Book & Author
Professor Richard M. Eaton: The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier — 1204-1760
By Dr Ahmed S. Khan
Chicago, IL
History is indeed the witness of the times, the light of truth. — Cicero
The South Asian subcontinent is abode to the largest Muslim population in the world — Pakistan (220 million), India (200 million) and Bangladesh (153 million).
The region of Bengal — Bangladesh and West Bengal (31 million) — is home to the world’s fourth-largest Muslim population. How and why such a large Muslim population exists in Bengal? And how did the religious conversion transpire? Professor Richard Eaton answers these questions in his book The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier — 1204 -1760. Professor Eaton used archaeological proof, Mughal administrative documents, narrative histories, and Sufi poetry to trace the historical diffusion of Islam and Indic civilizations. Focusing on agrarian growth and religious change his narrative starts in 1204 —when Persianized Turks from North India captured the former Hindu states of the lower Ganges delta — to 1760, when the British East India Company emerged as the dominant political force after it defeated Nawab Siraj-ud-daullah due to treason of Mir Jaffer in the Battle of Plassey. The book has been published by University of California Press Berkeley.
Richard M. Eaton (b. 1940) is Professor of History at the University of Arizona. He has authored a number of books; some of his well-known works include Sufis of Bijapur, 1300-1700 (1978), Islamic History as Global History (1990), Firuzabad: Palace City of the Deccan (1992), Essays on Islam and Indian History (2000), A Social History of the Deccan, 1300-1761 (2000), India's Islamic Traditions, 711-1750 (2003), Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India's Deccan Plateau, 1300-1600 (2014), and India in the Persianate Age: 1000-1765 (2019).
Professor Eaton presents his work in two parts spanned over ten chapters. Part I (Chapters 1-5) deals with the establishment and evolution of Indo-Islamic civilization from the early thirteenth century to the late sixteenth — for most of this period the delta region was ruled by kings of the independent Bengal sultanate. Chapter 1 presents Bengal's cultural, political, and economic picture before the advent of the Islamic rule. Chapter 2 investigates how Central Asian conquerors — informed by medieval Perso-Islamic conceptions of political legitimacy — established themselves in a society with different political and cultural traditions. Chapter 3 explores the activities of the earliest Sufis—Muslim mystics and holy men—who settled in the delta and reflects on their interaction with Bengali culture. Chapter 4 presents the delta's economy and the sociocultural basis of Muslim and Hindu communities that formed under the sultanate. And chapter 5 reviews and analyses the origin of mass Muslim society viz a viz past and present debates concerning ‘conversion’ to Islam — both in medieval India generally and in Bengal particularly.
Part II (chapters 6-10) explores the sociocultural transformations that took place between the late sixteenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries — when Bengal was incorporated into the Mughal Empire. The author notes: “Paradoxically, a substantial majority of Bengal's Muslim population emerged under a regime that did not, as a matter of policy, promote the conversion of Bengalis to Islam.” Chapter 6 discusses the rise and consolidation of the Mughal rule in Bengal. Chapter 7 presents the ideological foundation of Mughal rule. Chapters 8 and 9 explore the role played by village mosques and shrines in the diffusion of Mughal authority and Islamic values in the region. Finally, Chapter 10 analyses the religious dimensions of Islamization in premodern Bengal.
Reflecting on the target audience and objective of the book, the author observes: “This book is written with several audiences in mind. For South Asians who understand Islamic history in the subcontinent in terms of an unassimilated ‘foreign’ intrusion, the study explores how this religion, together with the Perso-Turkic civilization that carried it into the subcontinent, became indigenized in the cultural landscape of premodern Bengal. For Middle Easterners who understand Islam's historical and cultural center of gravity as lying between the Nile and the Oxus rivers, the book examines how and why Islamic civilization in the late medieval period became at least as vibrant and creative on the Bengali ‘periphery’ as in the Middle Eastern ‘heartland.’ It also addresses the issue of why so many more Muslims reside outside the Middle East, especially in South Asia, than within it. Finally, this study seeks to reach Western readers for whom Islam's significant expansion was in the direction of Europe—a confrontation that, among other things, bequeathed to Europe and its cultural off-shoots an image of Islam as a ‘militant’ religion. I argue that Islam's more significant expansion lay in the direction of India, where Muslims encountered civilizations far more alien than those they met with in the European or Judeo-Christian worlds. Their responses to that encounter, moreover, proved far more creative; and in Bengal, at least, the meeting of Islamic and indigenous cultures led to an exceptional demographic development: the emergence of the world's second-largest Muslim ethnic community. This book is concerned with the nature of that encounter and its extraordinary outcome.”
