Acclaimed historian Richard M. Eaton’s latest book India in the Persianate Age: 1000-1765 delves into the politics of the Indian sub-continent from the medieval period till the disintegration of the Mughal rule, focusing on dynasties, kings and wars. The book was published in September 2019 by University of California Press.
Eaton’s books usually deal with the social, political and cultural history of the Indian Subcontinent. In his seminal book about the history of Bengal, Rise of Islam on the Bengal Frontier (1993), he has provided readers with many illuminating bits of historical analyses about the spread of Islam to the Bengal delta.
Traditionally, Indian history is divided into three sections on the basis of religion: an ancient Hindu period, a medieval Muslim period and a modern Christian British period. In this book, Eaton seeks to show that it is not religion that shapes Indian history, rather it is language. It was Columbian scholar Sheldon Pollock, who came up with the term “Sanskrit cosmopolis” to describe how it was the Sanskrit language that united South Asia. Building on this, Eaton proposes that from the eleventh century onward, a “Persianate” culture emerged in India, which displaced the existing world of Sanskrit on the one hand and on the other, constructively engaged with existing languages and cultures.
However, these Muslim rulers, who were practicing Muslims and ruled over people who were either Hindus or Buddhists, had not interfered with the local peoples’ religious and cultural practices. Instead, they saw manifold cultural fusion, mostly in architecture and literature. This co-existence had been possible because, as Eaton says, these rulers “prioritized socio-political stability over narrowly interpreted religious dictates”. In the fields of literature, music and architecture, this co-existence resulted in the fusion of Persian and Sanskrit traditions.
In a review of this book by eminent historian Ramchandra Guha entitled “Indian cosmopolis: How Delhi’s Muslim rulers presided over a fusion of cultures and religions”, published recently in the UK-based Times Literary Supplement, Guha writes: “Eaton makes the pertinent point that whereas the British rulers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries became progressively more distant from their colonial subjects, with the Mughals it was the other way around, as an originally foreign dynasty over time became progressively more indigenized.” Guha is also of the opinion that, in Eaton’s attempt to make Indian history no longer “Hindu” or “Muslim”, he overcompensates and does not give enough credit to the religious aspects.