Three Overlapping Frontiers in Early Modern Bengal: Religious, Agrarian, Imperial¹

The ‘conversion’ to Islam in pre-colonial Bengal must be understood as a process, not an event. This process, though fundamentally religious in nature, cannot be detached from the larger social, economic, political and - especially - environmental context in which it occurred. A useful way of thinking about that process and its larger historical context is to conceptualize the history of precolonial Bengal as one characterized by four overlapping frontiers. One frontier was political in nature, which defined the territorial limits of sovereign territory under the Delhi sultanate, then the Bengal sultans, and finally the Mughal emperors. A second frontier was religious in nature, dividing Muslim from non-Muslim communities. A third frontier was that defined by the eastward march of Sanskritic civilization, whether carried by Buddhist monks or Brahmin priests. Finally, there was the agrarian frontier, which divided settled agricultural communities from the forest. Each frontier moved according to its dynamics, but they also overlapped and influenced each other in important ways.