The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760
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The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 Richard M. Eaton UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · London © 1993 The Regents of the University of California Acknowledgments I am deeply grateful to the many people who over the past decade or so have given me valuable assistance during the various stages of preparing the present work. The idea of the book took shape in early 1980, when I was a fellow at the National Humanities Center at Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. In fall 1981 and spring 1982 a fellowship with the American Institute of Indian Studies and a Fulbright-Hays Training Grant, administered through the American Cultural Center in Dhaka, enabled me to undertake exploratory field research in India and Bangladesh. Thanks to a University of Arizona Humanities grant, in fall 1984 I returned to Bangladesh for more research, and in spring 1985 I began analyzing data while a fellow with the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. In spring 1987 I was able to work on the manuscript while at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and a sabbatical leave of absence from the University of Arizona in 1988–89 enabled me to complete the bulk of the writing. For funding my travel, facilitating my support, and opening the doors of my research generally, I wish to thank all the then directors and officers of the above institutions—in particular P. R. Mehendiratta and Tarun Mitra of the American Institute of Indian Studies, Ahmed Mustafa of the American Cultural Center, William Bennett of the National Humanities Center, Nehemia Levtzion of the Institute for Advanced Studies, and Marc Gaborieau of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. I could never have undertaken this project without the generous assistance of the many librarians and staff at institutions whose holdings provide the book‘s documentary basis. Special thanks go to the British Library and the India Office Library, London; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; the National Archives of India, New Delhi; the Aligarh Muslim University Library; the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library, Patna; the National Library, the Asiatic Society, and the West Bengal Secretariat, Calcutta; the Varendra Research Museum, Rajshahi; the Dhaka University Library and the Bangla Academy, Dhaka; the Chittagong University Museum; and the Muslim Sahitya Samsad, Sylhet. I am especially indebted to Qazi Jalaluddin Ahmed, secretary of the Bangladesh Ministry of Education, for facilitating my research and making it possible for me to examine Mughal documents preserved in the various District Collectorates. For supplying me with photographs used in the book, I wish to thank Catherine Asher (fig. 6) and the Smithsonian Institution and its photographer, Charles Rand (fig. 1). For granting permission to make my own photographs, I thank G. S. Farid of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta (figs. 2, 3, 11), Shamsul Husain of the Chittagong University Museum (figs. 16, 17), and Omar Farooq and A. R. Khan of the Chittagong District Collectorate (figs. 22, 23, 24). Many of the themes in this book were first proposed in lectures I presented at various stages in the book‘s evolution. These took place at Duke University, Calcutta University, the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, the University of Pennsylvania, Ohio State University, the University of Arizona, Rutgers University, Utrecht University, Leiden University, the Centre d‘Etudes de l‘Inde et de l‘Asie du Sud in Paris, Heidelberg University, Cornell University, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Washington, Arizona State University, Pomona College, and the University of Chicago. I wish to express my gratitude to all the learned colleagues who attended those lectures and who generously offered comments and suggestions. I am also indebted to the many colleagues with whom I have privately exchanged views on various themes in this book, and from whom I profited much. In particular, I would mention Will Bateson, Elaine Scarry, Peter Bertocci, Ralph Nicholas, Muzaffar Alam, Shireen Moosvi, Paul Jackson S. J., Rajat Ray, Gautam Bhadra, Jagadish Narayan Sarkar, M. R. Tarafdar, Sirajul Islam, Perween Hasan, Kamalakanta Gupta, Thérèse Blanchet, France Bhattacharya, Dale Eickelman, André Wink, Anupam Sen, Abdul Karim, John Voll, Yohanan Friedmann, David Shulman, Marc Gaborieau, Sushil Chaudhury, Asim Roy, Marilyn Waldman, Tony Stewart, Carl Ernst, the late S. H. Askari, the late Sukumar Sen, and the late Hitesranjan Sanyal. My thanks also go to friends and colleagues who took the time to read through drafts of all or parts of the manuscript, and who made valuable comments and suggestions. These include Mimi Klaiman, Callie Williamson, Norman Yoffee, Margaret Case, Rafiuddin Ahmed, Carol Salomon, Dharma Kumar, and Barbara Metcalf. For whatever shortcomings may remain in the study, however, I