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 this cultural encounter?
The advent of the Turks into India is often seen by colonial and nationalist historians as an ‘Islamic intrusion’ into Indian history. This interpretation of the past along the communal lines of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ territories is now being questioned. This essay shall attempt to bring to light the various aspects of the conflict between these so-called “Hindu” and “Muslim” communities to try and see how much of these conflicts were actually driven by communal motives, as suggested by nationalist historians to their own gain.
The viewing of Indian history in terms of two monolithic religious communities, Hindus and Muslims, has its origins in nineteenth century interpretations of Indian history, where not only were the two communities described as monolithic but they were also projected as static over many centuries. Romila Thapar argues that while these terms may have been used earlier, they were used in a different sense, and their use has its own history, which she attempts to investigate. The newness of communities was not because they were invariably alien, but because there was a departure from the existing pattern of communities.
Colonialism’s impact on identity-formation has received much scholarly attention in recent years. However, it must be remembered that modern identities do not spring fully fashioned out of nowhere. They commonly employ the myths and symbols of earlier forms of identity which may be less clearly formulated and more restricted in circulation but are nonetheless incipient cores of ethnicity. Cynthia Talbot insists that supra-local identities did indeed exist in pre-colonial India and that these identities themselves were historically constructed and hence constantly in flux. It is critical to recognize that Hindu and Muslim identities were not formed in isolation; the reflexive impact of the other’s presence moulded the self-definition of both groups.
The definition of the Muslim community extends to all those who claim adherence to Islam, and the adherence is said to be demonstrated by a clearly states belief and form of worship, which through conversion confers egalitarian membership. The perspective of the court chronicles of the Sultans and the Mughals was that of the ruling class and this perspective is now seen as broadly endorsing the above definition and reinforcing the projection of a Muslim community, a perspective in which the Hindu is seen as the counterpart.
The notion of a Hindu community evolves from a geographic and ethnic description gradually giving way to religious association. The Hindu community is more difficult to define given the diverse nature of belief and worship making it the amorphous ‘Other’ of the Muslim community in some of the court chronicles. The crystallization of this perception occurs when erstwhile Vaisnavas, Saivas, Lingayats and others, begin to refer to themselves as Hindus.
The term ‘Hindu’ as referring to a religion is initially absent in the vocabulary of Indian languages and only slowly gains currency. This is logical keeping in mind that earlier religious identities were on the bases of sect and caste. Terms such as ‘Muslim’ or ‘Musalman’ are also not immediate entrants into the vocabulary of Indian languages after the arrival of Islam, although these terms occur in the texts of what were initially non-Indian languages. The idea of two distinctive, segregated civilizations, the Hindu and the Muslim, in conflict with each other was assumed in colonial scholarship. It crystallized the concept of a uniform, monolithic Hindu community dominating early history as did the Muslim equivalent in the subsequent period, with relations between the two becoming conflicting.
The argument that the notion of community was always defined by a single religion even in the pre-Islamic past has been countered by the evidence of sources other than Brahmanical normative texts. The studies done on caste, clan, village, town, language and region, have encouraged a diversified view of past identities.
The kinds of sources which give us an insight into the Turkish campaigns are the Persian literature and the Rajput Bardic literature. Works like Tarikh-i-Yamini by Utbi who was a member of Ulema class need to be read keeping in mind the background of the author. Adab-ul-Harb talks about battlelines being drawn for the sake of Islam and the status of shaheed being conferred on those who died in battle. However, it does point to different forms of warfare with a section on jihad, jaziya etc. The Tarikh-i-Yamini also refers to Mahumud of Ghazni as a holy warrior.
The Rajput Bardic literature is the second type of primary source that we have for the period. This was orally transmitted which tended to glorify the Rajput resistance. Works like Chandabardai’s Prithviraj Raso, Prithviraja Vijaya composed by Jayanaka, etc. form par of this traditional literature.
Aziz Ahmad looks at these two types of literature as ‘epic’ and ‘counter-epic’. He identifies the Islamic ‘epics of conquest’ written mainly in Persian, and Hindu ‘counter-epics of rsistance’. The Persian epic literature, according to Ahmad, developed in the Ghaznavid court and continued till the 17th century. They celebrate the victories over Hindu opponents and the coming of Islam to India. Amir Khusrau’s Miftah-al-Futuh was the first war-epic written in Muslim India, which celebrated Jalaluddin Khilji’s victories. The Hindu or Rajput epics, Ahmad argues, concentrate on the chivalry and heroic deeds of the Rajput warriors. There is a focus on the deceitful tactics of the Ghorids in the Prithviraj Raso. However the counter-epics were prone to interpolations as they were orally transmitted and also were depicted of tragedies beyond a single event.
Ahmad therefore talks of a “historical attitude and not a history” being created through the rhetorical and glorious character of the epics imbibing Qasida, as well as counter-epics, both being prone to a biased view. Reading them as facts would be erroneous.
