Sufism and Liberation across the Indo-Afghan Border: 1880-1928

How do we understand links between sufism and pro-egalitarian revolutionary activism in the early twentieth century; and how did upland compositions of self and community help constitute revolutionary activism in South Asia more broadly? Using Pashto poetry as my archive I integrate a history of radical egalitarian thought and political practice to a holistic study of self-making; of imperial spatiality; and of shifting gradients of power in the regions between Kabul and Punjab. Amid a chaotic rise of new practices of imperial and monarchic hegemony around the turn of the twentieth century, I argue, older sedimentations of ‘devotee selfhood’ in the high valleys of eastern Afghanistan gave rise, in social spaces preserved by self-reflexive poetic practice and circulation, to conscious desires for avoidance of all forms of hierarchy or sovereignty, in favour of a horizontal politics of reciprocity. Such inchoate drives for freedom later played a role in constituting anti-statist revolutionary subjectivities across great geographical and social distance. From upland sufi roots they rippled outward to intersect with the work of transnational socialist and anti-imperialist militants in Indian nationalist circles too; and even influenced scholars at the heart of the nascent Afghan nation-state

The mosques of Bayana, Rajasthan, and the emergence of a prototype for the mosques of the Mughals

Bayana’s political autonomy during the sultanate history of Delhi is reflected in its architectural monuments, particularly the mosques. The town, built by Muhammad b. Sām’s governor Bahā al-dīn Tughrul, has preserved his late twelfth-century mosque, which together with its early fourteenth-century extension was praised by Ibn Battūta, but it is the later mosques which show a pattern of continuous independence in architectural style. When in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries arcuate forms imported from Khurāsān flourished in Delhi, the Bayana architects, although aware of the style continued to choose the ancient Indian trabeate system, not as a result of lack of innovation, but as a display of their autonomy. Their design developments in the late fifteenth to sixteenth centuries led to a new concept for mosque plans, where the prayer hall no longer filled the western side, but jutted out into the courtyard, so that the northern and southern walls of the mosque stood within its courtyard. Akbar who had his capitals in Agra and Fathpur Sikri, once two villages in the Bayana territory, also adopted features of the architecture of the region. The new mosque plan first appears to some extent in Shaikh Salīm Chishtī’s Mosque, but the fully-fledged plan becomes a feature of later Mughal mosques of the time of Shāh Jahān and his successors