At the very time that the Mughal empire’s central institutions had reached an advanced state of decay, India’s largest Muslim community was emerging along the empire’s eastern frontier.38 Bengali Muslims, most of whom inhabit present-day Bangladesh, comprise the world’s second-largest ethnic community of Muslims. Their appearance was actually one dimension of a larger transformation of the region’s politics and economy, which coincided with the delta’s shifting geomorphology. The story of the growth Bengal’s Muslim population therefore begins with the land itself.
By depositing rich silt that made possible the cultivation of wet rice, Bengal’s many rivers had for centuries provided the material basis of the delta’s society and culture. But owing to the land’s flat surface, those slow-moving rivers never remained fixed in place. Upon silting up their channels, they repeatedly jumped their own banks and gravitated ever eastwards between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries (see Maps 5, 7 and 8). In the 1570s the Ganges had already divided into two branches in present-day Malda District, one branch flowing south towards Satgaon (near Kolkata) and the other flowing east towards Sonargaon (near Dhaka). By 1666 the former branch had become altogether unnavigable.39 Having abandoned its former channels in western and southern Bengal, the Ganges system then linked up with the Padma and other rivers, cutting through the heart of the eastern delta in present-day Bangladesh. These riverine movements carried the centre of Bengali civilization eastwards, as formerly thriving population centres in the western delta became moribund when the rivers abandoned them. Meanwhile, pioneers in the delta’s more ecologically active eastern regions cut virgin forests, throwing open a widening zone for field agriculture.40 Deposited over an expanding area of the eastern delta during annual flooding, greater volumes of silt permitted intensified cultivation along the larger rivers where rice cultivation had already been established, and an extension of cultivation into those parts of the interior not already brought under the plough. As a result, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Bengal achieved remarkable levels of rice production: by the 1630s more than 100 vessels laden with rice were embarking annually from Bengal, bound for ports around the Bay of Bengal as far east as Sumatra.41
Bengal’s riverine changes and subsequent agricultural boom coincided not only with the rise of Mughal power in the province, but also with the growth in overland and maritime trade that linked Bengal ever more tightly to the world economy. In the last two decades of the sixteenth century, while Mughal troops pushed into the heart of the active delta and established their provincial headquarters in Dhaka, the Portuguese built the port of Hooghly adjacent to modern Kolkata, expanded their community in Chittagong and planted mercantile colonies in and around Dhaka. In the early seventeenth century the Dutch and English trading companies gradually replaced the over-extended Portuguese as the dominant European merchants in Bengal’s port cities, and by the end of that century the export of raw silk and cotton textiles had grown so rapidly that Bengal emerged as Europe’s single most important supplier of goods in all Asia.42 Stimulating this manufacturing boom were substantial quantities of silver that poured into the province from overseas. In the 1550s the Portuguese were shipping so much treasure into Bengal that the value of silver currency in Goa actually fluctuated with their sailing seasons to Bengal and Malacca.43 Between 1709 and 1717 the Dutch and English East India companies together shipped into Bengal cargoes averaging 4.15 million rupees in value annually, 85 per cent of which was silver.44 Advanced to Bengali agents, merchants or weavers, this treasure was quickly absorbed into the regional economy, adding considerably to the stocks of rupee coinage already in circulation.45 Yet Bengal experienced no price inflation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, since the production of agricultural and manufactured goods, together with the population base, grew at levels high enough to absorb the expanding money supply created by the influx of foreign silver. Newly minted silver percolated freely throughout Bengali society, penetrating ever lower levels and facilitating the kinds of land transfers and cash advances that typically accompany an expanding agrarian frontier.