Cynthia Talbot examines the question of imagined identities of communities by focusing on one particular region, Andhra Pradesh, between 1323 to 1650 CE, commencing from the collapse of Andhra’s indigenous Kakatiya dynasty under repeated military pressure from the Delhi Sultanate, to the point in time when the last major Hindu dynasty in Andhra was extinguished. Because the vast majority of inscriptions document the endowment of land and other valuables to religious institutions, they are by nature the products of the propertied class.
Much of north India came under the hegemony of the Delhi Sultanate in the early thirteenth century, while Sultanate expeditions began penetrating south India at the very end of the thirteenth century. The threat felt by Hindu society in the face of superior Muslim forces during these initial centuries of interaction led to the political valorization of the ancient Ramayana epic, according to Pollock. There are few signs of a temple cult of Rama worship prior to the eleventh century. After 1000 CE the situation changed dramatically with the spread of Rama temples and the frequent appropriation of Rama as a model for royal behaviour. Pollock believes this is because Rama served as the symbol for Indian kings fighting Central Asian Muslim warriors. Unlike earlier conquerors or immigrants who were gradually absorbed into Indian civilization, Indo-Muslims retained their distinctive religious and linguistic practices. Because they were “unassimilating”, Muslims were the “Other” par excellence and their presence heightened Indian society’s sense of self. In Pollock’s view, the Ramayana served as the perfect vehicle for the demonization of these alien and dangerous newcomers.
The most negative representations of Muslims in Andhra records appear in the immediate aftermath of the events of 1323 CE when armed forced of the Delhi Sultanate swept through the Andhra region and caused the collapse of the indigenous Kakatiya dynasty. The Vilasa grant, for example, lists various proofs of the “wicked character of Muslim rule”—brahmans were forced to abandon their sacrificial rites, Hindu temple images were overturned and broken, tax-exempt brahman villages confiscated, and cultivators deprived of their produce. It is important here to note that only one of the proofs don’t have something directly to do with the highest class in society.
In the Sanskrit literature of ancient and medieval India, foreigners were frequently described as mleccha, which roughly translates to “barbarian”. According to Romila Thapar, mleccha is primarily a signal of social and cultural difference. Among the early barbarians of foreign origin mentioned in the Puranas were the Yavanas and Śakas. The names Yavana and Saka were resuscitated in medieval India as designators for Muslims. As with earlier “Others”, brahmanical tradition was concerned with the specifics of Islamic belief. Therefore, the communalist claim in present day of clear distinctions between Hindus and Muslims stretching back to the medieval period are mistaken. True, the brahmans did see the Muslims as “Others”, but it had little to do with their religion, but simply that they were of a foreign, alien origin. By assimilating Muslims to the mythological category of demons and by substituting the names of various other foreign groups for them, the distinctiveness of Muslims is erased. All that matters in this perspective is their otherness.
Cynthia Talbot stresses the importance of a sense of community in a frontier setting. Although the emergence of a sense of Hindu unity cannot be attributed solely to the stimulus of an opposing Muslim community, it is recognized that prolonged confrontation between different groups intensifies self-identities. Talbot believes that a broader, more inclusive Indic identity began to develop after the founding of Muslim polities in south Asia. Even among Muslims, the term “Hindu” initially meant a resident of India rather than a person holding certain non-Islamic religious beliefs. Not until the late thirteenth century did Persian literature written in India routinely use Hindu as a religious designation. She supports this assertion by bringing to light the fact that the terms Islam and Muslim never figure in Andhra inscriptions of the fourteenth through mid-seventeenth centuries. Instead the ethnic labels of Turk (Turushka), Persian (Parasika) and Greek (Yavana) are used.
So if religion was not the central feature of a budding Hindu self-identity, then other reasons must be sought to explain the demonic representations of Muslims in early fourteenth century Andhra inscriptions. It must be recognize that these records arose in the context of an advancing zone of military conflict. In frontier conditions, there is a feeling of crisis and a simultaneous coalescing of new socio-political groups. Therefore frontiers are “prime settings for ethnogenesis—the formation of new ethnic identities”.
In the vacuum left behind in the frontier borderland, chiefs like Prolaya Nayaka and Vema Reddi emerged who sought their acceptance not just by the use of the all-India literary language Sanskrit, the patronage of brahmans, and the memory of the previous Kakatiya dynasty, but also the rich symbolism of the age-old fight against demons and disorder. This is the context of for the Vilasa grant’s demonization of the Turks.
