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to in India 107 ered unique? By what indices can it be measured? What forces favor or hinder its progress? Nonetheless, scholars of various persuasions have recently taken a 7 lively interest in the study of Muslim conversion movements. It is the Approaches to the Study of Conversion aim of this paper to explore some of the approaches to this topic as it concerns one important area of the Islamic world — South Asia — with to Islam in India a view to isolating some of the problems encountered in previous stud- ies and to suggesting a more comprehensive hypothesis explaining the phenomenon. Theories of Conversion to Islam in India Most explanations of conversions to Islam in India can be reduced to three basic, and in my view inadequate, theories. The oldest of these is the "religion of the sword" theory. As a theme in the Western histo- riography of Islam it has a long and weary history that dates from the time of the Crusades; and for Indian Islam, too, it has always had its advocites. Yet as Peter Hardy has recently observed, those who argue RICHARD M. EATON that Indian Muslims were forcibly converted generally failed to define either "force" or "conversion,"1 leaving us to presume that a society can and will change its religious identity simply because it has a sword The expansion of Islam east of the Middle East has at its neck. Precisely how this mechanism worked either in theoretical been, apart from a few notable exceptions, a rela- or practical terms, however, is seldom spelled out. Moreover, propo- tively understudied subject. This is especially re- nents of this theory seem to have confused conversion to Islam with markable when one recalls that, by far, the world's greatest number of the extension of Turko-Iranian rule in North India between 1200 and Muslims reside east of Karachi. The reasons for this neglect of schol- 1765, a confusion probably originating in a too literal translation of arship, however, are not far to find. First is the identification of the primary Persian accounts narrating the "Islamic" conquest of India.2 Arab Middle East with the historical heartland of Islam, which makes it But the most serious problem with this theory is its incongruencc the natural object of study of classicists whose scholastic concerns often with the geography of Muslim conversions in South Asia. A glance at focus on the formation of cultural traditions. Second, despite its univer- the geographical distribution of Muslims in the subcontinent (see map salist claims and its undeniable status as a world religion, Islam is on p. 108) reveals an inverse relationship between the degree of Muslim related to Arab ethnicity, language, and culture in complex ways that political penetration and the degree of conversion to Islam. If conver- have always somehow made the study of Arab Islam a more legitimate sion to Islam had ever been a function of military or political force or proper field on the Islamist's agenda than "Eastern" or sub-Saharan (however these might have been expressed) one would expect that Islam. And third, for at least a century, severe methodological prob- those areas of heaviest conversion would correspond to those areas of lems have prevented scholars from explaining the formation, through South Asia exposed most intensely and over the longest period to rule conversion, of the majority of the world's Muslim population living by Muslim dynasties. Yet the opposite is the case: those regions of the beyond the Middle East. There have appeared few convincing answers most dramatic conversion of the population, such as Eastern Bengal or to such basic questions as: What is conversion per se? Can conversion to Western Punjab, lay on the fringes of Indo-Muslim rule, whereas the Islam be fit within a larger conceptual category, or must it be consid- 106 io8 Richard M. Eaton Conversion to Islam in India 109 as new converts to the Khalaji sultans who in turn rewarded them with robes of honor according to their rank.4 But individual conver- sion for political gain frequently lacked conviction, as witnessed by the more spectacular cases of apostasy: Khusrau Khan, a fourteenth- century usurper of the Delhi Sultanate; or Hariharrand Bukka, the cofounders of the Vijayanagar Empire. Then, too, nineteenth-cen- tury census reports speak of land-holding families of medieval Upper India declaring themselves Muslims either to escape imprisonment for nonpayment of revenue, or to preserve ancestral lands in the family name.5 More important examples of the "political patronage" phe- nomenon were the cases of groups coming into the employment of Muslim rulers and in this way gradually acculturating themselves to Indian Islam. The Kayasthas and Khatris of the Gangetic Plain, the Parasnis of Maharashtra, and the Amils of Sind all cultivated Muslim culture by virtue of their filling the government's great need for clerks and