INDIA :

The cities created in the Deccan by Muslim leaders introduced the concept of public space to the Indian world. 

Photograph of Aurangabad from the Allardyce Collection: Album of views and portraits in Berar and Hyderabad, taken by an unknown photographer in the 1860s. This view is of the Kham River, the city lies along its right bank. Photo: Public domain/Wikipedia.

When India specialists examine what Islam has brought to the country, they often focus on cultural aspects such as language, poetry, music, painting, culinary arts, or spirituality. They rarely consider the urban dimension. 

Certainly, historians and geographers readily examine how what the Marçais brothers called “the Islamic city” spread throughout India, but mainly to see it as an exogenous institution, even an enclave sheltering an elite that came from outside and was cut off from society. Pratyush Shankar’s recent book covers this dimension, of course, but goes further.

In History of Urban Form of India, a work based on the analysis of 42 Indian cities, the author distinguishes three types of cities – which form the three parts of the book: ancient cities, medieval cities, and cities produced by the modern state.

Ancient cities, apart from those of the Indus civilisation, are mainly epitomised in the “temple cities” of southern India. While medieval cities follow several different patterns, Pratyush Shankar distinguishes above all between merchant cities – typical of Gujarat – those of the Himalayas (whose form is conditioned by the terrain), and those built by Muslims in the Deccan.

Comparing them proves very useful in understanding Islam’s contribution to the Indian civilisation – something Pratyush Shankar helps us to do, without attempting it himself – thanks to his morphological approach to the city: he is interested only in the form of the city, not in its local mode of governance or its relationship with the state.  

All Indian cities inherited a significant part of their form or structure from the caste system. Pratyush Shankar points out in the introduction that the “Caste system had a huge impact in determining the location and formation of neighbourhood clusters that were inward looking (in cases of Jodhpur and Udaipur) and the possibility to shut off from the city by controlling the gates (Pols of Ahmedabad)”. 

History of Urban Form of India: From Beginning till 1900’s, Pratyush Shankar, OUP, 2024.

The caste logic is naturally at work in the “temple city”:

“The idea of using a Brahmin settlement (with a temple) for creating a surplus economy was central to the birth of cities in South India. This was legitimized through the Brahminical ideology of the Brahmin-Kshatriya coalition expressed through Vedic and puranic religion”.

And naturally, the “temple city” is “divided into various sectors based on function differentiation that was represented through various caste-based housing. The caste system was strictly observed and manifested itself in the planning of these urban centers”.

The cities built by Muslim leaders from the 14th century onwards in the Deccan did not escape the caste system – especially since distinguishing between Hindu and Islamic cities constitutes “a very simplistic binary” that does not reflect a much more complex reality. But these medieval cities of the Deccan added something new to the urban form that had prevailed in the country until then. This innovation did not take place within the city, but outside – and still, that was a key element of the city dynamics: not far from the city walls, but well outside the city itself, Sufi saints settled in an almost systematic manner. They deliberately distanced themselves from the city to show their detachment from material things and live in peace. At the same time, the inhabitants revered them: “People would leave the material city behind to spend a day at the sacred Sufi sites and return by evening”. 

After their death, these saints were buried in the very place where they stood, and a mausoleum called “Dargah” was built around their tomb, the size of which varied according to the popularity of the saint. 

What Pratyush Shankar does not say is that throughout society, Sufi saints were attributed with considerable powers, even beyond death: many devotees continued to visit the Dargah centuries after the saint’s death to ask him to grant their wishes (whether it be to have a child, to be cured of an illness, or to pass exams). This votive logic, due to its transactional nature, transcends social barriers of all kinds: Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, etc. worship Sufi saints, people from all walks of life, from the elite to the lower castes, rub shoulders at the Dargah and, finally, even in the Holy of Holies, women and men are admitted on an equal footing. But Pratyush Shankar assumes that the reader what I have mentioned above when he concludes:

“The unique contribution of the Deccan cities was perhaps not so much in any extraordinary formation within, but rather in the development of the prominent district of the Sufi saints and the suburbs. Sufi saints were popular amongst the masses and provided the much-needed counterpoint to the state. If the city represented the material world of trade, commerce, and power, the suburban precincts of Sufi tombs were just the opposite; a sacred and spiritual space with frugal infrastructure which is out there in the lap of nature. Over the centuries, this typology took firm root as these complexes of tombs became public places that were frequented by city dwellers like a pilgrimage out of the city, as they often lay just outside the fort walls of the city”.

The word is out: “public space”!

The cities created in the Deccan by Muslim leaders in the 14th century introduced the concept of public space to the Indian world, which had ignored  it until then due to the deep cleavages that divided society along lines of religion, caste, and gender. This is a contribution of Islam to India that some would call paradoxical, given that the image of this religion, today, is often dominated by the idea of segregation, even exclusion. But before Islam entered India, such open spaces did not exist in the country. 

View of the Feroz Shah Kotla, Delhi, 1830, 1843 (oil on canvas) by Colonel Robert Smith (fl.1880-90). Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Certainly, ascetics established their ashrams out of cities – like Ramana Maharshi’s cave above Tiruvannamalai – but his followers did not disturb him there, and when they did, they interacted with him on the mode of the guru-shishya parampara, whereas around the Dargah, one would find play grounds as well as picnic sites.   

