Book review: Jyoti Gulati Balachandran,Narrative Pasts: The Making of a Muslim Community in Gujarat,c. 1400-1650

In the opening pages of Narrative Pasts: The Making of a Muslim Community in Gujarat, c.1400–1650, Jyoti Balachandran recalls her visit to examine a private archive in Mangrol, a small coastal town in southwestern Gujarat. Her host, a local sayyid, shared with her his family’s genealogy that stretched from Prophet Muḥammad to the present time. It records the family’s migration to Gujarat in the first half of the fifteenth century and includes the well-known Sufi saint Sayyid Sirāj al-Dīn Muḥammad ‘Shāh-i ‘Ālam’ (d. 1475 ce). Sitting on the floor with this genealogical chart (shajara) and other manuscripts spread out before her, Balachandran had an experience that is familiar to many scholars of Muslim communities in South Asia, of unfolding and unravelling the lived lineages between past and present, between narration and textualisation, and between individual and communal identity. Narrative Pasts carefully delineates and interrogates these interwoven strands of the creation, re-creation and consolidation of a regional identity by Gujarat’s Muslim community. Balachandran rejects the view that this regional identity emerged from state-sponsored chronicles of the Sultanate of Gujarat or from a linguistic identification with Gujarati. Instead, she shows how the ‘narrative articulations of the past in the fifteenth century were integral to the making of a Muslim community in Gujarat with its unique history and identity’ (p. 4, original emphasis)—articulations such as those made by her host in Mangrol through both his textual artefacts as well as oral interpolations.

Gujarat is home to some of the earliest records of the Muslim presence on the Indian subcontinent, which date back to the seventh century. Epigraphic and archaeological evidence support the view of substantial Muslim settlements by at least the twelfth century. However, according to Balachandran, those early sources ‘do not express the conception of a community with a shared past that connected the experience of settlement at multiple sites into a coherent account’ (p. 4). Such a conception emerged only in the fifteenth century, when the largely inscriptional record began to be supplemented by the production of a variety of Arabic and Persian narrative accounts by learned Muslim migrants and their descendants. It is the corpus of these texts, produced mainly by Sufis and religious scholars, that serves as the primary focus of this book. What emerges from their examination is a nuanced social history of Gujarat’s Muslim community during a period when the region drew away from the Delhi-centred imperial polity and became more firmly embedded into the material and spiritual exchanges of the Indian Ocean world. While acknowledging this context, Balachandran somewhat goes against the direction of recent scholarship, which has sought to situate the development of Muslim communities in coastal India vis-à-vis different types of oceanic networks. Instead, her book places this history more firmly within socio-cultural and intellectual developments of the region itself.

The book is organised into five chapters, which are thematically divided into two parts. The first three chapters offer a careful examination of a Muslim literary imagination in Gujarat across the fifteenth and into the early sixteenth century. The first, ‘From Inscription to Texts’, is concerned with accounts of the ‘moment of settlement’ (p. 27) of individual Sufis in Gujarat. It argues that despite the long experience of the migration and settlement of Muslims in the region recorded in mosque inscriptions and other epigraphs, it was only through its narrativisation in literary texts of the fifteenth century that this past became translated into a communal history. The second chapter expands on this argument by showing how the literary innovations of this period gave form and substance to the self-fashioning of Muslim communal identity in the context of the relatively new political order in Gujarat. The third chapter, ‘Texts and Tombs’, examines the role of tombs and shrines in the deepening of the ‘intertwined processes of state, community and region formation in fifteenth-century Gujarat’ (p. 94). Royal patronage, participation of the Gujarat sultans in pilgrimage and the building of palaces and royal tombs in close proximity to Sufi shrines, all contributed to the co-creation of a sacral geography that gave physical expression to textual narratives of genealogy, affinity and affiliation.

Together, Balachandran understands these developments of the fifteenth century as ‘the first narrative moment that defined the broad contours of a community-in-the-making’ (p. 92). The second narrative moment, which is the focus of the final two chapters, occurred in the seventeenth century when the descendants and disciples of earlier Sufis created their own narratives to reinterpret their ancestors’ roles. The production and circulation of genealogies and biographies enabled them to shape the historical imagination around the origins and development of Gujarat’s Muslim settlement. The numerous works by Suhrawardi descendants in particular served to streamline spiritual lineages and claims and imbue their protagonists with a sense of heightened significance for the history of fifteenth-century Gujarat and beyond. As with the shajara the author examined in Mangrol, these genealogies place particular emphasis on the moment of migration. However, they trace not just biological ancestry but also chains (silsilahs) of scholarly and spiritual succession, establishing religious lineages that linked notable Muslims into networks of learning, prestige and spiritual authority. As Balachandran’s careful and expert reading shows, these Suhrawardi texts of the seventeenth century represent the codification—and, oftentimes, embellishment—of these chains of spiritual pedigree around the stature and status of these fifteenth-century Sufi masters.

This deeply researched and highly readable book makes a significant contribution to our understanding not just of the history of Gujarat’s Muslim community but also of its history-making across several centuries. Narrative Pasts offers a convincing framework for interrogating the complex interplay of history, memory and identity and as such should be welcomed as required reading by every social historian of early-modern South Asia.