ASHA: Blast From The Past

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

The attacks upon Ganga-Jamuni Tahzeeb in recent years have been mounted from several directions, some arising from a commendable desire to correct romanticised accounts of India’s past, others proceeding from a more troubling impulse to rewrite Indian history as an uninterrupted narrative of civilisational conflict. What unites these various critiques, however, is a shared conviction that the concept of a shared Indo-Persianate culture is essentially a secularist fabrication, a sentimental construction that conceals the grim realities of conquest, political inequality and religious discrimination. The argument runs that because Muslim rulers exercised political power over a Hindu majority, the cultural interaction that occurred under their patronage could not have been genuinely reciprocal; the Jamuna, as it were, dictated terms to the Ganga, and the language of synthesis merely masks what was in fact a process of imposition.

This line of reasoning, for all its apparent sophistication, rests upon a series of historical and conceptual errors that deserve careful examination. The most fundamental of these is the anachronistic projection of modern categories of nationhood, foreignness and indigenous belonging onto societies that operated according to entirely different logics of identity and political legitimacy. When we describe the Sultanate or Mughal ruling classes as a “foreign minority” dominating a “national majority”, we import into the thirteenth, sixteenth or seventeenth century concepts that acquired their modern political meaning only much later, during the transformative upheavals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Pre-modern societies certainly distinguished between insiders and outsiders, between rulers and subjects, between believers and non-believers, but these distinctions were not identical to the modern binary of national and foreigner, and to treat them as such is to commit a serious historical error.

Consider the logical consequences of applying this framework consistently. If every Muslim ruler was foreign because Islam originated outside India, then we must decide how many generations were required before a family became indigenous. Was Akbar, born at Umarkot in Sindh, foreign? Was Jahangir, born at Fathpur Sikri, foreign? Were the descendants of families who had lived in the subcontinent for five or ten centuries still foreign because their religion had originated elsewhere? The category quickly becomes untenable, collapsing under the weight of its own internal contradictions. What this reveals is not that migration and conquest did not occur, for they plainly did, but rather that migration, conquest and cultural origin cannot simply be translated into the modern political vocabulary of foreigner versus national without doing violence to the historical realities of pre-modern India.

The more sophisticated critique of Ganga-Jamuni Tahzeeb, drawing particularly upon the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Indian Muslims and the work of scholars such as David Lelyveld, raises questions that are certainly legitimate and deserving of serious engagement. When we observe that major Muslim intellectuals like Shibli Nu’mani, despite their deeply Indian ancestry, imagined their historical community through Medina, Baghdad and Damascus rather than through Ashoka, Harsha or ancient India, we are compelled to ask how deep the celebrated synthesis really was. If the most influential Muslim thinkers of the nineteenth century remained so thoroughly oriented towards the Islamic past, can we honestly claim that a genuine cultural confluence had occurred? This question is worth asking precisely because it prevents Ganga-Jamuni Tahzeeb from becoming an unhistorical celebration of perpetual Hindu-Muslim harmony, and for that reason alone it deserves our gratitude.

Yet the conclusions drawn from this observation do not necessarily follow. The evidence, when examined carefully, reveals something considerably more complicated than either the romantic or the critical accounts would suggest. Cultural interaction can coexist with distinct religious memories; political cooperation need not require identical historical genealogies; and composite cultures do not require the communities participating in them to surrender their separate identities. The fact that Shibli Nu’mani wrote biographies of Caliph Umar, al-Ma’mun, al-Ghazali and Rumi rather than histories of ancient India tells us something important about his intellectual formation and his sense of community, but it does not tell us that he was culturally foreign to India. He wrote in Urdu and Persian, participated in the intellectual life of north India, engaged with the educational debates of his time, and belonged to a society whose everyday culture bore the marks of centuries of interaction between diverse communities.

The fundamental error in using Shibli as evidence against Ganga-Jamuni Tahzeeb lies in the assumption that participation in a composite culture requires the possession of a composite historical canon. This assumption is demonstrably false. A nineteenth-century Hindu intellectual could regard the Ramayana, Mahabharata, Vedas and ancient Sanskrit literature as his principal civilisational inheritance while simultaneously speaking Urdu, reading Persian poetry, wearing clothing shaped by Indo-Persian conventions and participating in a shared north Indian urban culture. Precisely the same possibility existed for Muslims, who could regard the great figures of Islamic history as belonging to their intellectual ancestry while remaining culturally, linguistically and socially products of north India. Indeed, to insist that because Shibli’s distant ancestors had been Rajputs he somehow ought to have identified intellectually with their pre-conversion religious past introduces a conception of cultural identity based almost upon blood, a conception that belongs more properly to the racial theories of the nineteenth century than to any serious understanding of how cultural identity actually operates.

The nineteenth-century setting of Shibli’s work is crucial here, for he wrote in a colonial environment in which Muslim rule had already been organised into powerful European narratives of Indian history. James Mill and later colonial writers represented the “Muhammadan period” as an era of despotism, fanaticism and decline, and Muslim intellectuals responded defensively, producing historical works that attempted to demonstrate that Islamic civilisation possessed traditions of rational enquiry, administration, philosophy, science, ethical government and intellectual creativity. History became simultaneously scholarship, apologetic and islah, an instrument of community regeneration, and this undoubtedly encouraged a self-conscious Muslim historical identity. Yet the same nineteenth century was producing increasingly self-conscious Hindu historical identities as well, as ancient India could be reconstructed as an exclusively Hindu golden age and the medieval centuries narrated as foreign Muslim interruption. The crucial development, therefore, was not simply the persistence of ancient Muslim separatism but the modern communalisation of historical memory, a process driven by colonial enumeration, print capitalism, representative politics and eventually nationalism.

The metaphor of two rivers, so central to the concept of Ganga-Jamuni Tahzeeb, is therefore more appropriate than its critics acknowledge, provided we understand it correctly. Rivers do not lose their sources when they meet. The Ganga remains the Ganga and the Jamuna remains the Jamuna, but at their confluence their waters intermingle, and neither emerges from the meeting unchanged. More importantly, the movement is not one-sided. The Jamuna does not simply pour itself into an unchanged Ganga, nor does the Ganga absorb a passive Jamuna. Both enter the confluence carrying their own sediments, and both are altered by the meeting. Both absorb, both reject, both accommodate and both transform. That is perhaps the most useful way of understanding the historical process of cultural interaction in India, and it is a model that applies across virtually every domain of cultural life.

The best example of the mutual exchange of Ganga giving to Jamuna and vice-versa in equal measure are the festivals: the rituals of Muharram or the celebration of Basant in a Chishti khanqah, or the pyrotechny and sweetmeats in Diwali and Dussehra.

Or consider architecture, perhaps the clearest example of this two-way process. The earliest mosques of the Sultanate period already reveal negotiations between forms associated with Islamic religious architecture and building traditions deeply rooted in India. Indian craftsmen brought with them mastery of trabeate construction, carved stone, corbelled forms, brackets, pillars and decorative vocabularies developed over centuries, and over time arcuate construction, domes and vaulting interacted with these traditions. The result was not Persian architecture simply transplanted to India but something genuinely new. By the Mughal period this interaction had become extraordinarily sophisticated, so that Fathpur Sikri cannot be understood as either Persian or “Hindu” architecture. Its brackets, chhatris, pillars, carved ornament, trabeate forms, arches, domes, spatial organisation and decorative traditions came from multiple architectural genealogies, all brought together through the work of Indian masons, stonecutters, architects, designers and craftsmen operating within an imperial culture itself increasingly rooted in India. Here the language of cultural conquest becomes almost meaningless, for one cannot say that a Fathpur Sikri pillar represents the imposition of one culture upon another when it so clearly embodies the creative synthesis of multiple traditions.

The same process appears even more dramatically in language, where the interaction among Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Sanskrit-derived vernaculars, Apabhramsha traditions and regional spoken languages contributed over centuries to the development of Hindavi, Rekhta and eventually Urdu. But this was not Persian replacing an Indian language; Indian grammatical structures remained overwhelmingly dominant, and while Persian and Arabic contributed enormously to vocabulary, literary idiom and stylistic register, the resulting language was structurally South Asian. Persian itself changed in India, developing its own vocabulary, imagery, themes and stylistic characteristics, while Hindu writers became some of the most accomplished masters of Persian prose and poetry. Chandar Bhan Brahman is only the most celebrated example of a much larger phenomenon involving Kayasths, Khatris, Brahmans and other literate groups, while Muslim poets wrote in Braj, Hindavi and other vernaculars. The language produced at the confluence belonged fully to neither source alone.

North Indian classical music makes the attempt to separate Hindu and Muslim cultural ownership still more difficult, for the traditions associated with temples, courts, Sufi establishments, devotional communities and hereditary performers interacted over centuries in ways that cannot be disentangled without destroying the historical tradition itself. Dhrupad received Mughal patronage; Muslim musicians performed compositions invoking Hindu deities; Hindu musicians served Muslim courts; Sufi traditions absorbed Indian musical forms; and courtly music developed through musicians belonging to different religious backgrounds. One may identify individual genealogies and influences, but it is impossible to dismantle Hindustani classical music retrospectively into separate Hindu and Muslim components, for the tradition itself is the product of that interaction. Here again, both rivers gave and received, and the attempt to assign ownership to one community or the other is a fundamentally ahistorical enterprise.

Culinary history offers an equally obvious example of this reciprocal process. Central Asian and Persianate cooking traditions introduced or popularised certain techniques, dishes and styles of preparation, yet once in India they encountered local grains, pulses, vegetables, spices, methods of cooking and dietary conventions, and the cuisines that subsequently developed in Delhi, Awadh, Hyderabad and elsewhere were not imported packages but creations of interaction. The supposedly “Muslim” kitchen became deeply dependent upon Indian ingredients and tastes, while dishes and techniques associated with elite Indo-Persian cooking travelled into much wider society. Khichdi emerged as a preferred Mughal cuisine. Even here, borrowing was selective; religious restrictions remained, caste rules mattered, and communities rejected particular foods while adopting others. Vegetable biryani is one such example. That combination of adoption and refusal is precisely how culture evolves, and it is a process that cannot be reduced to a simple model of imposition.

The same caveat applies to the question of class and social location, for Ganga-Jamuni Tahzeeb should not be collapsed into Indo-Persian elite culture. While Persian literary culture was disproportionately connected with courts, bureaucracies, scribal groups and educated urban strata, the social field of composite culture was considerably broader. It developed in bazaars, workshops, army camps, towns, shrines, neighbourhoods and households. It existed among artisans and performers as well as poets and nobles. The evolution of Hindustani cannot be explained through courts alone, nor can culinary exchange, popular musical traditions, shared craft vocabularies, everyday forms of dress or practices associated with shrines and festivals. Composite culture was certainly uneven, often more visible in cities than villages, stronger in some regions than others, and experienced differently by elites, artisans and peasants, but that makes it historically specific rather than imaginary.

The critics are nevertheless right about one thing: Ganga-Jamuni Tahzeeb was fragile, and the violence required to partition Punjab and Bengal reveals precisely how deeply intertwined the populations had become. Separation was catastrophic because the societies being separated were not hermetically sealed civilisations, and the fact that people who shared languages, food, music, neighbourhoods and regional identities could nevertheless kill one another does not prove that the preceding cultural intimacy had never existed. It proves something more disturbing: that politics can destroy in a few years what societies have created over centuries. Shared cultural practices cannot automatically prevent political mobilisation based upon religious identity, and Partition demonstrated this terribly, but the persistence of cultural intimacy even in the face of political violence testifies to its genuine historical existence.