The use of tropes drawn from the brahman tradition does not indicate that the upstart warriors of the fourteenth-century Andhra were religiously motivated in their actions. Not can it be assumed that the derogatory language of these inscriptions reflects a deep hatred of the Muslim, much less proof of Muslim atrocities. By accentuating the threat from Muslims and their strange alien ways, aspiring kings in fourteenth century Andhra were only attempting to cast themselves in the role of defenders of the Indic social order. In other words, the self-identity of an emerging warrior elite in Andhra was strengthened through recourse to traditional notions of the enemy Other.
From the early fifteenth through mid-sixteenth centuries, a relatively stable balance of power was maintained between three major power centres in the peninsula. In this context of relative stability, quite different representations of Muslims surface in Andhra inscriptions. Throughout the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Muslims figure mainly as mighty warriors. Victories over Muslims were lauded in the heroic titles of Hindu kings and chiefs or praised in their genealogies. In other words, Muslims are depicted as respected political rivals, just like the other major Hindu powers of the peninsula.
Philip Wagoner suggests three phases on the basis of the shifts in balance of power affecting the attitude of south Indian elites towards Muslims. From roughly 1300 to 1420 CE Hindu polities were on the defensive and an anti-Turk polemic was widespread. During the second phase, ca. 1420 to 1565, however, great appreciation of Turkic culture is expressed in Hindu literature. The sacking of the Vijayanagara empire by a confederacy of Muslim states in 1565 ushered in another period of defensive polemics. Yet by the time this third phase occurred, many aspects of material culture and administrative technique had been assimilated by the non-Muslim peoples of south India.
Since medieval south India continued to have a majority non-Muslim population even within the regions where Muslims were politically dominant, the two societies always overlapped. In contrast to the ideological negation of the other society found within Christian-Muslim frontier zones, an explicit scheme of accommodation can be found in the Hindu sources of medieval Andhra, in the existence of the “three major kings”—the Ashvapati or Lord of Horses, the Gajapati or Lord of Elephants, and the Narapati or Lord of Men. The conception of a geo-political universe divided into three realms, each ruled by a king laying claim to superiority in one contingent of an army, is first witnessed in an Andhra inscription of 1423 CE, in which the Mughal emperor is the Lord of Horses or Ashvapati. The text portrays each of the kings as righteous in their behaviour and legitimate in their authority. The nature of the tripartite scheme suggests the Muslim polities were viewed as legitimate powers, ranging equally with the great Hindu dynasties of Orissa and Vijayanagara.
Temple Desecration
The new Delhi Sultanate signaled the first attempt to build an indigenous Indo-Muslim state and society in north India. With respect to religious policy, Eaton identifies two principal components: state patronage of an Indian-based Sufi order, and a policy of selective temple desecration that aimed not, as earlier, to finance the military machine of a vast and distant empire but to delegitimize and extirpate defeated Indian ruling houses.
It would be wrong, according to Eaton, to explain this phenomenon as a “theology of iconoclasm” felt to be intrinsic to the Islamic religion. While it is true that contemporary Persian sources routinely condemned idolatry, it is also true that attacks on images patronized by enemy kings, from about the sixth century AD on, thoroughly integrated into Indian political behaviour. Given these perceived connections between temples, images and their royal patrons, it is then not surprising that early medieval Indian history abounds in instances of temple desecration that occurred amidst inter-dynastic conflicts. While the dominant pattern here was one of looting royal temples and carrying off images of state deities, we also hear of Hindu kings destroying the royal temples of their political adversaries.
In short, it is clear that temples had been the natural sites for the contestation of kingly authority well before the coming of Muslim Turks to India. Turkish invaders, when attempting to plant their own rule in early medieval India, followed and continued established patterns. Undoubtedly, some temples were desecrated but the facts were never recorded, and conversely, later Indo-Muslim chroniclers tended to attribute acts of temple desecration to rulers even when no contemporary evidence supports the claims.
There are several broad patterns to the recorded temple desecrations. First, acts of temple desecration were almost invariably carried out by military officers or ruling authorities. Second, the chronology and geography of the date indicate that acts of temple desecration typically occurred on the military frontiers. Almost all the recorded instances of temple desecration occurred in the context of military conflicts when Indo-Muslim states expanded into the domains of non-Muslim rulers. Sultans viewed the desecration of royal temples as a normal of decoupling a Hindu king’s legitimate authority from his former kingdom, and more specifically, of decoupling that former king from the image of the state deity that was publicly understood as protecting the king and his kingdom.
The form of desecration that showed the greatest continuity with pre-Turkish practice 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. The deity’s image was radically detached from its former context and transformed from a living to a dead image. However, sacked images were not invariably abducted to the victor’s capital. Whatever forms they took, acts of temple desecration were never directed at the people but at the enemy king, and the image that incarnated and displayed his state deity.
Once the land and subjects of those former states became successfully integrated into an Indo-Muslim state, traditions of both Islamic and Indian statecraft were honoured, and temples lying within such states were to be left unmolested. The pattern of post-conquest temple protection, and even patronage, is especially clear in the time of the imperial Mughals, when temples were seen as state property and accordingly the state offered protection to both the physical structures and their Brahman functionaries.
