Neha Bainsla
B.A Hons(history)
MEDIEVAL INDIA
ASSIGNMENT-2
Do you agree with the view that the Turkish advent was an ‘Islamic Intrusion’ into Indian History? How does the literature of the period represent the cultural encounter?
The period from 1000 to 1200 AD was a period of tremendous change in Central and West Asia.The advent of the Turks in the 11th and 12th century is often seen as ‘Islamic Intrusion’ into the Indian history.The arrival of Islam in India dates to the early 8th century with the Arabs conquest of Sindh under Muhammad Qasim and trading links with Arabs and the establishment of Arab trading colonies in India also date from well before the Turkish invasion of the 11th century.In the course of this essay, I would like to outline at the very beginning the concepts and themes that I would wish to touch upon in analysing themes like the “Turkish Advent”, “Islamic Intrusion”, etc. But I shall also throw some light upon the “Indian History” of the time and how renowned historians have described it.
I will talk about the political scene that was prevalent just before the advent of the Turks and how it changed in their presence, and under their influence. I will then go on to talk about the “Colonial School of Historiography” and its concept of “Islamic Intrusion”. I will touch upon the idea of “Demonisation of Muslims”. This I believe is one of the most critically important aspects of this paper. And this is not just historically speaking; the times that we live in, and the ways in which society is witnessing the perversion of religious identities to suit ill-motivated and ill-begotten political, personal and sometimes economical ends serves as an important raison d’etre for analysing and mentioning this idea of “Demonisation” of religions, cultures, ways of thinking and ways of living.
I would then talk about the definition of identities in frontier settings, of how “Outsiders” set about legitimising their presence, solidifying their influence, and consolidating their positions.
I touch upon certain specific themes which would, in one way or another, serve to either demonstrate or refute this debate of “Intrusion”, temple desecration and the representation of images.The glorification of individuals (such as Mahmud of Ghazni); the rhetoric of religious texts like that of the Ramayana; the representation of certain themes in the contemporary literature of those times,like romance in Khusrau’s Ashika and politico-religious ideas in works by Isami etc. This will, in my belief, bring out to a certain extent, and decide one way or another, whether what happened in medieval India.If coming of the Turks was an “Islamic Intrusion” or something entirely different.
The characterization of the Turkish invasion as an ‘Islamic intrusion’ rides upon two main assumptions.The first being that the Turkish invaders were identified on the basis of their religion and their actions were religiously motivated.The second is that there exsited,and indeed has been exsited from the beginning of time a distinct and clearly identifiable all inclusive ‘Hindu’ identity.Both these assumptions are to a great extent favoured by Romila Thapar.She talks quite succinctly of communal ideologies in the Indian setting. According to her, ‘Communal’, in the Indian setting, “perceives Indian society as constituted of a number of religious communitie,which draws on a supposed religious identity and uses this as a basis for a political and social ideology.Such an ideology is of recent origin but uses history to justify the notion that community and therefore, the communal identity, have existed since the early past. Because the identity is linked to religion, it can lead to the redefinition of the particular religion.Such identity tends to iron out diversity and insists on conformity, for it is only through a uniform acceptance of the religion that it can best be used for political ends.
Modern historical interpretations of Hinduism, according to Thapar, is comprised of a consensus that the notion of “Hinduism” comprised sects from diverse, often from other religious, groupings,Ajivikas, Jains, Buddhists, Vaisnavas, Saivites etc. there was a plurality of doctrines, multiple manifestations of deities, no clear order of priesthood, and yet, there were certain conspicuous commonalities,the absence of prophets and revealed books, the absence of a monotheistic God, and the absence of conversion. However, this modern definition does not allow Hinduism, and its diverse constituents, to be viewed in their social and historical context. This, for Thapar, is as ironic as it is a loss to the crucial understanding of HinduismThe notion of a single unified Hindu community and faith system,the tenants of which are fundamentally different from those of Islam or Christianity is central to the historical construction of a ‘Hindu ‘ ancient period which comes an abrupt end with Turkish invasions as an ‘Islamic intrusion’.
