The encounter between Muslim and Hindu remains one of the defining issues of South Asian society today. It began as early as the 8th century, and the first Muslim kingdom in India, the Sultanate of Delhi, was established at the end of the 12th century. This power eventually reduced to vassalage almost every independent kingdom on the subcontinent. In Love's Subtle Magic, a remarkable and highly original book, Aditya Behl uses a little-understood genre of Sufi literature to paint an entirely new picture of the evolution of Indian culture during the earliest period of Muslim domination.
These curious romantic tales transmit a profound religious message through the medium of adventurous stories of love. Although composed in the Muslim courts, they are written in a vernacular Indian language and involve Hindu yogis, Hindu princes and princesses, and Hindu gods. Until now, they have defied analysis. Behl shows that the Sufi authors of these charming tales sought to convey an Islamic vision via an Indian idiom. They thus constitute the earliest attempt at the indigenization of Islamic literature in an Indian setting. More important, however, Behl's analysis brilliantly illuminates the cosmopolitan and composite culture of the Sultanate India in which they were composed. This in turn compels us completely to rethink the standard of the opposition between Indian Hindu and foreign Muslim and recognize that the Indo-Islamic culture of this era was already significantly Indian in many important ways.
Industry Reviews
"With its subtle readings, its steadfast rigor in contextualization, and its thorough dismissal of the sectarian binaries within which such texts have been traditionally read, the book is an illuminating, cosmopolitan, and continually insightful read and a wonderful testament to Behl's lasting place in South Asian scholarship."--Samira Sheikh, Journal of the American Oriental Society
"The monograph illuminates the genre of Hindavi Sufi romance, and subtly deploys this genre's emphasis on the magic of love to counter modern Hindu and Muslim nationalist sentiments. Behl furnishes us with an extraordinary account of this genre's structure, themes, and functions."--Reading Religion
"In Love's Subtle Magic, a remarkable and highly original book, Aditya Behl uses a little-understood genre of Sufi literature to paint an entirely new picture of the evolution of Indian culture during the earliest period of Muslim domination...Behl's analysis brilliantly illuminates the cosmopolitan and composite culture of the Sultanate India in which they were composed. This in turn compels us completely to rethink the standard of the opposition
between Indian Hindu and foreign Muslim and recognize that the Indo-Islamic culture of this era was already significantly Indian in many important ways."--Reading Religion
"Doniger has edited an excellent volume constructed from lectures and drafts written by the late Behl...This volume is an indispensable guide to a long-ignored literary genre that provides glimpses into a society in which Hindus and Muslims, kings and commoners, composed a social order now divided into two hostile communities...Highly recommended." --CHOICE
"Aditya Behl's magnum opus is the consummation of his long quest for the multiple meanings of four fourteenth- to sixteenth-century epic romances, Indic and Hindu in language and imagery, yet written by Muslim poets attached to Sufi orders. His magisterial and lucid analysis, graced by lovely translations and suffused by his passion for storytelling, transcends the communalized assumptions of much modern scholarship on these enigmatic poems, to
persuasively reconstruct their contemporary contexts of religious, political, and gender ideologies and of courtly and esoteric performance."--Philip Lutgendorf, author of Hanuman's Tale: The Messages of a Divine
Monkey
"In this multi-faceted work Aditya Behl shows persuasively that the Avadhi Sufi romances not only belong to a 'regional or Hindustani literary tradition with its own poets and politics,' but also move within a 'larger Islamicate world in which stories, people, and merchandise travelled freely.' Thus the 'yogic garb of the Sufi seeker and his sensuous meeting with the divinely beautiful beloved' must be read within a Sufistically inflected 'generic logic.' Behl
does an elegant job of elucidating the allegorical complexities of this logic; it is sad to realize that we will have no more such work from him."--Frances W. Pritchett, Professor of Modern Indic
Languages, Columbia University
"If India is an ocean of stories, its deepest currents are mysticism, its highest waves poetry. Only the most masterful of fishermen could test these waters with hope of success. Aditya Behl has done the nearly miraculous: he has given us all the catch from his wondrous, too brief, time as the supreme troller and the compleat angler of pre-modern Indian Sufi romances. Wendy Doniger has paid a tribute to his genius, putting it on display as if by an act of
legerdemain in editing this long but never disappointing treasure trove of Hindustan."--Bruce Lawrence, Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Humanities Professor of Religion, Duke University