The author cites a quote about prominent Sufi Shah Jalal (May 25, 1271 – March 15, 1346) by famous Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta (1304 – 1377), who travelled in 1345 by boat up the Meghna and Sumra rivers to meet him in Sylhet: “This shaikh was one of the great saints and one of the unique personalities. He had to his credit miracles (karamat) well known to the public as well as great deeds, and he was a man of hoary age. .. . The inhabitants of these mountains had embraced Islam at his hands, and for this reason he stayed amidst them."
Discussing the topic of ‘Mass Conversion to Islam: Theories and Protagonists,’ the author observes that the most interesting fact revealed by the census of 1872 was that the majority of Muhammadan residents in Lower Bengal were massed around the old capitals, but in the alluvial plains of the Delta. Professor Eaton dispels four conventional theories of Islamization in India: Immigration theory, religion by the sword thesis (forced conversion by military means); Religion of Patronage (conversion for receiving favors from ruling class) and Religion of Social Liberation Thesis (created by British ethnographers and historians, claims that lower ranks of Hindu case system converted to get out of Brahminic oppression).
Reflecting on the Religion of Sword theory — promoted by the orientalists — the author cites lines penned by Sir William Muir in 1898: “It was the scent of war that now turned the sullen temper of the Arab tribes into eager loyalty…Warrior after warrior, column after column, whole tribes in endless succession with their women and children, issued forth to fight. And ever, at the marvelous tale of cities conquered; of rapine rich beyond compute; of maidens parted on the very field of battle ‘to every man a damsel or two’…fresh tribes arose and went. Onward and still onward, like swarms from the hive, or flights of locusts darkening the land, tribe after tribe issued forth and hastening northward, spread in great masses to the East and to the West. ”
The author further observes: “If large numbers of rural Muslims were not observed until as late as the end of the sixteenth century or afterward, we face a paradox—namely, that mass Islamization occurred under a regime, the Mughals, that as a matter of policy showed no interest in proselytizing on behalf of the Islamic faith. Ruling over a vast empire built upon a bottom-heavy agrarian base, Mughal officials were primarily interested in enhancing agricultural productivity by extracting as much of the surplus wealth of the land as they could, and in using that wealth to the political end of creating loyal clients at every level of administration. Although there were always conservative ‘ulama’ who insisted on the emperors’ ‘duty’ to convert the Hindu ‘infidels’ to Islam, such a policy was not in fact implemented in Bengal, even during the reign of the conservative emperor Aurangzeb (1658–1707).”
Discussing the rise of Mughal power, the author states: “… by the mid-seventeenth century, as both foreign observers and contemporary revenue documents attest, the Mughals had established both power and credibility throughout the delta... Bengali chieftains who witnessed these successes increasingly understood that the advantages of joining the new order outweighed those of resisting it. Above all, the advent of the Mughal age, unlike previous changes of the guard at Gaur, did not represent a mere military occupation in which one ruling class simply replaced another. Nor were the changes accompanying Mughal rule merely ones of scale—that is, bigger cannons, a more dazzling court, or taller monuments. Rather… the conquest was accompanied by fundamental changes in the region’s economic structure, its sociopolitical system, and its cultural complexion, both at court and in the countryside.”
Reflecting on Mughal culture and its diffusion, the author notes: “Clearly, given its extraordinary incidence of Islamization, the cultural evolution of the east departed radically from that of the rest of the delta—or, for that matter, the rest of India. Yet Mughal policy, which in any case was not directed at converting the ‘natives,’ does not appear to have been applied any differently in the east than in the west. Nor is there any evidence that Sufis were any more pious, preachers any more zealous, or warriors any more courageous in East Bengal than were those in the west. For so different an outcome to have occurred, there must have been other factors or forces operating in the east that were altogether unique to the region.”
Expounding on the increased agricultural production and population growth in East Bengal in contrast to West Bengal, the author observes: “A distinguishing feature of East Bengal during the Mughal period—that is, in ‘Bhati’—was its far greater agricultural productivity and population growth relative to contemporary West Bengal. Ultimately, this arose from the long-term eastward movement of Bengal’s major river systems, which deposited the rich silt that made the cultivation of wet rice possible. Geographers have generally explained the movement of Bengal’s rivers in terms of the natural process of riverine sedimentation. In this view, in prehistoric times the entire delta was once under the ocean, and the Ganges met the sea in what is now the region’s northwestern corner (modern Murshidabad District), while the Brahmaputra did the same in the extreme north (modern Rangpur District). As sediment and debris accumulated at the rivers’ confluence with the ocean, a small delta began to form, through which the present-day Bhagirathi River carried the bulk of the Ganges to the Bay. The continued buildup of sediment from both the Ganges and the Brahmaputra steadily pushed the delta further southward into the Bay.”