Induction of diverse beliefs, and of different people from diverse castes had a transformative impact on Hinduism.Both Brahmanism and Sramanism. The incorporation of local cults, often horizontally, moving from village to village led to an increasing success of Hinduism. Romila Thapar’s primary contention is that India, as we know it today, on the eve of the “Turkish invasions” did not fundamentally have monolithic cultures or religions. The multiplicity of faiths and beliefs, and the absence of a monolithic ones seek to attest the fact that there could not have been an Islamic “intrusion” in the strictest sense of the term, primarily because for intrusion to occur and have its known effects, one need to pit the intruder or intruding culture against a fundamentally cohesive and monolithic entity, prevalent at the time when this intrusion is occurring.
The diversity of rituals,in Sati or in animal slaughter, of religious doctrine, of modes of assimilation, of languages, locations and castes, of economic positions of patrons, the numerous manifestations of religious symbols like the Swastika, the multitudinous interpretation and incorporation of epics like the Ramayana, in religious persecution of otherwise thought, even in matters of birth, death and re-birth .All of these “acted as a deterrent to a single, homogenous Hindu community.Sheldon Pollock too traces the rise of the cult of Rama. In the continuing processes of either appropriation or rejection of belief and practice, the kaleidoscopic change in the constitution of religious sects was one which precluded the emergence of a uniform, monolithic religion.” That “kaleidoscopic change”, and hence the creation of a monolithic religion in the geographic area “invaded” by the Turks the Indian Sub-Continent was missing.
But why has Hinduism been conceptualised as this monolithic, cohesive religion? Why has diversity within cults and in different geographical, political and cultural locations been dumbed-down to this simplistic understanding of Hinduism? Part of the answer lies in the flawed linking of Hinduism with other monotheistic religions like Islam, Christianity, even Buddhism, who see themselves as part of the historical process whose interpretations of religion and sects are based on original teachings. While they build their strengths on a structure of ecclesiastical organisation, in contrast, Hindu sects often had a distinct and independent origin. Major blames can also be attributed to the Orientalist scholarship, which was anxious to fit the ‘Hindu’ process into a comprehensible whole, based on a known model. The East India Company’s pursuit of codifying Hindu law required such a code to be based on a cohesive ideology, a monolithic system of beliefs, rituals and doctrine. The Manu Dharmasastra was, for example, seen to be an exercise in ‘one-size fits all’, where this one law was presumed to apply to the vast array of sub-sects, and even individually different and distinct sects. Part of the problem also lies with the upward mobility of artisans and traders of the 18-19th century, who, based on a flawed interpretation of Hinduism, sought to consolidate their spiritual and religious credentials by providing patronage—funds, temple building charters, in a pursuit to conform to the ‘brahmanical model’, which they thought, was the ‘real’ model of the Hindu faith.
Romila Thapar talks of Muslim ‘invader’, “The people of India curiously do not seem to have perceived the new arrivals as a unified body of Muslims. The name ‘Muslim’ does not occur in the records of early contacts. The term used was either ethnic, ‘Turuska’, referring to the Turks, or geographical, ‘Yavana’, or cultural, ‘Mleccha’ (meaning impure, referred to the non-Sanskrit speaking people, from outside the caste hierarchy, or those considered foreign, even from high ranks)These varying terms, each seeped in historical meaning, do not suggest a monolithic view, but rather a diversity of perceptions.Historians have theorised that the second century witnessed the face-off between two monolithic religions,Islam and Hinduism. This is problematic, and the problem stems from a faulty, simplistic interpretation of court chronicles of the Sultans. These entries referred to “Hindu” sometimes as a geographical entity, sometimes as followers of non-Islamic religions, oftentimes as indigenous populations. Thapar believes that the genesis of the term “Hindu” being used by indigenous communities, for the first time in the 15th century indigenous literature, lies in the fact that these populations regarded themselves as “the other.”The term Hindu basically came from the term geographical region ‘Sindh’.
