Revision summary
Indian Islam is regional, often shrine-centred, and internally ranked. Minority status after Partition made community a political fact. Reform and print pushed scriptural uniformity against custom. Caste-like divisions and dargah practice persist. Change is toward a firmer boundary, not toward one identical piety.
Model answer
Introduction
Islam in India is a lived religion of many regions, languages, and schools, not a single imported copy of Arabia. Its distinct features grew from conversion, local custom, and a minority position in a caste society. Those features have shifted with reform, partition, law, and the market.
Body
Distinct features
- Syncretic practice: dargah, urs, and shared saints sat beside mosque and sharia, as in Ajmer and many qasba towns.
- Caste-like ranking among ashraf, ajlaf, and arzal, so Indian Islam did not abolish graded inequality.
- Regional languages, Sufi silsilas, and customary personal law made practice local rather than uniform.
- A minority civic location after 1947 made identity more political than in a Muslim-majority state.
Change over time
- Colonial census and personal law froze ‘Muslim’ as a legal community, which Imtiaz Ahmad and others later showed was internally diverse.
- Reformist and Islamist currents, print, and madrasa networks pushed toward scriptural uniformity and against shrine custom.
- Urban middle-class piety, Tablighi circuits, and satellite preaching recast everyday observance.
- Communal violence and security politics thickened boundary-making, even as class and region still split the community.
Continuity
- Dargah culture, caste among Muslims, and regional rites have not vanished. They compete with purification drives.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD IS[Islam practised in India] --> SY[Dargah custom region] IS --> CST[Internal ranking] RF[Reform law nation] --> BD[Bounded identity] SY --> CH[Change and persistence] BD --> CH
Conclusion
Indian Islam is distinct in syncretism, internal hierarchy, and minority politics. Over time, law, reform, and the nation-state have pushed toward a more bounded community, while local custom still refuses a single mould.
Quick related
Students also ask
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How have the struggles against untouchability changed their forms and perspective from Gandhian to Ambedkarite positions?
Next question in the 2017 paper (Q1). View answer →
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Is Indian Islam only syncretic?
Syncretism is a historical feature, not the whole. Reformist currents have long contested it.
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Did Partition end local Islam?
It recast politics. Village and qasba custom continued under a new national minority frame.
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More from this paper
Q1(a) · UPSC Mains 2017 · Sociology GS 2 · 10 marks
Write a critique of the structural and functional perspective used by M.N. Srinivas in the understanding of Indian society
Perspectives on the study of Indian society
Srinivas studied India as an observed village structure, not a book of sacred rules. Function explained how custom held groups together. Desai’s class reading and Beteille’s disharmony expose the harmony bias. The village monograph cannot stand for mill, city, and tribe. Keep the field tools; refuse the closed-system claim.
Q1(b) · UPSC Mains 2017 · Sociology GS 2 · 10 marks
Which is more significant, the principle of 'hierarchy' or the principal of difference; in inter caste relations in the present day ?
Perspectives on the study of Indian society
Hierarchy still ranks bodies through honour, endogamy, and atrocity. Difference organises caste as political identity and rights. Srinivas’s dominant caste already split ritual rank from local power. Beteille’s disharmony names equality as value beside ranked practice. Public life leans to difference; intimacy still leans to hierarchy.
Q1(d) · UPSC Mains 2017 · Sociology GS 2 · 10 marks
How have the struggles against untouchability changed their forms and perspective from Gandhian to Ambedkarite positions?
Caste System
Gandhi treated untouchability as a moral sin to be cured by service and temple entry. He kept a reformed village and varna ideal. Ambedkar treated it as caste structure needing annihilation, rights, and exit options. Forms moved from satyagraha to parties, conversion, and the Constitution. Contemporary Dalit politics is largely Ambedkarite in perspective.
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