Islamicate

Abstract

Islamicate is obfuscating and contentious in its usage in South Asian media studies. The term is an invitation for debate, as observed in an exchange between two film historians – one from India where Muslims are the largest minority and the other from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The Pakistani historian conveyed her discomfort at the term used by Indian film scholars, taking the example of the film Mughal-e-Azam (1960): ‘Mughal-e-Azam is “Islamicate” ? I’d say it is Hinduicate’. Made over 19451960, the iconic Indian film carries the burden of a partition-induced alienation from Pakistan.1 Neither capturing the nuance nor the rigour of the polemic around the conceptualisation, yet the instance suggests that Islamicate’s relationship to the Islamic is as constitutive as its relationship with the non-Islamic. It was this spirit that guided Indian film scholars to borrow Marshal Hodgson’s neologism of the Islamicate as a ‘social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and Muslims, both among Muslims themselves and even when found among non-Muslims’ (Hodgson, 1974), for what they saw as the Muslim ethos of Hindustani cinema. But one must recognise that Hodgson himself explicated Islamicate consequentially to Islamdom (Hodgson, 1974, p. 56): a complex of social relations where Muslims and their faith are recognised as socially dominant, and where non-Muslims have formed an integral, if subordinate, element. Thus, it is no wonder that the tribulations produced by the concept in Muslim dominant contexts are contrary to those in non-dominant ones. The debate for South Asian screen studies was sparked by the publication of Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema (Bhaskar & Allen, 2009), which pursued the Islamicate culture by ‘focus(ing) on the expressive and social forms associated and identified with Muslim culture and their impact on the Hindustani cinema produced by the Bombay film industry’ (Bhaskar & Allen, 2009, p. 3). However, in the genres identified, Muslim as an adjective became the guiding basis of the taxonomy of Islamicate – the Muslim historical, the Muslim courtesan film, the classic Muslim social and the new wave Muslim social. There have been three interrelated objections to this explication of the Islamicate culture. The first is a matter of usage and knowledge production in that the work essentialises a form as syncretic as the Hindi cinema, by stereotyping and exoticising Muslims (Saeed, 2009; Taneja, 2010). The second was more specifically to do with Islamicate Culture’s insistence on complete genres where arguably any distinction between Islamicate and Islamic collapses thus missing out ‘on the nuances