NEW Typology

            First we considered an “action-reaction” typology in which we sorted the historical events based on how the Hindus and Muslims tried to unify and divide themselves. For example, in the political realm, Akbar implemented religious toleration policies, but a subsequent ruler reacted against the policies with fervor. Some trends, however, were not included in this action-reaction typology. Trends like cultural syncretism and religious tension were, in fact, organic results of coexistence. So, in the cultural and religious realms, we realized that we could not simply divide history into action and reactions, but needed to use a more inclusive typology.

            We realized that “unifying” and “dividing” were not so much categories of historical events as much as they were constant forces that shaped history. We wanted to identify the unifying and dividing forces between the two groups from which emerged a dynamic tension. That tension produced what we identified as the Indian-Islamic tradition.

            Because we took a historical approach in our research, we found it necessary to subdivide the unifying and dividing forces into four major time periods: Middle Period, Mughal Empire, British Empire, and Post-Partition. In the Middle Period, minority Muslims slowly moved in and adapted to the majority Hindu land. In the Mughal Empire, the Muslim minority became the elite ruling class for about 300 years. During the British Empire, European imperialism subordinated both groups to their rule and complicated the Hindu-Muslim relationship. Finally, after Partition, Hindus found power as a majority through the secular democratic system. While part of the Muslim minority population was separated from India through the creation of Pakistan, the Muslims remaining in India became an oppressed minority. We found that by dividing history into these four periods, we represented the four main shifts in power dynamics, which define Hindu-Muslim tensions. So while they are historically based, we see them as a main part of our typology, helping us to understand the Hindu-Muslim consciousness over time.

            The cultural, religious, historiographical, and political conclusions that we came to also contributed to our typology; the tensions, born from the unifying and dividing forces, are manifest in these four realms. (See Section X in our Group Paper for further analysis of these four themes.)

NEW Annotated Biblography

Academic Works, Books, and Writings:

Ahmad, Aziz. An Intellectual History of Islam in India. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1969. Print.
           

The first five chapters describe various Islamic sects, including Muslim interactions with Hindus.  The first chapter entitled “Sunni Orthodoxy” contains a subsection called “Modernity,” describing how Ahmad Khan started the modernist movement in India.   The subsection “Popular and Syncretic Beliefs” in chapter five delineates common beliefs and cultural synchronism between Muslims and Hindus during the time of the Mughal Empire. Our group used this book to understand the religious and cultural influences of both Muslims and Hindus on Indian society.

Ahmad, Syed Nesar. Origins of Muslim Consciousness in India: A World-system Perspective. New York: Greenwood, 1991. Print.
           

This book presents the effects of colonialism and global conflict throughout the 19th and 20th centuries on Hindus and Muslims in India, and the growth of conflict between them. Nesar describes how British Imperialism in India heightened the division between Hindus and Muslims, despite their shared Indian heritage.  This book also portrays many of the positions taken by Hindus and Muslims before the partition: Revivalists, nationalists, traditionalists, and more.  We used this source to develop a typology of various Indian opinions during the colonial period.

Desika Char, S.V. Hinduism and Islam in India: Caste, Religion, and Society from Antiquity to Early Modern times. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1997. Print.
           

This book covers a wide variety of comparisons of Hinduism and Islam in India including the caste system, economics, and politics throughout India’s history. This book takes the Hindu perspective of how Hindus reacted to the infiltration of Islam in India.  It reveals specific traditions, practices, and beliefs of Hindus and Muslims in India that caused rifts between the two groups.

Gottschalk, Peter. Beyond Hindu and Muslim: Mulitple Identity in Narratives from Village India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Print.

            This book helped our group take an anthropological look at the cultural connection between Hindus and Muslims in India by focusing in on one locality in India, Arampur Nexus.  The book emphasized how researchers tend to look for divisions between the two groups while forgetting their shared Indian heritage.  The ethnographer interpreted the landscape of the town with a less divisive perspective, noting many of the nuances of Indian identity and history.

