Aparna Kapadia's Review of A Genealogy of Devotion (American Historical Review) (original) (raw)

2021, American Historical Review

erly place the legacy of Aurangzeb and the greater military colonization of the East India Company. In such a sweeping survey, there are bound to be some shortcuts. The concept of "Persianate" itself remains undertheorized, as is the relationship between Persian and Marathi, Bangla, Hindavi, and other literary cultures. Further, there is an ambiguity between Persianate as a literary, cultural, and political concept versus an ethnic one; how to parse it alongside "Indo-Timurid," "Turko-Mongol," "Afghan," and other ethnically "nativist" categories, all of which are used in different registers. A more robust sketching of the relationship between sacral social and political actors-the sant, the bhakti, the Sufi, and the yogi-and the making of Persianate India could have added to our rediscovery of the religious dynamism in this hyper eventful period. In some instances, Eaton uses terms anachronistically, like "immigration" or "indirect rule" and even "settler colonialism." That aside, it is undeniable that Eaton has not only provided a broad and defining summation of his own extraordinarily rich scholarship but also incorporated a wide array of recent scholarship in his synthesis. The volume comes at a time when the contemporary politics of history in the subcontinent rest on a nativist, anti-Muslim claim to the past. The clear, historically grounded, richly documented history of belonging detailed by Eaton is a timely antidote to the separatist ideologies of Hindutva or Islamism.