aided by the anti-orientialist critique and perhaps most appalled by the contemporary political manipulation of these categories, a number of recent scholars have called for a reevaluation of these and other uncritically accepted intellectual constructs; but what they most often provide is a negative critique without an alternative. The participants in this panel have individually and together attempted to offer a new way of conceptualizing the issues of religious encounter, relying on the search for shared, not competing, conceptual structures through metaphors.
The definition of metaphor is most basic: a conceptual tool that seeks to describe one thing in terms of another, and which generally uses the concrete experience to articulate the abstract (we are indebted to Lakoff and Johnson here). Using this as a starting point, the panelists will examine a variety of texts from different regions and languages of South Asia to suggest that the "hybrid offspring" of these encounters-for example, when Sufis practice yoga through the manipulation of Persian and Sanskrit bija mantras (Ernst), when Tamil bhaktas visit Muslim tombs and Muslim scholars comment on bhakti poetry (Narayanan), when traditional Persian and Sanskrit aesthetic strategies are bound together (Behl), or when Muslims and Vaisnavas share a common religious figure and articulate similar cosmogonies (Stewart)-are not hybrids or confusions, but attempts to formulate one kind of experience in terms of another. The papers document the search for analogs (where difference is recognized but accommodated and appropriated), for equivalence of concept, for intellectual isomorphisms, and for structural morphologies of social organization and institutions.
Toward a Logic of Equivalence: Hindu and Muslim Convergence in Premodern Bengal
Tony K. Stewart, North Carolina State University
Contemporary scholars are often puzzled by the way in which Bengalis of the premodern period seem oblivious to the niceties of religious exclusion. Hindus and Muslims often share religious figures, participate in the other's activities, and even argue for the equivalence of sacral texts and selected practices. Yet in spite of this non-exclusive sharing (which is different from inclusion), Bengalis seem to have no trouble in recognizing and marking differences between religious traditions. Vaisnavas are never confused with Sunnis, nor yogis with Sufis, yet equivalences are routinely suggested. Apart from the obvious failure of our contemporary categories to articulate the construction of these various identities, I am led to ask what positive assumptions and conditions make this accommodation and appropriation possible? I will argue that we can profitably conceptualize this religious encounter through linguistic models appropriate to the analysis of diglossic linguistic culture and translation theory.
The case of religious language in premodern Bengal poses two parallel diglossic environments (Bengal/Sanskrit and Bengali/Urdu/Persian). These two Bengalis, while sufficiently similar to make them mutually intelligible, are sufficiently different to require translation between them. Translation, in its most basic form, is a process that seeks equivalence between two languages. The translation, however, is not only one of language, but of cultural equivalence. Looking at samples from the literature of Satya Pir (a Muslim faqir primarily worshipped by Hindus) and several Muslim cosmogonies, one Sufi (from Ali Roja's Agama) and one Sunni (from Saiyad Sultan's Nabi vamsa), I pose a series of complicating propositions to articulate how these predominately Muslim images are shared and made commensurate with Hindu, especially Vaisnava concerns. In ascending order of complexity, the process can be compared first to "literal" and "formal," then to "dynamic" translation, converging in "shared metaphors" on the popular level. These shared metaphoric worlds prove to be theologically consistent for both Hindus and Muslim consumers, and precisely because of the obviousness of that consistency, no formal statement to legitimize the positions seems to be required by those who use them.
Asymmetries of Appropriation: Hindus and Muslims in Congruent Tamil Worlds
Vasudha Narayanan, University of Florida
While the acrimonious relationship between Hindus and Muslims in the Indian subcontinent has received considerable notoriety, the mutual use and adaptation of religious vocabulary, ritual, and cultural elements in the southern Tamil-speaking regions have received very little attention from western academia. There is over six centuries of religious literature by Muslims in the Tamil language, of which the best known work is the seventeenth century epic Cira puranam or The Life of the Prophet. The author Umaru Pulavar (Omar the Poet) shows exquisite knowledge of earlier Hindu devotional literature in Tamil and closely follows the style of Kampan's ninth century Tamil version of the Hindu epic Ramayana. This appropriation of the cultural milieu through language and literature gives a distinctive flavor to the identity of the Tamil Muslim. The study of Kampan's Ramayana has been a part of the intellectual tradition of the Tamil-speaking Muslims and even today the best known exponents of this text are Muslim scholars. Hindu approaches to Muslim culture, however, have produced an interesting cultural asymmetry.
