Christophe Jaffrelot | SabrangIndia

What Indian Cities Owe to Islam

sabrang — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 04:41:09 +0000

When India specialists examine what Islam has brought to the country, they often focus on cultural aspects such as language, poetry, music, painting, culinary arts, or spirituality. They rarely consider the urban dimension.

Certainly, historians and geographers readily examine how what the Marçais brothers called “the Islamic city” spread throughout India, but mainly to see it as an exogenous institution, even an enclave sheltering an elite that came from outside and was cut off from society. Pratyush Shankar’s recent book covers this dimension, of course, but goes further.

In History of Urban Form of India, a work based on the analysis of 42 Indian cities, the author distinguishes three types of cities – which form the three parts of the book: ancient cities, medieval cities, and cities produced by the modern state.

Ancient cities, apart from those of the Indus civilisation, are mainly epitomised in the “temple cities” of southern India. While medieval cities follow several different patterns, Pratyush Shankar distinguishes above all between merchant cities – typical of Gujarat – those of the Himalayas (whose form is conditioned by the terrain), and those built by Muslims in the Deccan.

Comparing them proves very useful in understanding Islam’s contribution to the Indian civilisation – something Pratyush Shankar helps us to do, without attempting it himself – thanks to his morphological approach to the city: he is interested only in the form of the city, not in its local mode of governance or its relationship with the state.

All Indian cities inherited a significant part of their form or structure from the caste system. Pratyush Shankar points out in the introduction that the “Caste system had a huge impact in determining the location and formation of neighbourhood clusters that were inward looking (in cases of Jodhpur and Udaipur) and the possibility to shut off from the city by controlling the gates (Pols of Ahmedabad)”.

History of Urban Form of India: From Beginning till 1900’s, Pratyush Shankar, OUP, 2024.

The caste logic is naturally at work in the “temple city”:

“The idea of using a Brahmin settlement (with a temple) for creating a surplus economy was central to the birth of cities in South India. This was legitimized through the Brahminical ideology of the Brahmin-Kshatriya coalition expressed through Vedic and puranic religion”.

And naturally, the “temple city” is “divided into various sectors based on function differentiation that was represented through various caste-based housing. The caste system was strictly observed and manifested itself in the planning of these urban centers”.

The cities built by Muslim leaders from the 14th century onwards in the Deccan did not escape the caste system – especially since distinguishing between Hindu and Islamic cities constitutes “a very simplistic binary” that does not reflect a much more complex reality. But these medieval cities of the Deccan added something new to the urban form that had prevailed in the country until then. This innovation did not take place within the city, but outside – and still, that was a key element of the city dynamics: not far from the city walls, but well outside the city itself, Sufi saints settled in an almost systematic manner. They deliberately distanced themselves from the city to show their detachment from material things and live in peace. At the same time, the inhabitants revered them: “People would leave the material city behind to spend a day at the sacred Sufi sites and return by evening”.

After their death, these saints were buried in the very place where they stood, and a mausoleum called “Dargah” was built around their tomb, the size of which varied according to the popularity of the saint.

What Pratyush Shankar does not say is that throughout society, Sufi saints were attributed with considerable powers, even beyond death: many devotees continued to visit the Dargah centuries after the saint’s death to ask him to grant their wishes (whether it be to have a child, to be cured of an illness, or to pass exams). This votive logic, due to its transactional nature, transcends social barriers of all kinds: Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, etc. worship Sufi saints, people from all walks of life, from the elite to the lower castes, rub shoulders at the Dargah and, finally, even in the Holy of Holies, women and men are admitted on an equal footing. But Pratyush Shankar assumes that the reader what I have mentioned above when he concludes:

“The unique contribution of the Deccan cities was perhaps not so much in any extraordinary formation within, but rather in the development of the prominent district of the Sufi saints and the suburbs. Sufi saints were popular amongst the masses and provided the much-needed counterpoint to the state. If the city represented the material world of trade, commerce, and power, the suburban precincts of Sufi tombs were just the opposite; a sacred and spiritual space with frugal infrastructure which is out there in the lap of nature. Over the centuries, this typology took firm root as these complexes of tombs became public places that were frequented by city dwellers like a pilgrimage out of the city, as they often lay just outside the fort walls of the city”.

The word is out: “public space”!