These geographical, political and economic changes in eastern Bengal coincided in time and place with the earliest recorded appearance of a Bengali Muslim peasantry. In 1567 a Venetian traveller noted that the entire population of Sandwip, a large island in Bengal’s south-eastern corner opposite Chittagong, was Muslim, and in 1599 a Jesuit missionary, touring the rural districts near Narayanganj in south-eastern Dhaka District, noted that ‘the people are nearly all Mahometans’.46 In 1638, the Mughal governor of Bengal mentioned large Muslim communities inhabiting eastern Bengal’s Noakhali coast.47 Significantly, prior to the advent of Mughal rule in the delta, the masses of eastern Bengal were not firmly integrated into a Hindu socio-religious order.48 This suggests that, when the growth of Islam did occur in this region, its population did not migrate from a Hindu to a Muslim identity. Rather, the religious culture of the fishing, hunting and slash-and-burn farming communities of pre-Muslim eastern Bengal was saturated with local forest cults that focused especially on female deities such as Manasa or Chandi. On the other hand, the western portion of the delta, where Islam made little headway, was at the time of the Mughal conquest already populated by settled, wet-rice-cultivating communities of hierarchically ordered Hindu castes.49
From at least the sixteenth century, the arduous business of forest-clearing and land reclamation in the eastern delta was associated with the activities of enterprising men who were popularly – and often retroactively – identified as holy men. In local memory, some of these men swelled into vivid, mythico-historical figures whose lives served as metaphors for the expansion of both religion and agriculture. They endured precisely because, in collective memory, their careers captured and telescoped a complex historical socio-religious process whereby a land originally forested and non-Muslim became arable and mainly Muslim. A Bengali poem composed around 1590 associates Muslim pioneers with the clearing of forests and the establishment of local markets.50 And a late-sixteenth-century Bengali biography of the Prophet Muhammad and other prophets of Islam, the Nabi-Bangsa, characterizes the patriarch Abraham as a man who, born and brought up in a forest, travelled to Palestine, where he attracted tribes from nearby lands, mobilized local labour to cut down the forest and built a holy place – Jerusalem’s Temple – for offering prayers to God.51 In this way, the main themes of Abraham’s life as recorded in this epic precisely mirrored the careers of the hundreds of pioneers who, during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, mobilized local clients in the Bengali countryside for just such activities.
This literary evidence corroborates data found in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mughal documents referring to pioneers who opened up virgin forest for rice cultivation by mobilizing labour, advancing capital and clearing the land’s thick forests prior to launching rice-cultivation operations. From a local zamindar who might have had claims to the land, these entrepreneurs acquired authorization for clearing the forest, and from mainly Hindu bankers or moneylenders they obtained finances with which to pay their labour force. The pioneers then organized local labourers to clear and ultimately cultivate the land, which Mughal authorities subsequently declared tax-free.
Notably, it was never the state’s intention to promote a Muslim society on the Bengal frontier. Rather, by outsourcing community and economic development to enterprising pioneers, whether Hindu or Muslim, government officials endeavoured to secure a loyal and stable society on an otherwise unruly frontier, while also expanding the amount of arable land within their domain. As Mughal revenue documents stipulate, all pioneers regardless of their religious identity were required to ‘assiduously pray for the survival of the powerful state’. Loyalty, stability and agrarian productivity, not religious affiliation, were the state’s overriding concerns. As a condition for receiving a grant that authorized the development of a tax-free tract of forest, a Hindu pioneer had to build a temple and a Muslim pioneer had to build a mosque, either of which would have provided a measure of institutional focus and local stability. But because most pioneers were Muslims, more mosques appeared in the eastern delta than temples. Consequently, more indigenous peoples were exposed to Muslim than to Hindu religious culture.
As a result of these measures, the primitive mosques of bamboo and thatching built by Muslim pioneers constituted the earliest Muslim institutions in what had hitherto been dense, thinly populated forests. Shortly after the Mughals annexed the heavily forested Chittagong region in 1666, mosques and shrines began proliferating throughout the area, as provincial officers issued written orders (sanads) to local functionaries ordering them to transfer jungle lands from the royal domain – or from zamindars claiming proprietary rights – to enterprising pioneers. These tax-free grants set in motion far-reaching socio-economic processes: forest lands became rice fields, while local hunters, fisherfolk or slash-and-burn farmers became wet-rice-cultivating communities. They also became clients of the pioneers who had opened up particular tracts of land, and since these grants were renewable, subsequent generations were clients of the descendants of those pioneers. Over time, many of the original pioneers came to be venerated as Muslim holy men, or even as spiritually powerful Sufi shaikhs, and their grave sites as shrines. This is why in Bengal, unlike elsewhere in India, local saints are often associated with both the propagation of Islam and the introduction of wet-rice agriculture.
