Abstract
AbstractWhile Shiʿi Islam and its imperial expressions were known in the Deccan sultanates from the sixteenth century and expressed in court-sponsored production of theology, it was only in the eighteenth century that Shiʿi political theology emerged in North India in the new state of Awadh. In this paper, I argue that one can discern in the theology of Sayyid Dildar ʿAli Nasirabadi (d. 1820) a clear attempt at forging a new Shiʿi theological dispensation to bolster the state, based upon a tripartite attack on three rival approaches to faith and politics: Akhbarism, Sufism, and the Sunni rationalism of Farangi Mahall. A careful examination of these textual practices within the Awadhi context demonstrates one example of how Indian thinkers responded to the decline of Mughal power and articulated alternative epistemologies in vernacular contexts before the advent of the British Empire.
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