The concept of Ganga-Jamuni Tahzeeb should therefore certainly be rescued from romanticism. Medieval India was not an endless celebration of interfaith harmony; there were wars, temple desecrations, political discrimination, religious polemics and sectarian conflicts, as well as enormous inequalities of caste, class and gender. But correcting romantic history does not require replacing it with an equally simplistic history of permanent Hindu-Muslim antagonism, for the opposite of mythology is not counter-mythology but history, and history requires us to understand how conflict and cooperation, borrowing and rejection, accommodation and assertion could occur simultaneously. That is precisely what happened, and it is precisely what the metaphor of two rivers captures so well.

The greatest mistake, ultimately, is the retrospective search for pure cultural ownership. Such classifications sometimes possess analytical value, but when pushed too far they become historically absurd. Urdu cannot be returned to Muslims, nor can Persian written in India be returned to Iran. North Indian classical music cannot be dismantled into Hindu and Muslim notes, nor can the Taj Mahal be excised from Indian architecture. The Razmnama cannot be detached from the history of the Mahabharata simply because it was written in Persian, nor can the cultural world that produced these syntheses be dismissed as a secularist fiction. Shibli Nu’mani does not refute Ganga-Jamuni Tahzeeb; he demonstrates that shared culture never abolished separate historical memories. Iqbal demonstrates that cultural belonging does not automatically produce political nationalism. Partition demonstrates the terrible fragility of composite societies. And the history of the Sultanate and Mughal periods demonstrates something equally important: that modern binaries of national and foreign, majority and minority, indigenous and outsider cannot be projected backwards without distortion.

The Ganga-Jamuni tradition was not a finished achievement; it was a historical process, continually being created, negotiated, challenged, damaged and renewed. The Ganga did not become the Jamuna, and the Jamuna did not become the Ganga. Each retained its source and its course, but each altered the other at the confluence, and once the waters had mingled, trying to identify every drop as exclusively belonging to one river or the other became both impossible and historically pointless. India was made, in considerable measure, in that confluence, and to defend Ganga-Jamuni Tahzeeb today is therefore not to defend a comforting myth but to defend a harder historical truth: that civilisations are created not by cultural purity but through encounter, selection, resistance, borrowing and transformation. Those who cannot understand this, who insist upon reading the past through the lens of present communal categories, will find themselves unable to comprehend the richness and complexity of India’s plural heritage, a heritage that belongs to all who inhabit this subcontinent regardless of the faith into which they were born.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

For the past several days, since the news emerged that the University of Delhi had removed the long-standing postgraduate paper on the Delhi Sultanate from its revised History syllabus, journalists, academics, and concerned citizens have been asking two pressing questions. First, what is the actual importance and significance of the Delhi Sultanate for understanding Indian history? Second, what would be the negative consequences of removing this period from the curriculum? These are not merely academic queries; they go to the heart of how we understand our past and how we educate future generations. These questions were put to me too. I will try to address them in my own way here.

The decision by Delhi University to drop the elective paper, titled “The Delhi Sultanate: Structures of Authority in Medieval North India (13th-14th Centuries)“, from the postgraduate syllabus is not an isolated incident. It is part of a broader pattern of invisibilising the so-called “Muslim Period” of Indian history. Some of the other omissions in the third semester include papers on “History of North India, c. 1400-1550”, “Gender and Women in Early India: 1500 BCE to 1000 CE”, “Political Processes and Structure of Polities in Ancient India” and “Religion and Society in Ancient Indian Literature”. This began with the “rationalisation” of NCERT school textbooks, which removed all references to the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal rulers from Class 7 textbooks and reduced chapters on the Mughal Empire in Class 12. Influential women icons like Raziyya Sultan and Nur Jahan were also omitted from new Class 8 NCERT textbooks. In the past I wrote and spoke on these at a number of places. Let me also state at the very beginning that I started my teaching career by teaching Delhi Sultanate to undergraduate level, before shifting to the Mughals, whom I generally taught to post graduate students.

The latest restructuring at Delhi University is part of the ongoing curriculum restructuring under the defective National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. The revised postgraduate programme has been prepared under the Postgraduate Curriculum Framework (PGCF) 2024 in accordance with NEP 2020. The university’s syllabus document confirms that the revised postgraduate programme is based on PGCF 2024 under NEP 2020 and is effective from July 2026. Of the 38 Discipline Specific Elective papers proposed by the History Department, only 16 were included in the final notification, leaving 22 proposed courses outside the final syllabus. Professor Maya John, a member of DU’s Academic Council, criticised the decision and described it as an “infringement of the autonomy of the History Department”. According to her, the reasons for the decision “appear political and not academic in nature”. CPI(M) general secretary M A Baby questioned whether excluding a major period of the capital’s history amounted to an attempt to erase Delhi’s own past. “Being in Delhi and attempting to erase Delhi’s own history requires some serious chutzpah,” he said. To me it is just anostep to replace history with mithya, the make believe which has no basis.

This essay argues that the Delhi Sultanate is of profound significance for comprehending Indian history and that its erasure, even as an elective paper, from educational curricula produces grave intellectual and cultural consequences.

The Sultanate as a Historical Bridge

The period from the establishment of Ghurid power in the late twelfth century to the advent of the Mughals in 1526 was not an inert interval between “ancient India” and the Mughal Empire. As Aniruddha Ray argues in his integrated history of the Sultanate, this was a period in which political authority, agrarian relations, urbanisation, military organisation, technologies, social groups, languages, religious traditions, and cultural practices underwent transformations whose consequences extended far beyond the Sultanate itself. The Sultanate serves as a crucial historical bridge, and to remove it is to remove one of the principal links between early medieval and early modern India, thereby making much of what came afterwards unintelligible.

This methodological point is central to Ray’s organisation of The Sultanate of Delhi (1206–1526): Polity, Economy, Society and Culture, where he deliberately divides his account between political history and a second part dealing with the structure of government, land, trade, commerce, urbanisation, architecture, science and technology, social life, and religious movements. His purpose is to move beyond narratives that merely recount political events and to offer an integrated understanding of the Sultanate as a formative phase in Indian civilisation. What disappears when the Sultanate disappears from a curriculum is therefore not simply the Khaljis and Tughluqs, but an entire phase in the development of the Indian economy, society, cities, technologies, and culture.

Challenging the “Dark Age” Paradigm

There is a revealing historiographical history behind attempts to marginalise medieval India. Ray recalls that colonial officials from the late eighteenth century onwards characterised India’s medieval centuries as a “Dark Age”, partly to contrast supposedly disordered pre-colonial conditions with the benefits claimed for British government. Some Indian writers subsequently reproduced this terminology. Ray consciously wrote his integrated history of the Sultanate partly to challenge precisely this representation.

To omit several centuries in which cities expanded, commercial networks intensified, coinage spread, new technologies appeared, architecture flourished, vernacular and Persian literary cultures developed, and major religious movements transformed Indian society risks reproducing in another form the old colonial assumption that medieval India was somehow an interruption in Indian civilisation. The Sultanate was certainly an age of warfare, conquest, exploitation, and social hierarchy. But so were many other periods of Indian and world history. None of these characteristics converts three centuries into an historical void. The task of the historian is to explain change, not to designate convenient centuries as darkness.

Mohammad Habib’s “Twin Revolutions”

A major historiographical contribution that must be considered is the pioneering work of Mohammad Habib, particularly his landmark introduction to the 1952 reprint of Elliot and Dowson’s History of India as Told by Its Own Historians. Rejecting both the colonial narrative of a “Dark Age” and the mere chronicling of dynasties, Habib employed a framework of historical materialism to reinterpret the Sultanate’s advent. He argued that the Ghurian conquest was not simply a foreign invasion but should be viewed as “a revolution of Indian city-labour led by the Ghurian Turks”.

This bold thesis rested on his concept of an “Urban Revolution“. He contended that the conquest catalysed the creation of new cities, making them “the sole repositories of the country’s civic sense”. These urban centres became engines of change, concentrating the surplus of the working classes and giving the Sultans a powerful new base. This urban dynamism was followed by a “Rural Revolution“, a transformation of the agrarian administration that was fundamental to the stability and power of subsequent empires. As Habib argued, without this prior revolution in the administrative machine, Alauddin Khalji’s far-reaching agrarian policies would have been impossible. By proposing this “twin revolution” thesis, Habib placed the Sultanate at the very heart of a profound socio-economic transformation, making its study indispensable for understanding the emergence of a new India.

State Formation, Urbanisation, and Economic Transformation

The Sultanate period is indispensable for understanding how states are made. Older histories often described Sultanate institutions as though they were stable from the beginning: Sultan, wazir, iqtaʿ, provincial governor, army, and bureaucracy. But these institutions changed substantially over time. Sunil Kumar demonstrates that political relationships were intensely personal, with free military commanders, slaves, princes, jurists, and local chiefs operating through overlapping networks of service, patronage, and allegiance. The bandagān, or military slaves, could rise to the highest military and political positions, yet their authority remained rooted in personal dependence upon rulers. This tension between a slave elite produced through service and dynastic monarchy seeking to transmit sovereignty through hereditary succession is a central lesson in how political power was actually negotiated and exercised.

The economic history of the Sultanate is equally transformative. The Cambridge Economic History of India identifies the emergence and domination of the Delhi Sultanate as marking “a very clear break with the region’s political past” and introducing “innovations of profound importance”. These include the successful creation of a military power sustained by the regular extraction of resources from an extensive territory, the emergence of a new ruling class with direct claims over shares of the produce, a proliferation of urban centres, and the growth of new manufactures such as paper and lime mortar. Ray shows that maritime commerce between India and western Asia long predated the Sultanate but intensified and changed direction as larger Indian Ocean networks developed. Within the Sultanate, cash circulation expanded substantially, with the rapid increase in currency from the early fourteenth century linked with cash revenue payments, the movement of agricultural produce to towns, and the expansion of commercial exchange. A society in which agricultural surplus increasingly moves through markets, taxes are increasingly expressed in money, roads sustain caravans, and towns absorb rural produce is undergoing significant structural change.

Opening India to the Wider World

The Sultanate dramatically intensified India’s connections with the wider world. This was not a period of isolation but of unprecedented integration. The establishment of the Sultanate opened up India to a multitude of external economic, social, and religious influences, weaving the subcontinent more tightly into the fabric of the medieval world.

This external interaction is visible in the very structure of the state. As Sunil Kumar and Peter Jackson have shown, the Sultanate’s political and military elite was composed of a continuous flow of immigrants, slaves, and adventurers from Central Asia, Persia, and Afghanistan, who were then integrated into the Indian political order. Ray demonstrates how these immigrants, such as the Afghans, settled, acquired landed interests, and became key elements of the ruling class. Simultaneously, the Indian Ocean trade networks that Ray highlighted link India to West Asia, Southeast Asia, and China, making the subcontinent a vital node in a globalised medieval economy. To remove the Sultanate is to erase this crucial period of re-integration, making it seem as though India was a passive recipient of global forces rather than an active participant.

