Narrative Pasts

The Making of a Muslim Community in Gujarat, c. 1400-1650

Dr. Jyoti Gulati Balachandran

The book highlights the role of learned Muslim men in giving coherence to the region of Gujarat
It is largely based on Persian and Arabic Sufi texts that have rarely been employed to write the history of medieval and early modern Gujarat
It highlights the significance of historical processes in the fifteenth century, a period that is now increasingly seen as one of political and cultural dynamism not decline.
It situates the consolidation of Gujarat's regional identity between the fifteenth and the seventeenth century within the larger social, political, and literary developments in South Asia

Narrative Pasts

The Making of a Muslim Community in Gujarat, c. 1400-1650

Dr. Jyoti Gulati Balachandran

Description

Narrative Pasts retrieves the social history of a Muslim community in Gujarat, a region that has one of the earliest records of Muslim presence in the Indian subcontinent. By reconstructing the literary, social and historical world of Sufi preceptors, disciples, and descendants from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, the book reveals the importance of learned Muslim men in imparting a distinct regional and historical identity to Gujarat. The prominence of Gujarat's maritime location has often oriented the study of Gujarat towards the commercial world of the western Indian Ocean world. Narrative Pasts demonstrates that Gujarat was also an integral part of the historical and narrative processes that shaped medieval and early modern South Asia. Employing new and rarely used literary materials in Persian and Arabic, this book departs from the narrow state-centered visions of the Muslim past and integrates Gujarat's sultanate and Mughal past to the larger socio-cultural histories of Islamic South Asia.

Narrative Pasts

The Making of a Muslim Community in Gujarat, c. 1400-1650

Dr. Jyoti Gulati Balachandran

Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Note on Translation/Transliteration/Dates
Introduction
1. From Inscriptions to Texts: Locating the History of Muslim Migration and Settlement
2. State, Settlement, Texts: The Beginnings of Community and History Making in Gujarat
3. Texts and Tombs: The Creation of a Sacral Geography
4. Networks of Community Formation
5. Seventeenth-century Historiographical Resolutions: Ahmad Khattu and the Suhrawardi Contemporaries in Sad Hikayat
Conclusion
Appendix: Shaykh Ahmad Khattu and his Suhrawardi Contemporaries in 16th- and 17th- century tazkirat
Bibliography

Narrative Pasts

The Making of a Muslim Community in Gujarat, c. 1400-1650

Dr. Jyoti Gulati Balachandran

Author Information

Jyoti Gulati Balachandran, Assistant Professor of History, Pennsylvania State University

Jyoti Gulati Balachandran is Assistant Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University. A historian of medieval and early modern (c. 1200-1800) South Asia, Balachandran received her doctoral degree at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is interested in social and cultural histories of Muslim communities in Gujarat and the wider Indian Ocean world. Her research has appeared in the Indian Economic and Social History Review and she has contributed several articles to the third edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam.

Contributors:

NA

Narrative Pasts

The Making of a Muslim Community in Gujarat, c. 1400-1650

Dr. Jyoti Gulati Balachandran

Reviews and Awards

"Balachandran's book makes a number of important contributions. It provides a different angle on medieval Indian history, focusing on community-building versus conquest; it revises the received wisdom regarding the fifteenth century(not exhibiting the patterns of 'region versus centre' and 'linear decline overtime' but rather finding multi-centredness and simultaneous developments);and it expands the archive to include somewhat neglected genres, such as hagiography, genealogy and Sufi discourses." -- Ali Annoshahr, English Historical Review

"Narrative Pasts makes an important methodological intervention, where Balachandran critically reads texts deemed 'religious' or 'hagiographic' for their political, historical, and commemorative significance. It is a model for premodern scholarship that takes seriously the ways in which history and memory are equally invested in the making of community." -- Manan Ahmed, Indian Economic and Social History Review

"Narrative Pasts is a timely addition to the growing body of socio-cultural and historical studies on pre-colonial Gujarat. By focusing on histories of migration, settlement, regional integration and community formation, this book also implicitly questions the retrospective politics of polarization and narratives of conflict, invasion and aggression largely centred on the dynamic of the insider and outsider." -- Krupa Shah, South Asian History and Culture