Islam presided over India. Its reach encompassed
nearly the entire country, although the far reaches
of the south were spared its iconoclasm and its
heaviest hand.
The Islamic era (c. 1100 to 1750 C.E.) pro-
duced religious interaction that may be unique
in the world. Many of the Muslims who entered
India were Turks, who often had an appreciation
for the Sufi traditions. Sufis were often patron-
ized by the Islamic courts. As the Sufi wandering
holymen, many of whom were as otherworldly
and eccentric as their Indian counterparts, began
to meet with the local wanderers and saints,
new religious ideas began to develop. The long
tradition of Hindu saints who were lower caste,
anticaste, or anti-Brahminical were supplemented
by Sufi wanderers who held similar views. What
emerged were powerful spiritual traditions that
condemned all orthodoxy and were socially revo-
lutionary in that they decried caste as spiritually
bankrupt and laughed at the Brahmins as scoun-
drels and worse. The Sant tradition of North India
that emerged in this era was well represented by
such people as Kabir, who spoke most radically
about the stupidity of untouchability and the fool-
ishness of the orthodox.
The Sant and Sufi sentiments that developed
in this era merged in the tradition of Guru Nanak
(15th century) and the Sikhs, who eschew all
ritual, icons, and ritual leaders. For the Sikhs
there is no guru except the Granth Sahib, their
holy book, which has many verses from the poet-
saints of this era.
Other movements, such as the Bauls, remained
less institutionalized than the Sikh tradition. They
too combined elements from devotional Hinduism,
Sufi love poetry and music, and anti-Brahminical
sentiments into cultic groups that exist today out-
side the orthodox umbrella of Hinduism.British Era
By the beginning of the 18th century, the British had
arrived in India and had become powerful in Ben-
gal. They succeeded in developing political powerthrough the use of intermediaries carefully chosen
from corrupt Muslim potentates and Hindu kings in
the chaotic aftermath of Mughal rule.
It is no accident that Hindu modernism begins
in Bengal, as it represented the longest contact
point between the Western ruler, Britain, and
its new subjects. English education became the
norm for well-educated Bengalis by the early 18th
century. When other parts of the country were
just becoming accustomed to the heavy hand
of the British, the Bengalis had already become
more than familiar with their views and ways.
What emerged were both a reform movement in
Hinduism and the roots of the Indian nationalist
movement.
Groups emerged in the late 18th century who,
influenced in part by Christian ideas, sought to
reform Hinduism. Groups such as the Brahmo
Samaj of Ram Mohan Roy sought to end child
marriage, to allow widows to remarry, to eliminate
the custom of widows’ burning themselves on the
funeral pyres of their husband, to eliminate caste,
and to end worship of icons. Many of these people
worked from a notion that India had been domi-
nated by the British because the Indian culture
had become spiritually corrupt. They felt that if
they had had a stronger social sense and greater
solidarity, the British could not have so easily
gained preeminence. This view was held by nearly
every major fighter for Indian independence,
including Mahatma Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo.
The caste system received significant criticism
for more than two millennia by various groups
who argued from the point of view of a different
spiritual vision. The Buddha and Mahavira are the
first we know of, starting in 600 B.C.E., but the
Virashaivas of Karnataka, a South Indian state,
eliminated caste from their reform tradition in the
11th century C.E., and many groups of mendicant
wanderers such as the Siddhas routinely criticized
caste and Brahminical cultural dominance, from
the Buddha’s time forward. The medieval poet-
saints of North India who followed the views of
Kabir were only maintaining a long countertradi-
tion. So when the “reformists” of Bengal began toIntroduction xxiii Ji-xL-hindu-fm.indd xxiii 12/14/06 1:02:37 AM