Delhi as a Political Idea

One of the most consequential developments of these centuries was the emergence of Delhi as a major centre of political authority. This did not occur instantaneously. Sunil Kumar demonstrates that north India during the thirteenth century contained numerous competing centres of power, with the rulers of Delhi not continuously dominant. Peter Jackson’s detailed political history reinforces this: governors rebelled, Bengal might remain beyond effective control for years, and the central government sometimes granted the same iqtaʿ to rival commanders, allowing political competition to resolve the issue. That makes Delhi’s eventual durability more historically significant, not less. The Sultanate period is the period during which Delhi became not simply another north Indian city but a political idea. Remove the Sultanate and the subsequent importance of Delhi under the Mughals and even in 1857 becomes historically inexplicable.

The Mongol Challenge and India’s Eurasian Connections

Peter Jackson brings another aspect of the Sultanate into particularly sharp focus: its confrontation with the Mongols. The Mongol invasions formed part of one of the greatest transformations in Eurasian history. States across Central Asia and Iran vastly more established than the Delhi Sultanate were overwhelmed. Yet the Mongols repeatedly failed to conquer the central territories of the Sultanate. Jackson shows that pressure became particularly intense during Alauddin Khalji’s reign, when invasions of unprecedented scale threatened Delhi itself. This danger reshaped military organisation, with Balban developing forces specifically intended to guard the frontier and Alauddin maintaining substantial armies both against the Mongols and for campaigns within India. Had the Sultanate collapsed under Mongol pressure, the subsequent history of the subcontinent might have developed very differently. The Sultanate consequently forms part of the history not merely of India but of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Eurasia.

Social Mobility and Complex Hindu-Muslim Relations

Perhaps one of Ray’s most useful contributions is his emphasis upon social mobility. The Sultanate’s political establishment initially favoured Central Asian immigrant elites, but such monopolies could not be sustained indefinitely. As the state expanded, it required administrators, soldiers, accountants, and educated personnel on a scale that established aristocratic families alone could not supply. Ray notes the increasing entry of Indian Muslims, converts, persons of comparatively humble background, Hindus, and other groups into state service. This is precisely where the chronicler Barani becomes especially revealing: his anxiety about “low-born” persons entering education and public service tells us that social barriers were in fact being breached.

Ray’s evidence is especially useful in challenging simplistic narratives of Hindu-Muslim confrontation. He notes that Hindu soldiers served in Sultanate armies, Hindu commanders could hold significant military positions, Muslim nobles employed Hindu managers and accountants, and Hindus participated in local administration. This does not mean that medieval society was free of religious discrimination, exclusion, or violence. It was not. But it does demonstrate that social and political life cannot be reduced to “Hindu rulers versus Muslim rulers”. People interacted through administration, commerce, warfare, employment, craft production, and neighbourhood life even when religious and social boundaries remained strong. The historian’s task is precisely to explain how cooperation, inequality, conflict, and accommodation existed simultaneously.

The Sufi-Bhakti Crucible

The Sultanate era was not defined by monolithic religious confrontation but by a dynamic and complex process of cultural and spiritual exchange. Mohammad Habib persistently emphasised the historical role of the Sufis in creating a “culture of tolerance, accommodation and appreciation of difference”. Figures like the Chishti saint Nizamuddin Auliya, who maintained a deliberate independence from the court, were instrumental in this process. This was also the age of Amir Khusrau, who embodied the cultural synthesis of the period, seamlessly blending Persian and Indian traditions.

Simultaneously, the Bhakti movement was gaining momentum, with saints and poets across the subcontinent challenging orthodoxies and fostering personal devotion. The interaction between these two powerful currents created a fertile ground for new religious expressions and social ideas. Ray draws attention to another dimension: Sufi criticism of social inequality could attract members of disadvantaged social groups, including Hindus, and create spaces of interaction below the level of court politics. He even raises the suggestive question of whether such social experiences formed part of the much longer background against which Akbar’s sulh-i kul later emerged. One need not accept a simple linear progression from Sufism to sulh-i kul to recognise the larger importance of the point. The religious history of Mughal India did not begin with Akbar. Nor did Bhakti or Sufi interaction suddenly emerge in the sixteenth century. Their historical worlds had been taking shape for centuries. To excise the Sultanate is to remove the very crucible in which so much of India’s subsequent religious and cultural identity was forged.

Amir Khusrau and the Cultural Transformation of India

The Sultanate period is equally indispensable to linguistic and literary history. Amir Khusrau alone makes this evident. A major Persian poet, court intellectual, musician, and disciple of Nizamuddin Auliya, he inhabited simultaneously the Persianate literary world and the social world of India. Ray stresses the extraordinary evidentiary value of his writings. Khaza’in al-Futuh, Tughluqnama, Qiran al-Sa’dain, his letters and literary writings provide information not only on campaigns but on education, court culture, social life, and the religious world of Delhi. Persian became deeply rooted as a language of administration, historical writing, and high culture while interacting with Indian vernaculars. The linguistic environment from which Hindavi and ultimately the Hindi-Urdu continuum developed cannot be explained if the Sultanate is omitted. Cultures do not appear suddenly when dynasties change.

Science and Technology: A Society That Was Not Stagnant

Ray’s discussion of science and technology makes the case even stronger. Among the developments associated with these centuries were the spinning wheel, improved irrigation devices, distillation techniques, advances in military technology, architectural engineering, and the expanding use of paper and specialised craft knowledge. Ray explicitly rejects the idea that Indian society in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was technologically stagnant. He argues that peasants and artisans adopted new technologies when these increased production or market opportunities, and that technological change interacted with commercialisation and social relations. The spinning wheel is a particularly striking example. Ray, following earlier economic historians, notes that its adoption enormously increased the production of yarn, thereby influencing textile manufacture and commerce. He similarly links irrigation developments and the canals of Firoz Shah Tughluq with agricultural production. Even where historians disagree over precise origins and chronology, these debates demonstrate something fundamental: medieval India was technologically dynamic. To remove the Sultanate from education reinforces precisely the false image of technological immobility that historical scholarship has spent generations challenging.

Architecture as Historical Evidence

The built environment provides the most visible demonstration of the formative character of these centuries. Mosques, tombs, minarets, forts, reservoirs, madrasas, and urban complexes developed through interaction among imported architectural traditions, Indian craftsmen, regional building materials, and existing techniques. The Qutb complex, Siri, Tughluqabad, Jahanpanah, Firozabad, Hauz Khas, and the Lodi monuments are not merely picturesque remains. They are historical documents. They reveal changing engineering, patronage, labour organisation, urban development, and aesthetic interaction. Ray’s decision to devote a separate chapter to architecture and sculpture is therefore important. His overall structure places architecture alongside economy, technology, and social history rather than treating monuments as decorative appendages to political narrative. To preserve Sultanate buildings as “heritage” while removing the history that produced them would be profoundly contradictory. Heritage without historical context becomes spectacle.

Different Historians, Different Sultanates

The significance of the period becomes still clearer when one examines the very different ways historians have interpreted it. A. L. Srivastava, Mohammad Habib, Peter Jackson, Sunil Kumar, and Aniruddha Ray do not present the same Delhi Sultanate. Their disagreements concern fundamental historical questions. Was the Sultanate essentially foreign, or did it become rooted in India? Was it a theocracy, a military state, an exploiting ruling order, or a political formation whose religious ideology had constantly to negotiate with social reality? Did centralisation originate with rulers in Delhi or emerge through negotiations among rulers, military commanders, and local chiefs? How important were cities and commercialisation? Did conquest produce social transformation? What was the relationship between migration and indigenous developments? How far did technology reshape production?

Such disagreements are not reasons for excluding the Sultanate. They are reasons for teaching it. History becomes meaningful when students see that interpretations are arguments grounded in evidence rather than truths handed down for memorisation. Students would lose an opportunity to understand historical disagreement itself if the Sultanate were removed. No single interpretation should be converted into an authorised narrative. They should be read against one another. That is what studying history means.

The Costs of Erasure

The damage caused by removing the Delhi Sultanate from historical study is not that students will forget the dates of Iltutmish, Razia, Balban, Alauddin Khalji, or Muhammad bin Tughluq. The real loss is conceptual. Students will lose the ability to understand:

· how Delhi became a major political centre;
· how conquest evolved into state formation;
· how personal military networks developed into changing administrative structures;
· how military slaves became nobles and rulers;
· how the Sultanate survived the Mongol transformation of Eurasia;
· how revenue, military necessity, and political centralisation became interconnected;
· how local chiefs negotiated with imperial authority;
· how northern India and the Deccan became more closely connected;
· how towns expanded and craft production developed;
· how monetary circulation and commercial exchange intensified;
· how India participated in Indian Ocean and Eurasian trade;
· how technological change affected textiles, irrigation, warfare, and production;
· how migrants, converts, slaves, artisans, and local elites experienced differing forms of social mobility;
· how Persian became an Indian language of administration and high culture;
· how Sufi and Bhakti worlds developed;
· how architecture emerged through interaction rather than civilisational isolation;
· how the foundations of much that characterised Mughal India had been laid centuries earlier.

As historian Mridula Mukherjee observed, “Continuity is essential to any historical narrative. Big gaps distort understanding. That’s not how history is written or taught”. She warned that excluding such formative periods disrupts the chronological flow and prevents students from grasping the evolution of Indian society. The removal of the Sultanate from educational curricula reinforces precisely the false image of technological and social immobility that historical scholarship has spent generations challenging.

The Sources Teach Historical Method

The Sultanate deserves a substantial place in education for another reason: its sources teach students how historical knowledge is produced. Minhaj-i Siraj, Amir Khusrau, Ziyauddin Barani, Shams-i Siraj Afif, Ibn Battuta, malfuzat, inscriptions, coins, and architecture do not tell identical stories. Ray himself begins with a chapter on sources and insists upon combining Persian and Arabic chronicles with inscriptions, coins, regional-language materials, and travellers’ accounts. He notes that political history provided the traditional framework, but after Independence historians increasingly investigated agrarian history, urbanisation, social conditions, and regional histories through a wider body of evidence. His treatment of Barani is particularly instructive. Ray regards Barani as indispensable, especially for economic and social information, yet simultaneously warns of inaccuracies, memory, personal circumstances, and authorial motivation. Sunil Kumar carries this methodological critique still further, asking not only whether chronicles are factually reliable but how their categories and narratives themselves construct political meaning. Students therefore learn one of the most important lessons of historical education: sources must be interrogated, not merely believed.

Why the Sultanate Is Essential for Understanding the Mughals

The most obvious consequence of removing the Sultanate is the enormous explanatory gap created before Mughal India. Babur did not enter an India without a political history. By 1526, Delhi had acquired centuries of political prestige. Persian was deeply rooted in government and literature. A monetised economy and extensive minting traditions already existed. The iqtaʿ had undergone centuries of experimentation. Revenue extraction had increasingly connected villages with the state. Long-distance trade linked northern India to the coasts and Indian Ocean. Urban centres supported large populations of artisans, merchants, officials, and scholars. North India and the Deccan had been brought into sustained political interaction. Sufi institutions were deeply established. Military elites had long incorporated Turks, Afghans, Indian Muslims, Rajputs, and others. State workshops, or karkhanas, were already established institutions. Ray explicitly observes that the karkhana was among the Sultanate institutions that continued into Mughal times and that its basic structure displayed substantial continuity. The Mughal Empire therefore transformed an already transformed India. To jump from an earlier period directly to Akbar is to make Mughal state formation look almost miraculous.