The growth of Muslim communities along the Bengal frontier was thus a by-product of interconnected political, economic and ultimately geomorphological processes. Having assisted the grantee in clearing the forests, the latter’s dependants continued to serve the institution the grantee had established by cultivating the lands included in the grant. Each new mosque in the forest thus became the nucleus for a new community of Muslim cultivators. Even while the Mughals’ imperial centre was sinking into irreversible decay, along the state’s peripheries the government’s bureaucratic machinery continued to grind forwards out of sheer inertia of motion, issuing land grants that allowed enterprising pioneers to clear jungle land and establish permanent wet-rice cultivation. Indigenous peoples in this way became cultivators of the land, over time acquiring the religious identity associated with those original pioneers and their humble mosques.
A similar combination of peasantization and Islamization occurred in the western Punjab, a process that began in the thirteenth century but was not complete until the eighteenth. Like eastern Bengal, western Punjab had for centuries lain on the margins of expansive, Delhi-based empires. And like the indigenous communities of eastern Bengal, Jat pastoralists in the western Punjab had been only partially incorporated into a Hindu socio-religious world at the time of their earliest contact with Muslims. Finally, as in eastern Bengal, the growth of Islam in the western Punjab occurred in tandem with a transition to settled agriculture – specifically, as Jat clans began to abandon full-time pastoralism and take up settled wheat-farming. However, whereas Islamization in eastern Bengal had been launched and sustained by hundreds of humble, thatched mosques established by forest-clearing developers, in the Punjab this role was played by large, state-supported shrine complexes that had been built over the grave sites of renowned Sufi shaikhs. Located along the banks of the southern and western Punjab’s rivers – the Indus, Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi and Sutlej – these shrines were socio-cultural magnets, attracting large numbers of Jat communities for whom they provided a range of socio-economic and religious services. The spiritual power (baraka) of eminent Sufi shaikhs buried at these shrines was, and is, widely believed to adhere to the physical shrines and their immediate precincts. Like many other such shrines in western Punjab, that of Shaikh Farid al-Din Ganj-i Shakar, popularly known as Baba Farid, attracted rural folk from across the region seeking the blessings and intercession of a saint believed capable of mediating the human and divine worlds. Located in Pakpattan by the banks of the Sutlej River, Baba Farid’s shrine attracted the patronage of political actors at the highest levels. Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq built an imposing structure over the shaikh’s grave site and granted endowments for the upkeep of his shrine and its large public kitchen. Sultan Firuz Tughluq conferred robes of honour on the saint’s descendants and confirmed their land holdings. Ibn Battuta, Timur and Akbar all paid their respects to the shrine.
The predominant clientele of the Punjab’s great shrines, however, were Jat communities who by the eleventh century had migrated from Sind up the Indus valley into the southern Punjab, where they were described as ‘low Sudra’ cattle-owners. By the thirteenth century they were reported in the western Punjab, and by the late sixteenth they had taken up settled agriculture. By that time the charismatic authority of major shrines had long been preserved and nurtured by the descendants of their respective founders. These men not only supervised and led the rituals associated with the shrines; they also patronized the chiefs of Jat clans, just as they themselves were patronized by Mughal authorities. In Pakpattan, Jat chiefs gave their daughters in marriage to the sons of the leader of Baba Farid’s shrine, whereas the leader’s own daughters were kept within the extended family, thereby replicating the same sort of marital practices and alliances that the Mughals had established with politically subordinate Rajput clans. As Jat clans entered into political, religious and marital relations with shrines such as that of Baba Farid, the names they gave their children reveal a gradual adoption of an Islamic identity. As early as the fifteenth century, Muslim names began to appear among Jat tribes associated with Baba Farid’s shrine, but they did not become dominant among those tribes until the early eighteenth, indicating a very slow and apparently unconscious process of Islamization.52
Quite significantly, these socio-religious movements in eastern Bengal and western Punjab created the two largest Muslim communities in pre-British India, which would ultimately comprise the core of two post-British states: Bangladesh and Pakistan. The two communities shared a similar historical trajectory in that, in both, the evolution of an Islamic religious identity was associated with a transition to sedentary agrarian life among communities only lightly touched by Hindu culture. These were not, however, the only instances in which changes in socio-economic status led to new cultural identities. We have seen that rising social status resulting from participation in India’s military labour market also drove new cultural identities, as in the case of Kunbi farmers of Maharashtra becoming Marathas, Gujarati pastoralists becoming Rajputs, or Jats of eastern Punjab becoming Sikhs. All these cases indicate how cultural identities were never fixed or immutable, but contingent upon, and shaped by, larger processes specific to particular historical contexts.