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Parna Sengupta, Shahid Amin. Conquest and Community: The Afterlife of Warrior Saint Ghazi Miyan., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 199–201, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.199
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Extract
Shahid Amin’s book tells the story of (or rather the telling of the story of) Syed Salar Masud, known popularly as Ghazi Miyan, a widely revered saint whose shrine in Bahraich in North India (bordering Nepal) is a place of pilgrimages that has, over the centuries, acquired the power of aura in popular consciousness. Ghazi Miyan is identified by his followers as the nephew of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni (a historically unverifiable fact), the Turkic warrior who made repeated raids into northwest India in the early eleventh century. This claim of kinship explains the provocation in the title of the book, Conquest and Community: The Afterlife of Warrior Saint Ghazi Miyan; Mahumud of Ghazni is remembered as a brutal conqueror, yet his nephew, Ghazi Miyan, is remembered as a saint around whom a community of Hindus and Muslims continue to worship. In this richly textured study of competing narratives and memory, a genre of which Amin is one of South Asia’s foremost practitioners, he asks how a sense of community (of believers of various religions) is constituted because of, rather than in spite of, a history of conquest. Amin’s work is meant to upend scholarship that would “focus exclusively on the syncretism of such cults, without taking on board the narrative refashionings of conquest that these cults invariably entail” (8). Amin shows that the story of Ghazi Miyan challenges at once our understanding of how the Turkic conquest is “remembered” and our judgments about how figures who constitute that “event” ought to be remembered. For Amin’s Ghazi Miyan is a conqueror who turns into a protector (of, among other things, cows); a stranger who becomes kin; a warrior who is revered most as a saint.
