This book reveals the tensions between mobility and locality through the ways Sufi Islam responded to demands of settlement by preserving the migrant bodies of blessed men and the shrines, texts and rituals that surrounded them. The book uses a wide range of Persian and Urdu texts, alongside architectural and ritual traditions from the early modern period, to bring to life the cosmopolitan but often internally differentiated communities of Muslims that emerged in India between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. Tracing how these different Muslim communities located their sense of belongi ... More

This book reveals the tensions between mobility and locality through the ways Sufi Islam responded to demands of settlement by preserving the migrant bodies of blessed men and the shrines, texts and rituals that surrounded them. The book uses a wide range of Persian and Urdu texts, alongside architectural and ritual traditions from the early modern period, to bring to life the cosmopolitan but often internally differentiated communities of Muslims that emerged in India between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. Tracing how these different Muslim communities located their sense of belonging in their new homelands in different regions of India, the essays show how religious resources were deployed to create new spaces of memory on Indian soil through the interplay of architecture and narrative. In line with the ‘spatial turn’ in historical studies, the book develops new methodologies for relating textual, architectural and geographical remains from the period, as well as the ritual practices by which living Muslims interacted with both their books and the built and natural environment around them. By textualizing space and spatializing text, this book explores how Afghan, Mughal and Hindustani Muslims constructed new homelands while remembering distant places of origin. Central to this process were migrant Sufis and the hagiographical texts and architectural territories through which they preserved memory over time and anchored it to new spaces of settlement. The highly-readable and closely-integrated essays brought together in this book offer bold new insights into Indian, Islamic and comparative early modern history.