alone bear responsibility. Numerous other friends supported me in nonacademic ways, and to them I acknowledge my sincere gratitude. Among these I am pleased to mention Father G. M. Tourangeau and Joseph Sarkar of the Oriental Institute, Barisal, who introduced me to the language, culture, and society of Lower Bengal; Jim and Naomi Novak, who gave hearty welcome and kind hospitality whenever I turned up in Dhaka; Jan ―Van‖ Paxton, who bravely persevered in transcribing my early handwritten drafts; and Tad Park, who more than once rescued me from extremely stressful computer crises. Finally, I record my thanks to Pushpo (née Blossom), a canine friend who, curled at my feet, faithfully and supportively accompanied the writing of the following chapters. Introduction Sometime in 1243–44, residents of Lakhnauti, a city in northwestern Bengal, told a visiting historian of the dramatic events that had taken place there forty years earlier. At that time, the visitor was informed, a band of several hundred Turkish cavalry had ridden swiftly down the Gangetic Plain in the direction of the Bengal delta. Led by a daring officer named Muhammad Bakhtiyar, the men overran venerable Buddhist monasteries in neighboring Bihar before turning their attention to the northwestern portion of the delta, then ruled by a mild and generous Hindu monarch. Disguising themselves as horse dealers, Bakhtiyar and his men slipped into the royal city of Nudiya. Once inside, they rode straight to the king‘s palace, where they confronted the guards with brandished weapons. Utterly overwhelmed, for he had just sat down to dine, the Hindu monarch hastily departed through a back door and fled with many of his retainers to the forested hinterland of eastern Bengal, abandoning his kingdom altogether.[1] This coup d‘état inaugurated an era, lasting over five centuries, during which most of Bengal was dominated by rulers professing the Islamic faith. In itself this was not exceptional, since from about this time until the eighteenth century, Muslim sovereigns ruled over most of the Indian subcontinent. What was exceptional, however, was that among India‘s interior provinces only in Bengal—a region approximately the size of England and Scotland combined—did a majority of the indigenous population adopt the religion of the ruling class, Islam. This outcome proved to be as fateful as it is striking, for in 1947 British India was divided into two independent states, India and Pakistan, on the basis of the distribution of Muslims. In Bengal, those areas with a Muslim majority would form the eastern wing of Pakistan— since 1971, Bangladesh—whereas those parts of the province with a Muslim minority became the state of West Bengal within the Republic of India. In 1984 about 93 million of the 152 million Bengalis in Bangladesh and West Bengal were Muslims, and of the estimated 96.5 million people inhabiting Bangladesh, 81 million, or 83 percent, were Muslims; in fact, Bengalis today comprise the second largest Muslim ethnic population in the world, after the Arabs.[2] How can one explain this development? More particularly, why did such a large Muslim population emerge in Bengal—so distant from the Middle East, from which Islam historically expanded—and not in other regions of India? And within Bengal, why did Islamization occur at so much greater a rate in the east than in the west? Who converted and why? At what time? What, if anything, did ―conversion‖ mean to contemporary Bengalis? And finally, between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, in what ways did different generations and different social classes of Muslims in Bengal understand, construe, or even construct, Islamic civilization? In seeking answers to these questions, this study explores processes embedded in the delta‘s premodern history that may cast light on the evolution of Bengal‘s extraordinary cultural geography. Bengal‘s historical experience was extraordinary not only in its widespread reception of Islam but also in its frontier character. In part, the thirteenth-century Turkish drive eastward—both to Bengal and within Bengal—was the end product of a process triggered by political convulsions in thirteenth-century Inner Asia. For several centuries before and after the Mongol irruption into West Asia, newly Islamicized Turks from Central Asia and the Iranian Plateau provided a ready supply of soldiers, both as slaves and as free men, for commanders such as Muhammad Bakhtiyar. Once within Bengal‘s fertile delta, these men pushed on until stopped only by geographical barriers. Surrounded on the north and east by mountains, and to the south by the sea, Bengal was the terminus of a continentwide process of Turko-Mongol conquest and migration. It was, in short, a frontier zone. In reality, Bengal in our period possessed not one but several frontiers, each moving generally from west to east. One of these was the political frontier, which defined the territories within which the Turks and their successors, the Bengal sultans and governors of the Mughal Empire, minted coins, garrisoned troops, and collected revenue.