History Cannot Be Understood by Removing Difficult Centuries

There is a larger principle at stake. The purpose of historical education is not to manufacture a comforting genealogy for the present. Nor is it to divide the past into centuries that supposedly belong to one religious community and centuries belonging to another. Historical periods do not become dispensable because they are politically uncomfortable.

The Delhi Sultanate was born from conquest, but it became rooted in India. Its rulers invoked Islamic legitimacy, but political necessity repeatedly constrained religious prescription. Its armies fought Hindu rulers and also employed Hindu soldiers. Its nobility contained Turks, Khaljis, Afghans, Indian Muslims, converts, and men of slave origin. Its cities drew migrants while creating opportunities for Indian artisans. Its Persian literary culture interacted with Indian languages. Its economy became increasingly monetised. Its merchants participated in commercial networks extending across Asia. Its Sufis could challenge both social hierarchy and political authority. Its architects created forms that could not have emerged without the labour and skills of Indian craftsmen. Its institutions became part of the inheritance received and transformed by the Mughals.

To conclude, Aniruddha Ray’s integrated treatment is especially important here. His entire book is, in effect, an argument against defining the Sultanate by its dynasties alone. By including trade, cities, technology, architecture, society, and religion, he demonstrates that these three centuries belonged to the continuing history of Indian civilisation rather than constituting a blank space between two supposedly more legitimate periods.

To erase the Sultanate would therefore do more than shorten a syllabus. It would break historical connections. It would leave the Mughal period without its institutional and cultural prehistory, urbanisation without part of its development, economic history without crucial stages of monetisation and commerce, religious history without the formative centuries of Sufi-Bhakti interaction, and architectural history without some of India’s most important experiments in form and technology.

The past is not an inheritance from which inconvenient centuries may be deleted. It is a connected process of continuity, rupture, conflict, adaptation, and change. The Delhi Sultanate belongs in the curriculum not because it must be celebrated, defended, or condemned, but because without understanding these three centuries we cannot adequately understand the making of medieval India, the emergence of early modern India, or the historical processes through which the society we inhabit eventually came into being.

Select Reading List

1. Elliot, H. M., and John Dowson. The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians. Vol. II. With an Introduction by Mohammad Habib. Cosmopolitan Publishers, 1952.
2. Habib, Mohammad. Studies in Medieval Indian Polity and Culture: The Delhi Sultanate and Its Times. Edited by Irfan Habib. Oxford University Press, 2015.
3. Habib, Mohammad, and Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, eds. A Comprehensive History of India: The Delhi Sultanate (A.D. 1206-1526). Vol. V. People’s Publishing House, 1970.
4. Jackson, Peter. The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
5. Kumar, Sunil. The Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate, 1192-1286. Permanent Black, 2007.
6. Kumar, Sunil. “When Slaves Were Nobles: The Shamsi Bandagan in the Early Delhi Sultanate.” Studies in History 10 (1994): 23-52.
7. Ray, Aniruddha. The Sultanate of Delhi (1206–1526): Polity, Economy, Society and Culture. Routledge, 2019.
8. Raychaudhuri, Tapan, and Irfan Habib, eds. The Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume 1: c. 1200-c. 1750. Cambridge University Press, 1982.
9. Srivastava, A. L. The Sultanate of Delhi. Shiva Lal Agarwala, 1950.

Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947. New Delhi: Pearson Education India, 2014 edition. ISBN 978-93-325-3574-9. 441 pp.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

With the passing of Professor Sumit Sarkar (b. 1939) on 13 August 2026, India has lost one of the tallest historians of modern India. There will appropriately be assessments of his entire scholarly career: of The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, Writing Social History, his essays on nationalism, popular politics and religious identities, his early engagement with Subaltern Studies and his subsequent disagreements with some of its directions. Yet for several generations of students and teachers, there is one book through which Sumit Sarkar first entered their intellectual lives: Modern India, 1885–1947. I pay my tribute to him through this review.

It is difficult to think of many works of Indian history that have shaped so many historians before they became historians.

Published originally in the early 1980s, Modern India was ostensibly a general history of the last six decades of British rule. Sarkar himself described it much more modestly than its subsequent influence would warrant. The book, he explained, had two purposes: to synthesise the enormous body of specialised research that had accumulated on the political, social and economic history of modern India, and simultaneously to explore the possibilities of a “history from below”, moving away from the conventional concentration upon the activities, ideas and manoeuvres of political leaders.

Those two objectives transformed what could have been another textbook into something altogether different.

A Textbook That Was Never Merely a Textbook

Students approaching Modern India for the first time could be forgiven for finding it intimidating. Sarkar did not simplify history by removing its difficulties. He compressed an extraordinary quantity of research, argument, statistics and historiographical controversy into a narrative of remarkable density.

The structure of the book itself announces its difference. Political history is continually interrupted and enriched by the colonial economy, the drain of wealth, deindustrialisation, the commercialisation of agriculture, land relations, capitalist development, caste and communal consciousness, labour, business groups, peasants, tribal movements and the social roots of the intelligentsia. The Swadeshi movement is accompanied by labour unrest and the samitis; Non-Cooperation by its social composition and regional variations; Civil Disobedience by business attitudes, peasant movements and “pressures from below”; Quit India by its social composition and sharply differing regional trajectories. The final years bring together the INA trials and the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny with Tebhaga, Punnapra-Vayalar and Telangana.

This organisation was itself an argument about what constituted history.

Before Sarkar, the history of Indian nationalism could still quite easily be narrated as the history of the Indian National Congress: Moderate politics, Extremism, Gandhi, Non-Cooperation, Civil Disobedience, constitutional negotiations, Quit India, Mountbatten and Independence. Sarkar retained all of these. He did not replace political history with social history. What he did was more important: he altered the relationship between them.

Gandhi remained indispensable, but so did the peasant who interpreted Gandhi in ways Gandhi himself might not have approved. Congress resolutions mattered, but so did rumours in villages. Political leaders mattered, but workers, tribals, tenants, zamindars, businessmen, students, lower-middle-class activists and anonymous crowds acquired historical agency.

This was a profound pedagogical revolution.

Bringing the People into Modern Indian History

Perhaps the most consequential heading in the entire book appears near the beginning of Chapter Three: “Towards a ‘History from Below‘”.

Sarkar begins from a striking historiographical problem. Historians knew a great deal about the Western-educated intelligentsia but comparatively little about the historical experience and changing consciousness of peasants, agricultural labourers, artisans, industrial workers and other social groups. The consequence, he argued, was that the history of nationalism tended to become history written “from the top downwards”. He therefore imagined a history in which the rebellion of Birsa Munda could receive attention before the disputes between Moderates and Extremists.

Today such an approach may appear almost self-evident. It was not self-evident when Sarkar was writing.

His achievement becomes clearer if we recognise that Modern India appeared at a remarkable historiographical moment. Marxist history had already redirected attention towards colonial exploitation, class formation and material structures. The Cambridge School had challenged nationalist narratives through its analyses of locality, faction, patronage and elite competition. Subaltern Studies was just beginning its enormously influential intervention.

Sarkar engaged with all of these without becoming imprisoned within any one of them.

He could appreciate the Cambridge historians’ excavation of local politics while rejecting their tendency to reduce nationalism to competition, patronage and individual ambition. He could employ Marxist categories while criticising mechanistic class analysis. He could recognise the achievement of nationalist historiography while refusing its tendency towards the celebration of great leaders. And he could turn towards popular autonomy without pretending that “the people” constituted a homogeneous revolutionary subject.

That intellectual independence is one reason the book has aged so remarkably well.

Sarkar was unusually candid about his own standpoint. No historian, he wrote, could be free of bias; unconscious or concealed bias was more dangerous than acknowledged assumptions. He therefore stated his premises openly: colonial exploitation and resistance to it were central; Indian society contained profound internal tensions; class remained important but had to be handled flexibly; and conventional nationalist, communalist, Cambridge and even some Marxist historiographies shared, despite their differences, an excessive preoccupation with elites.

It was an extraordinary lesson for students: historical objectivity does not require pretending that the historian has no standpoint. It requires making one’s assumptions visible and submitting them to evidence.

Leaders and Masses

One of Sarkar’s most enduring contributions was his treatment of the relationship between nationalist leadership and popular initiative.

Consider Non-Cooperation. Sarkar refuses to describe it simply as a movement launched by Gandhi and obeyed by millions. He argues that it must be understood simultaneously at three levels: the all-India movement shaped by Congress leadership, the participation of distinct social classes and groups, and, perhaps most importantly, the regional and local variations.

That three-level method became enormously influential.

It allowed historians to ask questions that transformed research. What did swaraj mean to a peasant? Did a tribal community understand forest satyagraha in the same way as the Congress Working Committee? What happened when a national slogan entered a village? Were peasants merely mobilised by elite politicians, or did they appropriate nationalist language for their own struggles over rent, land, forests, wages and social dignity?

Sarkar repeatedly encountered moments when popular politics escaped elite control. In Bengal during Non-Cooperation, official reports themselves recorded movements moving “beyond the control of the leaders”. Villagers refused taxes and rents, entered forests and created their own institutions of “Swaraj”. Sarkar emphasised that some of the most striking examples occurred precisely in districts seldom visited by major nationalist leaders.

Yet he never romanticised spontaneity.

Popular movements could be courageous, creative and autonomous; they could also be fragmented, caste-bound, communal, locally limited or politically contradictory. National leadership could restrain radical possibilities, but it could also provide organisation, language and an all-India framework to dispersed grievances.

The tension between leadership and popular initiative therefore became not an inconvenience to be eliminated but the very substance of historical explanation.

Gandhi After Sarkar

The Gandhi who emerges from Modern India is consequently much more interesting than either the Mahatma of nationalist hagiography or the bourgeois manipulator of crude Marxist caricature.

Sarkar understood Gandhi’s extraordinary ability to discover symbols capable of connecting politics with everyday existence. Salt is perhaps the finest example. It transformed the abstraction of swaraj into something universally intelligible, particularly to the rural poor. Yet almost immediately, local pressures pushed beyond the carefully constructed Gandhian programme. Villagers along the route of the Dandi March demanded revenue refusal, something Gandhi accepted only reluctantly.

Thus the nationalist movement was neither simply commanded from above nor spontaneously generated from below. It emerged through negotiation, appropriation, misunderstanding, discipline, resistance and interaction between the two.

For generations of researchers, that insight opened entire fields of enquiry.

Region Matters

Another enduring lesson of Modern India was that there was no single Indian experience of nationalism.

Sarkar continually breaks the all-India narrative into regional histories. Non-Cooperation had different social foundations in Bengal, Bihar, Punjab, Awadh, Andhra and Kerala. Civil Disobedience could not be understood simply through Dandi. Quit India looked entirely different depending upon whether one stood in Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh, Midnapur, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Punjab, Kerala or the North-West Frontier Province.

