Seminar Studienseminar D Islamwissenschaft Muslim Societies and Structures of Authority in the Delhi Sultanate ca 1200-1550

If the period of the Delhi Sultanate (1200-1550) attracts any attention in general histories of India it is as a moment when Islamic institutions of statecraft and Muslim culture arrived in the subcontinent together with the establishment of a ‘Muslim’ state. For some readers of this period, the Delhi Sultanate is a moment of great fracture when the pasts of a Hindu civilization were swept away by invading Muslim iconoclasts. Sometimes present in this stream of scholarship is a litany of the achievements and failures of succeeding Muslim rulers. Occasionally the ‘hero-centric’ bent in this historiography is muted by a greater concern to develop the history of class relations where the medieval state served as the agent of the ruling class. In these readings, the focus on the state implies that the regimes of the Delhi Sultans are relegated as somewhat smaller regimes that were diminutive in their institutional sophistication when compared with the great Mughals. Alternatively some scholars highlight in this period the presence of a more inclusive Islam of the sufi saints, oftentimes distant from the Sultanate court, preaching a mystic ideology comparable in inspiration to that of the Bhakti saints. For these historians, the Sultanate period was one of great material and cultural accomplishment when Islam contributed to the making of a complex, variegated civilization that should stand today as ‘Indian’. In sum, there is no consensus amongst scholars on how to analyse this period, or, for that matter, how to contextualise it within a larger history of Islam or India. This paper intersects with the different historiographical interpretations of this period, to question afresh how the three centuries from the thirteenth through the sixteenth can be situated in the larger history of India. What is it about the Delhi Sultanate that led historians to evaluate it from sometimes very contrasting perspectives? In answering this question, this paper moves beyond the epistemologies that framed these debates, and questions afresh the different and changing social and political structures that framed and contested authority in north India during the 13th – 16th centuries. Islam certainly was an important aspect in the making of this world, but since it possessed so many facets and agencies, its many aspects related to society and politics in divergent and sometimes competing ways. While studying the different structures and processes that shaped the period of the Delhi Sultanate over time, the course seeks to identify the strands that allows for a more integral contextualisation of its evolving society and politics in the history of north India. Classes: The course is organized around weekly lectures and reading assignments. These readings are cumulative; you may not follow the historiographical development of a thought if you have missed an intervening text. W3-Professur für Turkologie/Iranistik (Univ. Prof. Dr. Christoph Neumann) LMU München SoSe 2015 Prof. Dr. Kumar Sunil