Ikram, S.M. Muslim Civilization in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. Print.
           

This book helped our group understand Muslim Indian history from the 8^th century until the rise of British colonialism in India.  Chapter nine of this book entitled “The Interaction of Islam and Hinduism” outlined the presence of Islam in India from the pre-modern era of 712-1526 A.D.  The book described the influence of Akbar’s court on the Mughal Empire as well as other political, economic, and social developments in India under Mughal rule.  The book concluded with a description of the deterioration of the Mughal Empire during the nineteenth century.  This source helped our group create a typology of the Muslim-Hindu interactions during the time of the Mughal Empire.

“India as a World Power.” Foreign Affairs 27.4 (1949): 540. MasterFILE Complete. Web. 15 Apr. 2013.

This source described the conflict over the partition of India. It provided our group with important statistics concerning the number of refugees in India and Pakistan after the partition.  The source also highlights Ghandi’s negative view on the separation of India and Pakistan.

Islam, Arshad. “Babri Mosque: A Historic Bone of Contention.” The Muslim World 97 (2007): 259-286.  ProQuest. Web. 16 Apr. 2013.

This source described the role the British Empire played in aggravating the tensions between the Hindus and Muslims living in India.  This article drew special attention to the Babri Mosque legend.  This legend that the Muslims destroyed a Hindu temple to build the Babri Mosque was actually a British smear campaign to enrage and separate the Indian people based on religious guidelines.

Izetbegović, Aljia. Islam between East and West. Plainfield, IN: American Trust Publications, 1994. Print.         
           

This book compares Islam in the East and West, through a social, legal, political, cultural, and psychological perspective. This source helped us understand the different viewpoints of the East and West overall instead of in a specific region such as India.

Mawdudi, Sayyid Abu’l-A‘la. “Chapter 3: Sayyid Abu'l-A 'la Mawdudi. Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from Al-Banna to Bin Laden. Ed. Roxanne L. Euben and Muhammad Qasim Zaman. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2009. 79-85. Print.

This chapter provides a broad sketch of the political tensions in India during the first half of the 20th century preceding independence. While describing the context in which the influential Islamist thinker Mawdudi grew up, the chapter identified the key players: the Hindu majority, Muslim minority, and predominantly Hindu but avowedly secular Indian National Congress. At this time, two opposing Muslim perspectives arose, reflecting many of the political and cultural implications of plurality in India. While some supported uniting with the Hindus against the common enemy of colonialism, Mawdudi and his contemporaries such as the Muslim League feared how such unity would compromise the integrity of the Muslim community. This source helped our group understand the culmination of Muslim-Hindu tensions at the moment of independence.

Siraj, Maqbool Ahmed. “India: A Laborartory of Inter-religious Experiment.” Religion and the Arts 12 (2008): 319-328. Ebsco Host. Web. 15 Apr. 2013.

This source provided a broad summary of misconceptions about religion in India from the time of Kabir and Nanak to the present day.  This source helped our group better see the formation of various religious movements and then reactions against these movements.  Key to our research, this source pointed out that robust cultural exchange occurred between Hindus and Muslims during the 650 years of Muslim rule in India.

Multimedia: Images, Audio, and Videos:

                                                                                       

Christian Colson, movie producer. “Slumdog Millionaire (Hindu Attack).” Online video clip. Youtube. 25 April 2012. Web. 21 April 2013.

This video clip corroborates our evidence that Western media and Hollywood depict the violence between Hindus and Muslims with only one dimension and without historical context.  Because millions of Western viewers watched Slumdog Millionaire, they left the movie with a superficial understanding of Hindu-Muslim relations.  While the movie clip accurately conveys reality of violence between Muslims and Hindus, it takes a distinctly modern approach: A minute long scene attack scene to convey hundreds of years of history.

