Asia 213
idealized ancient past accessible through scholarship
originated in neo-Confucianism. Nosco emphasizes
how each scholar's teachings built on earlier formu-
lations. Azumamaro, inspired by seventeenth-century
nativism, started the process by denouncing Confu-
cian and Buddhist doctrines of the Way, thereby
positing a superior native Way; Mabuchi went him
one better in claiming that unlike Chinese, who by
nature are immoral and in need of regulation, Japa-
nese naturally possess the moral rectitude of the
national gods; and Norinaga's literal reading of the
Kojiki, his insistence that Japan's sun deity provides
the world with light and warmth, added religious
fundamentalism to virulent nationalism.
Missing in Noscos construction of kokugaku is the
revolutionary impact of these texts. Indeed, Nosco
shows the real-life politics practiced by kokugaku
scholars to be cautious and stale; nevertheless, their
texts infused the generation below them with passion-
ate belief in an ernperor-centered polity and a spirit
of reckless and self-righteous defiance of the estab-
lishment that transformed first the intellectual land-
scape and eventually the politics of TokugawaJapan.
Unless we understand the compelling process of
ideological signification at work in these texts, the
revolutionary political space opened by kokugaku re-
mains a mystery.
STEPHEN VLASTOS
University of Iowa
RICHARD M. EATON. The Rise of Islam and the Bengal
Frontier, 1204-1760. (Comparative Studies on Muslim
Societies, number 17.) Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press. 1993. Pp. xxvii, 359.
$50.00.
Richard M. Eaton does not deliberately try to dis-
suade readers from perusing his book, but his suc-
cinct, plot-summary introduction and the following
hundred pages relating the geographical, political,
and religious particulars of Islamic penetration of
Bengal in the pre-Mughal period successfully conceal
the enormously rich and insightful analyses and
methodological excursions contained in its latter
two-thirds. The afficionado of Bengali history, or of
Indo-Muslim history in general, will enjoy every bit of
this well-written exploration of Islam in Bengal or
perhaps rage at Eaton's disinclination to follow any of
the customary theories of Bengali Islamicization he
outlines at the end of part 1. But this is a book that
deserves a broader audience. It should be read by
Islamicists in general and by historians of the Islamic
Middle East in particular.
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Turkic
Muslim adventurers chased the Hindu rulers out of
the western part of the delta formed by the Ganges
and Brahmaputra rivers. They built some mosques.
They had varying relations with stronger Muslim
states to the west centered on Delhi. Some Sufis
wandered by. Various accommodations were made
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
with local non-Muslim elites. Readers interested spe-
cifically in Bengal or seeking an encyclopedic knowl-
edge of the expansion of Muslim dominion will find
this story well told. Parallel narratives could be
mounted for a dozen other locales, however, most
notably in Anatolia and the Balkans during the same
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period.
Eaton's purpose in laying this narrative foundation
comes out after he disposes of the prevailing theories
of Bengali Islamicization. The conversion-by-sword
theory lacks evidence and cannot account for Islam
succeeding best, as in east Bengal, where the sword
was least strenuously applied. Conversion as an escape
by low-caste peoples from the tyranny of Brahmanical
social and economic domination cannot account for
Islam flourishing most, proportionately, in regions
like east Bengal where the Brahmanical establishment
was least established. Conversion to share in the
financial benefits of Muslim empire cannot explain
why Muslims predominate in remote provincial east
Bengal more than they do around Delhi and Agra,
where Muslim rule was longest lasting and most fully
elaborated. The fact of the matter, he persuasively
argues, is that the enormously high percentage of
Muslims in east Bengal reported in the British colo-
nial censuses cannot be readily explained either by
the narrative of early Muslim rule or by any of the
prevailing theories.
Part 2, therefore, begins a fascinating detective
story as, step by step, Eaton homes in on an explana-
tion for the Islamicization of Bengal. Using a broad
array of data, including colonial censuses, Bengali
and Sanskrit poetry, lists of mosques and shrines,
analysis of Mughal landholding practices, and local
"olklore, he establishes that the main growth of Islam
came well after the advent of Mughal rule, indeed,
much of it during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, often dismissed as periods of Muslim de-
cline in India. He further links the growth of the
Muslim population to siltation and the consequent
eastward migration of the Ganges River's outlet to the
sea, the present position being reached roughly at the
start of the Mughal period. This riverine excursion
led to the development of a low-lying, densely
jungled, lightly populated delta. The process of jun-
gle clearance and the establishment of rice farming
becomes the economic counterpart of the expansion
of Islam among a dispersed peasantry of local peoples
and newcomers from the north and west.
In operational terms, the Mughals gave land grants
to Hindu and Muslim officials, who then subleased
them to entrepreneurs who corraled and supervised
the work teams that actually brought the jungle under
cultivation. Eaton shows through specific examples of
settlement and aggregate statistics from key areas that
the focus of these land grants was usually a Hindu or,
much more often, a Muslim holy place. Mosques and
shrines supported by converted jungle agriculture
(although not through the institution of waqf) im-
planted Islam in a countryside that was rapidly in-
FEBRUARY 1995
214 Reviews of Books
creasing in productive output and population. Bengal
eventually became the most flourishing agricultural
region in India.
