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?
Some Attempts:
In writing this paper, 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”, “Cultural Encounter”, etc. But I would also like to talk about “Indian History” of the time and how it has been conceptualised and defined by various historians of various schools of thought.
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; the representation of images—religious or secular; 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—with the coming of the Turks—was indeed viewed as an “Islamic Intrusion” or as something entirely different.
The “Colonial School of Historiography”
and its concept of “Islamic Intrusion”:
Romila Thapar 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 communities…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.”[1]
Thapar specifically mentions Hindu communal thought and says that these ideas sought to claim legitimacy from the past, from history, in search of and to define an “imagined” Hindu identity. This search, despite not being the sole cause of communal conflagration, is nevertheless invoked to foster and to reinforce that communal ideology.
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 Hinduism. Chronological perspectives of Hindu ideas and texts do not allow for an understanding of the social history and social constructs of that historical period. Textual interpretations in modern scholarship of this period, often at the cost of popular understanding and manifestations, only further distorts the true perspectives of such religious identities.
But the picture that is reflected in the indigenous view of religion, from historical sources of that time is a different one. Here, Hinduism is shown to be comprised of prevalently two groups—Brahmanism and Sramanism, with clear distinctions between them—Patanjali once called these two groups as distinct as a “snake and mongoose.” Differences were fundamental—in religious rituals, killing of animals, incorporation of diverse castes, even in the caste system, in support and patronage, in legitimation of authority or in induction of diverse beliefs within the central folds of the two groups.
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. But more importantly in our discussion, it led to the creation of different cults, different systems of beliefs, maybe different religions—the rise of Shaktism, Puranic traditions, Bhakti cults, Saivism and Vaishnavism—all seek to illustrate what is Romila Thapar’s primary contention—that India, as we know it today (a concept not necessarily prevalent then), 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 Hindus (the Vaishnavas and Saivites were constantly feuding, the Brahmanical Saivites constantly attacked the Jain and Buddhist influenced Sramanas, the newly rich Virasaivas and Lingayatas persistently persecuted Jain monks in Karnataka), even in matters of birth, death and re-birth—all of these “acted as a deterrent to a single, homogenous Hindu community. 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.”[2] 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. [3]
As Thapar puts it: “The notion of a Hindu community does not have as long an ancestry as is often presumed. Identities were, in contrast to the modern nation state, segmented identities. The notion of community was not absent but there were multiple communities identified by locality, languages, caste, occupation and sect. What appears to have been absent was the notion of a uniform, religious community readily identified as Hindu.” Rather, the first use of the term “Hindu” occurs centuries later, in Arabic texts, often to refer to the inhabitants of the land of the Sindhu—the Indian Sub-Continent.
Says Thapar, in the context of the Muslim “invaders”: “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 perception that groups subscribing to Hindu and Muslim symbols had of each other was not of opposing monolithic cultures and religions; it was more in terms of distinct and disparate classes, castes and sects, based on a social construct rather than religious.
Thapar says that even the recognition of religious identities does not automatically establish a religious community. Clashes which would, on the face of it, and especially today, appear religiously motivated, between Hindus and Muslims, would require deeper investigation to ascertain how much of this was religious, and how much was born out of social, castes and sectional conflict. It would require us to understand how much, and which groups provided support to other castes and sects, and which ones fought the other. One has to look at regional, social, section, and casteist conflict, before pronouncing any conflict of this time as religious, Hindu-Muslim adversity.
Richard Eaton also espouses 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. The duo, in their work, History of India as Told by its Own Historians, first published in 1849, 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 who had preceded English rule are thus quite clear. Writing on the pernicious influence that this understanding of premodern history had on subsequent generations, the eminent historian Md. Habib once remarked, “The peaceful Indian Mussalman, descended beyond doubt from Hindu ancestors, was dressed up in the garb of a foreign barbarian, as a breaker of temples, and an eater of beef, and declared to be a military colonist in the land where he had lived for about thirty or forty centuries…The result of it is seen in the communalistic atmosphere of India today.”[4] Although penned many years ago, these words are especially relevant in the context of current controversies over the history of temple desecration in India. For 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.”[5]
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. These notions were, in a sense, summarised by Christian Lessen who, in the mid-19th century, attempting to apply a Hegelian dialectic, wrote of the Hindu civilisation as the thesis, the Muslim civilisation as the anti-thesis and the British as the synthesis!”[6]
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.
Communal Representations: Demonisation and Identities
Cynthia Talbot attempts to examine the representation of various identities of religious groupings. She examines how “Hindus” represented Muslims and also how they dealt with representing personal-identities. She uses Andhra between 1323 and 1650 for this exercise. This period is important in many ways: the beginning of the study corresponds with the fall of Andhra’s Kakatiya dynasty and the repeated onslaught of Khalji and Tughluq armies, beginning 1303; the study ends with the extinction of the fourth and last Vijayanagar dynasty, in 1650, when the region came under the hegemony of the Qutb Shahi sultans of the Golconda region and the Adil Shahs of Bijapur. [7]
She argues that while Sheldon Pollock’s contention that the story of the Ramayana, with its pitting of Rama against the “other” Ravana and his Rakshasa demons may not find epigraphic data in Andhra, his basic premise that the Ramayana became increasingly meaningful to the Hindu society, threatened by Muslim hegemony, and that the epic story had widespread acceptance among the amorphous Hindus, who saw the Muslims as uncompromising and unwilling to assimilate the non-Muslim beliefs within their fold, is essentially true and corroborated by the flurry of epigraphic activity of the time.[8] In this, the argument essentially is that Hindus, heretofore willing to live with, work with and compromise with the so called outsiders, now faced a situation where the outsider simply refused to accommodate the indigenous way of life, with its myriad, oftentimes contradictory beliefs and systems.