"Rabbi Shergill - Bulla Ki Jaana Maen Kaun." YouTube. YouTube, 16 Mar. 2006. Web. 20 Apr. 2013.

            This video of Rabbi, a current Indian singer who incorporates 18^th century Sufi poetry into his music, is a prime example of cultural syncretism in India today and a desire to transcend boundaries. We learned from reading the comments on the YouTube page because Indians discussed the beauty of his work. This allowed us to see the shared history of a religiously unified India that is shared among some today.

Popular Stuff, Newspaper Articles, and Non-Academic Books:

Guha, Ramachandra. “Two Indias.” The National Interest July/August (2009): Ebsco Host. Web. 20 Apr. 2013.

This source helped our group understand the recent political history of India.  The source described the various political actors fighting in India, which includes one group fighting for secularism and another fighting for politics guided by Hindu orthodoxy.  Importantly, this source frames Indian politics within the context of modernity.

"India's Muslims: Growing, Neglected." The Economist. N.p., 2 Mar. 2013. Web.      10 Apr. 2013.

            This recent article from The Economist discusses the demographic state of Indian Muslims, whose population continues to rise despite the gradual decline in Indian growth rate. This paints a poignant picture of urban and rural poverty among Muslims, whose “social backwardness” (i.e. resistance to use contraception and tradition gender roles) exacerbates their “economic backwardness.” Thus the article proposes a relatively orientalist view of Muslims, portraying them as “backwards” victims of the capitalist system. The data and views expressed in this article support our historiographical and political theories about Muslims in India.

Mishra, Pankaj. "India’s Fantasy of Disloyal Muslims May Come      True." Bloomberg View. Bloomberg, 19 Mar. 2013. Web. 10 Apr. 2013.

Mishra, a modernist Indian scholar, writes about the Islamaphobic discrimination affecting Indian Muslims today. He addresses terrorism and the misconceptions and realities surrounding Indian Muslims’ involvement—or lack thereof. Most importantly, he addresses the impact of modernity and its conceptions of democracy and pluralism as a cause of Indian Muslims’ detachment from mainstream Muslim terrorism like Al Qaeda. Despite this, Muslims are often the innocent scapegoat when terrorism occurs in India, and Mishra proposes that the resentment from such prejudice is slowly causing the radicalization of Indian Muslims, which he calls a “self-fulfilling prophecy” of the anti-Muslim Indian majority. The article illustrates our findings about political prejudice well.

“Santan Jât Na Pûcho Nirguniyân.” Songs of Kabir. Trans. Rabindranath Tagore. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1915. Web.

This primary source is a translated version of one of Kabir’s poems.  Kabir, who lived in India from 1440 to 1518, believed in the sacred teachings found in both Hinduism and Islam.  This particular poem describes how people of various occupations and religious viewpoints look for God in their lives.  Our group researched Kabir and his followers to understand how some Indians believed in the beautiful unity of Hinduism and Islam.

Seager, Richard Hughes. The Dawn of Religious Pluralism: Voices from the World's Parliament of Religions, 1893. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1993. Print.

This primary source provided a snapshot of one western perspective on pluralism. It included a brief section entitled “Three Views of Islam” with essays by authors of both Arab and western descent.  While our group gained a valuable understanding of pluralism by reading this source, the source did not end up matching the final theme of our project: Hindu-Muslim interaction.  The source did, however, help our group contextualize the plurality within a modern framework. 

Sharma, Betwa. “Kashmir Is on the Boil, Once Again.” The New York Times. 14 Mar. 2013. Web. 22 April 2013.

This month-old article described the large amount violence and unrest in Kashmir due to land disputes.  This article captured how modern media sources depict the confusion, violence, and conflict between Pakistanis and Indians over Kashmir.  Our group gained a better understanding of the real implications of political decisions like drawing national boundaries: Violence and chaos.

Statistical Date, Surveys, and Polls:

We found statistics in other sites, but our historical approach did not necessitate this category.