His discussion of 1942 is exemplary. Sarkar contrasts the relative quiet of Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province with the formidable mass rebellions in Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, Midnapur, Orissa and Maharashtra-Karnataka, and seeks explanations in agrarian structure, communal politics, wartime employment, political organisation and earlier histories of mobilisation.

This insistence upon regional variation helped reshape the research agenda of modern Indian history. The national movement could no longer adequately be studied from Delhi, Bombay or Calcutta alone. District archives, vernacular newspapers, police reports, oral memories and local records became indispensable.

The “nation” had to be reconstructed from its regions.

Neither Celebration nor Denunciation

One reason students repeatedly return to Sarkar is that his history refuses easy moral comfort.

Colonialism is not neutralised. Sarkar’s analysis begins from the structural reality of imperial domination and exploitation. Yet nationalism is not sanctified merely because it opposed colonialism.

Congress could mobilise millions and simultaneously contain them. Capitalists could support nationalism while fearing labour militancy. Rich peasants and poorer cultivators could participate in the same movement for different reasons. Caste mobilisation could challenge hierarchy while creating new exclusions. Religious identities could coexist with nationalism but could also harden into communal politics.

Even Independence appears as both triumph and tragedy.

The movement had accomplished what once appeared impossible: the entry of masses into political life and the destruction of the permanence claimed by the Raj. Yet Partition, communal violence and the survival of major structures of colonial administration complicated any triumphalist ending. Sarkar’s opening chapter therefore describes the transition between 1885 and 1947 as immense but “grievously incomplete”.

That phrase captures something essential about his historical imagination.

History was made through contradictions.

The Extraordinary Ending: 1945–47

The final chapter perhaps best demonstrates Sarkar’s method.

A conventional narrative of the transfer of power would naturally concentrate upon Wavell, Attlee, Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Jinnah, the Cabinet Mission and Mountbatten. Sarkar discusses them all. But beside constitutional negotiation he places the INA agitation, the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny, strikes, Tebhaga, Punnapra-Vayalar and Telangana.

His formulation is crucial: the decisions of British and Indian leaders cannot be understood without the “counterpoint” of pressures from below. Popular mobilisation helped make continued British rule untenable; fear of uncontrolled popular radicalism simultaneously encouraged Congress leaders towards negotiation and compromise; and the limitations of popular anti-imperialist mobilisation helped determine the settlement eventually reached in August 1947.

In a few sentences, the distinction between political history and social history collapses.

Negotiations at the top become unintelligible without movements below.

That was Sumit Sarkar’s craft at its finest.

How Modern India Shaped Historians

The influence of this book cannot be measured merely through citations.

Its deeper impact lies in the questions generations of historians learned to ask after reading it.

A student who read Sarkar seriously could no longer be satisfied by knowing what happened. One had to ask: Who participated? From which social groups? Why did the movement succeed in one district and fail in another? What happened to a political slogan when it travelled from the Congress platform to the village? What were the economic circumstances behind mobilisation? Who benefited? Who remained outside? Where did caste intersect with class? How did religious identity acquire political meaning? When did leaders lead, and when were they themselves being pushed by movements they only partially controlled?

Perhaps even more importantly, Sarkar taught students to distrust neatness.

Historical movements do not proceed according to textbook categories. The “Moderate”, “Extremist”, “Gandhian”, “Communist”, “peasant”, “bourgeois”, “communal” and “nationalist” inhabit overlapping historical worlds. People move between categories. Political meanings change according to place and circumstance.

Once one had learned to read history this way, it was difficult to return to a chronicle of governors-general, Congress sessions and constitutional Acts.

Beyond the Specialists: A Book Read Across the Historical Profession

There is another measure of the extraordinary reach of Modern India: it was never read only by specialists in modern Indian history.

Alongside the major works of Bipan Chandra and, for a somewhat later generation, Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Sarkar’s Modern India became one of those rare books that crossed the artificial chronological boundaries within which university departments often organise the Indian past. Ancient historians read it. Medievalists read it. Archaeologists read it. Scholars whose own research ended centuries before 1885 nevertheless kept returning to it.

I can say this personally. Although my own specialisation has been medieval India, this is one of the books on modern Indian history that I have read, returned to, and learned from repeatedly, much as I have from the major works of Bipan Chandra and Sekhar Bandyopadhyay. One did not need to be a specialist in colonial India to recognise what Sarkar was doing. The book offered lessons in historical method that travelled far beyond its chronological limits: how structures and events should be connected; how political history must be anchored in social and economic realities; how elite sources can be read for evidence of popular action; how regional variation complicates generalisation; and, above all, how the historian must continuously ask who is missing from an apparently complete narrative.

That is perhaps one of the clearest signs of a truly important historical work. It changes the habits not only of scholars working on its own period but also of historians working on entirely different centuries.

A medieval historian reading Sarkar could begin asking differently about peasants beneath the Mughal revenue system, artisans beneath courtly descriptions, local society beneath chronicles of emperors, and regional experience beneath the apparently uniform institutions of an empire. An ancient historian might similarly be reminded that dynasties and inscriptions cannot exhaust the social history of a civilisation. In this sense, Modern India taught a methodological lesson that was never confined to modern India at all.

A Book That Shaped Lives

There is another history of Modern India that will probably never be adequately documented.

It is the history of the book in classrooms, university libraries, hostels and teachers’ studies across India.

Copies were underlined until entire pages became marked. Margins accumulated questions, exclamation marks and disagreements. Students preparing for examinations discovered that what appeared to be a textbook demanded the concentration normally reserved for a monograph. Teachers returned to particular passages year after year and discovered another argument concealed within Sarkar’s compressed prose.

Some readers became historians.

Some became teachers.

And those teachers placed the book before another generation.

That is how scholarship shapes lives.

Sarkar himself acknowledged this relationship beautifully. In the preface he thanked the students of his modern Indian history classes upon whom he had tested his ideas for years, adding that their questions and criticisms had been indispensable in helping him refine his formulations.

The acknowledgement tells us something important about the origins of the book. Modern India was not simply written and then taken into the classroom. It grew partly out of the classroom itself.

Perhaps that is why it has lived there for so long.

A Book to Argue With

No great historical work survives because every proposition in it remains correct.

Much has happened in modern Indian historiography since Modern India appeared. Subaltern Studies developed in directions Sarkar himself subsequently criticised. Gender history transformed our understanding of nationalism and domesticity. Dalit and caste histories raised questions inadequately addressed by older class-centred frameworks. Studies of Adivasi politics, environmental history, religious identities, print culture, everyday life and global and transnational connections have greatly expanded the field.

Parts of Modern India inevitably belong to the historiographical moment in which it was written.

But that does not diminish the book’s greatness. It establishes it.

A classic is not a book that ends debate. A classic is a book after which debate cannot return to where it was before.

By that measure Modern India, 1885–1947 is unquestionably a classic.

Students may disagree with Sarkar’s Marxism. They may question particular class formulations, interpretations of Gandhi, assessments of bourgeois politics or explanations of communalism. Sarkar himself would surely have preferred disagreement grounded in evidence to ritualistic reverence.

What cannot easily be escaped are the questions he placed before us.

Where are the people?

What is happening beneath the resolutions of political organisations?

What is the relationship between material circumstances and political consciousness?

How does an all-India movement change as it enters different regions?

How do ordinary people appropriate the language created by leaders?

And what happens when those people begin making history on their own terms?

The Historian’s Afterlife

On 13 August 2026, Sumit Sarkar left this world. But historians have a peculiar afterlife.

They survive not simply in books bearing their names but in the questions other people ask because they once read them.

Somewhere a student encountering modern Indian history for the first time will open Modern India, 1885–1947. Perhaps she will initially search for Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, Civil Disobedience or Quit India. But if she continues reading, she will encounter peasants, workers, tribals, students, women and men in provincial towns, village activists, businessmen, zamindars, tenants and anonymous crowds. She will discover that nationalism was simultaneously an idea, an organisation, a social coalition and millions of individual experiences. She may begin wondering why the history she previously knew contained so few of these people.

At that moment Sumit Sarkar will have done it again.

He will have produced another historian.

That may ultimately be the deepest measure of the achievement of this book. It did not merely tell generations of Indians what happened between 1885 and 1947. It taught them how to think historically.

And books that teach us how to think do not die with their authors.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

At a time when serious attempts are being made to distort India’s past, compressing six centuries into an indistinguishable age of Hindu-Muslim strife; when the Mughals are either invisibilised or reduced to demonic carnivores; when Vikram Sampath’s works normalise the self-professed ‘Veer’ Savarkar as a genuine nationalist; when Sanjeev Sanyal rewrites early history on the basis of later period sources; and when non-professionals presume to instruct historians on how their discipline should be practised, one is compelled to ask: Do we still need an Irfan Habib?

The answer is emphatically yes. But not because Habib must always be right, or because his interpretations should be treated as final. We need him because his scholarship represents the primacy of evidence, mastery of sources, intellectual rigour, secular explanation and the courage to resist politically convenient myths.

Historical revision is not objectionable; history advances through it. Habib himself challenged earlier interpretations. His The Agrarian System of Mughal India transformed a history dominated by emperors by asking different questions: Who produced the empire’s wealth? How was surplus appropriated? What relationships existed between peasants, zamindars and the state? This shifted attention from the ruler’s religion to society’s structure. Once the peasant and artisan entered the picture, the inadequacy of explaining six centuries through communal antagonism became obvious.

That lesson is urgently relevant. We increasingly encounter representations in which Alauddin Khalji, Babur, Akbar and Aurangzeb become a single category: Muslim rulers confronting an eternal Hindu India. Political rivalries, caste, class and commercial interests are subordinated to religion. Yet Rajputs fought Rajputs and allied with Mughals. Mughal princes fought one another with Hindus and Muslims on every side. Marathas served the Mughal state as well as fought it. Muslim rulers fought other Muslim rulers with ferocity inexplicable through communal categories.

None of this requires sanitising the medieval past. Temples were destroyed. Discrimination existed. Habib’s writings hardly present Mughal India as idyllic. But that is precisely the point: History requires neither glorification nor demonisation, it requires explanation.

Today, the Mughal is transformed from a historical subject into a political metaphor, the permanent foreigner, the destroyer. Once caricature replaces analysis, the purpose is no longer to understand the empire but to manufacture an adversary for the present.

The same problem appears in modern history. Savarkar deserves serious study. His revolutionary career and conception of Hindutva are important. But his transformation into the self-evident Veer Savarkar raises another problem. Recovery is legitimate; rehabilitation must remain answerable to the complete record. A historian cannot decide beforehand that the subject is a national hero and then arrange inconvenient evidence around that conclusion.

Similarly, Sanjeev Sanyal and other non-professionals have entered the popular arena. His ‘Stitched Ship Project’ “created a 5th Century ship” based on 17th century sources!

The distinction that matters is not between professional and non-professional. It is between history and assertion. Historical method demands asking who produced a source, when and why, whether independent evidence corroborates it, and whether our interpretation survives contrary evidence. Learning Persian, Sanskrit or Arabic is not academic gatekeeping; it is elementary discipline. Yet we inhabit a culture in which years of such expertise count for less than the confidence of a television assertion.

