“Briskness in the Market of Shaikh-Dom”: The Commercialization of Piety in Early Eighteenth-Century Delhi

Abstract

Among the primary targets of the so-called reformers of Indian Islam of the eighteenth century were the so-called false mystics of their era. In their oft-expressed complaints against shopkeeper-mystics and pious frauds, this article discerns a sharpening crisis of values between the pursuit of the eternal divine and the allurements of evanescent earthly pleasures. Such a crisis of values, contends this article, should not simply be understood as part of some process of the decline and renewal of Islam in the Mughal empire. Rather, it was caused by a very real anxiety about the erosion of long-standing pious ideals by the forces of commerce that swept across the subcontinent in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. By comparing a range of biographical compendia, hagiographies, epistles, chronicles, poetry, and belles lettres produced by Mughal intellectuals, this article illustrates the ways in which the seductions of both elite influence and mass veneration combined to thwart the Sufi’s path at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.