The cities created in the Deccan by Muslim leaders in the 14th century introduced the concept of public space to the Indian world, which had ignored it until then due to the deep cleavages that divided society along lines of religion, caste, and gender. This is a contribution of Islam to India that some would call paradoxical, given that the image of this religion, today, is often dominated by the idea of segregation, even exclusion. But before Islam entered India, such open spaces did not exist in the country.

View of the Feroz Shah Kotla, Delhi, 1830, 1843 (oil on canvas) by Colonel Robert Smith (fl.1880-90). Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Certainly, ascetics established their ashrams out of cities – like Ramana Maharshi’s cave above Tiruvannamalai – but his followers did not disturb him there, and when they did, they interacted with him on the mode of the guru-shishya parampara, whereas around the Dargah, one would find play grounds as well as picnic sites.

In his book, Pratyush Shankar confines this contribution to the Deccan, but it is tempting to argue that the innovation he points to can be found throughout India. In the north too, Sufi saints settled on the outskirts of cities – did Nizamuddin not choose to live far from Delhi? – and their mausoleums still offer the image of a public space open to all. This is even more striking when the Dargah is still surrounded by greenery, even though it has been incorporated into the city, such as Sarkhej Roza in Ahmedabad or Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi, where Anand Taneja has clearly shown that people from all walks of life still gather today, as befits a public space!

Christophe Jaffrelot is Senior Research Fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris, Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s College London, Non resident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Chair of the British Association for South Asian Studies.

Courtesy: The Wire

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Who Is India’s All-Weather Friend in This World?

sabrang — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 09:57:40 +0000

In his latest book, S. Jaishankar writes: “After all, diplomacy is all about making friends and influencing people”. In the armed conflict between Pakistan and India this May, China reinforced its role as Islamabad’s “all-weather friend”. Beijing took Pakistan’s side far more clearly than in previous wars between the two neighbors. When the likelihood of Indian retaliation to the April 22 attack in Pahalgam increased, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi declared: “As an ironclad friend and an all-weather strategic cooperative partner, China fully understands Pakistan’s legitimate security concerns and supports Pakistan in safeguarding its sovereignty and security interests“. During the conflict, according to Indian sources, China helped Pakistan with air defense and satellite imagery. And after the guns fell silent, when India – which had just denounced the Indus Treaty – indicated that it might deprive Pakistan of some of the water to which that treaty entitled it, China hinted that it too might deprive India of water from the Brahmaputra.

How do you explain this seemingly unconditional support?

First, Pakistan has become an important customer for Chinese arms dealers, as 80% of its arsenal is Chinese-made. Not only is Pakistan an attractive market for China, it also enables the latter to test on the battlefield weapons that the two countries have sometimes developed together.

Secondly, China has invested $68 billion in foreign direct investment in Pakistan in the framework of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor, the flagship of the Belt and Roads Initiative, despite the recurring tensions between Beijing and Islamabad stemming from Pakistan’s late payments or attacks on Chinese engineers by Baloch nationalists. What’s more, part of the $68 billion has been used to build roads, railroads and power plants in areas claimed by India, such as Gilgit Baltistan.

Thirdly, China probably wanted to seize the opportunity to make India’s life complicated, as two bones of contention have (re)emerged since Narendra Modi came to power. First, in keeping with Hindu nationalist ideology, the Indian government has expressed revisionist views, proclaiming its desire to restore Akhand Bharat, which would include the part of Ladakh conquered by China in the 1962 war. Secondly, India sought to resist China’s push into other South Asian countries, starting with Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. For decades, China has kept India busy on its western flank by arming Pakistan, forcing New Delhi especially towards regional policies like Neighbourhood First or Look East.

Fourthly, India has alienated China by pursuing its rapprochement with the United States, as evidenced by good relations – till recently at least – between Modi and Trump, and India’s intention to attract American companies looking to relocate their Chinese factories to India.

Who is India’s all-weather friend?

While Islamabad can count on a particularly valuable all-weather friend, not only because it is the world’s second major power, but also because China clashes with India in the Himalayas, New Delhi, by contrast, was relatively isolated during the May crisis.

At the United Nations Security Council, India failed to get either Pakistan or the terrorist group to which it attributed the Pahalgam attack mentioned in the press release. Above all, the US intervention caught India off-guard. While the Trump administration, initially, refused to get involved, on the third day of the conflict, the hypothesis of a nuclear escalation led the White House to intervene – and it did without sparing India. On May 10, Donald Trump announced that he had silenced the guns thanks to an express mediation during which he promised good trade deals to the belligerents. He also invited them to negotiate a lasting peace and offered to act as his good offices to settle the Kashmir question. This sequence could only be seen as an affront by New Delhi for two reasons.

