Shahid Amin's Conquest and Community is a lucidly written book, even poetic in places, that explores the legend of Syed Salar Masud, long venerated in the eastern parts of the Gangetic plains of North India. In an age of hyper-homogenized communitarian politics across the world, Amin's book is bravely and profoundly countercultural in its orientation, as it attempts to recover and broadcast the oral memory and religious practices of a local hero-cult to Anglophone audiences afflicted by a profound amnesia about any local, anywhere.

The local hero in question here is Syed Salar Masud, also remembered as Ghazi Miyan, who is believed to have lived and died in the eleventh century. In Amin's own eloquent words, he is

The book's five sections narrate these “traces” of both “text” and “the culture of rural Hindustan.” Part one begins with a discussion of the earliest Persian-language account of Syed Salar Masud and his eleventh-century jihad—an account dating to the seventeenth century. Part two describes the figure of Ghazi Miyan in folklore. Part three traces the economy and geography of veneration, discussing domestic worship among peasant and artisan groups, and also the role of a particular caste-group of singers of the legend, the Dafalis. Part four identifies the locations of sustained opposition to the cult in the later nineteenth century, from orthodox sections among both Hindus and Muslims, members of whom had easy access to print culture in this period. Part five returns to the persistence of Ghazi Miyan in everyday memory and in the very texture of the language, in proverbs and sayings.

As Amin goes on to argue, the “conflation of categories,” the “conundrums” presented by such a legend

And yet, for this reviewer at least, it is this set of methodological choices—to focus on narrations, and on the poetic texture of the local veneration of Ghazi Miyan—that also set up the book's blind spots. Thus, Amin passes up on multiple opportunities to embed his authors and texts in a sociohistorical context, whether in the past or in the present. While it is true that little is known of at least some of these authors, Amin neglects to cite the relevant scholarship from recent years that fleshes out precisely such communities of transmission and reception in the Mughal era.Footnote ¹ If the sociology and history of the legend—its locality and its community in the past and the present—are never elaborated for the reader, then the historian is at liberty to hypothesize a world just beyond the edges of empirically graspable history.

Nor are the multiple genres in which the legends of Ghazi Miyan have flourished themselves historicized. Amin's discussion of Abdur Rahman Chishti's seventeenth-century account, for example, sees the author and his text in the context of a Sufi engagement with community and history in the Mughal era. Even from Amin's discussion of Abdur Rahman's account, though, it is apparent that this seventeenth-century narration contained multiple literary genres with their own distinctive narrative conventions and tropes. Abdur Rahman's frame narrative was clearly historicist, linking Ghazi Miyan with Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni from the eleventh century. However, his account of Ghazi Miyan then proceeds entirely in the genre of hagiography, in which miracles offer proof of charisma and exemplary lives are fashioned with explicitly didactic ends. In this project, Abdur Rahman, like the authors of other hagiographies across religious traditions, appears to deliberately fuse historical time with miraculous time, insights that Amin neglects to explore at any length.

The narrations of the 1990s recorded by Amin suffer from a similar lack of political or social context. We do not get a sense of whether the artisan groups mentioned in the colonial-era ethnographies as the primary adherents of the cult of Ghazi Miyan—the potters, oil-pressers, and so on—continue to be the most devout adherents of the cult. Nor do we get a sense of whether the intense political and electoral mobilizations of the 1990s by rival political parties, in precisely this region of eastern Uttar Pradesh, have had any impact upon the shrine to Ghazi Miyan at Bahraich, or upon his followers. The legend of Ghazi Miyan then continues to be located primarily in the realm of a lived experience that is asserted to be beyond the archive, even beyond evidence.

Methodologically, eschewing such questions of social and historical context ends up allowing Amin to locate the legend of Ghazi Miyan in the domain of a culture denuded of all politics, even as its poetics are richly fleshed out here. Coexistence, conflict, and accommodation, as well as their remembering and forgetting, are all then dependent upon preserving that culture. Neither memory nor amnesia is grasped as a resonant interpretation in any given context. Remembering and forgetting are not seen as dependent upon ongoing contests and negotiations over hierarchies of access and entitlements—the politics, in this sharply defined sense—that, arguably, generated such legends as well as the communities around them. And we are left with a sense of events beyond our grasp, which threaten to obliterate the memory of such accommodation, of conflict tempered by coexistence.

Conquest and Community will provoke spirited debates about memory and amnesia, and about historical method, in both advanced undergraduate classes and graduate-level seminars. It also has three useful appendices of narrations contained in colonial accounts from the beginning and end of the nineteenth century, and of another set of narrations Amin himself recorded in the 1990s. The appendices thus provide readers with primary sources over the last two hundred years, adding to the book's pedagogic value.