Making a "Muslim" Saint: Writing Customary Religion in an Indian Princely State

Printing the Saints: Muslim Hagiography in Colonial India

While scholars have long drawn attention to the “classic” medieval Persian hagiographies of the Sufi saints written by authors such as Farid al-Din ‘Attar and ‘Abd al-Rahman Jami, the continued survival of the genre through to the twentieth century has been largely ignored by scholarship. There seems to be a curiously inverse relationship between the focus of scholars on a small number of medieval “classics” and the neglect of the later examples of the genre whose numbers have grown voluminously with each passing century.¹ The undoubted popularity of the genre of the Persian, and later Urdu, Sufi hagiography scarcely declined with the onset of modernity in India, and the history of printing in India is replete with examples of editions of both new and old hagiographical texts. As catalogs of early Indian printed works show, the need for tales of the saints was felt by members of all of India’s religious communities as the nineteenth century progressed and the twentieth century began. As a consequence of the long-standing neglect of postmedieval Sufi literature, early Urdu printed hagiographical texts have received scant attention from the arbiters of literary taste in both the East and West. This is perhaps reasonable enough, given their often meager literary merits. While some Urdu hagiographies do possess claims to literary craftsmanship, in many cases the readership at which such texts aimed led to their composition in a regional or otherwise simplified idiom. Yet when stylistic considerations are put aside, we may well approach the importance of the Urdu hagiography from the standpoint of its popularity. Lithographic editions of hagiographic texts—dealing with non-Indian as well as Indian Sufi saints—appeared in large numbers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of these texts, such as the Hadiqat al-awliya, by Ghulam Sarwar Lahawri (d. AH 1307/1890), became well known through large parts of India and ran into several editions.² Maqasid al-salihin, Muhammad ‘Abd al-Rahman of Kanpur’s Urdu translation of the Persian hagiographical text Hikayat al-salihin, similarly ran through numerous North Indian editions during the 1870s and afterward.³ This great expansion in hagiographical printing encompassed most of the languages with which South Asian Muslims were familiar, from Bengali to Punjabi, Sindi, Gujarati, and Tamil. In the case of Gujarati and Urdu in particular, many early hagiographical works were printed in Bombay. Bombay’s lithographic printing industry also helped uphold the use of Persian in India by printing considerable numbers of classic Sufi texts.⁴ The North Indian book market was similarly greedy for printed editions of Sufi classics in Persian during the late nineteenth century. The Rashahat-e-‘ayn al-hayat (Sprinklings from the Springs of Life) of Wa‘iz Kashifī (d. AH 910/1504) is a case in point, running through at least nine editions from Kanpur and Lucknow between 1890 and 1911.⁵ The popularity of such texts may be understood in a number of different ways, alternatively as a sign of an emergent bourgeois religiosity or as part of a continuum with pre-reformist Muslim piety. What is clear, however, is that such texts play an important role in book as well as literary history in India.

While the importance of these texts may be accepted, it might be argued that the most successful of them are in many respects the least rewarding. The great saintly compendia (tazkirat) of the nineteenth century are by their nature formulaic and often repetitive in the extreme.⁶ All too often, they also represent an emergent reformist model of the saint as preacher and instructor rather than miracle worker. Amid this expansive literature, however, there may be found numerous examples of hagiographies that continue to present...