First, whenever American presidents have put an end to a conflict between Indians and Pakistanis, it has always been to the benefit of the former. On July 4, 1999, Bill Clinton summoned Nawaz Sharif to Washington to withdraw Pakistani forces from the Kargil heights. This time, Trump presented himself as the saviour who spared the world a nuclear war. While India claimed to have demonstrated its military superiority, the impression the world took away from this episode was that the conflict ended in a draw. The Indians who were the most determined to “do away with Pakistan”, whipped up into a frenzy by the nationalist hysteria of a media in thrall of the government, could only feel immense frustration.

Secondly, Trump was ruining India’s efforts not to internationalise the Kashmir issue, which, since the Treaty of Shimla negotiated by Indira Gandhi in 1972, was to be considered a bilateral affair. Here again, Trump was playing into Pakistan’s hands.

All in all, while India had been striving for years to avoid appearing indissolubly linked to Pakistan on the international stage, Trump marked a return to an “India-Pakistan hyphenation” that was dragging India down: entangled in an endless regional conflict, the country can hardly appear as a global power in the making.

In the aftermath, Trump showed even greater benevolence towards Pakistan when he declared: “Pakistan has very strong leadership. Some people don’t like when I say this, but it is what it is. And they stopped that war. I’m very proud of them”. In unison, General Michael Kurilla, the head of US Central Command (CENTCOM), recently hailed Pakistan as “a “phenomenal partner in the counter-terrorism world”.

The fight against terrorism, in fact, could be the explanation for the recent American-Pakistani rapprochement. At the end of February, the Trump administration decided “to exempt $397 million in security assistance to Pakistan from its massive foreign aid cuts. The funds will be allocated to a program that monitors Pakistan’s U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets-to make sure that they are used for counterterrorism, and not for action against India”. But then there is something paradoxical in Trump’s post-Pahalgam treatment of India and Pakistan as equals, as if one were not a victim of terrorism and the other the crucible of so many terrorist groups. Things may become clearer during the five-day official visit of Field Marshal Asim Munir who has been invited in Washington to discuss military and strategic ties between Pakistan and the United States.

Whatever the reason for Trump’s positive assessment of Pakistan, it contradicts India’s efforts to isolate the country. In fact, while New Delhi has been trying for years to marginalise Islamabad on the international stage, the past few weeks have shown that Pakistan retains many supporters – and not just in the United States.

At the very time when India and Pakistan were going through a serious crisis, the latter being accused by India of supporting jihadist groups operating on its soil, on May 9, the International Monetary Fund executive board approved a fresh $1.4 billion loan to Pakistan under its climate resilience fund and approved the first review of its $7 billion programme, freeing about $1 billion in cash. India protested at the board meeting that the Pakistan programme raised concerns about the “possibility of misuse of debt-financing funds for state-sponsored cross-border terrorism.” But no other country represented on the board supported it, even if only by abstaining from the vote. A month later, Pakistan obtained two positions in two UN bodies: on the one hand, Pakistan’s permanent representative to the United Nations, has been appointed chair of the U.N. Security Council’s 1988 Sanctions Committee, which monitors sanctions targeting the Taliban and, on the other, a Pakistani diplomat has also become vice-chair of the 1373 Counter-Terrorism Committee. These positions could hardly have escaped Pakistan by virtue of its status as a non-permanent member. But Pakistan’s election as a non-permanent member with 182 votes in 2024 alone testifies to the country’s non-marginalisation.

How is India’s longest-standing partner, Russia, behaving in this context? It has tended to show neutrality, even siding with Pakistan. Not only did Moscow keep silent after the Pahalgam attack, but it also pledged to resurrect a Soviet-era steel mill near Karachi. To give substance to the corridor that Pakistan and Russia are seeking to develop through Central Asia, a Lahore-Moscow train even inaugurated a new rail link this month.

In the aftermath of the Pahalgam attack, only two countries showed a vocam solidarity with India: Afghanistan and Israel. The former was responding to India’s overtures, with New Delhi and Kabul seeking to catch Pakistan on the back foot, but this strategy came to a halt when Beijing intervened, determined to pursue the Road and Belt Initiative in the area: Chinese mediation led to Afghan-Pakistani reconciliation, culminating in the opening of a Pakistani embassy in Kabul .