But despite there being no evidence in support of Pollock’s Ramayana theory, there is evidence from 1323 A.D., when the Kakatiya capital Warangal was seized, and where the outsiders, the Muslims, are essentially represented as demons.
In the first phase, Talbot provides epigraphic instances that represent the Muslim outsiders as “Mlecchas.” The most hostile depiction of Muslims found in Andhra’s inscriptions appears in the Vilasa Grant of Prolaya Nayaka (EI 32.30), dating to sometime between 1325 and 1350 A.D.[9] 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 is 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, obliterated. I believe that this kind of description has another purpose: it seeks to 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.
However, in this and certain other inscriptions like Vema Reddi’s 1345 A.D. inscription, besides words like “Turushka”, “Yavana” and “Parasika”, the word “mleccha” (meaning barbarian), is used to refer to the Muslims. And this is where an important fact stares us in the face: that even though derogatory terms were used to signify the Muslim’s foreign identity or his lack of culture, ethics and civilization, Muslims were never separated out and individually referred to separately, solely for their religious credentials.
In fact, generic terms like the “mleccha” were used to describe, in Sanskrit literature, both foreign groups and indigenous tribes, who shared in common, a lack of adherence to the established, accepted, and ‘normal’ brahmanical norms. And despite the employment of an array of terms to describe Muslims, they were almost always, in inscriptions and texts, cast in the traditional role of the ‘enemy’. They were depicted much like the traditional evil folk, the asuras and the rakshasas, as unfriendly enemies of the Brahmins. For Thapar, “mleccha” is primarily “a signal of social and cultural difference.”[10] Maybe not so much about religious peculiarities and religio-spiritual identities.
Talbot says, and the point drives to the heart of my contention here that, “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’.”[11] 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.
As much important as it is to delineate socio-cultural differences from religious identities, in analysing the impact of one group on another group, it is also important to understand why certain groups are invoked and represented by the others in a specific way. In this case, the question boils down to this: why were Muslims represented as demons and enemies of the gods/Brahmins in the early 14th century Andhra inscriptions, if religion was not a major part of the consciousness of us-versus-them and the “Other”? Talbot suggests the importance of analysing the social standing of those who produced/commissioned these inscriptions in answering the question. She alludes to the ‘feelings of crisis’ that Pollock mentions, in the context of a moving frontier, a frontier of military and socio-cultural conflicts and changes. Because of the change taking place rapidly in a frontier setting, new socio-political groups emerge, all in search of new identities to consolidate themselves in the newly emerging society. In the case of Andhra, those who had grants like the Vilasa and the Kondavidu Reddi inscripted—Prolaya Nayaka and Vema Reddi here—were men who were upstarts, who had recently carved out socio-political territory and the authority that came with it, for themselves. These men were operating in a “power vacuum” and were in search fundamental justification for their newly anointed kingly status. They sought patronage from Brahmins, by making generous offerings; these offerings were inscripted in the Sanskrit medium, on a copper-plate, in traditional royal fashion; since their claim to authority could not be asserted by independent corroboration, they needed the support of the traditional legitimizers of authority—the divinely-sanctioned Brahmins. But that support also included, besides the patronage of the Brahmins, the Sanskritised copper-plates and the memory of their ancestors—the kakatiyas, something else. They needed the rich symbolism of the age-old fight against demons and disorders. By painting the conquesting Muslims and their alien ways, in such a light, these upstarts, these aspiring claimants of authority could successfully cast themselves in the role of the much desired champions of the faith, the defenders of the Hindu way of life and social order. This was what was required of a king. “The representation of Muslims as demons may therefore have been instrumental, and secondary, to the primary goal of providing Telugu warrior lineages with a secure identity and a legitimate authority.”[12]
The mid-14th to the mid-16th centuries witnessed a time of relative balance of power between the non-Muslim and the “other” Muslim groupings. in the Gulbarga region, a Sultanate of some sort established itself; some splinter kingdoms came up in the northwest portion of the peninsula; Vijaynagar was powerful, in the south; the Ganga-Gajapatis held power in the north-eastern part along the Andhra-Orissa border. In this time of relative stability, where each group consolidated itself, a new scheme starts coming into display in various works. Three major kings are identified—the Asvapati or Lord of Horses, the Gajapati or lord Elephants, and the Narapati or Lord of Men. These are clearly derived from the three wings of the army comprised of cavalry, elephant corps and the infantry. The earliest use of this triad is found in a Telugu work dating from around 1600 A.D.—the Rayavacakamu. Here the Narapati is the king of Vijayanagara; Gajapati is the king of Orissa; Asvapati is the king of Agra. But Asvapati can be attributed as a generic label for Muslim power in the North too, and is not restricted to a Mughal ruler—in the past, the Rayavacakamu mentions that the Asvapati was the Sultan of Delhi. Asvapati at times also represented the Deccan Sultan—the Bahamanis. Even the Qutub Shahis of Golconda use the term for themselves, in a 1600 AD Telugu inscription.
