Making Space: Sufis and Settlers in Early Modern India by Nile Green (review)

India’s many Sufi shrines produce a unique historical consciousness attuned simultaneously to local and distant Muslim states. Tracing influences and cross-pollinations between aesthetic, conceptual, and material institutions, Nile Green’s Making Space: Sufis and Settlers in Early Modern India deftly intertwines pre-colonial political history, Sufi hagiography, and the architectural development of shrines as sites of temporal and epistemic power. The Sufis he portrays from Iran, Central Asia, and the Middle East settled in various Indian geographies since the late-medieval era and imported unique visions of ethnic, linguistic, and devotional origins that became integral components of the dynamic matrix of Indian Muslim governance. Ignoring their internal historical consciousness, or impact on the political culture of the Bahmanid, Mughal, and Deccan imperium would mean to misunderstand the sources of Indo-Muslim power that rested in trans-regional and multiethnic polities bound to mystical brotherhoods.

The rise of network studies has affected how we conceive of disciplinary and archival purity, and Green’s analysis of the Indian context draws together sources that may typically be pursued separately by social historians, scholars of religion, Persian, and Urdu literature. Instead, Green puts forth an analysis that is focused on the very marble walls of the shrines of Khuldabad, and simultaneously, imbricated within a mélange of metaphors for what, and for whom, that space mattered. This union of ‘text and territory’ in Green’s analysis works to locate histories and concepts in contested spaces, buildings, lands, and trade routes that reproduced the legends of Muslim presence across generations.

His central argument holds that the tomb of the Sufi saint of early modern India acted as an ‘enduring spatial anchor’ that made the present Indian landscape replete with a material and narrative archive of distant homelands and origin stories that animated religious and cultural life for emergent Muslim settler communities. For instance, Green describes how the Chishtī and Naqshbandī Sufis of the Deccan met to study the hagiographic texts of their pious ancestors from Sultanate Delhi and Timurid Khurasan and Transoxiana. Green considers this discursive remembrance a product of the texts themselves, which circulated and brought together the old communities with the new, not only through their unique historical contours, but also through the formalism of prose models that inspired commentaries among later generations. While traditional political history may envisage these territories erecting a sovereign’s flag after official military conquest, Green’s analysis demonstrates how the enduring hallmarks of piety, memory, and devotion ebb and flow despite the fissures of dynastic rise or fall.

Emphasizing this point, Green expounds on the higher status, either real or symbolic, that many Sufi saints held above Muslim rulers. Mughal political theology articulated a conjunction of diverse religious practices, not the least of which incorporated shrine visitation. Bābur (d. 1530), like his Delhi Sultanate predecessors, continued the longstanding tradition of recognizing saints like Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ (d. 1325) as symbols capable of bolstering temporal power. Through importing these holy men from Iran and Central Asia, to performing circumambulation of their tombs, and establishing capital cities in the shadow of Sufi shrines, Mughal political theology flourished under pious blessings either offered or indirectly appropriated from these saints. Green astutely points out how the borrowing of insignia, titles, and investiture ceremonies between the royal court and Sufi tomb (dargāh) enabled the idiom of mystic brotherhoods to permeate the political sphere, which analogized Mughal emperors like Akbar to Sufi masters.

Composed in eight chapters, all but Chapter 2 has appeared in an earlier published form. Making Space does not assume a linear progression through historical time. Rather, the chapters are organized thematically and point towards Green’s longstanding research into Sufi shrines with much emphasis on those in and around Aurangabad and Khuldabad in contemporary Maharashtra. Green’s prose tends to dis-locate a particular Sufi text or shrine in time...