Richard Eaton also points some of the shortcomings in the Orientalist scholarship of this period of “Turkish Invasions,” and believes that modern conflagration of religious identities, like the one witnessed in the disgraceful Babri Masjid demolition, can be traced back to this deliberately flawed picture of the Muslims. He quotes Sir Henry Elliot, who, along with John Dowson, were keen to contrast the justice and efficiency of the British rule with the cruelty and despotism of the Muslim rulers who had preceded the empire.Both these historians, paint a cruel, despotic picture of the “Muhammadan”. On the other hand, the advent of the British power and the light of European discernment that it brought would shed its beams upon the obscurity of the past.
Elliot’s motives for de-legitimizing the Indo-Muslim rulers are thus quite clear. Writing on the pernicious influence that this understanding of premodern history had on subsequent generations.It has been through a selective use of Elliot and Dowson’s selective translations of pre-modern Persian chronicles, together with a selective use of epigraphic data, that Hindu nationalists have sought to find the sort of irrefutable evidence,one of Sita Ram Goel’s chapters is entitled “From the Horse’s Mouth”,that would demonstrate a persistent pattern of villainy and fanaticism on the part of pre-modern Indo-Muslim conquerors and rulers.”
As Romila Thapar tries to enunciate on this flawed assumption in colonial/oriental scholarship, “The idea of two, distinctive, segregated civilisations, the Hindu and the Muslim, in conflict with each other was assumed in colonial scholarship. Thus James Mill, differentiated the Hindu civilisation from the Muslim, which gave rise to the periodisation of Indian history as that of the Hindu, Muslim and British periods. It crystallised the concept of a uniform monolithic religious community dominating the early history, as did the Muslim equivalent in the subsequent period, with relations between the two becoming conflictual. The employment of blanket terms such as the ‘Hindus’ and the ‘Muslims’ is inherently problematic because it erases precision associated with historical scholarship, with respect to social groups. It is methodically, as well as historically invalid and untrue. Such a process completely ignores continuities in history. Complex social, cultural and even religious constructs of communities, often entwined and inextricable, are broken arbitrarily by such simplistic notions and ‘labels’. As we move away from employing such concepts of monolithic identities, vast arenas of complex constructs in socio-political, cultural, and even religious spheres, among communities and groups, in their multiple manifestations and functions.
Cynthia Talbot brings up the issue of self and other.She is a critic of Nationalists and Colonial writing ,which emphasize the separation of Hindu and Muslim community.She also emphaisizes on super-local identities.
In the first phase, Talbot refers to the epigraphic instances that represent the Muslim outsiders as “Mlecchas.” At that time they were not called Muslims as they are called today.The most hostile depiction of Muslims found in Andhra’s inscriptions appears in the Vilasa Grant of Prolaya Nayak, between 1325 and 1350 A.D.It is a long, copper-plate inscription and describes the hostilities between Kakatiya Prataparudra and Ahammadu Suratrana,the lord of the Turushkas-Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq. The inscription essentially describes the taking over of the region, by the Muslims,the “forces of evil”,after the death of Prataparudra. The inscription proclaims that: “when the sun, who was Prataparudra, thus set, the pitch darkness of the Turushkas enveloped the world.” Prataparudra was captured, and on his way to Delhi, dies on the Narmada’s banks. While this inscription indicates to eight Sultanate campaigns in the region, during Prataparudra’s reign, Muslim sources describe only five.
