:: Saturday, January 04, 2003 ::

Temple Desecration in Pre-Colonial India Part Two:

The Indo-Islamic States:

On this point, the data are quite clear: pragmatism as well as time-honoured traditions of both Islamic and Indian statecraft dictated that temples lying within such states be left unmolested. We learn from a Sanskrit inscription, for example, that in 1326, thirteen years after he annexed the northern Deccan to the Tughluq empire, Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq appointed Muslim officials to repair a Siva temple in Kalyana (in Bidar district), thereby facilitating the resumption of normal worship that had b een disrupted by local disturbances. According to that sultan's interpretation of Islamic law, anybody who paid the poll-tax (jizya) could build temples in territories ruled by Muslims.
Such views continued to hold sway until modern times. Within several decades of Muhammad bin Tughluq's death, Sultan Shihab al-Din (1355-73) of Kashmir rebuked his Brahmin minister for having suggested melting down Hindu and Buddhist images in his kingdom as a means of obtaining quick cash. In elaborating his ideas on royal patronage of religion, the sultan referred to the deeds of figures drawn from classical Hindu mythology. "Some (kings)," he said, have obtained renown by setting up images of gods, others by worshipping them, some by duly maintaining them. And some, by demolishing them! How great is the enormity of such a deed! Sagara became famous by creating the sea and the rivers.... Bhagiratha obtained fame by bringing down the Ganga. Jealous of Indra's fame, Dushyanata acquired renown by conquering the world; and Rama by killing Ravana when the latter had purloined Sita. King Shahvadina [Shihab al-Din], it will be said, plundered the image of a god; and this fact, dreadful as Yama [death], will make the men in future tremble".About a century later, Muslim jurists advised the future Sikandar Lodi of Delhi (reign: 1489-1517) that "it is not lawful to lay waste ancient idol temples, and it does not rest with you to prohibit ablution in a reservoir which has been customary from ancient times."

The pattern of post-conquest temple protection, and even patronage, is especially clear when we come to the imperial Mughals, whose views on the subject are captured in official pronouncements on Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, one of the most controversial figures in Indian history. It is well known that in the early eleventh century, before the establishment of Indo-Muslim rule in north India, the Ghaznavid sultan had made numerous, and very destructive, attacks on the region. Starting with the writings of h is own contemporary and court poet, Firdausi (death 1020), Mahmud's career soon became legend, as generations of Persian poets lionised Mahmud as a paragon of Islamic kingly virtue, celebrating his infamous attacks on Indian temples as models for what ot her pious sultans should do. But the Ghaznavid sultan never undertook the responsibility of actually governing any part of the subcontinent whose temples he wantonly plundered. Herein lies the principal difference between the careers of Mahmud and Abu'l-fazl, Akbar's chief minister and the principal architect of Mughal imperial ideology. Reflecting the sober values that normally accompany the practice of governing large, multi-ethnic states, Abu'l-fazl attributed Mahmud's excesses to fanatical bigots who, having incorrectly represe nted India as "a country of unbelievers at war with Islam," incited the sultan's unsuspecting nature, which led to "the wreck of honour and the shedding of blood and the plunder of the virtuous."

Indeed, from Akbar's time (reign: 1556-1605) forward, Mughal rulers treated temples lying within their sovereign domain as state property; accordingly, they undertook to protect both the physical structures and their Brahmin functionaries. At the same time, by appropriating Hindu religious institutions to serve imperial ends - a process involving complex overlappings of political and religious codes of power - the Mughals became deeply implicated in institutionalised Indian religions, in dramatic contrast to their British successors, who professed a hands-off policy in this respect. Thus we find Akbar allowing high-ranking Rajput officers in his service to build their own monumental temples in the provinces to which they were posted, as in the case of the Govind Deva Temple in Brindavan, patronised by Raja Man Singh. Akbar's successors went further. Between 1590 and 1735, Mughal officials repeatedly oversaw, and on occasion even initiated, the renewal of Orissa's regional cult, that of Jagannath in Puri. By sitting on a canopied chariot while accompanying the cult's annual car festival, Shah Jahan's officials ritually demonstrated that it was the Mughal emperor, operating through his appointed officers (mansabdar), who was the temple's - and hence the god's - ultimate lord and protector. Such actions in effect projected a hierarchy of hybridised political and religious power that descended downward from the Mughal emperor to his mansabdar, from the mansabdar to the god Jagannath and his temple, from Jagannath to the sub-imp erial king who patronised the god, and from the king to his subjects. For the Mughals, politics within their sovereign domains never meant annihilating prior authority, but appropriating it within a hierarchy of power that flowed from the Peacock Throne to the mass of commoners below. Such ideas continued in force into the reign of Aurangzeb (1658-1707), whose orders to local officials in Banaras in 1659 clearly indicate that Brahmin temple functionaries there, together with the temples at which they officiated, merited state protecti on. "In these days," he wrote in February of that year, "information has reached our court that several people have, out of spite and rancour, harassed the Hindu residents of Banaras and nearby places, including a group of Brahmins who are in charge of ancient temples there. These people want to remove those B rahmins from their charge of temple-keeping, which has caused them considerable distress. Therefore, upon receiving this order, you must see that nobody unlawfully disturbs the Brahmins or other Hindus of that region, so that they might remain in their t raditional place and pray for the continuance of the Empire.". By way of justifying this order, the emperor noted: "According to the Holy Law (shari`at) and the exalted creed, it has been established that ancient temples should not be torn down." On this point, Aurangzeb aligned himself with the theory and the practice of Indo-Muslim ruling precedent. But then he added, "nor should new temples be built" - a view that broke decisively from Akbar's policy of permitting his Rajput officers to build their own temple complexes in Mughal territory. Although this order appears to have applied only to Banaras - many new temples were built elsewhere in Mughal India during Aurangzeb's reign - one might wonder what prompted the emperor's anxiety in this matter.