This brings us to a deeper question: What is the job of a historian? Is it merely to narrate stories of the past, or to guide us to a better future? Sympathisers of extreme rightist forces, eager to break the communal fabric, suggest that historians should remain aloof from prevailing politics, lower their gaze, retreat into an imagined mythical past, and let politicians break the country. This is a convenient demand. It asks the historian to abdicate their most essential duty: to hold a mirror to the present by illuminating the past.

A historian cannot remain aloof. The very act of choosing what to study, what questions to ask, and what evidence to privilege is inherently political. But the historian’s politics must be the politics of truth, not of partisanship. Their duty is not to serve any faction but to serve evidence. They must guide us by showing that the past is complex, that communities were never monolithic, that conflict and coexistence were always intertwined. When politicians peddle a binary, mythical past to fracture society, the historian’s silence is complicity. Speaking truth to power is not activism; it is professional integrity.

Habib’s opposition to communal historiography has never depended upon defending one community against another. Communal history, whether Hindu or Muslim, imagines religious communities as homogeneous entities moving unchanged through centuries. Habib’s historical materialism challenged this by revealing the competing interests of classes, castes and regions that repeatedly crossed religious boundaries. His secularism emerged not merely from political conviction but from historical method.

This becomes particularly important in our emerging post-history world. History has never been more visible, with medieval rulers appearing in election speeches, monuments becoming controversies, studios debating centuries-old battles. The past is everywhere. But historical thinking is increasingly absent. We are in danger of producing a society saturated with the past but indifferent to history. This is post-intellectualism: expertise is suspect, complexity is evasion. The specialist who says “the evidence is complicated” appears weaker than the propagandist who announces “the truth is simple.” But the historian’s truth is often complicated. Akbar could order massacres and later proclaim sulh-i kul. Aurangzeb could destroy particular temples and patronise others. Rajputs could resist Mughal armies and become pillars of the Mughal ruling class. None fits the binary world of communal mythology.

So, do we still need an Irfan Habib? Perhaps more urgently today than in 1963. Not because we require another orthodoxy. We need him because we need historians who will insist that the past cannot be bullied into saying what the present wants to hear. We need historians willing to tell governments that evidence cannot be changed by notification; religious communities that faith cannot determine historical fact; political movements that mythology cannot substitute for documentation; and fellow historians that ideological sympathy cannot rescue a proposition unsupported by sources.

There are many today who wish him and his work forgotten. They seek to invisibilise scholars like him, just as they must forget the medieval period itself. Such people exist even within the institution he considered home turf, the very institution known throughout the world by his name. His work remains inconvenient to those who manufacture a mythical past, for it insists on complexity where they demand simplicity, on evidence where they offer assertion. The attempt to erase him mirrors the attempt to erase the very centuries he illuminated.

At ninety-five, the question is not simply whether India still needs Irfan Habib. It is whether India can continue to produce historians prepared to practise history with that degree of rigour and courage. For the real danger is not that one interpretation may defeat another. It is that history itself may be displaced by myth-making. And if that happens, the politician will have broken the country while the historian lowered their gaze. We need historians who will look up, speak out, and guide us, not to a mythical past, but to a future built on an honest reckoning with what truly was.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

On 12 August 2026, Professor Irfan Habib completes ninety-five years. This is an extraordinary milestone in the life of a historian who has profoundly influenced the study of India’s past. Equally important has been his defence of history as a critical and secular discipline. For more than seven decades, his presence has been felt in classrooms and seminar rooms, in the Indian History Congress, and in controversies over textbooks and historical monuments. He has also been at the centre of some of the most important intellectual and political battles concerning the interpretation of India’s past.

To describe Irfan Habib merely as an eminent historian of medieval India would therefore be inadequate. He is certainly one of the foremost historians produced by independent India, but he has also been a teacher, institution-builder, public intellectual and, throughout his life, a fighter. Scholarship and public commitment have never inhabited separate compartments in his intellectual world.

Born on 12 August 1931, Irfan Habib grew up in an unusual intellectual environment. His father, Professor Mohammad Habib, was himself among the pioneering historians of medieval India and a major figure at Aligarh Muslim University. The younger Habib consequently encountered history not merely as a university discipline. It was part of a wider conversation about colonialism, nationalism, society and the making of modern India. Yet he did not simply inherit his father’s historical concerns. He developed an approach and a body of scholarship distinctly his own.

Aligarh Muslim University became the principal arena of his academic life. There he taught generations of students and played a decisive role in establishing the Department of History and its Centre of Advanced Study (which now does not exist since March 2023, in spite of claims) that it emerged under him as one of India’s leading centres of historical research. Together with scholars such as Mohammad Athar Ali, Iqtidar Alam Khan, Satish Chandra and, subsequently, Ahsan Jan Qaisar, Shireen Moosvi and a host of others, he contributed to a fundamental reorientation in the study of medieval India.

The importance of this intellectual transformation is sometimes obscured by the label ‘Aligarh School‘. What was actually involved was a profound change in the questions historians asked. Earlier histories had largely been structured around dynasties, battles, rulers and court politics. The new historiography shifted attention towards the structures beneath the throne: peasants and zamindars, land revenue and agrarian relations, social classes, towns and markets, money and trade, technology and crafts, the nobility and the mechanisms through which the state appropriated and distributed the agricultural surplus.

History ceased to be simply an account of what Akbar, Jahangir, Shahjahan or Aurangzeb did. It became an enquiry into the society over which they ruled.

Habib’s The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–1707, first published in 1963, was a landmark in this transformation. Based upon a formidable command of Persian chronicles, administrative texts, revenue terminology, European accounts and other contemporary evidence, the book attempted nothing less than a reconstruction of the economic and social foundations of the Mughal Empire. It examined the peasantry, zamindars, revenue administration, agrarian surplus and the relationship between political authority and rural society.

Individual propositions advanced in the book have naturally been debated, modified and challenged over the succeeding six decades. That is precisely what happens to an important work of history. Its enduring achievement is that many of the questions it asked became unavoidable. Anyone seriously studying Mughal agrarian relations has, in one way or another, had to engage with Irfan Habib.

His intellectual range, however, has always been much wider than Mughal agrarian history. His writings have encompassed historical geography, cartography, technology, monetary systems, urbanisation, trade, social formations, the Indian economy, colonialism, nationalism and historiography. His Atlas of the Mughal Empire and Atlas of Ancient India, remain a remarkable exercise in combining textual scholarship with historical geography and cartographic reconstruction. His collected essays demonstrate an intellectual curiosity extending across large stretches of Indian history.

At the heart of all this work lies an uncompromising commitment to evidence.

Habib has never concealed his Marxism. But the Marxism visible in his best historical scholarship is not a substitute for empirical investigation. Theory supplies questions and categories; it does not relieve the historian of the obligation to establish facts. Anyone who has heard him discuss a paper knows how quickly an imposing theoretical proposition can be brought down to earth by a deceptively simple question: What is your evidence?

A Persian word, a revenue figure, the date of a document, the location of a village, the provenance of an inscription or the precise statement of a contemporary chronicler matters. The larger interpretation must ultimately withstand the scrutiny of the smaller fact. This insistence upon evidence connects the scholar to the public intellectual.

A Secularism That Was Never Selective

Irfan Habib’s secularism has never consisted simply of opposition to one particular kind of communalism. He has been adamantly opposed to all brands of communalism. This is fundamental to understanding both his scholarship and his public life.

It is relatively easy to condemn the communalism of one’s opponents. The more difficult test is whether one is prepared to confront communalism within one’s own immediate social and institutional surroundings. Habib repeatedly passed that test.

In Aligarh, he was often as forceful in confronting Muslim communalists, sectarian politics and conservative forces as he would later become in opposing the ideological appropriation of history by Hindutva. He never accepted the proposition that minority status could make communalism intellectually defensible. Nor did opposition to majoritarian communalism require silence about obscurantism or communal politics among Muslims. This brought him into bitter confrontations within Aligarh itself.

The episode of his suspension from Aligarh Muslim University in 1981 needs to be understood within this larger history of struggle. The immediate circumstances had their institutional complexities, but the episode also revealed something fundamental about Habib. He could be extraordinarily stubborn when he believed that academic freedom, secular values, democratic principles or the character of the university was at stake. Personal consequences rarely persuaded him to soften a position that he regarded as a matter of principle.

One might put it differently: Irfan Habib could be persuaded by evidence, but not intimidated by authority. That quality has sometimes made him a difficult adversary and occasionally, perhaps, a difficult colleague. But it is also one of the reasons his intellectual career possesses such remarkable consistency.

Leading the Indian History Congress from the Front

Nowhere has this combination of scholarship and public commitment been more visible than in his long association with the Indian History Congress.

For Habib, the Congress was never simply an organisation that assembled once a year so that historians could read papers and return home. It represented something larger: the collective responsibility of professional historians to defend the integrity of their discipline. At critical moments, he expected historians to speak.

When Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency in 1975, Habib was unwilling to accept the proposition that historians should remain indifferent to the suppression of democratic freedoms. His resistance to authoritarianism is worth remembering today precisely because it demonstrates that his criticism has never depended simply upon which political party happened to occupy power.

The same determination became increasingly visible as communal interpretations of Indian history gained political strength. When organisations associated with Hindutva sought to represent the medieval centuries primarily as an unending civilisational struggle between Hindus and Muslims, Habib was among those who challenged the historical foundations of that narrative.

He repeatedly helped the Indian History Congress take positions when silence would have been more comfortable. Whether the issue involved textbooks, historical monuments, communal interpretations of the past or institutional autonomy, he believed that professional historians had a responsibility to intervene when claims masquerading as history entered public life.

He led from the front. That phrase is particularly appropriate because he did not merely encourage others to take positions. He put his own scholarship, reputation and considerable argumentative energies behind them.

Babri Masjid and the Battle over Evidence

The Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi dispute became perhaps the greatest public test of this conception of the historian’s responsibility.

By the late twentieth century, assertions about the history of the site at Ayodhya had moved from religious belief into mass politics and eventually into the judicial arena. Habib recognised early that historians could not answer politically charged claims by simply declaring themselves above politics. If claims were being made about what had or had not existed at a particular place in the past, those claims had to be examined through historical and archaeological evidence. He therefore became deeply involved in the scholarly examination of the evidence surrounding the Babri Masjid.

His contribution was important not simply because he took a position but because he helped insist upon the rules by which historical claims should be tested. Texts had to be dated. Archaeological evidence had to be contextualised. Inscriptions had to be authenticated. Later traditions could not automatically be projected backwards. Assertions repeated frequently enough did not thereby become historical facts.

When the dispute reached the courts, including the prolonged proceedings before the Allahabad High Court, the historical case required scholars capable of navigating Persian sources, chronicles, archaeology, inscriptions, historical geography and the enormous accumulation of claims and counterclaims that had gathered around Ayodhya. Habib’s role in building and defending that historical argument was formidable.

Without his scholarship, intellectual energy and determination, the historical case presented in relation to the Babri Masjid might have been considerably weaker. He understood that once history itself had been summoned as a witness, professional historians could not abandon the courtroom of public opinion, or the actual courts, to mythology presented as historical fact.

The destruction of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992 was consequently not simply the destruction of a monument for him and many of his colleagues. It represented a profound challenge to secular politics, constitutional values and the professional historian’s insistence that the past cannot be altered by mobilisation in the present.