Talbot says that this triad, and the prevalent attribution of “Asvapati” to Muslims can be interpreted in a variety of ways: it can be a “pragmatic acceptance of the geo-political realities of the Deccan” in the 1450-1550 period—indeed, with the Bahamani Sultanate in 1347 AD, the Muslim presence became fairly consolidated here. But the triad can also be seen as a tool for “legitimising powers” of the Muslims, ranking them in the same league as the Vijaynagara and Orissa polities. And because no two members of the triad could be conceptualised without the third, the Sultan became integral to the political scene.
Muslims were certainly represented as demons, and this witnessed an acceleration in times of conflict and dramatic military face-off, or under rapid geographical expansion. Reports of temple desecration were recorded, but these were conspicuously limited to the regions where the territory was contested and where there was conflict. Surprisingly, there are seldom instances of temples being desecrated or plundered in core “Muslim” governed areas. Temples like the ones at Ahobilam, Srisailam, Srikurman and possibly Simhacalam did report desecration. But they all had one thing in common—they were geographically located in contested territories. However, there are no reports of temples being desecrated in locations well within Muslim control. Complete Muslim despotism would surely have seen this as an oddity.
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.[13]
Cultural Encounters: Religious or other concerns?
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.[14] What is problematic with this inscription, and countless others such which are taken to be true at face value is that the inscription is hardly contemporary of the time that it describes; it is almost 400 years late! 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 everybody—nationalists or historians—to view such “evidence” with suspicion, and not take them as straight “From the Horse’s Mouth.”[15]
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.” 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: “If a Siva linga, image, or temple breaks apart, moves, sweats, cries, speaks, or otherwise acts with no apparent cause, this warns of the destruction of the king and his territory.” In short, from about the 6th century on, images and temples associated with dynastic authority were considered politically vulnerable.” [16]
Interestingly, sometimes, in order to punish an in-subordinate non-Muslim officer in an Indo-Muslim state, when he showed signs of rebellion or dishonesty, the state wilfully desecrated the temple(s) most clearly identified with that officer. The belief that patrons still, even after peaceful or violent assimilation into the Indo-Muslim state’s ruling class, would derive legitimacy and political strength from these temples served for their desecration in times of disloyalty, or when punishment needed to be meted out. This is seen in the case of 1478, when the Brahmanis’ garrison in Kondapalle mutinied, murdering its governor. The riled sultan personally marched to the fort where the defectors laid siege, stormed it, destroyed the temple within, and built a mosque in its place.
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.[17] 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.[18]
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.[19]
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.[20]
Conclusion:
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 is indeed a sad position, whose ill-begotten gains are being cynically abused and whose dishonest results are still amply visible in every nook and cranny of our civil, political and cultural dialogue, interaction and living.
Rijul Kochhar
B.A. (Hons.) History- II Year
Medieval Indian History
(Dr Tasneem Suhrawardy)
[1] Romila Thapar, Imagined Religious Communities (Cultural Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History).
[2] Romila Thapar, Imagined Religious Communities (Cultural Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History).
[3] Romila Thapar, The Tyranny of Labels (Cultural Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History).
[4] KA Nizami, Politics and Society During the Early Medieval Period.
[5] Richard M. Eaton, Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States.
[6] Romila Thapar, The Tyranny of Labels (Cultural Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History).
[7] Cynthia Talbot, From Mleccha to Asvapati: Representations of Muslims in Medieval Andhra.
[8] Sheldon Pollock, Ramayana and Political Imagination in India.
[9] Cynthia Talbot, From Mleccha to Asvapati: Representations of Muslims in Medieval Andhra.
[10] Romila Thapar, Modern Asian Studies, 1989.
[11] Cynthia Talbot, From Mleccha to Asvapati: Representations of Muslims in Medieval Andhra.
[12] Cynthia Talbot, From Mleccha to Asvapati: Representations of Muslims in Medieval Andhra.
[13] Cynthia Talbot, From Mleccha to Asvapati: Representations of Muslims in Medieval Andhra.
[14] Andre Wink, Al Hind (Volume II).
[15] Richard M. Eaton, Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States.
[16] Richard M. Eaton, Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States.
[17] Richard H. Davis, Lives of Indian Images.
[18] Entry for the date 1688 in “Hindu Timeline,” Hinduism Today (December 1994), cited in Cynthia Talbot, Inscribing the Other, Inscribing the Self: Hindu-Muslim Identities in pre-Colonial India.
[19] Richard M. Eaton, Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States.
[20] Richard M. Eaton, Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States.