However, this inscription must be analysed with a slight amount of care, because the situation that it describes, the “evil” that is reflected in its account of the time after the coming of the Muslims, is essentially too similar to the predictions of the Puranas, vis-à-vis the Kal Yuga, where a terrible future for humans is prophesised, in the wake of the increasing consolidation of power by the non-Ksatriya dynasties,the Yavanas, Sakas etc. The inscription describes the wicked character of Muslim rule: the slaughter of cows, the consumption of liquor and beef, the desecration of temples and images, the destruction of Brahmin villages, the slaying of Brahmins. And so, “tortured in this way by the demon-like Yavana soldiers, the island of Tilinga suffered terribly, without hope of relief, as if it were a forest engulfed by a rampaging fire.” This story of the “rampaging fire” is too close to the general situations of the impending Kal Yuga, where it is prophesised that people will no longer respect the Vedas and rituals will be forgotten, and where the hierarchical caste structure will be destroyed.This description would aslo it enforce fear-mongering, encouraging those that it seeks to disaffect with its frightening picture of the future under the outsider’s control, to rise in rebellion, and maybe, to ward off future foreign incursions.
Cynthia Talbot emphasizes on the identity factor and says, “Even before prolonged contact with Muslims, the Brahmanical tradition obviously had a consciousness of its own identity and of an ‘Other’ that did not conform”. As with earlier “Others,” whether foreign invaders or indigenous tribal peoples, brahmanical society was not concerned with the specifics of Islamic beliefs. What was significant was their common failure to uphold varnasrama dharma, or, in short, brahmanical privilege. This is why Muslims could be called Yavanas, an ancient term deriving probably from Ionian and originally referring to Hellenistic people to the northwest, or Saka originally denoting the Central Asian Scythians. By assimilating Muslims to the asura/ rakshasa category or category of demons, and by substituting the names of various foreign groups, the distinctiveness of Muslims is erased. All that matters in this perspective is their ‘otherness’.” Anybody who did not conform was the “Other”, irrespective of their identities—mainly religious, but many a time also irrespective of their geographical and cultural credentials. At this time religion did not really play a role in determining enmity between those already established and those conquesting. What mattered was how different from the brahmanical norm these “Other” groups were.
The rhetoric of the holy warrior (in the case of Muslim elites), and of temples and Brahmins by Hindu elites, according to Talbot, should not be viewed as a sign of growing differentiation or hostility between the two groups, but as attempts on each group’s part to enhance and consolidate core groups and foster a sense of community. We have already seen that co-existing with the Muslim as “mleccha” were other “representations of a more incorporative nature like that of the “Asvapati”.” Muslims, according to her,
were a separate ethnic and cultural group, comprising their own distinct social unit, but the basis for their “other”ness included many features, beyond the merely religious.
It is well known, and a matter of some widespread consensus, that during the two centuries before 1192 (which was when an indigenous Muslim state and community first appeared in North India) Persianized Turks systematically raided and looted major urban centres of the North Indian region, plundering and making off with immense amounts of booty, to their bases in central Asia. The pattern began with the Ghaznavid king Sabuktigin, and continued in the time of his son, Mahmud of Ghazni. There can be two ways of analysing the reasons behind this: one is by way of looking at certain pieces of ‘evidence’, like the inscription from the erstwhile capital of Malwa (in M.P.), Dhar. It refers to the destruction of a temple by a Muslim, Abdullah Shah Changal, during the reign of Raja Bhoja, in the span of 1010 AD and 1053 AD. It also mentions the conversion of Raja Bhoja to Islam. Far from being factual, the inscription is seen as a richly textured legend, inscribed after centuries of oral transmission, and inevitable, inaccurate embellishments. The temple may have been desecrated; however, the conversion of Raja Bhoja is highly unlikely, and at odds with other established evidence from this time. The themes at play in the inscription, as in other such countless inscriptions,of conversion, martyrdom, redemption, patronage to religious sites, destruction of temples and construction of mosques,all of these are born out of the community’s need at the time to reconstruct their origins. It cannot be taken as the gospel truth. Eaton strongly advises historians not to view such “evidence” with suspicion, and not take them as straight “From the Horse’s Mouth.”