As a “friend of India”, in the words of Kobbi Shoshani, the Israeli Consul General in Mumbai, Israel supported the post-Pahalgam retaliation. Many Israeli observers have also drawn parallels between Netanyahu’s retaliation after the Hamas attack on October 7, 2024 and Modi’s last May. Whether the comparison is apt or not, India abstained – yes, abstained – at the United Nations when a motion calling for a ceasefire in Gaza was put to the vote in June 2025 when 149 countries supported it – and failed to condemn Israel’s attack on Iran in mid-June, dissociating itself from the stance taken by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, whose main pillars are China and Russia.

Are we to conclude from recent developments that Israel is now India’s all-weather friend? It’s too early to say. But another question deserves to be asked: if China is more than ever Pakistan’s all-weather friend, can India afford not to deal China?

India’s dependence on China

The fact is that China has been providing unstinting support to a country that India’s political leadership portrays as ‘public enemy number one’ at a time when India is proving more dependent on China than ever in economic, industrial and commercial terms.

In 2024-25, China’s exports to India represented a record $113.5 billion, while India’s declining exports to China fell to $14.3 billion, resulting in a deficit of $99.2 billion. This figure reflects not only the weakness of Indian industry, which is unable to compete with Chinese manufactured goods, but also its dependence on Chinese suppliers.

Indeed, finished goods represent only a small proportion of India’s imports from China (6.8% in 2023-24), the bulk of which are intermediate goods (70.9%) and production goods (22.3%) that India’s industry and services need to produce and export. As a result, the more India exports, the more it imports from China. This logic is particularly at work in the electronics and pharmaceuticals sectors: while India exports a growing number of smartphones, starting with the iPhone, it imports components from China; while India has become “the world’s pharmacy” thanks to its exports of generic medicines, many of the active ingredients come from China.

It should be noted that India’s dependence on China is even greater than the statistics show, as India imports products manufactured by Chinese firms based in Malaysia or Vietnam – where they have relocated to circumvent the tariff barriers or import quotas set by many countries, including India. Solar panels are a case in point, making India extremely dependent on China for its energy transition.

In this context, the April-May crisis between India and Pakistan gave China the opportunity to put pressure on New Delhi. On April 28, the Indian press reported on additional delays in deliveries to India of iPhone spare parts imposed by the Chinese. Shortly afterwards, China decided to make access to rare earths more difficult, putting the Indian automotive sector in difficulty – hence New Delhi’s idea of sending a delegation to Beijing to negotiate an exceptional regime for India.

Indeed, India has begun talks with China on this and other issues and is seeking a compromise. Earlier this month, the Indian government announced that India would facilitate Chinese investment on its soil, reversing the decision that had been taken in 2020 in the wake of the confrontation between soldiers from the two countries. At the same time, on June 5, the Indian ambassador to China Pradeep Kumar Rawat was received by the Chinese vice-minister of foreign affairs, Sun Weidong, with both parties pledging to “jointly implement the leaders’ important consensus, fostering people-to-people exchanges [and] win-win cooperation, and driving China-India relations forward on a healthy and stable path”.

In conclusion, if, as Jaishankar says, “diplomacy is all about making friends and influencing people”, the question that Indian diplomats should closely examine today is none other than: where are the friends of India who are prepared to support her in adversity and isolate her public enemy number one, Pakistan? The question is all the more pertinent given that Pakistan itself has an all-weather friend on whom India is economically highly dependent – not to mention the Chinese threat in the Himalayas and India’s neighbourhood. If neither the USA nor Russia can play the role of India’s all-weather’ friend, India’s vulnerability to China will be even more difficult to counter.

Indian diplomacy, which had to be supplemented by other forces, as evident from the fact that that New Delhi had to send seven all-party delegations to explain India’s policy in 32 countries, is challenged to find a solution to the risk of New Delhi’s relative isolation vis-à-vis the growing threats coming from the China-Pakistan duo. All in all, isn’t it the transactional philosophy of multilateralism that deserves to be revisited? In his 2020 book The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World, S. Jaishankar wrote: “This is a time for us to engage America, manage China, cultivate Europe, reassure Russia, bring Japan into play, draw neighbours in …” But what about making friends, especially if this is what diplomacy is “all about”? Here, it’s India’s tradition of refusing alliances that is at stake. By multiplying its partners the plurilateral way, India has diversified its supports, but it has also diluted them: these transactional links are weak compared to those forged with an ally.

Courtesy: The Wire

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