Reflecting on spread of Islam and the Agrarian order in the East, the author states: “In the active delta, then, Islam was introduced as a civilization-building ideology associated both with settling and populating the land and with constructing a transcendent reality consonant with that process…The main factors contributing to the emergence of new peasant communities in eastern Bengal—colonization, incorporation, and natural population growth—were all related to the shift of the active portion of the delta from the west to the east…Although East Bengal’s growing fertility was too gradual to be noticed by contemporary observers, it is nonetheless witnessed in revenue demand statistics for the late sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, as well as in popular traditions that celebrated the leadership and labors of forest pioneers. The growth of a Muslim peasant society, such a striking development in the post-sixteenth-century eastern delta, thus appears to have been related to larger ecological and demographic forces…Finally, the cultural and ecological-demographic changes of the post-sixteenth-century period must be seen in the context of the new political environment that accompanied these changes—namely, the advent of Mughal authority in the delta.”
Discussing the Mughal state and the Agrarian order, the author notes: “From the reign of Akbar onward, the Mughals sought to integrate Indians into their political system at two levels. At the elite level they endeavored to absorb both Muslim and non-Muslim chieftains into the imperial service, thereby transforming potential state enemies into loyal servants. They also sought to expand the empire’s agrarian base, and hence its wealth, by transforming forest lands into arable fields and the semi-nomadic forest-dwelling peoples inhabiting those lands into settled farmers…while Bengal’s agrarian frontier accommodated Hindu and even Christian institutional growth, it was a Muslim gentry that received the lion’s share of patronage from Mughal district revenue officers. It was they who acquired the greatest amount of state-recognized control over patches of virgin jungle, who attracted the most local labor for reducing the land to rice paddy, and who built the mosques or shrines that in turn served as nuclei for the economic and religious transformation of micro-regions. Greater patronage ultimately favored the growth of rural Muslim communities over the growth of communities professing other religious identities.”
To conclude the book, the author states: “The findings…refute stereotypes found in both Indian historiography and Islamic studies. One of these is the tendency to see the Mughal Empire in the eighteenth century as hopelessly mired in decline, disorder, chaos, and collapse. In part, this view grew out of a British imperial historiographical tradition serving to legitimize the European conquest and occupation of India by contrasting the alleged dynamism of ‘modern’ (i.e., British imperial) India with the alleged chaos or stagnation of ‘traditional’ (i.e., pre-British) India. In part, too, the view of the eighteenth century as one of endemic decline and disorder grew out of a centrist bias common to both British imperial and Mughal schools of historiography.”
The author further notes: “Secondly, European colonialists have long stereotyped the Muslim clergy, or ‘ulama,’ as a conservative class of men obstinately hostile to ‘change.’ Aware that North Africa, India, and Indonesia had all been ruled by Muslims prior to the rise of European imperialism, French, British, and Dutch colonial officials anxiously suspected Muslim resentment of their rule in those regions. In 1871 W. W. Hunter published an influential book that portrayed India’s ‘ulama’ as stagnant, unprogressive, disenfranchised, and potentially seditious—a stereotype that lingered long after the close of the colonial era. Evidence presented in this study, however, has pointed to the dynamic role played by Bengal’s religious gentry in advancing the frontiers of both the Mughal political-ideological system and the Islamic world.”
The author ends the book by commenting on the success of Islam in Bengal and citing a Persian proverb: “In the ‘success stories’ of world religions, and the story of Islam in Bengal is among these, the norms of religion and the realities of local sociocultural systems ultimately accommodate one another. Although theorists, theologians, or reformers may resist this point, it seems nonetheless to be intuitively grasped by common folk. A famous proverb, known throughout Bengal and northern India and uttered usually with a smile, implicitly links social status with Islamically legitimated titles:
The first year I was a Shaikh, the second year a Khan;
This year if the price of grain is low, I’ll become a Saiyid.
What made Islam in Bengal not only historically successful, but a continuing vital social reality, has been its capacity to adapt to the land and the culture of its people, even while transforming both.”
The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier — 1207-1760 by Richard M. Eaton is an important book and must be read by all historians of South Asia and the Islamic world. Professor Eaton has provided a unique scholarship in the Indo-Islamic studies covering important aspects of Bengal’s history viz a viz economic, political, social, cultural and religious domains.
(Dr Ahmed S. Khan - dr.a.s.khan@ieee.org ) - is a Fulbright Specialist Scholar, 2017-2022).
