André Wink

André Wink is an emeritus professor of history at University of Wisconsin, Madison.

He is known for his studies on India and the Indian Ocean area, particularly over the medieval and early modern age (700 to 1800 CE).

He is the author of a series of books published by Brill Academic, Oxford University Press, and Cambridge University Press on al-Hind – a term used in Arab history to refer to the Islamized regions in the Indian subcontinent and nearby regions.

Wink was born in 1953, in Hollandia, Netherlands New Guinea (present day Jayapura, Indonesia).

He studied at Leiden University, and in 1984, he received a Ph.D. in Indian history under the guidance of Indologist J.C. Heesterman.

Historian Derryl N. Maclean, who published Religion and society in Arab Sind in 1984, noted Wink's first volume focuses on the initial expansion of Muslims into the East and their economic activities at the frontiers.

Wink sketched Sind as an "economically and culturally marginal" territory dominated by rebellions, a view supported more to colonial historians than primary sources.

The chapter on non-Arab India provided "welcome glimmers of insight" and did "break some new ground" by challenging R.S. Sharma's thesis of feudalism.

However, states MacLean, Wink's work exhibited signs of "hasty research and composition" affecting his larger conjectures and portrayed a reductive, unsubtle and "ahistorical caricature" of a complex Indo-Islamic past.

Maclean criticized his "the cavalier manner with unattributed quotes from primary sources", "numerous broad and unsupported statements", "quasi-orientalist musings" and "chaotic transliterations" some of which are "clearly misreadings".

MacLean's more serious concern with Wink's volume 1 is the tendency therein to make Islam and Hinduism more real than the abstraction they are.

In Wink's approach, "Islam becomes a rubric for an economic complex", states MacLean.

Historian Peter Jackson states Wink's volume 1 deals with India and entire Indian Ocean basin just like the Arabic-Persian term "Hind embraced a far wider area than the subcontinent".

The book is based on a "highly impressive range of secondary literature" as well early literature published in the Middle East.

Its central theme is how the formation of the Caliphate and Islamic expansion interconnected with the "development of the India trade".

Wink goes beyond the typical rhetoric of Islamic holy war and Arab politics, vigorously challenging the "notions purveyed by R.S. Sharma" that unconvincingly parallel early India into the mold of medieval Europe.

Jackson criticizes Wink's use of a few partially incorrect names, willingness to accept some discredited dates, and some sources such as Chachnama.

Nevertheless, states Jackson, Wink's volume 1 overall is "an important and stimulating work which not only distils a considerable body of the most recent scholarship but breaks new ground in the originality of its ideas".

The historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam, in one of his essays, states Wink's volume 1 "tends to treat both Islam and Muslims in a largely monolithic and undifferentiated fashion and is strikingly reticent both on questions of ideology and on the social and economic competition and conflict between different groups operating in the Indian Ocean".

Denis Sinor states that he fails to detect any other central themes other than the primary importance of trade and admires Wink's "erudition and wide reading".

However, the book was loaded with "far too many data on far too many subjects", and "often overtly verbose and superfluous", striving to fit a vast range of facts into a framework too small to hold them.

Yet, it has its qualities too, offering new insights and data for further research to the few patient readers, states Sinor.

Sunil Kumar, in his review of Wink's first volume, noted the author to "seldom extend beyond a 'cut and paste' methodology" where information was conveniently chosen and discarded from existing secondary scholarship to pursue his broader agenda.

K.S. Shrimali reiterates like criticisms and found the work to be neo-colonialist.

In 1986, Wink published a socioeconomic history of the Marathas in eighteenth century.

Reviews were largely favorable and his revionist approach was admired.

Indologist Catherine Asher calls it a "ground-breaking volume" that is based on recent scholarship as well as the "contemporary Arab, Persian, Sanskrit and Indian vernacular texts".

Wink examines the "political, economic and social" impact on the Indian subcontinent between seventh and eleventh centuries from the conquests and expansion of Islam.

His central thesis on the economic impact of Islam dispelled many commonly held dogmas on demonetization theory, and underlined the errors in "drawing parallels between contemporary Europe and India".

She concludes that any book of such sweep was bound to have critics but the shortcomings were minor enough to render the study as remarkable and pivotal.

Bruce B. Lawrence – a scholar of religious studies, states Wink's scope is "ambitious, even monumental", but volume 1 of "al-Hind is seriously flawed by its too narrow focus, its author's near total disregard of cultural actors, issues, and influences".

Lawrence questions Wink's glossing over India's past political history to make his economic and trade theory related point that there was "no cohesive entity labelled India before Arabs coined the word al-Hind".

His discussion of the economic impact of early Islamic expansion into India relies primarily on a region consisting of the Gurjara-Pratiharas, the Rashtrakutas, the Cola-mandalam and the Asian archipelago, with only two – Kashmir and Bengal – covered from the rest of India.

Some of his conclusions on Tibet and China are scarcely discussed in the book.

The major blunder of Wink's volume 1, states Lawrence, is to "reduce the entire process of Islamization to an expanding commercial network, with the result that Islam becomes merely the idiom for unifying the economy of the Indian Ocean at the beginning of the second millennium AD."

Wink's Volume 1 is blind to cultural history of institutional Islam, where he reduces Islamization to an "idiom of trade" in trans-Asian scale rather than the necessary broader view of its "religious or juridical or political significance".

The book is a reprieve from small scale histories that characterizes South Asian historiography, but a better study would integrate insights of historians such as Derryl MacLean, remarks Lawrence.

He became a professor at the University of Wisconsin in 1989, from where he has contributed ever since to the field of history of India, Indonesia and countries near the Indian Ocean.

Until 1990, he researched and published from the Netherlands.

He became a senior fellow in 2009.