While the Muslims studied both religious and secular literature in Tamil and expressed their understanding of Islam through traditional Tamil literary genres, Hindus have primarily encountered the Islamic traditions on the level of myth and ritual. The Hindus of this region have incorporated certain Muslim saints and teachers into their pantheon. They make pilgrimages to their tombs, and weave stories of Muslim practitioners into the legends of their gods; the large temple of Visnu/Ranganatha in Srirangam, for example, has a shrine for the Tulukka Nacciyar ("Turkish/Muslim consort").
This paper will focus on notions of ethnic and religious identity by exploring the use of the Tamil vocabulary in Umaru Pulavar's The Life of the Prophet and raising questions about the incorporation of Muslim figures in Hindu popular piety and ritual. Specifically, I will examine how the consistent use of Tamil words connected with Hindu theology affects the depiction and understanding of Tamilnadu; and how these metaphoric constructs enable each group to interact with and participate in the other's conceptual worlds without any sense of displacement or incongruity.
Yogic Breath Control and Yoginis in the Persian Translation of the Kamarupa Seed
Syllables
Carl W. Ernst, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
The Islamic mystical tradition has for centuries included in its repertory of techniques various systems of breath control used in meditation. In modern times, Orientalists and Muslim fundamentalists have argued (for different reasons) that these practices are related to yogic types of meditation. Aside from brief references to Nathpanthi yogis in historical and mystical texts, the historical evidence for such a connection is basically restricted to a series of texts derived from a lost Sanskrit work called Amrtakunda or The Pool of Nectar, which was translated into Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu. This paper discusses a related work called Kamru bijaksa or Kamarupa Seed Syllables.
This text is known primarily from a Persian manuscript acquired by the Italian traveller Pietro della Valle in 1622 in the southern Persian city of Lar; della Valle was so keenly interested in yoga that he later sought out yogis in India and also (he claims) successfully employed the techniques described in this work. It can be described as an expanded version of the second and ninth chapters of The Pool of Nectar, which are devoted to the use of breath control for divination and to the summoning of the female spirits known as yoginis. The existing translations of The Pool of Nectar have interpreted yogic practices with varying degrees of approximation to Islamicate themes. In the process, many typical features of yoga have actually been elided; for example, certain yantra-style diagrams have undergone grammatization and turned into Arabic script. The Kamarupa Seed Syllables, in contrast, shows a close concentration on technique that includes painstaking copies of Sanskrit letters for visualization. This paper will evaluate the way in which the rhetorical and metaphorical constructs of certain yogic practices have been interpreted and made comprehensible in specific Islamicate contexts.
Rasa and Romance: The Mediated Worlds of Maulana Da'ud's Candayan
Aditya Behl, University of California, Berkeley
One of the major literary traditions of premodern Hindi poetry is the Avadhi or eastern Hindi premakhyan, literally "love-story," written by Sufi poets in the Allahabad-Benares region and Bihar. The Avadhi poems, which equate sensual love with love of God, were sponsored by new Islamic literary and religious communities which arose after the fourteenth century. The carving out of political territories from which revenue could be collected by an Islamic state at Delhi and by local sultanates such as Jaunpur, Malwa, and Bengal, was accompanied by the carving out of spiritual territories by different Sufi silsilahs. Within this conjuncture of ruling groups and religious communities, the genre of the Sufi romance stands at the nexus of two sets of cultural politics: the relations between men and women, always crucial to any romantic fiction, and the relations between the Muslim conquering groups and the local cultures they encountered. This paper focuses on the first Sufi romance of the genre, the Candayan of Maulana Da'ud, written in 1379. The poet establishes a narrative formula in which the hero has to mediate between his wife and a symbolic beloved, who represents divinity. Within the utopic space of the romance, differences between Hindu and Muslim, men and women, and Sufis and kings are addressed and resolved through the resolution of the lover's quest for his beloved and his reconciliation of this world and the next. Rather than a simple syncretism, then, the Sufi romances are sophisticated courtly poems which circulate among multiple audiences and naturalize the new Indian Islamic religious vision using a local symbolic and poetic language.