Turning to the social aspects of this development of
an agricultural frontier in Bengal, Eaton observes that
many Muslim entrepreneurs had religious credentials
that gave them charismatic authority over their work
groups, or that they were subsequently credited with
such authority in local lore. But they are far from
being the wandering Sufis and propagators of mystic
brotherhood so often imagined by historians endeav-
oring to explain Islamic expansion. Sufis of this sort,
mostly Chishtis, were present in pre-Mughal times,
but the new Muslim communities of the rice-
growing delta were dedicated to agricultural labor
and organized around mosques and shrines rather
than brotherhoods.
As for the Hindus, their comparatively small share
in the growth of the frontier arises from several
sources: partly from the negligible impact of Hindu-
ism on the region prior to the advent of Islam, the
indigenous population being oriented for the most
part toward local jungle goddesses; partly from the
greater acreage granted to Muslim mosques and
shrines than to Hindu establishments; and partly to a
factor not well articulated, the apparently greater
ability of Muslim than of Hindu charismatic entrepre-
neurs to deploy a work force to clear the jungle and
plant rice.
This latter factor provides Eaton with a springboard
for discussing the nature of religious" conversion" in
general and for reinterpreting the concept of Islami-
cization. Eschewing conventional understandings of
conversion as movement across definitive doctrinal
boundaries, Eaton argues for a more amorphous
religious environment in which people called on
whatever supernatural forces they were aware of to
help them in their daily lives. He shows that in the
early phases of "Islamicization," Muhammad and his
family were invoked alongside Krishna, Siva, and
various local nature deities. Only gradually did Mu-
hammad emerge as a figure directly parallel to non-
Muslim divinities, and more gradually still as the
exclusive source of holy precept and example. The
last stage, coming only in recent times, has resulted
from the effort by reformers, particularly pilgrims
returned from Mecca, to purge Bengali Islam of local
customs that diverge from Middle Eastern practice.
To strengthen his case, Eaton discusses the advantage
a scriptural tradition like that of Islam has in compet-
ing with more fluid religious traditions, and he ob-
serves that the production of writing in Bengal ex-
panded in tandem with the spread of Islam, although
the Arabic language and script never became deeply
established.
Although Eatons argument is made with great
subtlety, it does not quite answer the question it is
intended to address: why Muslim entrepreneurs suc-
ceeded so well in recruiting peasant workers, many of
whom must have been only slightly familiar with
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Islam. He rightly strives to avoid a simple equation of
economic growth with Islamic expansion. But observ-
ing that what the peasants who settled the frontier
actually believed in was a melange of Hinduism,
Islam, and local cult-presumably reinforced or tol-
erated, if not fully shared, by their charismatic Mus-
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lim community leaders-falls short of explaining why
the Muslim component of this mixture came to
prevail so generally. Were the newcomers from the
north and west already oriented toward Islam when
they arrived in east Bengal? Or did this association
start when they signed on to work under a charismatic
Muslim entrepreneur?
Because Eaton has done so much to elucidate the
growth of Islam in Bengal, asking a question like this
is probably unfair. The sources at his disposal simply
do not provide an answer. In this, they are like the
sources relating to Islamicization in most other parts
of the world. Historians can describe and date the
growth of Islamic communities, but explaining why
Islam becomes the choice of masses of individuals is
almost always a matter of guesswork. Eaten's insight
into the apparent murkiness of the distinction be-
tween Islam and non-Islam is pertinent to other
conversion situations and a caution to historians who
try to impose the strict doctrinal boundaries of later
times on periods of the initial growth of Muslim
communities.
Eaton's contribution in this book, therefore, goes
well beyond Bengal and India. It is a superb case study
in the growth of a Muslim community. It provides an
exemplary display of the historiographical sophistica-
tion needed to make sense of diverse and difficult
sources. Readers who are not particularly interested
in the history of Bengal are urged to persevere.
RICHARD W. BULLIET
Columbia University
BRIAN K. SMITH. ClassifYing the Universe: The Ancient
Indian Varna System and the Origins of Caste. New York:
Oxford University Press. 1994. Pp. xv, 408. Cloth
$49.95, paper $24.95.
This illuminating study, a companion to Brian K.
Smith's Reflections on Resemblance, Ritual, and Religion
(1989), continues his exploration of "hierarchical
resemblance" in India's ancient Vedic ideology: the
presumption that the universe is composed of mutu-
ally resembling, interconnected, and hierarchically
ranked constituents. In the earlier volume, Smith
explicated the vertical connections between higher or
prototypical forms and their lower counterparts. In
this volume he explores with elegant clarity the
horizontal linkages that conjoin similarly ranked ele-
ments in the hierarchical registers that collectively
comprise the universe: social classes, gods, space,
time, flora, fauna, and so on. Separate chapters are
devoted to those various realms. Although the subti-
tle's reference to the "origins of caste" suggests more
FEBRUARY 1995