Overview
- Explores the historical encountering between two religious cultures that today are mostly perceived as being antagonistic
- Provides an innovative perspective on how the colonized escaped the control of the colonizers through the building of their own vernacular knowledge
- Documents the history of 19th and early 20th century Sindh through the lens of Sufi paradigm, and re-organization of religious milieu through colonial intervention
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Table of contents (12 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Conclusion
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book demonstrates how a local elite built upon colonial knowledge to produce a vernacular knowledge that maintained the older legacy of a pluralistic Sufism. As the British reprinted a Sufi work, Shah Abd al-Latif Bhittai's Shah jo risalo, in an effort to teach British officers Sindhi, the local intelligentsia, particularly driven by a Hindu caste of professional scribes (the Amils), seized on the moment to promote a transformation from traditional and popular Sufism (the tasawuf) to a Sufi culture (Sufiyani saqafat). Using modern tools, such as the printing press, and borrowing European vocabulary and ideology, such as Theosophical Society, the intelligentsia used Sufism as an idiomatic matrix that functioned to incorporate difference and a multitude of devotional traditions—Sufi, non-Sufi, and non-Muslim—into a complex, metaphysical spirituality that transcended the nation-state and filled the intellectual, spiritual, and emotionalvoids of postmodernity.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Michel Boivin is the Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies (CEIAS), affiliated with The French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and The School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS), France. He holds a PHD in Oriental Languages, Civilisations and Societies from Sorbonne University. He was trained in contemporary history and anthropology, with specializations in Islamic and South Asian Studies. He has authored or edited fourteen books, the most recent of which are The Hindu Sufis of South Asia, Discovering Sindh’s Past (with Matthew A. Cook and Julien Levesque, 2019), Devotional Islam in Contemporary South Asia (with Remy Delage, 2015), and the Historical Dictionary of the Sufi Culture of Sindh in Pakistan and in India (2015).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Sufi Paradigm and the Makings of a Vernacular Knowledge in Colonial India
Book Subtitle: The Case of Sindh (1851–1929)
Authors: Michel Boivin
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41991-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-41990-5Published: 02 June 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-41993-6Published: 02 June 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-41991-2Published: 01 June 2020
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 318
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations, 8 illustrations in colour
Topics: Social Anthropology, Epistemology, History of South Asia, Social Aspects of Religion