![]() Rahul Govind CONQUEST AND COMMUNITY: THE AFTER-LIFE OF WARRIOR SAINT GHAZI MIYAN By Shahid Amin Orient BlackSwan, Hyderabad, 2015, pp. 352, Rs. 995.00 VOLUME XL NUMBER 8 August 2016 Shahid Amin’s Conquest and Community:
The After-life of Warrior Saint Ghazi
Miyan is an ambitious exercise in history
writing that combines a range of sources,
textual and ethnographic. It is also self-consciously
a critique of the existing practice of
the historian’s craft, insisting, by way of introduction,
that the political realities of the
day require ‘new ways’ to write and imagine
history. More concretely, Amin’s work examines
the figure of Ghazi Miyan, who exists
in contemporary popular memory in the
Bhairach region. The fascinating paradox that
forms the impetus for his ‘historical’ investigation
is the fact that Ghazi Miyan, described
as Mahmud of Ghazni’s nephew across this
material, does not seem to have in fact existed;
contemporary chronicles of Mahmud
of Ghazni make no mention of him. It is
Amin’s argument that a study of the figure
of Ghazi Miyan and the veneration accorded
to him, across centuries, is a sign of the historical
‘displacement’ of the figure of
Mahmud of Ghazni as a foreign conquerormarauder.
However, Ghazi Miyan is no ‘rosary
fondling Sufi’ (p. 6). The crucial intervention
that Amin makes is to study the way
in which the figure of Ghazi Miyan has been
altered across textual and folk imagination
so as to address the more granular, mundane
everyday needs and anxieties such as childbearing.
Thus, it is not as though ‘conquest’
is simply erased or forgotten, but it is ‘refashioned’
to suit the everyday, and it is in
terms of such creative refashioning that we
can understand the nature of popular veneration
or the contemporary ‘syncretism’ of
the Ghazi Miyan cult as a historical process.
To simply ignore conquest, Amin argues,
would be to cede completely the narratives
and facts of conquest to majoritarian writings.
The main evidence that Amin mobilizes
for his argument includes Abdur Rahman
Chisthi’s Mirat-i-Masudi, the hagiography of
Ghazi Miyan written in the early 17th century,
textual material from the 19th and early
20th centuries, as well as his own field work
in the 1990s among the balladeers singing
songs of Ghazi Miyan in the Bhairach region.
Abdur Rahman Chisthi was a prolific
writer, but Amin’s interest does not lie in
interpreting the Mirat in the light of his oeuvre. Focussing exclusively on this Mirat
(for there were other Mirats penned by
Chisthi), or rather on certain segments,
Amin narrates its plot, which tells the story
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