Desire, Deviance and Muslim Elite in Medieval India

Abstract

The studies of Islamic societies generally approached through the sexual ideology of Islam fail to capture the fluidities of practiced religion. The treatment of desire in Islam, as strictly heterosexual, and within the realm of marriage, with concessions only to male desire, offers little scope for study of love and desire outside marriage and beyond reproductive role. The paper here through the writings of ruling Muslim elite -  court chronicles, records and letters, observations, tazkiras (biographies) etc. over the centuries of Sultanate and Mughal rule in India, explores the normative of love and desire among Muslims in medieval India, and what therefore was regarded as deviance.  Whether the sharia (Islamic law) and the kanuns (imperial decree) in specifying  deviance and punishment had the same fixed and immutable position based on the written word of Quran, or whether these changed with the dynamism of social and political regimes? The paper seeks to study the diverse ways in which the regimes interacted with culture and aesthetics of the people and sought to employ these resources to its advantage, obviously not affording to be punitive in all cases.

The paper sees lack of fixedness and flexibility in shari’a despite the written text of Quran. This not simply on account of the effect of mystical and socio-philosophical ideal of Sufi Islam that rendered love as markedly universal emotion, with considerable fluidity and ambiguity to permissible limits of love. The rule structure itself required recognizable incorporation of local norms and practices.