Culture and Power in South Asian Islam : Defying the Perpetual Exception

This book explores the meanings and markers of South Asian Islam from diverse viewpoints, including linguistic and literary perspectives from Bengal, Tamil Nadu, and Sri Lanka, as well as new angles on the historiography of Muslims in South Asia. With three sections on spatial re-orderings, literary culture, and reform respectively, this book enters debates about vernacularization, cultural history, and the many ways that South Asian Islam intersects with, and shapes, the history of South Asia in a global context. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

This book explores the myriad diversities of South Asian Islam from a historical perspective attuned to the lived practices of Muslims in various portions of South Asia, outside of Urdu, Persian, or Arabic language perspectives. These perspectives are, in some cases taken both from literal regions rarely noticed within discussions of South Asian Islam, such as Sri Lanka, Bengal, and Tamil Nadu. In other contributions the perspectives draw on historiographic interventions about the role of fakīrs in South Asian history, qasbahs in South Asian history, and the role of Aligarh students within the Pakistan movement. As a collection of voices aimed at stimulating debate about the range and diversity of South Asian Islam, the book probes meanings and markers of categories like "Indic," "Islamicate," and "local" or "global" Islam within the context of South Asia. Relevant to debates in the history of South Asia as well as Islamic studies, this collection will serve as a reference point for discussions about South Asian Islam as well as the nature and role of vernacularization as a cultural process. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.