ePub The Muslims of India: A Documentary Record (Oxford India Collection) by From Oxford University Press in History

Description

This book traces the changing and long-term history of the vast Brahmaputra valley region; that has distinct languages; faiths; monastic traditions; and lay-monk relationship; in different orders and gender and household relations. It examines the political and economic order of Buddhist; Vaisnava; Saiva; Tantric; and Sufi teachers and their disciples; students; and adherents in the northeast India. In the course of the nineteenth century; war; changes in revenue regimes; and the growth of the plantation economies fragmented this landscape and dissolved the relationships. The economic and military processes also reshaped the moral-political economy in which wives of monastic males; female cultivators and labour-servants were the key constituents. These substantive changes were obscured by the language used by colonial officials to describe monks as 'savages'; and female-dependent communities as 'primitive tribes'. After the formation of the new nation; Indian historians and anthropologists began to write histories using colonial terms. In the process; both colonial and postcolonial historians erased the erstwhile monastic relationships across the region. They contributed to a widespread forgetting of the women who had made it all possible. The study examines how the new nation as well as its new history rests on many layers of forgetting.