The encounter between Muslim and Hindu remains one of the defining
issues of South Asian society today. This encounter began as early
as the 8th century, and the first Muslim kingdom in India would be
established at the end of the 12th century. This powerful kingdom,
the Sultanate of Delhi, eventually reduced to vassalage almost
every independent kingdom on the subcontinent. In Love's Subtle
Magic, a remarkable and deeply 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 deeply serious religious message through the medium of
lighthearted stories of love. Although composed in the Muslim
courts, they are written in a vernacular Indian language. Until
now, they have defied analysis, and been mostly ignored by scholars
east and west. Behl shows that the Sufi authors of these charming
tales purposely 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.
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