Gregory G. Maskarinec

Walking through the middle hills of Western Nepal in 1964, Marc Gaborieau experienced a moment of epiphany that transformed his scholarly career. Requesting a mid-day meal in a village whose inhabitants appeared identical to Hindus of the surrounding villages, he was told: "There's no question of lunch. It's Ramadan!" This accidental stumbling across of Nepal's Muslim banglemakers has resulted in an impressive flow of articles, an earlier monograph, and now, this definitive work.

Churaudde Muslim banglemakers, are descended from Hindu converts of Northern India who began, at least as early as the seventeenth century, to settle in the various hill kingdoms that now comprise Nepal. Given land by local rulers in exchange for the glass ornaments that they manufactured, they formed small but stable communities.

They have been considerably assimilated. Their kinship terms, for example, show no traces of languages their ancestors spoke, but are identical to those used throughout Nepal. Although some Nepalis derisively refer to Islam as "ultho dharma" (upside-down religion), this emphasis on differences, Gaborieau persuasively argues, is more the result of power struggles among elites than one of intrinsic practices.

Islam in South Asia, he shows, preserves many fundamentally Hindu practices of caste, kinship, life cycle ceremonies and calendrical festivities. It is not just that a substratum of Hindu practices survived conversion, however. Gaborieau demonstrates that a specific historical configuration arose, which he calls "medieval North-Indian Islam." This arrangement unself-consciously elaborated many Hindu themes by addition and substitution. As a result, Muslims have been traditionally distinguished from Hindus by only a minimum set of canonical practices, most conspicuously, circumcision and burial of the dead.

Some key elements of medieval North-Indian Islam are the acceptance of the miraculous interventionary power of saints and the collective impurity of the patrilineage at the time of a death or a birth. Perhaps most notable is the rite that ends the main mourning period after forty days, when a fakir, a member by birth of a heterodox Sufi order, acts as funerary priest and receives mortuary gifts from the chief mourner, who also honors him by tying a turban around his head. Gaborieau's informants even reported that within memory, symbolic food offerings (rice balls-pi=9E=8Fa, just as Hindus feed to their ancestors) were made periodically at the tombs.

In cases of a death in inauspicious circumstances, the deceased may, as for Hindus, trouble his lineage. Such cases require a spirit medium through whose mouth the spirit speaks. The medium often establishes a shrine for the spirit, where members of the lineage regularly worship. Lineage cults are common throughout Nepal, but, since, as the Prophet himself stated, "there is no genealogy in Islam," it is remarkable to find them among Muslims (these practices are, not surprisingly, condemned by reformists as Satanic).

Such close similarities with Hindu structures stimulate Gaborieau to pursue a wider inquiry into Curauthe kinship and social structure, the central concerns of this work. Both topics are meticulously situated into their widest political, legal, and religious dimensions, with both fine details and general issues of power and domination examined. My one complaint is that the text is frozen in an "ethnographic present" of 1964-1975, leaving the reader to wonder whether the last twenty years haven't brought further changes, whether, for example, untouchable Hindu musicians still play at Muslim weddings or whether reformists have suppressed spirit mediums.

However, the startling and wide-ranging conclusions reached, and the historical depth achieved by a careful reading of the available material, make this a minor flaw in a profoundly compelling book.

The first half of the book consists of descriptive material: ethnographic context, kinship terminology, legal constraints (permissible marriages have been closely regulated by the Nepalese state since the legal code of 1853), and religious constraints (elegantly examined in terms of life cycle ceremonies). While much of this extensive material is genuinely interesting, it is the book's second half, consisting of carefully argued interpretations, that make this work so remarkable.

Gaborieau discovered that while all other aspects of Curauthe kinship structure differ very little from that of Hindus, after six or eight generations, patrilineages break into intermarrying segments, a practice unthinkable among Hindus. The results, he demonstrates, is in an intermediate system between the extremes of endogamy and exogamy, a model that effectively undermines this most archetypal dichotomy of structuralist kinship theory. Gaborieau shows that this system is made possible because the Muslims refuse to sacralize relationships of power.

If there is a radical opposition between Hinduism and Islam, he argues, it is found neither in kinship nor social systems, but in the relations of power to the sacred. Conversion to Islam desacralized the lineage, permitting exogamy to fracture. Marriage became a contract instead of a sacrifice, weakening relations among affines.

Conversion likewise weakened obligations that bind a patrilineage into a corporate grouping by eliminating the ancestral deities that Hindu worship, so that clans never evolved. Consequently, at the local level, power is atomized, producing deteriorations both symbolic and substantial in the relations of authority.

Gaborieau shows that Curauthe occupy a precise position in the caste hierarchy as an impure but not untouchable group. He demonstrates that South Asian Islam clearly recognizes the division of humanity into multiple ranked groups on the basis of profession and birth, and that these groups have different degrees of ritual purity. To put it simply, they practice a caste system.

The free commensuality of Muslims is nothing but a myth, particularly when it comes to untouchables. Contrary to a wide-spread belief, conversion to Islam does not better one's status: Hindu untouchables become Muslim untouchables. Curauthe refuse to accept food or water from an untouchable's hand; they refuse them entry into their houses; physical contact compels ritual purification before entering the mosque.

Explicitly refuting the claim that Hindus and Muslims form two separate societies on the basis of their opposing "ultimate" values, Gaborieau convincingly demonstrates that South Asian Islam might be called a Hinduism without Brahmans or ancestors; the system is "decapitated," but not obliterated.

This work refutes Islam's modernist claim to be a necessarily egalitarian religion, as well as the assertion, as Ernest Gellner's memorable opening sentence of Muslim Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) declared, that "Islam is the blueprint of a social order."

Before Gaborieau's work, the questions of whether South Asian Muslims maintain a caste system and have a distinct social structure had been answered both ways, depending on whether members' assertions or observed social relations were emphasized. This book conclusively demonstrates that there are South Asian Muslims who knowingly practice both a caste system and a social order very similar to those of Hindus, and that, at least for South Asia, hierarchy as much as egalitarian beliefs characterize Islam.

(Maskarinec's second book Nepalese Shaman Oral Texts has just been published by Harvard University Press. This review reprinted from Anthropos 91 (1996)).