Islam, Migration and New Social Worlds

Research record

Islam entered the social history of Mithila, Vajji and Anga through more than conquest. From the thirteenth century onward, the region stood inside a widening field of movement linking Delhi and the middle Ganga plain, Lakhnauti and Bengal, Jaunpur, Bihar, Anga and the routes toward Nepal. Armies and governors mattered, but so did merchants, transporters, scribes, scholars, Sufis, artisans, soldiers seeking employment, refugees and households that moved with patrons or opportunity. Their presence created new institutions and new forms of language, consumption and association without making every locality identical. The history of these encounters therefore has to be reconstructed as a history of mobility and settlement rather than as a simple sequence of invasions. The chapter also keeps four processes analytically distinct: conquest, migration, durable settlement and religious change. A victorious army does not by itself prove large-scale migration; a migrant population does not by itself prove conversion among older inhabitants; and later demographic patterns cannot be projected backward without evidence. Persian chronicles, Arabic and Persian inscriptions, Sufi letters and discourses, Sanskrit and Avahaṭṭa literature, archaeology, genealogy and later regional histories each preserve different slices of this past. Read together and critically, they reveal a medieval society in which religious difference existed alongside political bargaining, service, exchange, shared routes and multilingual communication.

Section index

1. 34.1 Islam as a social history, not an invasion label
2. 34.2 Source control: chronicles, inscriptions, literature and memory
3. 34.3 Before 1324: a connected frontier already in formation
4. 34.4 The 1324 Tughluq attack: political rupture, not demographic zero point
5. 34.5 Tirhut between Delhi, Bengal and Jaunpur
6. 34.6 Military mobility and the social life of garrisons
7. 34.7 Administrators, qazis and fiscal intermediaries
8. 34.8 Migration was socially differentiated
9. 34.9 Markets, merchants and the Ganga–Bengal corridor
10. 34.10 Sufi mobility and the geography of discipleship
11. 34.11 Bihar’s Sufi centres and Mithila: proximity without conflation
12. 34.12 Mosques, tombs and inscriptions: material anchors with survival bias
13. 34.13 Towns and route junctions as zones of intensified encounter
14. 34.14 Multilingualism: Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Maithili and Avahaṭṭa
15. 34.15 Documentary labour and the translation of authority
16. 34.16 The later Vidyāpati Ṭhakkura in a Persianate-connected world
17. 34.17 Kīrtilatā: political contact seen through literary genre
18. 34.18 Local rulers and Sultanate powers: negotiation as normal politics
19. 34.19 Conflict and accommodation were simultaneous possibilities
20. 34.20 Conversion: evidence, mechanisms and limits
21. 34.21 Household formation, marriage and local rootedness
22. 34.22 Artisans, service groups and occupational neighbourhoods
23. 34.23 Food, dress and material culture as slow histories of contact
24. 34.24 Shrines, sacred geographies and shared social space
25. 34.25 Muslim society was internally differentiated
26. 34.26 Nepal and the Tarai: bidirectional movement across the northern frontier
27. 34.27 Women, migration and the archive of silence
28. 34.28 Memory, legend and later communal narratives
29. 34.29 What can be inferred securely
30. 34.30 Conclusion: new social worlds without a single frontier

Cite this record

Gajendra Thakur. “Islam, Migration and New Social Worlds.” Videha Digital Research Archive: Mithila–Vajji–Anga. Videha — https://www.videha.co.in/ · ISSN 2229-547X · GitHub mirror: https://videha-ejournal.github.io/videha/ · Digital Research Archives on GitHub: https://github.com/videha-ejournal. https://videha-ejournal.github.io/mithila-vajji-anga/records/history/social-34/