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ID:
162465
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Summary/Abstract |
In spite of the many beautiful works of art and architecture produced under the patronage of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (r. 1628–58 CE), including the incomparable Taj Mahal, historians have not generally been kind to him. In scholarship both past and present, he is often compared unfavourably with his grandfather, Akbar, and his father, Jahangir, described pejoratively as an ‘orthodox’ Muslim whose reign was characterised by a stricter adherence to shari‘a and religious intolerance of Hindus and Christians. This article re-examines recurrent issues in the historiography of Shah Jahan's life and rule, his religious views and his attitudes towards Hindus, Jains, Christians and Sufis. Based on a diversity of historical and art historical sources, it concludes that the so-called evidence for his ‘orthodoxy’ has been largely misconstrued. This is perhaps due in part to the inflated rhetoric of royal chronicles and colonial critics, as well as to post-Partition prejudice against Islam.
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2 |
ID:
075664
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Publication |
2006.
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Summary/Abstract |
Scholarly inquiries into communalism in South Asia have often exclusively focused on politically constructed religious and ethnic identity categories. This article challenges these assumptions by arguing that territoriality and the designation of homelands played an important, but largely unrecognized, role in developing social and political boundaries in the region. By analyzing the writings of Bipin Chandra Pal during the Swadeshi period, this article points to the territorialization of a Hindu-based version of the national homeland as a key process in the development of communal difference in Bengal and South Asia more generally. It is concluded that the Hindu-dominated rhetoric of the early nationalist movement implicitly marked Hindus as the only true members of the nation. By implicitly excluding all other forms of social affiliations from the narrative of the homeland, it is argued that the stage was set for the contestation of territorial identity categories that played out through the 20th century in Bengal.
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