It seems certain that rulers were well aware of the highly charged political and religious relationship between a royal Hindu patron and his client-temple. Hence, even when former rulers or their descendants had been comfortably assimilated into an Indo- Muslim state's ruling class, there always remained the possibility, and hence the occasional suspicion, 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 in an Indo-Muslim state showed signs of disloyalty - and especially if he engaged in open rebellion - the state often desecrated the temple(s) most clearly identified with that officer. After all, if temples lying within its domain were understood as state property, and if a government officer who was also a temple's patron demonstrated disloyalty to the state, from a juridical standpoint ruling authorities felt justified in treating that temple as an extension of the officer, and hence liable for punishment. Thus in 1478, when a Bahmani garrison in eastern Andhra mutinied, murdered its governor, and entrusted the fort to Bhimraj Oriyya, who until that point had been a loyal Bahmani client, the sultan personally marched to the site and, after a six-month siege, stormed the fort, destroyed its temple, and built a mosque on the site. A similar thing occurred in 1659, when Shivaji Bhonsle, the son of a loyal and distinguished officer serving the Adil Shahi sultans of Bijapur, seized a governmen t port on the northern Konkan coast, thereby disrupting the flow of external trade to and from the capital. Responding to what it considered an act of treason, the government deputed a high-ranking officer, Afzal Khan, to punish the Maratha rebel. Before marching to confront Shivaji himself, however, the Bijapur general first proceeded to Tuljapur and desecrated a temple dedicated to the goddess Bhavani, to which Shivaji and his family had been personally devoted.

We find the same pattern with the Mughals. In 1613 while at Pushkar, near Ajmer, Jahangir ordered the desecration of an image of Varaha that had been housed in a temple belonging to an uncle of Rana Amar of Mewar, the emperor's arch enemy. In 1635 his son and successor, Shah Jahan, destroyed the great temple at Orchha, which had been patronised by the father of Raja Jajhar Singh, a high-ranking Mughal officer who was at that time in open rebellion against the emperor. In 1669, there arose a rebellion in Banaras among landholders, some of whom were suspected of having helped Shivaji, who was Aurangzeb's bitter enemy, escape from imperial detention. It was also believed that Shivaji's escape had been initially facilitated by Jai Singh, the great grandson of Raja Man Singh, who almost certainly built Banaras' great Vishvanath temple. It was against this background that the emperor ordered the destruction of that temple in September. About the same time, serious Jat rebellions broke out in the area around Mathura, in which the patron of that city's congregational mosque had been killed. So in early 1670, soon after the ring-leader of these rebellions had been captured near Mathura, Aurangzeb ordered the destruction of the city's Keshava Deva temple and built an Islamic structure (idgah) on its site. Nine years later, the emperor ordered the destruction of several prominent temples in Rajasthan that had become associated with imperial enemies. These included temples in Khandela patronised by refractory chieftains there; temples in Jodhpur patronised by a former supporter of Dara Shikoh, the emperor's brother and arch rival for the Mughal throne; and the royal temples in Udaipur and Chitor patronised by Rana Raj Singh after it was learned that that Rajput chieftain had withdrawn his loyalty to the Mughal state. Considerable misunderstanding has arisen from a passage in the Ma'athir-i Alamgiri concerning an order on the status of Hindu temples that Aurangzeb issued in April 1669, just months before his destruction of the Banaras and Mathura temples. The passage has been construed to mean that the emperor ordered the destruction not only of the Vishvanath temple at Banaras and the Keshava Deva temple at Mathura, but of all temples in the empire. The passage reads as follows: Orders respecting Islamic affairs were issued to the governors of all the provinces that the schools and places of worship of the irreligious be subject to demolition and that with the utmost urgency the manner of teaching and the public practices of the sects of these misbelievers be suppressed.The order did not state that schools or places of worship be demolished, but rather that they be subject to demolition, implying that local authorities were required to make investigations before taking action. More importantly, the sentence immediately preceding this passage provides the context in which we may find the order's overall intent. On April 8, 1669, Aurangzeb's court received reports that in Thatta, Multan, and especially in Banaras, Brahmins in "established schools" had been engaged in teaching "false books" and that both Hindu and Muslim "admirers and students" had been travelling over great distances to study the "ominous sciences" taught by this "deviant group." We do not know what sort of teaching or "false books" were involved here, or why both Muslims and Hindus were attracted to them, though these are intriguing questions. What is clear is that the court was primarily concerned, indeed exclusively concerned, with curbing the influence of a certain "mode" or "manner" of teaching within the imperial domain. Far from being, then, a general order for the destruction of all temples in the empire, the order was in response to specific reports of an educational nature and was targeted at investigating those institutions where a certain kind of teaching had been taking place.