The other method to analyse the desecration of temples at the time of Ghazni is to view it as an exercise for purely material purposes, rather than on religious determinations. Based in Afghanistan and never seeking a permanent dominion in India, the earlier Ghaznavid rulers raided richly endowed temples and the “glittering” Indian cities, solely for getting access to the loot that they possessed. With the booty, they had a view to enlarge their political objectives to the west in Khurasan. The predatory nature of these raids was also integral to the Ghaznavid political economy: raising and maintaining professional, permanent armies; paying for slaves, weapons and other military or state-related expenditure.
In the mid-11th century, when the Seljuqs and Ghurids tightened their grip on Ghazni’s successors, the latter became much more provincial, restricting their expeditions to eastern Afghanistan and Punjab’s upper reaches—a far cry from the bold, audacious and long attack on Somnath by Mahmud of Ghazni. The coming of the Ghurids changed these predatory raids of the Ghaznavids—an indigenous Indo-Muslim state and society were attempted to be built in North India. A policy of selective temple desecration ensued, but not with an aim to finance military expenses of a vast, distant empire, but to deligitimize the ‘divinely-sanctioned’ authority of the defeated rulers or the still-fighting adversaries.
The authority of a ruler was tied to the legitimacy that the ruler invoked from temples,in return, he provided patronage, protection and other luxuries to the temple, and by extension, it ministers,the priests and other temple officials. The desecration, destruction or redefinition of the idea behind the temple would serve to detach a defeated raja from the “most prominent manifestation of his former legitimacy.” But what is important here is that temples that were identified as not extending this legitimacy to the ruler, or temples that had been abandoned by their patrons, and hence rendered politically useless, were left untouched, and unharmed. This was seen, for instance, at the temples of Khajuraho, which were left unharmed when it was found that the patrons of the temples—the Candella kings—had abandoned them, before the Turkish armies arrived, some time in the 13th century.
Another facet of this desecration activity is what Richard Eaton calls the “theology of iconoclasm.” He talks of the existence of a relationship between temples and political institutions.While it is true that contemporary Persian sources routinely condemned idolatry, on religious grounds, it is also true that attack on temple images had been a regular feature of indigenous, and thoroughly integrated warring enemy kings, from the beginning of the 6th century.Eaton says: “With their lushly sculpted imagery vividly displaying the mutual interdependence of kings and gods, and commingling of divine and human kingship, royal temple complexes of the early medieval period were thoroughly and pre-eminently political institutions. It was here that, after the 6th century, human kingship was established, contested and revitalised.Moreover, not withstanding that temple priests endowed a royal temple’s deity with attributes of transcendent and universal power, that same deity was also understood as having a very special relationship with the particular geographical site in which its temple complex was located. As revealed in temple narratives, even the physical removal of an image from its original site could not break the link between deity and geography. The bonding between king, god, temple, and land in early medieval India is well illuminated in a passage from Brhatsamhita, a text from the 6th century AD.In short, from about the 6th century on, images and temples associated with dynastic authority were considered politically vulnerable.
We have evidence of temple destruction by the Turkish “outsiders”, who plundered for monetary benefits, as well as to undermine the authority and ‘divine sanction’ of his legitimacy to govern and rule. It was a political ploy, serving to annex territory by striking at a vulnerable and sensitive part of the enemy’s belief system. The method of desecration, as is witnessed, was not religiously motivated, but rather politically. And this is counterfactually proven by the prevalence of routine desecration of the temples of one king, by his enemy (but importantly, indigenous, and ‘Indian’) opponent, simply to usurp the authority to rule by taking advantage of the weakness that is enunciated in the Brhatsamhita text. This is seen in 642 AD, when the Pallava king, Narasimhavarman I, looted the image of Ganesha from the Chalukyan capital of Vatapi; fifty years later, the vanquished Chalukyan armies now brought back images of Ganesha and Yamuna from defeated powers in North India. In the 8th century, Bengali troops destroyed the image of Lalitaditya’s state deity, Vishnu Vaikuntha, in Kashmir. There are numerous such instances of Pallavas, Cholas, Rashtrakutas, Pratiharas, even Sri lankan Sinhalas indulging in such practices of image and temple desecration, to undermine the political legitimacy through divine sanction, of their adversaries and foes. We must keep sentiments aside from facts here, and while I, in no way either condone or condemn such acts, the numbers of such desecration, with dependable historicity stands, according to Eaton, at about 60. This is a far cry from the 60,000 cited by some Hindu nationalists.