It seems certain that Indo-Muslim rulers were well aware of the highly charged political and religious relationship between a royal Hindu patron and his client-temple. There always remained the possibility that a temple’s latent political significance might be activated and serve as a power base to further its patron’s political aspirations. Such considerations might explain why it was that, when a subordinate non-Muslim officer showed signs of disloyalty, the state often desecrated the temple(s) most clearly associated with him. No evidence, however, suggests that ruling authorities attacked public monuments like mosques or Sufi shrines that had been patronized by disloyal or rebellious officers. Mosques or shrines carried very different political meanings than did Hindu temples. All actors, rulers and ruled alike, seem to have recognized that the deity worshipped in mosques or shrines had no personal connection with a Muslim monarch. Mosques were considered detached from both land and dynastic authority and hence politically inactive. As such, their desecration would have had no relevance to the business of disestablishing a regime that had patronized them.
Alberuni writing soon after the raids of Mahmud of Ghazni, states that Mahmud destroyed the economy of the areas where he looted and this accounts for the antagonism of the local people towards the Muslims. The historical question would inquire into the degree of devastation, the areas referred to, and the memory of disruption. An interesting case is that of Somanatha, particularly associated with Mahmud’s destruction of the Siva temple in the early eleventh century. Interesting, Bilhana referring to his visit to Somanatha later in the same century makes no mention of Mahmud’s raid. An inscription in the vicinity of Somanatha in AD 1216 also makes no reference to the destruction of the temple or its restoration, while at the same time being a eulogy in the town of Veraval and its temples.
The balance of power between Hindu and Muslim polities in south India was shattered rather abruptly in 1565 when the peninsular sultanates launched a combined attack against Vijayanagara. By 1652 CE, all of Andhra was under the hegemony of Muslim polities. Andhra inscriptions of this period are silent on the catastrophic events of 1565. One reason for the absence of anti-Muslim rhetoric may simply be the small quantity of inscriptions issued in Andhra after 1565. It could also be due to the suspension of worship at many Hindu temples.
Where resources have survived, it appears that temple desecration was on the rise during this third phase of the Hindu-Muslim encounter in Andhra. Talbot has assessed that some Hindu sites in Andhra were demolished in the fourteenth century in the initial Turkic conquest and shortly thereafter, most notably the temples in the Kakatiya capital of Warangal. However, there are few verifiable cases of Andhra temple destruction in the following period when the balance of power was relatively stable (Wagoner’s phase two).
From evidence of the temple desecration at Ahobilam, Srikuram and Srisailam, two salient points arise. The first is that all the incidents took place in contested territory. Eaton believes that temple destruction by Turks and other Muslim rulers throughout India was motivated by political considerations far more than religious ones. Because a royal temple symbolized the king’s power in Hindu political thought, destroying it signified the king’s utter humiliation. The second implication is that violence to temples often only involved the appropriation of movable property rather than the actual demolishing of idols and buildings.
The rhetoric of religious war in Indo-Turkish historical chronicles frequently served to either inflate the importance of minor military campaigns or to mask the political ambitions of rulers. Sadly, the medieval Muslim rhetoric of iconoclasm is today being interpreted literally by Hindu nationalists and used as a waeapon against Indian Muslims.
Therefore a few things must be remembered when analyzing the acts of temple desecration in medieval India. Had instances of temple desecration been driven by a “theology of iconoclasm” such a theology would have committed Muslims in India to destroying all temples everywhere, including ordinary village temples, as opposed to the strategically selective operation that seems actually to have taken place. Finally, it is important to identify the different meanings that Indians invested in religious monuments and the different ways these monuments were understood to relate to political authority.
In sum, by placing known instances of temple desecration in the larger contexts of Indo-Muslim state building and state maintenance, one can find patterns suggesting a rational basis for something commonly dismissed as irrational, or worse. These patterns also suggest points of continuity with Indian practices that had become customary well before the thirteenth century. Such continuity thus questions the civilizational divide between “Hindu” and “Muslim” postulated in British colonial historiography.
According to Talbot, the language of us-versus-them was used by both sides to strengthen the emergent identities in a fluid and constantly changing socio-political milieu. But the rhetoric of the destroyer of temples in the case of Muslim elites and of the protector of temples and brahmans in the case of Hindu elites can be misleading in suggesting that the primary motivations for conflict were religious in nature.
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Bibliography:
- Aziz Ahmad: Epic and Counter-Epic
- Cynthia Talbot: Inscribing the Other, Inscribing the Self: Hindu-Muslim Identities in pre-Colonial India
- Romila Thapar: The Tyranny of Labels
- Romila Thapar: Imagined Communities
- Richard Eaton: Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States
- Class Notes