In sum, apart from his prohibition on building new temples in Banaras, Aurangzeb's policies respecting temples within imperial domains generally followed those of his predecessors. Viewing temples within their domains as state property, Aurangzeb and Indo- Muslim rulers in general punished disloyal Hindu officers in their service by desecrating temples with which they were associated. How, one might then ask, did they punish disloyal Muslim officers? Since officers in all Indo-Muslim states belonged to hierarchically ranked service cadres, infractions short of rebellion normally resulted in demotions in rank, while serious crimes like treason were generally punished by execution, regardless of the perpetrator's religious affiliation. No evidence, however, suggests that ruling authorities attacked public monuments like mosques or Sufi shrines that had been patronised by disloyal or rebellious officers. Nor were such monuments desecrated when one Indo-Muslim kingdom conquered another and annexed its territories. On the contrary, new rulers were quick to honour and support the shrines of those Chishti shaikhs that had been patronised by defeated enemies. For example, Babur, upon seizing Delhi from the last of the city's ruling sultans in 1526, lost no time in patronising the city's principal Chishti tomb-shrines. The pattern was repeated as the Mughals expanded into provinces formerly governed by Indo-Muslim rulers. Upon conquering Bengal in 1574, Mughal administrators showered their most lavish patronage on the two Chishti shrines in Pandua - those of Shaikh Ala al-Haq (d. 1398) and Shaikh Nur Qutb-i Alam (d. 1459) - that had been the principal objects of state patronage by the previous dynasty of Bengal sultans. And when he extended Mughal dominion over the defeated Muslim states o f the Deccan, the dour Aurangzeb, notwithstanding his reputation for eschewing the culture of saint-cults, made sizable contributions to those Chishti shrines in Khuldabad and Gulbarga that had helped legitimise earlier Muslim dynasties there.

Differentrial Treatment of Temples and Mosques: A Case of Religious Discrimination or Different Symbolic Registers?

Evidence presented in the foregoing discussion suggests that mosques or shrines carried very different political meanings than did royal temples in independent Hindu states, or temples patronised by Hindu officers serving in Indo-Muslim states. For Indo- Muslim rulers, building mosques was considered an act of royal piety, even a duty. But all the actors, rulers and the ruled alike, seem to have recognised that the deity worshipped in mosques or shrines had no personal connection with a Muslim monarch. Nor were such monuments thought of as underpinning the authority of an Indo-Muslim king, or as projecting a claim of sovereign authority over the particular territory in which they were situated. One can hardly imagine the central focus of a mosque's ritu al activity, the prayer niche (mihrab), being taken out of the structure and paraded around a Muslim capital by way of displaying Allah's co-sovereignty over an Indo-Muslim ruler's kingdom, in the manner that the ritual focus of a royal temple, th e image of the state-deity, was paraded around pre-modern Hindu capitals in elaborate "car" festivals. This point is well illustrated in a reported dispute between the Emperor Aurangzeb and a Sufi named Shaikh Muhammadi (d. 1696). As a consequence of this dispute, in which the shaikh refused to renounce views that the emperor considered theologically dev ant, Shaikh Muhammadi was ordered to leave the imperial domain. When the Sufi instead took refuge in a local mosque, Aurangzeb claimed that this would not do, since the mosque was also within imperial territory. But the shaikh only remarked on the Emperor's arrogance, noting that a mosque was the house of God and therefore only His property. The standoff ended with the shaikh's imprisonment in the Aurangabad fort - property that was unambiguously imperial.

This incident suggests that mosques in Mughal India, though religiously potent, were considered detached from both sovereign terrain 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 patronised them. Not surprisingly, then, when Hindu rulers established their authority over the territories of defeated Muslim rulers, they did not as a rule desecrate mosques or shrines, as, for example, when Shivaji established a Maratha kingdom on the ashes of Bijapur's former dominions in Maharashtra, or when Vijayanagara annexed the former territories of the Bahmanis or their successors.20 In fact, the rajas of Vijayanagara, as is well known, built their own mosques, evidently to accommodate the sizable number of Muslims employed in their armed forces. By contrast, monumental royal temple complexes of the early medieval period were considered politically active, inasmuch as the state-deities they housed were understood as expressing the shared sovereignty of king and deity over a particular dynastic realm. Therefore, when Indo-Muslim commanders or rulers looted the consecrated images of defeated opponents and carried them off to their own capitals as war trophies, they were in a sense conforming to customary rules of Indian politics. Similarly, when they destroyed a royal temple or converted it into a mosque, the ruling authorities were building on a political logic that, they knew, placed supreme political significance on such temples. That same significance, in turn, rendered temples just as deserving of peace-time protection as it rendered them vulnerable in times of conflict.

Temple Desecration and the Imperatives of State-Building:

Much misunderstanding over the place of temple desecration in Indian history results from a failure to distinguish the rhetoric from the practice of Indo-Muslim state-formation. Whereas the former tends to be normative, conservative, and rigidly ideological, the latter tends to be pragmatic, eclectic, and non-ideological. Rhetorically, we know, temple desecration figured 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 Bahmani 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 Brahminic thread and enslave woman and children - all this is due to the glory of Mahmud [of Ghazni].... The achievements that you make to-day will also become a story tomorrow.. But the new sultan appears to have been more concerned with political stability than with the glorious legacy his court-poet wished him to pursue. There is no evidence that Bahman Shah violated any temples. After all, by carving out territory from lands formerly lying within the Delhi Sultanate, the founder of the Bahmani state had inherited a domain void of independent Hindu kings and hence void, too, of royal temples that might have posed a political threat to his fledgling kingdom. Unlike temple desecration or the patronage of Chishti shaikhs, both of which figured in the contemporary rhetoric on Indo-Muslim state-building, a third activity, the use of explicitly Indian political rituals, found no place whatsoever in that rhetoric. Here we may consider the way Indo-Muslim rulers used the rich political symbolism of the Ganga River, whose mythic associations with imperial kingship had been well established since Mauryan times (321-181 B.C.). Each in its own way, the mightiest imperial formations of the early medieval peninsula - the Chalukyas, the Rashtrakutas, and the Cholas - claimed to have "brought" the Ganga River down to their southern capitals, seeking thereby to legitimise their claims to imperial sovereignty. Although the Chalukyas and the Rashtrakutas did this symbolically, probably through their insignia, the Cholas literally transported pots of Ganga water to their southern capital. And, we are told, so did Muhammad bin Tughluq in the years after 1327, when that sultan established Daulatabad, in Maharashtra, as the new co-capital of the Delhi Sultanate's vast, all-India empire. In having Ganga water carried a distance o f forty days' journey from North India "for his own personal use," the sultan was conforming to an authentically Indian imperial ritual. Several centuries later, the Muslim sultans of Bengal, on the occasion of their own coronation ceremonies, would wash themselves with holy water that had been brought to their capital from the ancient holy site of Ganga Sagar, located where the Ganga River emptied into the Bay of Bengal.

