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Chapter 9: In Search of Equivalence: Conceiving Muslim-Hindu Encounter through Translation Theory
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229 9 In Search of Equivalence Conceiving Muslim-Hindu Encounter through Translation Theory Tony K. Stewart From the sixteenth century to the early colonial period, the region of Bengal was notable for its vibrant religious activity, activity that was often closely allied to political and military fortune, economic expansion, and the opening of new lands for cultivation. As population grew, the delta region became the site of numerous encounters of religious communities, not so much in the sense of active proselytizing or efforts to lay claim to a land in the name of religion, but in the considerably more casual process of individuals and groups from different backgrounds meeting as they moved into previously unsettled territories and tried to keep something of their religion about them. This is especially important to remember in the study of Islam in Bengal because of an often naive assumption that Bengal was innately “Hindu” and then gradually converted to Islam, when, in fact, only portions of western Bengal and the periphery around the delta were initially Hindu in orientation, while much of the remaining territory was unsettled or sparsely so. This frontier territory—much of what constitutes Bangladesh and southern parts of western Bengal today—was domesticated by practitioners of one or the other tradition on a more ad hoc basis. Those areas east of the Gangā tended to yield more readily to Muslim development because 230 Figuring Religions of certain explicit restrictions on brāhmaṇa settlement and the more general fact that much of that land was insufficiently domesticated for Hindu habitation of a kind favored elsewhere. Many of the small communities that carved their niches in the un- or partially settled land were often remote and isolated, only eventually linking to larger metropolitan trading and political networks that we assume today to be the norm in the region that is now so heavily populated. In these outposts it comes as no surprise that religious power—the ability for individuals to negotiate and impose a meaningful moral order on an often wild and unruly physical and cultural landscape— was not automatically an issue of theology or doctrinal purity and even less so an issue of religious practice. The evidence suggests that what was deemed right was what was powerful (and vice versa), and what was religiously powerful in these regions was often simply what worked to help people endure. Regardless of their background, nearly everyone in this precolonial period acknowledged certain forms of local and regional power, and because of this, apposite religious structures (e.g., the ascetic Hindu saṃnyāsin and the Sufi pīr) operated with a kind of exchange equivalence.1 Doctrine seems often to have had little bearing in these situations, but that in no way should imply that doctrine was not present; it was simply used and understood differently than is the academic norm today. If we approach the development of religious belief and practice in Bengal as a function of the local and assume that in this environment improvisation was central to survival—as it would have to be in an area without the strong institutions that accompany more organized religion—then we must reconceive the nature of the religious encounter that characterizes the region in this pre- and early colonial period. The reason is straightforward enough: old academic models for articulating this encounter label it “conflict ,” in which case there is little left to say apart from that one succeeded and the other did not, or label it “syncretism,” which produces something new and different from either original part. Seldom do we see any analysis that articulates how two or more traditions in this region might encounter one another without this ontological shift in the makeup of the tradition; and the change most often assumed is the latter. Syncretism is predicated on the assumption that preexisting and discrete doctrinal or ritual systems are mysteriously combined to form some unnatural admixture. But the myriad forms of the concept of syncretism (when used as an interpretive, rather than strictly descriptive, category) become highly problematic in nearly all of their applications because they nearly uniformly read into the history the very institutional (ritual, theological, social) structures that are not yet present [18.232.88.17] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:19 GMT) In Search of Equivalence 231 in any enduring way. But this is to say that the constituent parts that are brought together to create this syncretistic entity are historical back formations of a kind...