Yet there is an important symmetry that must not be forgotten. The Irfan Habib who confronted Hindutva over Ayodhya was the same Irfan Habib who confronted Muslim communalists in Aligarh. There was no contradiction between these battles. They arose from precisely the same principle.

Majoritarian communalism and minority communalism do not possess equal political power and may have very different consequences, but neither can provide an acceptable framework for historical enquiry. Habib’s secularism has therefore never meant balancing one communal narrative against another. It has meant rejecting the communal construction of history itself.

History as a Public Responsibility

This explains why Habib has so often entered controversies that another scholar might have preferred to avoid.

He has opposed attempts to rewrite textbooks according to political requirements. He has challenged the transformation of mythology into history. He has spoken against attacks upon secular institutions and repeatedly defended the autonomy of historical scholarship. Governments have changed. Political circumstances have changed. The ideological forces against which he has argued have changed.

The underlying principles have not.

This is perhaps the most striking continuity in his public life. He could oppose authoritarian tendencies under a Congress government during the Emergency and subsequently confront the far more systematic communal rewriting of history associated with the Hindu Right. At Aligarh, meanwhile, he could turn with equal intellectual aggression upon those Muslim communalists who sought to use religion or community as a shield against criticism.

His position was never that the historian should be politically neutral in the sense of remaining silent before falsehood. Rather, the historian must be intellectually independent. Governments, religious communities, political parties and ideological movements cannot be permitted to determine in advance what the past is supposed to have been. The evidence must decide.

The Teacher

There is, however, another Irfan Habib familiar to generations of students at Aligarh.

He is the formidable figure sitting in the front row of a seminar, listening carefully until an unsupported assertion, doubtful date or questionable interpretation produces the raised hand. A speaker may have constructed an elaborate argument, only to discover that Professor Habib wants to know the source for a single sentence upon which the entire construction depends.

For young researchers this could be intimidating. It could also be extraordinarily educational. His criticism has always carried an implicit lesson: do not make a claim for which you cannot produce evidence.

Yet alongside the fierce debater has existed a remarkably generous teacher. Generations of researchers have experienced his willingness to suggest a source, locate an obscure reference, explain a difficult Persian expression, comment upon an argument or point towards evidence that the student had overlooked. His intellectual generosity has never required intellectual indulgence. Indeed, taking a student’s work seriously has often meant criticising it seriously.

To be corrected by Irfan Habib has itself been part of the education of several generations of Indian historians.

An Intellectual Legacy

Perhaps his greatest contribution cannot therefore be measured simply by counting books, articles, lectures or controversies. It lies in the questions he taught historians to ask.

Who actually produced the wealth of the Mughal Empire? How was the agricultural surplus appropriated? What was the relationship between peasant, zamindar and state? How were commodities produced and exchanged? What technologies were available? What did money mean in an overwhelmingly agrarian economy? How should social classes be understood in pre-colonial India? How did the nobility reproduce itself? How were towns connected to the countryside? And how can documents produced by states and elites be made to reveal something about people who rarely wrote histories themselves?

Such questions transformed the study of medieval India.

But Habib’s life poses another question, one extending beyond medieval history: What should a historian do when the past itself becomes a political battleground? His answer has been given through nearly three-quarters of a century of scholarship and public engagement. The historian cannot surrender evidence to mythology, communal passion or political authority. There are moments when remaining silent is itself an intellectual choice. Habib has seldom chosen silence.

He has consequently been admired, criticised, attacked and fiercely disagreed with. That is hardly surprising. A scholar who enters major public controversies cannot expect universal approval. Nor would Habib himself, one suspects, regard universal approval as particularly desirable. Intellectual life advances through disagreement, provided that disagreement remains answerable to evidence.

At ninety-five, Professor Irfan Habib represents an extraordinary continuity in Indian intellectual history. His lifetime stretches from the final phase of colonial rule through Independence and the building of the Republic, the great expansion of Indian universities, the emergence of new schools of social and economic history, the Emergency, the rise of communal politics, the destruction of the Babri Masjid and the present battles over the meaning of India’s past.

Through these enormous transformations, one characteristic has remained remarkably constant: his willingness to argue, to dissent and, when necessary, to fight.

Those of us who have studied under him, worked with him, argued with him, been corrected by him, or learnt the historian’s craft by reading his works know that such an intellectual legacy cannot adequately be contained within a bibliography. A great teacher survives not simply through his publications but through the questions he leaves behind, through habits of enquiry transmitted to successive generations and even through the disagreements he provokes.

On 12 August 2026, therefore, as Professor Irfan Habib celebrates his ninety-fifth birthday, we celebrate far more than the longevity of one of India’s most distinguished historians.

We celebrate the scholar who helped transform our understanding of Mughal India; the teacher who taught generations to ask for evidence; the Marxist who insisted that theory must submit itself to empirical scrutiny; the secularist who refused to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable brands of communalism; the public intellectual who opposed authoritarianism when it came from the Congress and communalism when it came from the Hindu Right; the Aligarh academic who was equally unafraid of Muslim communalists in his own backyard; and the historian who repeatedly led the Indian History Congress from the front when the integrity of the discipline was under attack.

Above all, we celebrate a fighter.

Governments have come and gone. Political orthodoxies have changed. New varieties of communalism and historical mythology have arisen. Academic fashions too have changed. Irfan Habib has continued to ask the same stubborn question: Where is the evidence?

At ninety-five, that question, and the courage required to keep asking it, may be among his greatest gifts to Indian history.

Happy 95th birthday, Professor Irfan Habib.

Review: Sherry Jones, The Jewel of Medina: A Novel. New York: Beaufort Books, 2008. 372 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8253-0518-4.

Historical fiction occupies an uneasy space between documented history and literary imagination. The best examples illuminate the past without claiming to replace it; the weakest blur the line between evidence and invention until readers can no longer distinguish one from the other. Sherry Jones’s The Jewel of Medina belongs to the former category only in part. It is an engaging novel, vividly written and emotionally compelling, but it also raises important historiographical questions about the representation of one of the most influential women in Islamic history, ʿĀʾishah bint Abī Bakr. I read it first years back when a copy of this book was gifted to me by my late brother in law, Late Professor Rizwan Husain, who retired from the Department of English, Aligarh Muslim University. However, I found time to re-read it now after my own retirement and, here is my review of the book.

Long before it appeared in print in 2008, The Jewel of Medina became an international controversy. Random House withdrew the novel before publication after concerns that it might provoke violent reactions, although it was eventually published by Beaufort Books. Ironically, much of the outrage came from people who had never read the work itself. Once the controversy subsides, however, the novel deserves to be judged on literary and historical grounds.

Jones makes her intentions clear from the outset. She explicitly describes the work as fiction and notes that while historical figures are retained, the dialogue and much of the narrative are products of the author’s imagination. The publisher likewise presents the book as the story of Aishah, who ‘must rely on her wits, her courage, and even her sword’ to establish herself within the emerging Muslim community, portraying it simultaneously as ‘a love story, a history lesson, and a coming-of-age tale’. This declaration is important. Jones never claims to have written a biography. She has written a historical novel, and it should first be evaluated as such.

As literature, The Jewel of Medina succeeds remarkably well. Jones recreates seventh-century Arabia with considerable narrative energy. The landscapes of Mecca and Medina, caravan routes, tribal rivalries and domestic life are rendered in language that is accessible without becoming simplistic. Her prose is cinematic, and her descriptions frequently immerse the reader in the atmosphere of the Hijaz.

The novel begins dramatically with the Affair of the Slander (ḥadīth al-ifk), placing the reader immediately inside Aishah’s emotional world as accusations concerning her return with Ṣafwān ibn al-Muʿaṭṭal spread through Medina. Jones transforms the incident into a psychological drama in which suspicion, fear, jealousy and political intrigue unfold simultaneously. The opening is effective precisely because it begins not with theology but with crisis.

Throughout the narrative Jones presents Aishah as intelligent, outspoken, adventurous and fiercely independent. In the Author’s Note, she describes her heroine as ‘an outspoken… influential political advisor… warrior… religious scholar’, emphasising her determination to shape her own destiny. This portrait undoubtedly appeals to modern readers. Yet it also reveals the novel’s central limitation.

Jones’s Aishah is, in many respects, a distinctly twenty-first-century woman inhabiting a seventh-century world. Her concerns, emotional vocabulary and understanding of individual freedom often resemble those of a modern feminist protagonist more than those emerging naturally from the earliest Arabic sources. The historical Aishah was certainly remarkable, but she lived within a social, political and religious universe profoundly different from our own. Jones sometimes allows contemporary values to reshape that universe rather than permitting the historical context to define her heroine.

The contrast becomes especially clear when one reads the novel alongside the most important scholarly studies of Aishah. Nabia Abbott’s classic Aishah: The Beloved of Mohammed (1942) remains the foundational biographical reconstruction, grounded in careful sifting of early Arabic sources. Denise Spellberg’s Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past (1994) offers a sophisticated analysis of how medieval Muslim historians constructed Aishah’s legacy for their own purposes. And Sayyid Murtada ‘Askari’s The Role of Aishah in the History of Islam (published in Arabic in the 1960s and translated into Persian and English) represents a sharply critical Shi’i perspective, arguing that many traditions attributed to Aishah were fabricated to serve political ends.

Abbott, a pioneering scholar of Islamic studies and the first woman professor at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, brought remarkable methodological rigour to her work. Her purpose differs fundamentally from Jones’s. She argues that Aishah deserves study not merely because she was Muhammad’s favourite wife, but because after his death she remained an influential figure in the political and intellectual life of the early Muslim community for almost half a century. Her concern is historical reconstruction rather than literary recreation. More importantly, Abbott explains her method with exemplary clarity. She recognises that the early Islamic traditions contain sectarian interpolation, political propaganda and legendary accretions, but insists that critical historical scholarship enables the careful historian to distinguish ‘the true from the false and the probable from the improbable’. This methodological discipline underlies her entire biography.

Spellberg’s work, published more than fifty years after Abbott’s, takes a different approach. Where Abbott sought to recover the historical Aishah, Spellberg examines how medieval Muslim scholars, almost exclusively men, shaped Aishah’s memory to serve evolving communal identities. As Spellberg writes in her introduction, ‘it is about the construction and presentation of ʿAʾisha bint Abi Bakr’s historical persona by a select group of medieval Muslim men who shaped the memory and meaning of her life for their fellow believers. It is their story not hers, for she is the object not the subject of their written remembrance and evocation.’ Spellberg demonstrates that Aishah’s legacy became a battleground for Sunni and Shiʿi definitions of legitimate authority, proper female behaviour, and communal identity. Her analysis reveals that the ‘real’ Aishah is ultimately unrecoverable; what we have instead is a series of layered interpretations, each reflecting the concerns of its own time.

‘Askari’s work represents a distinctly Shi’i scholarly tradition, one that approaches Aishah’s traditions with profound scepticism. He argues that many of the traditions attributed to her, especially those praising Abu Bakr and ‘Umar or justifying the order of the caliphate, were fabrications designed to legitimise the early caliphs at the expense of ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib. ‘Askari’s method involves tracing the chains of transmission (isnād) of Aishah’s traditions and subjecting them to rigorous historical criticism. His conclusion is stark: Aishah’s historical persona, as preserved in Sunni sources, is a construct shaped by political expediency and sectarian polemic. While his work is avowedly partisan, it represents an important counterpoint to the Sunni scholarly tradition and reminds us that Aishah’s legacy has never been a neutral subject of historical inquiry.