No Indo-Muslim chronicle or contemporary inscription associates the use of Ganga water with the establishment or maintenance of Indo-Muslim states. We hear this only from foreign visitors: an Arab traveller in the case of Muhammad bin Tughluq, a Portugue se friar in the case of the sultans of Bengal. Similarly, the image of a Mughal official seated in a canopied chariot and presiding over the Jagannath car festival comes to us not from Mughal chronicles but from an English traveller who happened to be in Puri in 1633. Such disjunctures between the rhetoric and the practice of royal sovereignty also appear, of course, with respect to the founding of non-Muslim states. We know, for example, that Brahmin ideologues, writing in chaste Sanskrit, spun elaborate tales of how warriors and sages founded the Vijayanagara state by combining forces for a common defence of dharma from assaults by barbaric (mleccha) Turkic outsiders. This is the Vijayanagara of rhetoric, a familiar story. But the Vijayanagara of pra tical politics rested on very different foundations, which included the adoption of the titles, the dress, the military organisation, the ruling ideology, the architecture, the urban design, and the political economy of the contemporary Islamicate world. As with Indo-Muslim states, we hear of such practices mainly from outsiders - merchants, diplomats, travellers - and not from Brahmin chroniclers and ideologues.

One often hears that between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, Indo-Muslim states, driven by a Judeo-Islamic "theology of iconoclasm," by fanaticism, or by sheer lust for plunder, wantonly and indiscriminately indulged in the desecration of Hindu temples. Such a picture cannot, however, be sustained by evidence from original sources for the period after 1192. Had instances of temple desecration been driven by a "theology of iconoclasm," as some have claimed, such a theology would have committed Muslims in India to destroying all temples everywhere, including ordinary village temples, as opposed to the highly selective operation that seems actually to have taken place.
Rather, contemporary evidence associates instances of temple desecration with the annexation of newly conquered territories held by enemy kings whose domains lay on the path of moving military frontiers. Temple desecrations also occurred when Hindu patrons of prominent temples committed acts of treason or disloyalty to the Indo-Muslim states they served. Otherwise, temples lying within Indo-Muslim sovereign domains, viewed normally as protected state property, were left unmolested.

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 the reign of Aurangzeb, Shaikh Muhammadi took refuge in a mosque believing that that structure - being fundamentally apolitical, indeed above politics - lay beyond the Mughal emperor's reach. Contemporary royal temples, on the other hand, were understood as highly charged political monuments, a circumstance that rendered them fatally vulnerable to outside attack by Hindu or Muslim invaders. Therefore, by targeting for desecration those temples that were associated with defeated kings, conquering Turks, when they made their own bid for sovereign domain in India, were subscribing to, even while they were exploiting, indigenous notions of royal legitimacy. The fundamentally non-religious nature of these actions is reflected in the fact that contemporary inscriptions in Sanskrit or in regional languages never identified Indo-Muslim invaders in terms of their religion, as Muslims, but generally in terms of their linguistic affiliation (most typically as Turk, "turushka"). That is, they were construed as but one ethnic community in India amidst many others. 28 B.D. Chattopadhyaya finds in early medieval Brahminical discourse an essential urge to legitimise any ruler so long as he was both effective and responsible - meaning, in particular, that he protected Brahmin property and temples. Th is urge was manifested, for example, in the perception of the Tughluqs as legitimate successors to the Tomaras and Cahamanas; of a Muslim ruler of Kashmir as having a lunar, Pandava lineage; or of the Mughal emperors as supporters of Ramarajya (the "kingship of Lord Rama"). Indo-Muslim policies of protecting temples within their sovereign domains certainly contributedto such perceptions.

In Conclusion, 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 pattern s also suggest points of continuity with Indian practices that had become customary well before the thirteenth century. Such points of continuity in turn call into serious question the sort of civilisational divide between India's "Hindu" and "Muslim" periods first postulated in British colonial historiography and later reproduced in both Pakistani and Hindu nationalist schools. Finally, I have here tried to illustrate the different meanings that contemporary actors invested in the public monuments they patronised or desecrated, and to reconstruct those meanings on the basis of the practice, and not just the rhetoric, of those actors.

:: Conrad Barwa 12:17 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Some thoughts on Temple Desecration in Pre-colonial India:

The topic of Temple desecration is another example of how history is being used as a battlefield in different ways of viewing the past more specifically between Saffronists, Nationalsits and Secularists; in line with this and in response to a recent query I am embarking on an extended discussion of the topic; beginning with a summary of the most recent research by historians looking at the period; here I draw mainly on the work of Richard Easton, Romila Thapar and Brajudulal Chattopadhyay.