In short, it is clear from the numerous examples available, that temples had been the natural sites for the contestation of kingly authority, long before the coming of the Muslim Turk “Invaders” to India. Not surprisingly, says Eaton, these Turks, when attempting to plant their own rule in early medieval India, took recourse to continued and established patterns for re-establishing new authority over old lands and subjects. Often, the most prevalent form of desecration was the seizure of the image of a defeated king’s state deity, and its abduction to the victor’s capital as a trophy of war.
Eaton has a few words for the rhetoric and reality of temple desecration, and by extension, the reality of Turkish advent, and the ways in which it has been construed in literature,both Hindu and Muslim,of the period, and later.Much misunderstanding over history results from a failure to distinguish the rhetoric from the practice of Indo-Muslim state formation. Whereas the former (i.e., the reality of desecration) tends to be normative, conservative, and rigidly ideological, the latter (i.e., the rhetoric) tends to be pragmatic, eclectic and non-ideological. Rhetorically, we know that temple desecration figured very prominently in Indo-Muslim chronicles as a necessary and even meritorious constituent of state formation. In 1350, for example, the poet-chronicler ‘Isami gave the following advice to his royal patron, ‘Ala al-Din Hasan Bahman Shah, the founder of the Bahamani kingdom in the Deccan: “If you and I, O man of intellect, have a holding in this country and are in a position to replace the idol-houses by mosques and sometimes forcibly to break the Brahmanic thread and enslave women and children—all this is due to the glory of mahmud [of Ghazni.The achievements that you will make to-day will also become a story to-morrow.” But the new sultan appears to have been more concerned with political stability,there is no evidence that he converted any temples to mosques.”
A third activity, also for political legitimisation, is witnessed—the use of Indian political ritual. For instance, aware of the importance that the Cholas, Chalukyas and Rashtrakutas placed on the Ganges river, we are told that in 1327, Sultan Muhammad bi Tughluq, after establishing his new capital at Daulatabad, ordered for water from the Ganges to b carried to him, forty days away, “for his personal use.” Several centuries later, there are reports of the Muslim sultans of Bengal would, on their coronation ceremonies, wash themselves with the water brought from the holy site of the Ganga Sagar, where the river Ganga met the bay of Bengal.
After reading the essay above we are much closer to standing on weather the Turkish invasion was an ‘Islamic intrusion’ or not.The numerous examples outlined above ,the absence of real monolithic “Hindu” and “Muslim” groups; the oftentimes accommodative representation of various identities of religious groupings, Hindu, Muslim or others; the cultural encounters, sometimes violent, sometimes peacefully co-existent,all these instances deal a serious blow to evil image of the Muslim “invader” that has been painted: as the fanatic, wanton, plundering, barbaric, desecrator of Hindu religious identity. It also seriously challenges the idea of a civilizational divide between India’s “Hindu” and “Muslim” periods, first postulated erroneously by colonial historians of the Raj, and subsequently, unfortunately, replicated in Indian and Pakistani nationalist schools. This also brings out the issue of cultural boundaries in a situation where different groups of elites compete for power.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1)Romila Thapar:Imagined Religious Communities
2)Romila Thaphr:The Tyranny of Labels
3)Cynthia Talbot:Inscribing the Others,Inscribing the Self:Hindu-Muslim Identities in Pre-Colonial India
4)Richard M.Eaton:Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States.
5)Sheldo Pollock:Ramayana and Political Imagination in India.