As a case study of the changing mentalities that emerged in colonial India, this article analyses a discussion that took place among several munshis (secretaries trained in Persian to run the affairs of princely states), and also provides a translation and edition of the text. The subject was a short polemical letter refuting the immortality of the soul, published around 1850 in the Simla Akhbār (Simla News). The main question entertained in this correspondence was not the merit of the sceptical argument, based in part on modern medical findings, but the potential public impact of dismissing a religious doctrine that sustains morality. Two of the participants in this conversation, Shivaprasad and Sital Singh, displayed the full range of changes that made the nineteenth century so extraordinary, and the way they responded illustrates some of the salient features and stages of this process, including the difficulty of foreseeing the elimination of much of the system for which munshis were trained.

Historians of Islamicate intellectual practices in pre-colonial South Asia have long argued that authoritative knowledge was located in persons rather than books, and that religious texts were thus typically transmitted in the context of face-to-face meetings between teacher and student. While it has been noted that some early modern Sufi networks engaged in the remote transmission of authoritative knowledge by means of letters, with reduced emphasis on face-to-face meetings, the causes for this development are still debated.

Looking at the correspondence, theoretical treatises, and authorisations (ijāzas) produced in the circle of the celebrated eighteenth-century Naqshbandi reformer Shah Wali Allah of Delhi, this article argues that the willingness to engage in the transmission of remote knowledge was not simply a product of the changing material conditions of late-Mughal India, but rather was underwritten by emergent spiritual and psychological ideas about the nature of personhood. Because a person was not merely a material entity bounded by a corporeal (living) body, bodily proximity between two individuals was less valuable than their spiritual congruence. This congruence could be strengthened during periods of face-to-face companionship but could also be generated and maintained through letters alone. Indeed, these scholars sometimes assert the superiority of the letter over physical companionship because it allowed for a coming together of two spirits without the intrusion of the gross material body. Working within this intellectual framework, scholars in this network regularly exchanged books of all genres as well as ijāzas remotely (often over vast distances).

Marshall Hodgson has been rightly admired for his vast contributions in the fields of both Islam and world history. Despite the many decades since the publication of his works on these topics, his ideas have largely survived the test of time and continue to be influential. There are two respects, however, in which Hodgson's ideas appear to have been fundamentally flawed—namely, his notion of cultural cores versus peripheries in the Islamic world, and his understanding of modernity. This article explores both of these themes.

This article offers a first survey of a novel genre of grimoires published in Urdu-reading India in the early twentieth century. It contained a wide selection of magic material from Islamicate and Tantric sources as well as Western parapsychology and spiritualism. Its applications ranged from remedies of last resort in illness, relationship troubles, and other life problems to common household cures and magical tricks performed for pleasure alone. Produced and read by members of all religious groups in North India, this material indicates important changes in popular attitudes towards magic. Magic by no means declined at the beginning of the twentieth century, but flourished as a viable commercial print genre that became increasingly detached from religion.

This article investigates the relationship between caste and Islam in Bengal at a time when they acquired heightened significance as markers of identity for the colonial state and between communities. Scholarship, mainly drawing on North India, has emphasised the contrast between the existence in practice of a hierarchical system of social stratification among Muslims and the ideals and traditions of Islamic egalitarianism. This article, however, shows that caste-based struggles and tensions produced a revolutionary Islam. I suggest that the subversive potential of Islamic egalitarianism, described in early Islam by Louise Marlow, was kept alive by low-caste Bengali Muslims. The social reality of caste enabled multiple understandings of what it meant to be a Muslim, and the more radical among them were subaltern ontologies—different meanings of what it was to be a Muslim in the world. Here, I analyse writings on caste by four unreliable narrators around the turn of the twentieth century—a British colonial ethnographer, an ashrāfī Muslim anthropologist, and two Muslim reformers—to describe the politics and lifeworlds of low-caste Muslim groups in Bengal. The article argues for a more nuanced understanding of this period of Islamic reform and development, one that is conscious of the subaltern currents shaping its course. I show how a reformist politics of ‘rejection’ of elite Islam emerged as a response to the problem of caste inequality. These discourses and practices repudiating elite Muslim titles, centring histories of labour, and emphasising equality as an embodied experience reveal the revolutionary potentialities of a subaltern Islam.

This article examines the discussion of core Islamic rituals in the writings of the influential eighteenth-century Sufi, hadith scholar, and jurist Shah Wali Allah of Delhi (d. 1762). It brings out the implications of Wali Allah's sustained concern with demonstrating how divinely mandated rituals serve human interests, not just at the individual but also at the societal and political levels. This aspect of Wali Allah's thought has parallels with how many modernists and Islamists in colonial and post-colonial South Asia have sought to explain Islamic rituals in terms of their social ramifications. But there are some significant differences between them, too, and these help shed further light on Wali Allah's distinctive theory of ritual.