Much of the contemporary evidence on temple desecration cited by Hindu nationalists is found in Persian materials translated and published during the British occupation of India. Especially influential has been the eight-volume History of India as Told by its Own Historians, first published in 1849 and edited by Sir Henry M. Elliot, who oversaw the bulk of the translations, with the help of John Dowson. But Elliot, keen to contrast what he understood as the justice and efficiency of British rule with the cruelty and despotism of the Muslim rulers who had preceded that rule, was anything but sympathetic to the "Muhammadan" period of Indian history. As he wrote in the book's original preface: "The common people must have been plunged into the lowest depths of wretchedness and despondency. The few glimpses we have, even among the short Extracts in this single volume, of Hindus slain for disputing with Muhammadans, of general prohibitions against processions, worship, and ablutions, and of other intolerant measures, of idols mutilated, of temples razed, of forcible conversions and marriages, of proscriptions and confiscations, of murders and massacres, and of the sensuality and drunkenness of the tyrants who enjoined them, show us that this picture is not overcharged....With the advent of British power, on the other hand, "a more stirring and eventful era of India's History commences ... when the full light of European truth and discernment begins to shed its beams upon the obscurity of the past." Noting the far greater benefits that Englishmen had brought to Indians in a mere half century than Muslims had brought in five centuries, Elliot expressed the hope that his published translations "will make our native subjects more sensible of the immense advantag es accruing to them under the mildness and the equity of our rule." Elliot's motives for delegitimising the Indo-Muslim rulers who had preceded English rule are thus quite clear. Writing in 1931 on the pernicious influence that the colonial understanding of pre-modern Indian history had on subsequent generations, Mohammad Habib 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 h ad lived for about thirty or forty centuries.... The result of it is seen in the communalistic atmosphere of India today."

Although penned many years ago, these words are relevant in the context of current controversies over the history of temple desecration in India. For it has been through selective translations of pre-modern Persian chronicles, together with a selective u se of epigraphic data, that Hindu nationalists have sought to find the sort of irrefutable evidence that would demonstrate a persistent pattern of villainy and fanaticism on the part of pre-modern Indo-Muslim conquerors and rulers. One of Goel's chapters is even entitled "From the Horse's Mouth." In reality, however, every scrap of evidence in this controversial matter requires careful scrutiny.

Temple Desecration in the Pre-Islamic Era

It is well known that, during the two centuries before 1192, which was when an indigenous Indo-Muslim state and community first appeared in north India, Persianised Turks systematically raided and looted major urban centres of South Asia, sacking temples and hauling immense loads of movable property to power bases in eastern Afghanistan. The pattern commenced in 986, when the Ghaznavid Sultan Sabuktigin (reign 977-997) attacked and defeated the Hindu Shahi raja who controlled the region between Kabul an d northwest Punjab. According to Abu Nasr `Utbi, the personal secretary to the sultan's son, Sabuktigin "marched out towards Lamghan (located to the immediate east of Kabul), which is a city celebrated for its great strength and abounding in wealth. He conquered it and set fire to the places in its vicinity which were inhabited by infidels, and demolishing the idol-temples, he established Islam in them".Linking religious conversion with conquest - with conquest serving to facilitate conversion, and conversion serving to legitimise conquest - `Utbi's brief notice established a rhetorical trope that many subsequent Indo-Muslim chroniclers would repeat. Notwithstanding such rhetoric, however, invasions of India by Sabuktigin and his more famous son Mahmud of Ghazni (r. 998-1030) appear to have been undertaken for material reasons. Based in Afghanistan and never seeking permanent dominion in India, the earlier Ghaznavid rulers raided and looted Indian cities, including their richly endowed temples loaded with movable wealth, with a view to financing their larger political objectives far to the west, in Khurasan.The predatory nature of these raids was also structurally integral to the Ghaznavid political economy: their army was a permanent, professional one built around an elite corps of mounted archers who, as slaves, were purchased, equipped, and paid with cash derived from regular infusi ons of war booty taken alike from Hindu cities in India and Muslim cities in Iran. For example, Mahmud's plunder of the Iranian city of Ray, in 1029, brought him 500,000 dinars' worth of jewels, 260,000 dinars in coined money, and over 30,000 dinars' wor th of gold and silver vessels. India, however, possessed far more wealth than the more sparsely populated Iranian plateau. Mahmud's 1026 raid on Somnath alone brought in twenty million dinars' worth of spoil.

The dynamics of north Indian politics changed dramatically, however, when the Ghurids, a dynasty of Tajik (eastern Iranian) origins, arrived from central Afghanistan toward the end of the twelfth century. Sweeping aside the Ghaznavids, Ghurid conquerors and their Turkish slave generals ushered in a new sort of state quite unlike that of the foreign-based Ghaznavids. Aspiring to imperial dominion over the whole of north India from a base in the middle of the Indo-Gangetic plain, the new De lhi Sultanate (1206-1526) signalled the first attempt to build an indigenous Muslim state and society in north India. With respect to religious policy, we can identify two principal components to this project: (a) state patronage of an India-based Sufi order, the Chishtis, and (b) a policy of selective temple desecration that aimed not, as earlier, to finance distant military operations on the Iranian Plateau, but to delegitimise and extirpate defeated Indian ruling houses.

