Review

Author(s): Andr Wink

Review by: Andr Wink
Source: The International History Review, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Aug., 1994), pp. 569-572
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40107329
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 Reviews of Books 569

Richard M. Eaton. The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Pp. xxvii, 359. $60.00 (us).

as Richard eaton reminds us in his important new book, more than two-
thirds of the world's 900 million Muslims live outside the Middle East; four-
fifths of all Muslims are non-Arabs; and the majority of the world-wide
community lives in South and South-East Asia, Indonesia being the country
with the largest number of Muslims in the world, followed by Pakistan,
Bangladesh, and India. Today, it is the Bengalis who comprise the second-
largest Muslim ethnic population, after the Arabs. Of an estimated 96.5
million people living in Bangladesh in 1984, 81 million, or 83 per cent, were
Muslims, and of the 152 million Bengalis in Bangladesh and West Bengal,
about 93 million were Muslims. During the Partition, those parts of Bengal
that had a Muslim minority became the state of West Bengal within the
Republic of India, while those with a Muslim majority became the eastern
wing of Pakistan or, since 1971, Bangladesh.
With British activity centred on Calcutta, in the largely Hindu south-
western part of Bengal, the British census of 1872 noted with surprise 'the
enormous host of Muhammadans resident in Lower Bengal - not massed
around the old capitals, but in the alluvial plains of the Delta', and ever since
this observation was made, the question of the conversion to Islam and the
Islamization of Bengali cultivators has been raised and almost immediately
became a contested issue. As James Wise wrote in 1894, tne history of the
spread of Islam among the peasantry of Lower and Eastern Bengal 'is a subject
of such vast importance at the present day as to merit a careful and minute
examination'. Representing a form of Islam which, as seen by Middle
Easterners, was situated in the periphery of the Muslim world, while for the
West, the most significant expansion of Islam had always been in the
direction of Europe, Bengal and South Asia in general until recently have
received little attention by comparison. Eaton rightly argues that the more
significant expansion of Islam lay in the direction of India - where it
encountered civilizations which were more alien to it than in the Judaeo-
Christian world.
The confusion which surrounds the issue of conversion to Islam in South
Asia, including Bengal, is astounding, and Eaton's book effectively demolishes
a number of misleading theories that have been advanced to account for it.
British official thinking, from the 1872 census onwards, was dominated by the
idea that conversion to Islam offered an escape from the intolerable rigidities
of the Hindu caste system. Eventually, most Muslims in South Asia would
subscribe to this theory as well. Recurrently, scholars have also advanced a
variant of the same theory which says that especially the Buddhists of Sind
and Bengal converted to Islam, at an early stage, because of brahmin

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570 The International History Review

persecution. But whatever form it took, and whatever aim it served, the
notion that Islam was a 'religion of social liberation' assumes the prior
existence of a highly stratified Hindu social order precisely in those areas -
Sind and Bengal - where it is least in evidence.
A second theory, which views Islamization in South Asia as the effect of
immigration from outside the sub-continent, does not appear to be adequate
for Sind and Bengal either, as in these areas Islam was clearly not just an
unassimilated foreign intrusion, and actual conversion among indigenous
populations occurred on a massive scale. A third theory, postulating forced
conversion, is inadequate because a substantial majority of Bengal's popula-
tion became Muslim under a political regime - that of the Moguls - which
did not promote the conversion of Bengalis to Islam at all. Moreover, most
conversion occurred away from the main capitals of Muslim rule in North
India. And, finally, the idea that political patronage was an important reason
for converting, as has been suggested by still others, does not seem plausible
in many cases for the same reason - most conversion occurred on the
periphery of Indo-Muslim rule.
In advancing a theory of conversion and Islamization of his own, Eaton
takes as his starting-point the peculiar status of Bengal as a frontier area. This,
in effect, is how it was perceived by the Moguls and their contemporaries.
Bengal was the terminus of a continent-wide process of Turko-Mongol
conquest and migration. Very soon after the Muslim conquest in the
thirteenth century, a typically North Indian chauvinism towards the delta
becomes manifest, and this grew in strength under the Moguls from the late
sixteenth century onwards, when Bengal became the dumping-ground for
disaffected servants of the regime and other undesirables. Eaton compares the
Mogul stereotype that Bengal was a hostile and foreign land, 'where owing to
the climate's favouring the base, the dust of dissension is always rising', a
'house of turbulence', and thus a hardship post for the imperial service, to the
British colonial discourse of later times. He points out, against a whole school
of thought which took its inspiration from Edward Said's work, that such
discourse is not specifically European in origin and character. In the
perspective of the North Indian Mogul or ashraf elite, Bengalis, as native ahl-i-
Hind, were associated with 'fishermen' and were openly despised; and this
also explains the Moguls' disinclination to convert them to Islam.
But more important, Eaton proposes, the political and Islamic frontier in
Bengal coincided with an agrarian frontier, and it is the gradual eastward
movement of the latter which provides the key to the process of conversion
and Islamization in the area. At an early stage, prior to the thirteenth century,
the agrarian frontier in the Bengal delta was in its turn superimposed on the
frontier of Sanskritic or Hindu civilization. Sanskritic civilization had had a

