Enquiries in Medieval India: Religion, Society, Culture, and Polity

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Enquiries in Medieval India: Religion, Society, Culture, and Polity illustrates the nature and span of medieval India, which was always subject to external influences. These influences, upon assimilation, made India internally plural and got reflected in a continuing conversation between its different socio-religious traditions, cultures, strands of thought, and polities. With deliberations on the periodization of medieval India to exploring contacts between India and Central Asia during the period, this work investigates a range of historical problems. It examines the role of political ideas, institutions, religious vocabulary, cultural virtues, and communal relationships that helped in consolidating and conducting the affairs of the state in a pluralistic society. The intricate links of urbanization with the perception of territoriality of the medieval state are brought into focus in an essay and, in another, there are investigations into the place of Sufism in the politics of the Deccan. Keeping aside the framework of preoccupations with different dynasties and their fortunes and intervening into unexplored fields, this book explores how the institutional bases in every field of state and society formed the bedrock for the entire medieval period and beyond.

Rattan Lal Hangloo is Honorary Chancellor, Nobel International University at Toronto, Canada. He was Vice- Chancellor, University of Allahabad and Kalyani University, and previously Professor and Head of the Department of History at University of Hyderabad. He is the author of Agrarian System of Kashmir, 1846-1900 (1995); State in Medieval Kashmir (2000); and Kashmir: Before the Accession and After (2022), and has edited the volumes Situating Medieval Indian State (1995); Approaching Islam (2005); History of Science and Technology in India: Exploring New Themes (2011); and Indian Diaspora in the Caribbean: History, Culture, and Identity (2012).

HISTORY IS NOT merely about what happened in the past, but also about how that past is interpreted from time to time. Since no field has been completely researched, there will always be limitations for historians and gaps for people to access knowledge of our past. In addition to written information, there are numerous scientific techniques for analysis of empirical evidence that is available to us in various repositories of knowledge. Every available source about the past has its own specialties, priorities, compulsions, and prejudices because each source was written with a definite purpose and idea. Whatever has survived in terms of evidence is a fraction that, therefore, needs to be interpreted very carefully. Reconstruction of the past and study of the present is more important than putting many facts together. For historians, collecting and weighing extant evidence is only a limited part of their work. A historian's ultimate purpose is not only to indulge in a dispassionate study of the past, but also to objectively reconstruct it, lest it be a simple repetition. Construction or reconstruction of any historical event is a cumulative process leading to various formulations, which further lead to creations, modifications, and eliminations of certain items associated with our historical past.
There is a need to transcend the limitations of our ideological positions to understand the medieval period in order to help scholars to go beyond the narrow confines of their own understanding and, thereby, enhance people's intellectual curiosity about the era.