Slavery originated during the age of savagery and it was widely prevalent in ancient Egypt,Greece and Rome,centuries before the coming of Christ.Ancient India also had slaves but they were so mildly treated that foreign visitors like Megasthenes, who were acquainted with their fate in other countries,failed to notice the existence of slavery in this country.The present study documents for the first time the Muslim slave system as it obtained in medieval India under Muslim rule.

For over five hundred years, Muslim dynasties ruled parts of northern and central India, starting with the Ghurids in the 1190s through the fracturing of the Mughal Empire in the early eighteenth century. Scholars have long drawn upon works written in Persian and Arabic about this epoch, yet they have neglected the many histories that India’s learned elite wrote about Indo-Muslim rule in Sanskrit. These works span the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire and discuss Muslim-led kingdoms in the Deccan and even as far south as Tamil Nadu. They constitute a major archive for understanding significant cultural and political changes that shaped early modern India and the views of those who lived through this crucial period. Audrey Truschke offers a groundbreaking analysis of these Sanskrit texts that sheds light on both historical Muslim political leaders on the subcontinent and how premodern Sanskrit intellectuals perceived the “Muslim Other.” She analyzes and theorizes how Sanskrit historians used the tools of their literary tradition to document Muslim governance and, later, as Muslims became an integral part of Indian cultural and political worlds, Indo-Muslim rule. Truschke demonstrates how this new archive lends insight into formulations and expressions of premodern political, social, cultural, and religious identities. By elaborating the languages and identities at play in premodern Sanskrit historical works, this book expands our historical and conceptual resources for understanding premodern South Asia, Indian intellectual history, and the impact of Muslim peoples on non-Muslim societies. At a time when exclusionary Hindu nationalism, which often grounds its claims on fabricated visions of India’s premodernity, dominates the Indian public sphere, The Language of History shows the complexity and diversity of the subcontinent’s past.

The history of Islam in India has resulted in impassioned debates between scholars-from the secularists to the Hindu right. Arguing that these histories tend to project modern concerns back in time, Raziuddin Aquil conducts a dispassionate investigation of the period between the thirteenth and the nineteenth centuries, from the heyday of Muslim political domination of large areas of the Subcontinent to the decline of the Mughals, accompanied by the transformations colonialism brought in its wake. Using texts from the medieval and early modern periods, Aquil uncovers connections between a variety of factors-the religious orthodoxy or the ulama; Muslim rulers' attempts to deal with competing religious ideologies; the influence of Sufi traditions; the emergence of Sikhism and its tenuous relationship with Islam; and the development of Urdu as a language of the people. Situating his arguments in the context of contemporary politics involving Hindus and Muslims, Islam and the West, and the longterm struggles within Muslim societies between reason and faith, Aquil contends that some of the issues explored here have come down to us from medieval times while others have been transformed completely into concerns that are purely modern in origin. Penetrating and readable, In the Name of Allah tackles the legacy of Muslim rule in India, and in the process presents Islam as a complex and continually changing tradition.