deep impact on Bengal's north-western and western sub-regions but hardly

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 Reviews of Books 571

on the eastern delta, which remained relatively unpeasantized. The reason for
this was largely climatological: as one approached the delta, the monsoon
rainfall increased, as did the density of vegetation. When, in the late sixteenth
century, we get the first abundant evidence of a Muslim peasant population in
Bengal, such evidence comes largely from the non-Hinduized eastern sector.
Prior to that time, Bengal had only known the urbanized, immigrant ashrdf
Muslims.
By an extraordinary coincidence, the Mogul conquest of Bengal and the
relocation of the imperial capital to Dhaka in the later sixteenth century
coincided with the historic eastward movement of Bengal's rivers, which
provided the basis for new agrarian communities. Dhaka then became the
new centre, deep in Bengal's hinterland, from where diverse forest peoples,
with little or no previous exposure to the Hindu caste system or any other
literary high culture which would have had the potential of stabilizing their
religious patterns, were integrated into the Mogul social and bureaucratic
system, while vast stretches of the forests of the eastern delta were trans-
formed into arable land. In the process, indigenous Bengalis, who had
formerly practised hunting, fishing, or simple forms of forest agriculture, were
gradually transformed into Muslim rice farmers.
The absorption of these peoples into Islam was similar to the integration
of aboriginal people into the Hindu caste and ritual structure which had taken
place in India much earlier. The expansion of the Mogul state into regions
with an undeveloped agrarian infrastructure was thus ecological as well as
political, and also had religious implications; significantly, a good number of
the Muslim saints of East Bengal who had accompanied the colonization
movement were associated with the pioneering of agriculture and land
reclamation in the active part of the delta.
This book, based on newly uncovered Persian manuscript materials from
Bengal itself, represents a significant advance over the previous major work
on Islam in Bengal, Asim Roy's The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal
(1983). Where Roy focused on literary traditions and adopts a basically
unhistorical treatment of the subject, Eaton gives most attention to the social
history of the Bengali Muslim peasantry and highlights the chronology and
historical periodization of the growth of Islam with much greater precision,
while providing a clear view of the ecological and socio-economic context of
change. Furthermore, instead of Roy's concept of 'syncretism', which tends
to treat 'Islam' and 'Hinduism' as reified abstractions, Eaton adopts from his
mentor, John Smail, the concept of 'creative adaptation', which stresses the
active, creative role played by those undergoing Islamization rather than
forced culture change and a 'synthesis' of 'Islam' and 'Hinduism'.
In earlier work, Eaton had already taken up a similar approach while
studying the conversion to Islam in Sind and the Punjab - on the western

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 572 The International History Review

periphery of Hindu civilization. There he had linked conversion to the

gradual transformation of pastoralists to farmers (cf. 'The Political and Reli-
gious Authority of the Shrine of Bab a Farid', in Moral Conduct and Authority:
The Place o/Adab in South Asian Islam, ed. B. D. Metcalf [1984], pp. 333-56).
It is quite possible that parallels to the process which is here described and
analysed for Bengal will be found in parts of Java, where Islam also grew in
conjunction with agrarian expansion. For the study of Islam in Bengal, this is,
in any case, the most important book to appear to date, and it deserves to be
read by all historians of India and the Islamic world.

University of Wisconsin - Madison Andre Wink

Anne Curry. The Hundred Years War. London: Macmillan, 1993. Pp. xiv,
192. 30.00;
Anthony Goodman and Anthony Tuck, eds. War and Border Societies in the
Middle Ages. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Pp. xi, 198. $59.95
(us).

the hundred years war, as Anne Curry points out in her short survey of
the subject, had little significance for contemporaries outside western Europe,
but within this area impinged on all countries and formed the main influence
on international relations in the late middle ages. Curry's aim is to provide a
succinct and basic review of Anglo-French relations in the later middle ages
for those with little knowledge of the subject. She seeks to provide a
diplomatic rather than a military study and deliberately eschews detailed
comment on the impact of the war on politics, economy, or society. She
further narrows her sights by concentrating primarily on English objectives
and actions. In such an intensively worked field and with little space to
indulge herself, Curry is wise to focus on one particular aspect of the larger
issue and, by choosing 'international relations', she has opted for a difficult
but rewarding approach. It must be said that the book produces more light
than heat - no sense of the horror of prolonged warfare for medieval soldiers
or civilians comes through from these pages - but neither does she offer a dry
recitation of truces and battles. She emphasizes, for instance, the role the war
played in the development of diplomatic conventions which lasted until the
early modern period, and is sensitive to the question of the relationship
between the war and the growth of English national identity. She is surely
right to reiterate that a sense of nationalism was a cause rather than a
consequence of the conflict, but she argues convincingly that the advances in
diplomacy fostered by the war also aided the growth and further definition of
national feeling.
Curry argues that what distinguished the Hundred Years War from

xvi, 3: August 1994

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