In his book, Pratyush Shankar confines this contribution to the Deccan, but it is tempting to argue that the innovation he points to can be found throughout India. In the north too, Sufi saints settled on the outskirts of cities  – did Nizamuddin not choose to live far from Delhi?  – and their mausoleums still offer the image of a public space open to all. This is even more striking when the Dargah is still surrounded by greenery, even though it has been incorporated into the city, such as Sarkhej Roza in Ahmedabad or Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi, where Anand Taneja has clearly shown that people from all walks of life still gather today, as befits a public space!                    

Christophe Jaffrelot is Senior Research Fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris, Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s College London, Non resident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Chair of the British Association for South Asian Studies.

source: http://www.thewire.in / The Wire / Home> English> Opinion> Urban / by Christophe Jaffrelot / October 18th, 2025

GUJARAT :

By recreating a whole world around a group of traders in western India, Chhaya Goswami’s Globalization before Its Time is business history as it should be.

A Dutch trading ship from the late 17th-century. Credit: Wikimedia

The Arabian Sea has a special place in Indian business history. For centuries the cities and settlements on the Arabian Sea littoral traded with each other, exchanging Indian textiles for horse, armaments, pearls and ivory. In turn, some of the textiles were passed on to the Atlantic slave trade in Africa as a medium of exchange, or sent overland to European markets. Coastal merchants indigenous to the region bordering the sea engaged in this business and developed sophisticated systems of banking and shipbuilding to support the mercantile enterprise. The Hindu and Muslim traders of Kachchh were examples of such groups of people.

In the 17th century, the Arabian Sea trade flourished thanks to the control that three powerful empires – the Ottoman in Turkey, the Safavid in Iran and the Mughal in India – exercised on some of the key seaports, and regular transactions amongst them. This was also the time when the European merchant companies established themselves in the Indian Ocean trade, even though the Portuguese had arrived in this world somewhat earlier. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Mughal empire had almost collapsed and its access to the Arabian Sea ports had long come to an end. Europeans were in the ascendance.

What happened to the indigenous traders and bankers during this period of transition? Two contending stories exist on this question. The first says that they lost ground to the Europeans while their patrons lost political power. The second says that the indigenous traders found partnerships and agency with the Europeans lucrative, and as their fortunes flourished, the Europeans gained in political power. Both stories overstate the Europeans’ commercial prowess and understate the Indians’ capacity to shape the course of history.

Chhaya Goswami’s book is a corrective to such biased histories. It shows that the Kachchhi traders did gain from European trade, and withstood well the decline of empires, but they could do so thanks to their own resources, which included well-developed institutions of commerce and banking, knowledge of the seas, shipping, and shipbuilding, past history of collaborating with political actors, and access to both maritime and overland trading routes.

The book is divided into four chapters, each one of substantial length. Chapter one explores the special characteristics of Kachchh that make it a “land of entrepreneurs”. Chapters two and three describe Kachchhi traders’ activities in Muscat and Zanzibar respectively, and chapter four deals with some of the prominent firms in the maritime trade, and how a few of them extended their operations beyond the southwest Asia region.

Why Kachchh? What is special about the region that it should produce so many merchant groups? The convenient location of the region on a navigable part of the eastern Arabian Sea, as well as the Mandvi port, of course, supplies a part of the answer.

Another part of the answer has to do with politics. The western coastal regions were ruled by small states that depended heavily on income from trade. This dependence was due to the poor agricultural conditions in the region. In turn, these states, though nominally vassals of the Mughals, could exercise a great deal of independence in policy. They used their freedom to create a model of rule where merchants and bankers had a prominent place, not only during warfare, the all-too-common palace intrigues or disasters, but also in normal times. Merchants and bankers helped the business of governance by collecting taxes, revenue farming, making loans, and taking part in administration, whereas the states helped them by offering lucrative contracts and implicitly recognising their laws and practices.

But the political and geographical environment explains little unless we also consider the social and institutional basis of entrepreneurship in the region. The merchant groups in question were ready to establish diaspora networks in port cities around the Arabian Sea. They conducted extensive and complicated financial operations including bill and insurance, and their bills were acceptable to the distant trading points thanks to the diaspora network.

The book shows in interesting detail how Vaishnavite temples and monasteries became effectively banks, clearing houses, and guarantors of reputation. Community law had great force. The merchants had considerable interest in shipbuilding, which in turn encouraged timber trade. In banking, trading, shipbuilding, and navigation, master-apprentice hierarchies were highly developed, showing how much skills were valued and how skills formed.

The book is well-researched and builds on the author’s deep knowledge of vernacular sources and the regional context. It is business history as business history should be, that is, it succeeds in recreating a whole world around a group of traders, and fills an important gap in Indian economic history scholarship.

One wishes, at the same time, that the author had tried to place the Kachchhi traders more firmly in debates on the 18th century economic transition in southern Asia, and attempted some comparative discussion of trading ‘firms’ in Kachchh and elsewhere in the world. Surely the Europeans operated in the same world, with a very different model of a firm. Did the difference matter to institutional and political change? But, perhaps wisely, Goswami’s book steers clear of dry historiography. Instead, it keeps in mind its readers – who will no doubt find the material presented fascinating and the quality of the narrative superb.

Tirthankar Roy is a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

source: http://www.thewire.in / The Wire / Home> English> Books / by Tirthankar Roy / July 04th, 2016