Research in both the orthodox and unorthodox aspects of the religions of the subcontinent made major advances after Partition, and there was a new focus on Islam in its specific South Asian context.
Comprehensive surveys of Islam in India emerged from different perspectives: S.M. Ikram’s History of Muslim Civilization in India and Pakistan (Lahore, 1961) and Muhammad Mujeeb’s The Indian Muslims (London, 1967) presented the Pakistani and Indian perspectives respectively, while Anne-Marie Scheme’s Islam in the Indian Subcontinent (London, 1980) presented an external perspective on the subject.
On the Sikh community, W.H. McLeod, a sympathetic historian from New Zealand, wrote the widely accepted and objective work, The Evolution of the Sikh Community (Delhi, 1975). The southern peninsula was the focus of new community studies such as Stephen Frederic Dale, The Mappilas of Malabar 1498-1922: Islamic Society on the South Asian Frontier (Oxford, 1980) and Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society 1700-1900 (Cambridge, 1989). These works showed the distinctive regional forms of Islam and Christianity.
The syncretism local forms imported to Islam by popular Fakirs were imaginatively explored by Richard M. Eaton in The Sufis of Bijapur: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India (Princeton, 1978), and by Asim Roy in The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal (Princeton, 1983).
ADVERTISEMENTS:
The Research in the esoteric and popular forms of Hinduism made a major advance with Mircea Eliade’s classic study for Yoga in French: Le Yoga: Immortalite et Liberte (Paris, 1954). Other important books that explored forms of Hinduism outside the orthodox Brahmanical mould included: Edward C. Dimock, The Place of Hidden Moon: Erotic Mysticism in the Sahajiya Vaishnva Cult of Bengal (Chicago, 1966); Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva (Oxford, 1973); Sanjukta Gupta, Dirk Jan Hoens and Teun Goudriaan, Hindu Tantrism (Leiden, 1979); and Charlotte Vaudeville, A Weaver Named Kabir: Selected Verses with a Detailed Biographical and Historical Introduction (Delhi, 1993).
The religious and social movements of reform in colonial India emerged as an important focus of research after independence. The movement of Islamic revival went back to the eighteenth century and was studied by S.A.A. Rizvi in Shah Wali-allah and His Times (Canberra, 1980). The Brahmo movement in Bengal, one of the most important reform movements in the nineteenth century, was treated by David Kopf in The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton, 1979).
The movement of reform in Islam in the nineteenth century was treated by Christian W. Trail in Sayyid Ahmad Khan: a Reinterpretation of Muslim Theology (New Delhi, 1978). More generally, themes of religious reform were treated in synthetic general works such as Charles H. Heimsath, Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform (Princeton, 1966), and Kennath W. Jones Socio-Religious Reform Movements in British India: The New Cambridge History of India 3.1. (Cambridge, 1994). The movements of revival and reform fostered a new kind of politics of religious identity.
In Pakistan, Ishtiaq Husain Qureishi claimed, in The Muslim Community of the Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent 610-1947: A Brief Analysis (The Hague, 1962), that the Muslims had always constituted a separate nation in the subcontinent. Religion tended to become a matter of politics in the twentieth century historiography.