Jones proceeds differently from all three scholars. Where Abbott pauses before uncertain evidence, Spellberg scrutinises the motives of medieval narrators, and ‘Askari rejects entire bodies of tradition as fabricated, Jones fills the gaps with imagination. Such imaginative reconstruction is entirely legitimate in fiction, but readers unfamiliar with early Islamic history may mistake invention for historical probability.

The difference appears vividly in their treatment of Aishah’s childhood. Jones depicts her as a rebellious tomboy, racing through Mecca with a wooden sword, longing for unrestricted freedom and already resisting the constraints imposed upon girls. Abbott’s reconstruction is based closely upon the classical Arabic traditions. She likewise portrays Aishah as lively and energetic, but emphasises her delight in dolls, games and childhood companions. She carefully reproduces traditions describing Muhammad watching her play, joining children’s games, allowing her to observe public entertainments, and defending her childish pleasures even against Abu Bakr’s objections. Abbott’s Aishah is unmistakably a child of seventh-century Arabia; Jones’s often resembles a modern adolescent struggling against patriarchy.

Spellberg adds yet another dimension to this comparison. She demonstrates that Aishah’s childhood, like every other aspect of her life, was subject to selective memory and reinterpretation. The traditions that emphasise her youth at marriage, for instance, served to underscore her virginity and thus her special status among Muhammad’s wives. But these same traditions also rendered her vulnerable – a young bride whose word could be doubted, whose innocence required divine vindication. Spellberg shows that ‘Aishah’s age is a major preoccupation’ in the early sources, with variations that suggest later sectarian agendas rather than reliable historical reporting.

‘Askari, for his part, argues that the traditions about Aishah’s childhood and marriage are among the most suspect. He notes that Aishah was only a child when she entered the Prophet’s household, yet she is credited with transmitting thousands of traditions about matters she could scarcely have witnessed. For ‘Askari, this discrepancy is evidence that later narrators attributed their own views to Aishah, using her prestigious name to lend authority to their political and theological positions. This is a powerful reminder that even the most seemingly biographical details in the early sources may serve ideological rather than documentary purposes.

The marriage itself illustrates another methodological divergence. Abbott records the traditional reports concerning Aishah’s age without either apology or sensationalism. She notes that the early sources express no surprise at the disparity in age between bride and groom because such arrangements belonged to the social conventions of their own time. Jones, while retaining the traditional chronology, continually interprets the relationship through modern emotional categories. The marriage becomes above all a romance, whereas Abbott situates it within the political, social and familial structures of early Islam.

Indeed, Abbott repeatedly emphasises the political dimensions of marriage alliances in the formative Muslim community. She demonstrates how marriages involving Abu Bakr, ʿUmar, ʿUthmān and the Prophet strengthened emerging political relationships and consolidated communal leadership. Even the marriage of Ḥafṣah is analysed primarily as a political alliance rather than merely a domestic episode. Jones certainly acknowledges politics, but emotional relationships remain the principal engine of her narrative.

Spellberg extends this political analysis considerably. She argues that Aishah’s marriage was not merely a personal union but a divine arrangement, one that was subsequently deployed to legitimise Abu Bakr’s succession. The traditions in which Gabriel presents Aishah’s likeness to Muhammad, Spellberg shows, served to portray her selection as heavenly ordained, thereby indirectly sanctioning her father’s later political role. But this same divine imprimatur made Aishah a target for Shiʿi polemic, which rejected both her father’s caliphate and her own exalted status.

Perhaps nowhere is the difference more striking than in the treatment of the Affair of the Slander. Jones constructs the episode as an extended psychological novel. Safwan becomes a figure around whom emotional ambiguity revolves. Internal monologues, imagined conversations and romantic tension drive the narrative. Abbott, by contrast, approaches the same episode through the earliest Arabic sources, carefully distinguishing between variant traditions while resisting the temptation to invent motives or emotional states unsupported by the evidence.

Spellberg’s treatment of the same episode reveals its profound sectarian significance. She shows that the accusation of adultery became a prism for Sunni-Shiʿi differences. Sunni Muslims embraced Aishah’s divine vindication as recorded in the Qur’an, celebrating her as al-mubarraʾa, ‘the vindicated’. Shiʿi Muslims, however, rejected this interpretation entirely. Some argued that the relevant Qur’anic verses referred not to Aishah but to Muhammad’s concubine Maryam the Copt; others maintained that Aishah herself had slandered Maryam. As Spellberg observes, ‘Shiʿi Muslims accepted the accusation of adultery made against ʿAʾisha, but not her divine exoneration from the charges.’ This meant that Aishah’s reputation remained permanently vulnerable. She could be termed by Shiʿi sources both an adulteress and a liar – accusations that struck not only at her personally but at the entire Sunni edifice of communal memory and authority.

‘Askari’s treatment of the same episode is even more critical. He points to what he sees as inconsistencies and anachronisms in the traditional account, arguing that the story of the slander was embellished over time to serve partisan ends. He notes that the narrative relies entirely on Aishah’s own testimony, a testimony that, in his view, is inherently suspect given her later political alignment with those who opposed ‘Ali. For ‘Askari, the Affair of the Slander is not a story of divine vindication but a carefully constructed piece of propaganda designed to establish Aishah’s innocence and, by extension, the legitimacy of her father’s caliphate.

Jones is nevertheless careful to acknowledge historical uncertainty. She reminds readers that many aspects of early Islamic history remain disputed, including Aishah’s age and later sectarian evaluations of her relationship with Muhammad. This admission is commendable. Yet she frequently converts historical uncertainty into literary licence. Where the evidence is silent, the novel often substitutes psychological plausibility for documentary support.

The novel is also deeply influenced by modern feminist interpretation. Its concluding pages argue explicitly that Muhammad intended women to enjoy greater freedom, but that subsequent generations of men deprived them of those rights. Aishah herself becomes the voice through whom this argument is expressed. This is an intellectually respectable interpretative position and reflects one current within contemporary Islamic feminist scholarship. However, it remains precisely that: an interpretation. Early Islamic history is considerably more complex than the novel sometimes suggests. The development of Islamic law, political authority and gender relations cannot be reduced to a simple narrative of prophetic liberation followed by male suppression.

Spellberg’s work is particularly valuable here because it shows how Aishah’s legacy was used by medieval scholars to define proper female behaviour, often in ways that restricted women’s public roles. She demonstrates that both Sunni and Shiʿi authors, despite their profound disagreements about Aishah’s character, converged on a shared conclusion: her participation in the first civil war demonstrated the dangers of female political involvement. As one tradition cited by Spellberg has it, ‘Men perish if they obey women.’ The historical Aishah, whatever her own motivations, became a cautionary tale. Spellberg writes that ‘the manipulation of ʿAʾisha’s example provided a platform for debate about her role in politics. Although Sunni and Shiʿi authors disagreed about the essential nature of ʿAʾisha’s persona, they found significant similarities in the derivative, negative rules which her singular example implied for all Muslim women in the matter of political participation.’

‘Askari would go further. He argues that Aishah’s political involvement was not merely misguided but actively destructive, a product of her jealousy, ambition and hatred of ‘Ali. His account of Aishah’s role in the rebellion against ‘Uthman and the Battle of the Camel is unremittingly hostile. He portrays her as a scheming intriguer who manipulated events to serve her own interests and those of her family. While this interpretation is clearly partisan, it reflects a tradition of Shi’i scholarship that has deeply influenced how many Muslims understand Aishah’s legacy.

Nor does Jones sufficiently convey Aishah’s extraordinary intellectual legacy. Historical tradition remembers her not only as the Prophet’s beloved wife but also as one of the foremost transmitters of hadith, an important legal authority, a participant in the first civil war, an adviser to successive caliphs, and one of the principal architects of early Islamic memory. Abbott consistently foregrounds these dimensions of her career, whereas Jones, understandably for a novelist, gives greater prominence to romance and domestic emotion.

Spellberg’s analysis of Aishah’s role in hadith transmission is especially illuminating. She observes that Aishah is credited with transmitting thousands of traditions, far more than any other woman in early Islam. Yet Spellberg also emphasises that ‘Aishah could not control her final contribution to the communal record of the Islamic community. Aishah might be the first link in many oral chains of authority, but no tradition ever rested on her word alone. Her memory and observations were at the mercy of those who came after her.’ This insight is crucial: the historical Aishah, however remarkable, was ultimately shaped by male scholars who selected, preserved and interpreted her words according to their own priorities.

This is not to diminish the literary achievement of The Jewel of Medina. On the contrary, the novel deserves praise for introducing a broad readership to one of Islam’s most remarkable women. Its prose is graceful, its pacing assured and its central character unforgettable. Jones succeeds in making Aishah emotionally accessible in ways that academic biographies rarely attempt. Yet precisely because the novel is so persuasive, it should not be mistaken for biography.

Readers seeking to understand the historical Aishah should accompany Jones with Nabia Abbott’s Aishah: The Beloved of Mohammed, Denise Spellberg’s Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past, and Sayyid Murtada ‘Askari’s The Role of Aishah in the History of Islam. They should also consult the early Arabic sources: Ibn Saʿd’s Ṭabaqāt al-Kubrā, al-Ṭabarī’s Tārīkh, al-Dhahabī’s Siyar Aʿlām al-Nubalāʾ, Ibn Ḥajar’s Al-Iṣābah, and al-Zarkashī’s Al-Ijābah. These works reveal an Aishah who was not only beloved, but intellectually formidable, politically influential and indispensable to understanding the formative decades of Islamic civilisation.

Ultimately, The Jewel of Medina succeeds best when read as historical imagination rather than historical reconstruction. Sherry Jones has written an engaging and often moving novel that restores Aishah to the centre of a popular narrative. Nabia Abbott, by contrast, reminds us that the real Aishah needs little embellishment. Denise Spellberg shows that even that ‘real’ Aishah is ultimately a product of interpretation, a palimpsest of competing voices, each seeking to claim her for their own vision of the past. And ‘Askari demonstrates that the contest over Aishah’s legacy continues to this day, with profound implications for how Muslims understand their own history. The historical woman, recovered patiently from the complex and sometimes contradictory Arabic sources, remains every bit as fascinating as the fictional heroine. Indeed, if anything, history presents us with a figure whose achievements surpass even the most accomplished literary invention.

Works Consulted:

• Abbott, Nabia. Aishah: The Beloved of Mohammed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942. The classic, foundational Western biography that seeks to reconstruct the historical ʿĀʾishah through a careful critical analysis of early Arabic sources.
• Spellberg, Denise A. Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of ʿAʾisha bint Abi Bakr. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. A seminal work that does not attempt a biography but instead analyzes how medieval Muslim scholars (primarily men) constructed and debated ʿĀʾishah’s legacy for their own political and sectarian purposes.
• ʿAskari, Sayyid Murtada. The Role of Aishah in the History of Islam. Vol. 1. Translated by ʿAla ad-Din Pazargadi. A critical Shiʿi scholarly work that subjects the traditions attributed to ʿĀʾishah to rigorous historical criticism, arguing that many were fabricated to serve political ends.