The first of these policies was based on a conception of religion and politics well summarised by the Deccani court-poet `Abd al-Malik `Isami. Writing in 1350, `Isami observed that the existence of the world is bound up closely with that of the men of faith. In every country, there is a man of piety who keeps it going and well. Although there might be a monarch in every country, yet it is actually under the protection of a fakir (Sufi shaikh).Sufis, in other words, were understood as the "real" sovereigns of Indo-Muslim states. Among all South Asian Sufi orders, moreover, the Chishtis were the most closely identified with the political fortunes of Indo-Muslim states, and especially with the p lanting of such states in parts of South Asia never previously touched by Islamic rule. The pattern began in the first half of the fourteenth century, when that order's rise to prominence among Delhi's urban populace coincided with the political expansio n of the imperial Tughluqs. By effectively injecting a legitimising "substance" into a new body politic at the moment of its birth, the patronage of Chishti shaikhs by governors in Tughluq provinces, or by independent rulers succeeding to po wer in those provinces, contributed positively to the process of Indo-Muslim state-building. Equally important to this process was its negative counterpart: the sweeping away of all prior political authority in newly conquered and annexed territories. When such authority was vested in a ruler whose own legitimacy was associated with a royal temple - typically one that housed an image of a ruling dynasty's state-deity, or rastra-devata (usually Vishnu or Siva) - that temple was normally looted, redefined, or destroyed, any of which would have had the effect of detaching a defeated raja fr om the most prominent manifestation of his former legitimacy. Temples that were not so identified, or temples formerly so identified but abandoned by their royal patrons and thereby rendered politically irrelevant, were normally left unharmed. Such was the case, for example, with the famous temples at Khajuraho south of the Middle Gangetic Plain, which appear to have been abandoned by their Candella royal patrons before Turkish armies reached the area in the early thirteenth century.

It would be wrong to explain this phenomenon by appealing to an essentialised "theology of iconoclasm" felt to be intrinsic to the Islamic religion. It is true that contemporary Persian sources routinely condemned idolatry (but-parasti) on religious grounds. But it is also true that attacks on images patronised by enemy kings had been, from about the sixth century A.D. on, thoroughly integrated into Indian political behaviour. With their lushly sculpted imagery vividly displaying the mutual inter dependence of kings and gods and the 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 sixth century, human kingship was est ablished, contested, and revitalised. Above all, the central icon housed in a royal temple's "womb-chamber," and inhabited by the state-deity of the temple's royal patron, expressed the shared sovereignty of king and deity. Moreover, notwithstanding 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, indeed a sovereign relationship, with the particu lar 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. "A divine power," writes David Shulman, "is felt to be present naturally on the spot."The bonding between king, god, temple, and land in early medieval India is well illustrated in a passage from the Brhatsamhita, a sixth century text: "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 sixth century on, images and temples associated with dynastic authority were considered politically vulnerable.

Given these perceived connections between temples, images, and their royal patrons, it is hardly surprising that, as Richard H. Davis has recently shown, early medieval Indian history abounds in instances of temple desecration that occurred amidst inter-dynastic conflicts. In 642 A.D., according to local tradition, the Pallava king Narasimhavarman I looted the image of Ganesha from the Chalukyan capital of Vatapi. Fifty years later armies of those same Chalukyas invaded north India and brou ght back to the Deccan what appear to be images of Ganga and Yamuna, looted from defeated powers there. In the eighth century Bengali troops sought revenge on king Lalitaditya by destroying what they thought was the image of Vishnu Vaikuntha, the state-deity of Lalitaditya's kingdom in Kashmir. In the early ninth century, the Rashtrakuta king Govinda III invaded and occupied Kanchipuram, which so intimidated the king of Sri Lanka that he sent Govinda several (probably Buddhist) images that had represented the Sinhala state, and which the Rashtrakuta king then installed in a Saiva temple in his capital. About the same time, the Pandyan king Srimara Srivallabha also invaded Sri Lanka and took back to his capital a golden Buddha image that had been installed in the kingdom's Jewel Palace. In the early tenth century, the Pratihara king Herambapala seized a solid gold image of Vishnu Vaikuntha when he defeated the Sahi king of Kangra. By the mid-tenth century, the same image was seized from the Pratiharas by the Candella king Yasovarman and installed in the Lakshmana temple of Khajuraho.

In the early eleventh century, the Chola king Rajendra I furnished his capital with images he had seized from several prominent neighbouring kings: Durga and Ganesha images from the Chalukyas; Bhairava, Bhairavi, and Kali images from the Kalingas of Orissa; a Nandi image from the Eastern Chalukyas; and a bronze Siva image from the Palas of Bengal . In the mid-eleventh century, the Chola king Rajadhiraja defeated the Chalukyas and plundered Kalyani, taking a large black stone door guardian to his capital in Thanjavur, where it was displayed to his subjects as a trophy of war (see Figure 5). In the late eleventh century, the Kashmiri king Harsha even raised the plundering of temples to an institutionalised activity; and in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, while Turkish rulers were establishing themselves in north India, kings of the Paramara dynasty attacked and plundered Jain temples in Gujarat. This pattern continued after the Turkish conquest of India. In the 1460s, Kapilendra, the founder of the Suryavamshi Gajapati dynasty in Orissa, sacked both Saiva and Vaishnava temples in the Cauvery delta in the course of wars of conquest in the Tamil country. Somewhat later, in 1514, Krishnadevaraya looted an image of Balakrishna from Udayagiri, which he had defeated and annexed to his growing Vijayanagara state. Six years later he acquired control over Pandharpur, where he seems to have looted the Vittala image and carried it back to Vijayanagara, with the apparent purpose of ritually incorporating this area into his kingdom.Although the dominant pattern here was one of looting royal te mples and carrying off images of state-deities, we also hear of Hindu kings engaging in the destruction of the royal temples of their political adversaries. In the early tenth century, the Rashtrakuta monarch Indra III not only destroyed the temple of Kalapriya (at Kalpa near the Yamuna River), patronised by the Rashtrakutas' deadly enemies, the Pratiharas, but also took special delight in recording the fact.

