Short answers, pulled from the story.
André Wink is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, known for his studies of India and the Indian Ocean region from 700 to 1800 CE. He authored a multi-volume series on al-Hind, the Arab geographical term for the Islamized regions of the Indian subcontinent, published by Brill Academic, Oxford University Press, and Cambridge University Press.
André Wink was born in 1953 in Hollandia, Netherlands New Guinea, a city now called Jayapura in Indonesia. He studied at Leiden University, where he received a Ph.D. in Indian history in 1984 under indologist J.C. Heesterman.
The al-Hind series examines the political, economic, and social transformation of the Indian subcontinent and Indian Ocean region as Islam expanded from the seventh through the fifteenth centuries. Three volumes appeared between 1990 and 2003, covering the early medieval expansion of Islam, the conquest of India and the Delhi Sultanate, and fourteenth and fifteenth century Indo-Islamic society.
Critical responses were sharply divided. Indologist Catherine Asher called it "ground-breaking" and "remarkable and pivotal," while Bruce B. Lawrence judged it "seriously flawed by its too narrow focus," arguing Wink reduced the entire process of Islamization to an expanding commercial network. Derryl N. MacLean found signs of "hasty research and composition," and K.S. Shrimali called the work neo-colonialist.
Peter Jackson called André Wink's three volumes of al-Hind "magisterial works" grounded in impressive secondary literature. He praised volume 1 as "an important and stimulating work" that broke "new ground in the originality of its ideas" and described volume 2 as "otherwise splendid" and "much needed" for situating Indian history in global context.
The Making of the Indo-Islamic World c.700-1800 CE was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. Roy S. Fischel praised it as "a unique and significant contribution" to the study of how Islam came to India, though he noted its span of over a millennium makes it "not easily accessible" to readers without prior knowledge of the subject.