This volume is a welcome addition to the field of Religion and Material Culture, an interdisciplinary field that has slowly taken shape over the last two or three decades, but is only recently receiving concerted scholarly attention. The renewed interest in objects produced and used by religious practitioners “on the ground” marks a shift away from the doctrinal, scriptural, and sectarian concerns traditionally at the forefront of the History of Religions. The results often challenge the neatly reified categories of modern scholarship. As Flood notes in his Introduction, and demonstrates throughout his book, “people and things have been mixed up for a very long time, rarely conforming to the boundaries imposed on them by modern anthropologists and historians” (p. 1).
Flood focuses on the period “from the conquest of Sind by Arab armies … to the establishment of the Delhi sultanate,” a period that has “occupied center stage in colonial and nationalist constructions of a past that has been cast as a perpetual confrontation between Muslim invaders and Hindu resisters” (p. 2). He outlines a new approach to “de-construct these monoliths” and “trace dynamic patterns of engagement between Hindus and Muslims… emphasizing relations rather than essences” (p. 3). Flood critically assesses notions of hybridity that can “presuppose (if not produce) ‘pure’ original or parent cultures” (p. 5), and he turns to models that “have extended the purview of translation from the strictly linguistic to other fields of cultural production” (p. 8). In this, his interest is in “the relationship between strategies of translation associated with objects and processes of transculturation … a complex process of transformation unfolding through extended contact between cultures” (p. 9). Similarly, he encourages us to “engage both media simultaneously, to read between and beyond text and image rather than privileging one over and above the other” (p. 9).
The Introduction (pp. 1–14) is followed by six topical chapters. Chapter 1, “The Mercantile Cosmopolis” (pp. 15–59), uses evidence for the exchange of gifts, texts, inscriptions, coins, and loot to look at the role of eastern territories, especially Sind, as part of larger trade networks in the 9th–10th centuries. Chapter 2, “Cultural Cross-dressing” (pp. 61–87), investigates how Hindu rulers styled and clothed themselves, following Islamic frames of reference; Flood here shows how clothing can be analyzed as a kind of arena of translation, or cultural “contact zone” (p. 74). Chapter 3, “Accommodating the Infidel” (pp. 89–120), looks at patterns of resistance to Islamic orthodoxy during the Ghurid dynasty (ca. 12th–13th centuries), as well as changing religious identities; here, Flood focuses on the evidence of texts, coins, and what he refers to as “transregional networks of piety and political authority” (p. 54).
Chapter 4, “Looking at Loot” (pp. 121–35), explores “looting” as an arena for comparing Hindu/Muslim practices, gifting, and displays of dominance. Chapter 5, “Remaking Monuments” (pp. 137–226), reevaluates older models of “hybrid” architecture, uses of spolia, and the redeployment of Hindu iconography in Islamic architecture. Chapter 6, “Palimpset Pasts and Fictive Genealogies” (pp. 261–8), explores the renovation of sacred spaces via political aspiration and aggrandizement. The Conclusion (pp. 261–8) synthesizes the contents of the book, reflecting on themes like “cosmopolization” with reference to recent scholarship such as Daud Ali's work on medieval court-cultures (pp. 263–4). Flood's refreshing insights into past scholarship include an intelligent and intriguing reevaluation of Marcel Mauss's theory of reciprocity (p. 263).
The volume includes 180 black-and-white figures representing various artifacts, diagrams, and maps, albeit with no plate list. There is an Appendix with principal dynasties and rulers (p. 269), extensive Endnotes (pp. 271–310), and an Index (pp. 353–66). The bibliography (pp. 311–52) is subdivided into “Primary Sources” and “Secondary Sources” (the latter split into “History and Material Culture” and “Conceptual and Theoretical”).
Flood's focus on material culture, and his consideration of the unique problems that objects present for our understanding of religions, signal something of a paradigm shift. He stresses “‘routes not roots’ and ‘networks not territories’… ‘things not texts’” (p. 9). Flood, moreover, successfully resists categories of “civilisational” conflict as well as “hybridization.” Instead, he seeks to forge new intellectual spaces based on models of syncretism and “translation,” and he points to the fluidity with which ideologies and artifacts have been integrated within the diverse regions and cultures of South Asia. The result is an excellent and timely exegesis of a diverse range of cultural, religious, and material data for both Islamic and Hindu traditions.
Many of Flood's insights are applicable to problems of religious identity throughout South Asia, within and beyond the medieval period. His treatment of coinage as “cultural contact-zones,” for instance, may be applicable to the iconographic and cultural syncretism of the Kushan period. While there was perhaps some repetition of ideas that might have been better put to examining more of the particularities of the “Hindu” data, Flood's book remains a must-read for anyone engaged in the study of material culture and religions in South Asia.