The Delhi Sultanate

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. Not surprisingly, Turkish invaders, when attempting to plant their own rule in early medieval India, followed and continued established patterns. The table and the corresponding maps in this essay by no means give the complete picture of temple desecration after the establishment of Turkish power in Upper India. Undoubtedly some temples were desecrated ut the facts in the matter were never recorded, or the facts were recorded but the records themselves no longer survive. Conversely, later Indo-Muslim chroniclers, seeking to glorify the religious zeal of earlier Muslim rulers, sometimes attributed acts of temple desecration to such rulers even when no contemporary evidence supports the claims. As a result, we shall never know the precise number of temples desecrated in Indian history. Nonetheless, by relying strictly on evidence found in contemporary or near-contemporary epigraphic and literary sources spanning a period of more than five centuries (1192-1729), one may identify eighty instances of temple desecration whose historicity appears reasonably certain. Although this figure falls well short of the 60,000 claimed by some Hindu nationalists,19 a review of these data suggests several broad patterns.

First, acts of temple desecration were nearly invariably carried out by military officers or ruling authorities; that is, such acts that we know about were undertaken by the state. Second, the chronology and geography of the data indicate that acts of te mple desecration typically occurred on the cutting edge of a moving military frontier. From Ajmer in Rajasthan, the former capital of the defeated Cahamana Rajputs - also, significantly, the wellspring of Chishti piety - the post-1192 pattern of temple d esecration moved swiftly down the Gangetic Plain as Turkish military forces sought to extirpate local ruling houses in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century. In Bihar, this included the targeting of Buddhist monast ic establishments at Odantapuri, Vikramasila, and Nalanda. Detached from a Buddhist laity, these establishments had by this time become dependent on the patronage of local royal authorities, with whom they were identified. In the 1230s, Iltutmish carried the Delhi Sultanate's authority into Malwa , and by the onset of the fourteenth century the Khalji sultans had opened up a corridor through eastern Rajasthan into Gujarat.

Delhi's initial raids on peninsular India, on which Khalji rulers embarked between 1295 and the early decades of the fourteenth century, appear to have been driven not by a goal of annexation but by the Sultanate's need for wealth with w hich to defend north India from Mongol attacks. In 1247, Balban, the future sultan of Delhi, had recommended raiding Indian states for precisely this purpose.20 For a short time, then, peninsular India stood in the same relation to the North - namely, as a source of plunder for financing distant military operations - as north India had stood in relation to Afghanistan three centuries earlier, in the days of Sabuktigin and Mahmud of Ghazni. After 1320, however, a new north Indian dynasty, the Tughluqs, sought permanent dominion in the Deccan, which the future Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq established by uprooting royally patronised temples in western Andhra, most prominently the Svayambhusiva complex in the centre of the Kakatiyas' capital city of Warangal. Somewhat later Sultan Firuz Tughluq did the same in Orissa.

Regional Islamic Kingdoms and their Expansion

From the late fourteenth century, after the tide of Tughluq imperialism had receded from Gujarat and the Deccan, newly emerging successor states sought to expand their own political frontiers in those areas. This, too, is reflected in instances of temple desecration, as the ex-Tughluq governor of Gujarat and his successors consolidated their authority there, or as the Delhi empire's successors in the South, the Bahmani sultans, challenged Vijayanagara's claims to dominate the Raichur doab and the Tamil coast. The pattern was repeated in Kashmir by Sultan Sikandar , and in the mid-fifteenth century when the independent sultanate of Malwa contested renewed Rajput power in eastern Rajasthan after Delhi's authority there had waned.

In the early sixteenth century, when the Lodi dynasty of Afghans sought to reassert Delhi's sovereignty over neighbouring Rajput houses, we again find instances of temple desecration. So do we in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth cent uries, when the Bahmani Kingdom's principal successor states, Bijapur and Golconda, challenged the territorial sovereignty of Orissan kings, of Vijayanagara, and of the latter's successor states - especially in the southern Andhra country. Unlike the Deccan, where Indo-Muslim states had been expanding at the expense of non-Muslim states, in north India the Mughals under Babur, Humayun, and Akbar - that is, between 1526 and 1605 - grew mainly at the expense of defeated Afghans. As non-Hindu s, the latter had never shared sovereignty with deities patronised in royal temples, which probably explains the absence of firm evidence of temple desecration by any of the early Mughals, in Ayodhya or elsewhere. The notion that Babur's officer Mir Baqi destroyed a temple dedicated to Rama's birthplace at Ayodhya and then got the emperor's sanction to build a mosque on the site - the Babri Masjid - was elaborated in 1936 by S.K. Banerji. However, the author offered no evidence that there had ever been a temple at this site, much less that it had been destroyed by Mir Baqi. The mosque's inscription records only that Babur had ordered the construction of the mosque, which was built by Mir Baqi and was described as "the place of descent of celestial beings" (mahbit-i qudsiyan). This commonplace rhetorical flourish can hardly be construed as referring to Rama, especially since it is the mosque itself that is so described, and not the site or any earlier structure on the site. However, whenever Mughal armies pushed beyond the frontiers of territories formerly ruled by the Delhi sultans and sought to annex the domains of Hindu rulers, we again find instances of temple desecration. In 1661 the governor of Bengal, Mir Jumla, sack ed the temples of the neighbouring raja of Cooch Bihar, who had been harassing the northern frontiers of Mughal territory. The next year, with a view to annexing Assam to the imperial domain, the governor pushed far up the Brahmaputra val ley and desecrated temples of the Ahom rajas, replacing the principal one at Garhgaon with a mosque. All of these instances of temple desecration occurred in the context of military conflicts when Indo-Muslim states expanded into the domains of non-Muslim rulers. Contemporary chroniclers and inscriptions left by the victors leave no doubt that field com manders, governors, or sultans viewed the desecration of royal temples as a normal means of decoupling a former 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. This was accomplished in one of several ways. Most typically, temples considered essential to the constitution of enemy authority were destroyed. Occasionally, temples were converted into mosques, which more visibly conflated the disestablishment of former sovereignty with the establishment of a new one.