administrative servants at all levels, which Aziz Ahmad compared with the later "westernization" process.6 Finally, the acculturation of captured soldiers or slaves, severed as these men were from their fami- Muslims as a percent of total population lies, formed another dimension of this process. Adequate though the patronage thesis may be in accounting for the relatively light incidence of Islamization in the political heartland, it cannot explain the massive conversions to Islam that took place along the political fringe—especially in the Punjab and Bengal. For political patronage, like the influence of the sword, decreases rather than in- creases as one moves away from the Delhi heartland toward the periphery. What is needed is some theory that would explain the phenomenon of mass conversion to Islam on India's periphery and not just in the heartland, and among India's millions of peasant cultivators and not Geographical distribution of South Asian Muslim population. [Adapted from J. just among urban elites. To this end a third theory is frequently in- Schwartzberg, ed. A Historical Atlas of South Asia (Chicago and London: voked, one which has for long been the most popular explanation of University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 04]. the phenomenon—the "religion of social liberation" theory. Elabo- heartland of that rule, the upper Gangetic Plain, saw a much lower rated by British ethnographers, Pakistani nationals, and Indian Mus- incidence of conversion.3 lims among many others, the substance of the theory is that the Hin- A second theory commonly advanced to explain the conversions of du caste system is a rigidly discriminatory form of social organization Indians to Islam is the "political patronage" theory, or the view that and that the lowest and most degraded castes, recognizing in Islam an Indians of the medieval period converted in order to receive some ideology of social equality, converted to it en masse in order to escape nonreligious favors from the ruling class—relief from taxes, promo- Brahmanical oppression. tion in the bureaucracy, and so forth. In the early fourteenth century, This theory, too, has serious problems. The first is that it commits for example, Ibn Battuta reported that Indians presented themselves the fallacy of reading the values of the present into the peoples or 110 Richard M. Eaton Conversion to Islam in India \ 11 events of the past. Are we to assume that before their contact with Hindu in the first place, for the vast majority of South Asian Muslims Muslims the untouchables of India possessed, as though they were the question of "liberation" from the "oppressive" Hindu social order familiar with the writings of Rousseau or Jefferson, some innate no- was simply not an issue. tion of the fundamental equality of all men denied them by an op- ft pressive Brahmanical tyranny? To the contrary, it seems that Hindu Toward a New Theory of Conversion: Accretion and Reform society of medieval India was more influenced by what Louis Dumont calls the principle of homo hierarchicus, or of institutionalized inequal- Much more in keeping with the geography and chronology of Muslim ity, than by the principle of homo equalis.7 Beyond that, a careful read- conversions in India would be, I would suggest, an understanding of ing of Persian primary sources suggests that in their presentation of mass conversion as a process whereby preliterate peoples on the eco- Islam to Indians, Muslim intellectuals did not stress the Islamic ideal logical and political frontier of an expanding agrarian society became of social equality as opposed to Hindu caste, but rather Islamic mono- absorbed into the religious ideology of that society. Proceeding from theism as opposed to Hindu polytheism.8 Moreover, even if it were the theoretical work of Nehemia Levtzion, and before him of A. D. true that Islam had been presented as an ideology of social equality, Nock,10 I would further divide this process into two subprocesses, there is abundant evidence that former Hindu communities failed that of accretion and that of reform. Whereas the simplest model of a upon conversion to improve their status in the social hierarchy and conversion movement would be one beginning with accretion and that, to the contrary, they simply carried over into Muslim society the ending with reform, we should not see this process as any necessary or same practice of birth-ascribed rank that they had had in Hindu irreversible march from the first to the second. A closer examination society.9 of individual cases of Muslim conversion movements in India reveals But the most damaging problem with the "liberation theory," as more complex patterns—some, for example, oscillating back and with the two others discussed above, appears when we return to the forth between accretion and reform, others stuck on accretion indefi- map (p.

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