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When the “Lord of the Whole World” Received the “Lord of All Monks”: Reimagining Jainism, Rethinking “Muslim Rule” in India’s History

As the Delhi Sultanate expanded its empire across India in the early fourteenth century, local communities had to reconfigure their political, economic, social, and religious networks. The Jain monk Jinaprabhasūri (d. 1333) narrated his meetings with Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq (r. 1325-1351) in his Kalpapradīpa (The Light of the Age), depicting a mutually beneficial relationship that leads to a new era of prosperity for Jains. In fact, many Jain portrayals of Muslim rulers stand in stark contrast to colonial and current historiography that present Islam and Muslims as inimical to “Indian culture.” Drawing on his forthcoming book, Reimagining Jainism in Islamic India: Jain Intellectual Culture in the Delhi Sultanate, Dr. Steven M. Vose challenges two persistent and problematic ways of writing the history of India: one, that Jains disengaged from political life with the advent of “Islamic rule” in India, and two, that Muslim rulers were hostile to Indian religious communities and destructive of Indian culture.

Dr. Steven M. Vose (PhD, South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania) is the Bhagwan Suparshvanatha Assistant Professor of Jain Studies in the Department of History at the University of Colorado, Denver. A historian of Jain communities in western India from the late medieval period to the present, his work focuses on community formation, identity politics, and interactions between religious communities and political powers. His first book, Reimagining Jainism in Islamic India: Jain Intellectual Culture in the Delhi Sultanate, is forthcoming on Routledge. His current research examines the effects of neoliberalism and globalization on the formation of transnational Jain communities.