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. In February 1299, for example, Ulugh Khan sacked Gujarat's famous temple of Somnath and sent its largest image to Sultan `Ala al-Din Khalji's court in Delhi. When Firuz Tughluq invaded Orissa in 1359 and learned that the region's most important temple was that of Jagannath located inside the raja's fortress in Puri, he carried off the stone image of the god and installed it in Delhi "in an ignominious position". In 1518, when the court in Delhi came to suspect the loyalty of a tributary Rajput chieftain in Gwalior, Sultan Ibrahim Lodi marched to the famous fortress, stormed it, and seized a brass image of Nandi evidently situated adjacent to the chieftain's Siva temple. The sultan brought it back to Delhi and installed it in the city's Baghdad Gate.Similarly, in 1579, when Golconda's army led by Murahari Rao was campaigning south of the Krishna River, Rao annexed the entire region to Qutb Shahi domains and sacked the popular Ahobilam temple, whose ruby-studded image he brought back to Golconda and presented to his sultan as a war trophy. Although the Ahobilam temple had only local appeal, it had close associations with prior sovereign authority since it had been patronised and even visited by the powerful and most famous king of Vijayanagara, Krishnadevaraya. The temple's political significance, and hence the necessity of desecrating it, would have been well understood by Murahari Rao, himself a Marathi Brahmin.

In each of these instances, the deity's image, taken as war trophy to the capital city of the victorious sultan, became radically detached from its former context and in the process was transformed from a living to a dead image. However, sacked images we re not invariably abducted to the victor's capital. In 1556, the Gajapati raja of Orissa had entered into a pact with the Mughal emperor Akbar, the distant adversary of the sultan of Bengal, Sulaiman Karrani. The raja had also given refuge to Sulaiman's more proximate adversary, Ibrahim Sur, and offered to assist the latter in his ambitions to conquer Bengal and overthrow the Karrani dynasty. As Sulaiman could hardly have tolerated such threats to his stability, he sent an army into Orissa which went st raight to the Gajapati kingdom's state temple of Jagannath and looted its images. But here the goal was not annexation but only punishment, which might explain why the Gajapati state images were not carried back to the Bengali capital as trophies of war. Whatever form 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. A contemporary account of a 1661 Mughal campaign in Cooch Bihar, which resulted in t he annexation of the region, states that the chief judge of Mughal Bengal was ordered to confiscate the treasure of the defeated raja, Bhim Narayan, and to destroy the image of the state-deity. But the judge himself issued orders against harming the gene ral population, warning that if any soldiers were caught touching the property of the common people, their hands, ears, or noses would be removed. In short, in newly annexed areas formerly ruled by non-Muslims, as in the case of Cooch Bihar, Mughal officers took appropriate measures to secure the support of the common people, who after all created the material wealth upon which the entire imperial edifice rested.


:: Conrad Barwa 2:31 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Courage:

Actor Sean Penn recently traveled to Iraq and made the following statement:

I am a citizen of the United States of America, I believe in the Constitution of the United States, and the American people. Ours is a government designed to function 'of'-'by'-and-'for' the people. I am one of those people, and a privileged one. Privileged to have lived a life under our Constitution that has allowed me to dream and prosper. In response to these privileges I feel, both as an American and as a human being, the obligation to accept some level of personal responsibility for the policies of my government, both those I support and any that I may not. Simply put, if there is a war or continued sanctions against Iraq, the blood of Americans and Iraqis will be on our hands. My trip here is to personally record the human face of the Iraqi people so that their blood -- along with that of American soldiers -- would not be invisible on my own hands. I sit with you here today in the hopes that any of us present may contribute in any way to a peaceful resolution to the conflict at hand."

[read more]

:: Vikash Yadav 9:29 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Resisting the Migra:

A group of Americans of Pakistani heritage have denounced the INS for asking permanent residents to register with the Federal Government. Given the treachery of the INS against Muslims in recent weeks, one can only applaud their struggle against the INS. Here is a good quote from the Associated Press article:

"We are Americans who have chosen to live here," Shaukat Sindhu, president of the Chicago-based Pakistani American Association of North America, said at a news conference Friday. "Suddenly, we are foreigners in this country. We have done nothing wrong, and now we have to register with the government. "If this would make our nation, America, more safe, it would be OK," he said. "But it doesn't look like it. It sounds like the Pakistani community is being targeted unfairly."

Interesting Monstah's blog also highlights the inconsistencies in a recent all-points bulletin issued by the FBI looking for five men who entered the country illegally. The story has been carried by most media outlets, but the story is inconsistent and lacking in any detail. In Philadelphia, some TV and radio stations reported that the men are of Arab descent while other media outlets have reported that the men are Pakistani. These ambiguous reports based on scraps of evidence only function to heighten paranoia and a generalized fear of men of color.

:: Vikash Yadav 12:17 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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