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Temple
Destruction and Muslim States in Medieval India
Author: Richard M. Eaton,
A Book Review by Yoginder Sikand
Central to the diverse memories of Hindus and Muslims in India
about the history of Hindu-Muslim relations are incidents or
claims of the destruction of Hindu temples by Muslim rulers.
These memories are a defining element in the construction of
contemporary communal identities. Some Muslims see medieval
Muslims Sultans who are said to have destroyed temples as
valiant heroes who struggled against Brahminism, idolatry and
polytheism. For many Hindus, these very kings are the epitome of
evil and godlessness.
The theme of the iconoclast Muslim Sultan is routinely put to
use for political mobilization by communal forces, as so
tragically illustrated in the case of
the Babri Masjid controversy, resulting in the deaths of
thousands of people. Not content with that, Hindutva forces are
on record as declaring that they
aim at destroying or capturing some 30,000 mosques and Muslim
shrines, which, they claim, were built on the sites of Hindu
temples allegedly destroyed by Muslim rulers. Hindutva
literature is replete with exhortations to Hindus to avenge the
misdeeds, both real and imaginary, of medieval Muslim kings,
including destruction of temples. This propaganda and the
communal mobilization that it has provoked have resulted in a
sharp deterioration of inter-communal relations in recent years.
That some Muslim kings did indeed destroy certain Hindu temples
is an undeniable fact, which even most Muslims familiar with
medieval history would readily concede. However, as this
remarkable book by the noted historian Richard Eaton points out,
extreme caution needs to be exercised in accepting the claims of
medieval historians as well as in interpreting past events in
terms of today's categories. Failure to do this, he says, has
resulted in the construction of the image of all Muslims as
allegedly fired by an irrepressible hatred of Hindus, a gross
distortion of actual history.
The notion of the Muslim Sultan as temple-breaker, Eaton says,
derives essentially from history texts written by British
colonial administrators, who, in
turn, drew upon Persian chronicles by Muslim historians attached
to the courts of various Indian Muslim rulers. Eaton argues that
British colonial historians were at pains to project the image
of Muslim rulers as wholly oppressive and anti-Hindu, in order
to present British rule as enlightened and civilized and thereby
enlist Hindu support. For this they carefully selected from the
earlier Persian chronicles those reports that glorified various
Muslim Sultans as destroyers of temples and presented these as
proof that Hindus and Muslims could not possibly live peacefully
with each other without the presence of the British to rule over
them to prevent them from massacring each other. Although some
of these reports quoted in British texts were true, many others
were simply the figment of the imagination of court chroniclers
anxious to present their royal patrons as great champions of
Islamic orthodoxy even if in actual fact these rulers were lax
Muslims.
Dealing with actual instances of temple-breaking by Muslim
rulers, Eaton appeals for a more nuanced approach, arguing that
in most cases these occurred not simply or mainly because of
religious zeal. Thus, the raids on temples by the eleventh
century Mahmud Ghaznavi must be seen as motivated, at least in
part, by the desire for loot, since the temples he destroyed
were richly endowed with gold and jewels, which he used to
finance his plundering activities against other Muslim rulers in
Afghanistan, Iran and elsewhere. Beginning in the early
thirteenth century, the Delhi Sultans' policy of selective
temple desecration aimed, not as in the earlier Ghaznavid
period, to finance distant military operations on the Iranian
plateau but to de-legitimize and extirpate defeated Indian
ruling houses. The process of Indo-Muslim state building, Eaton
says, entailed the sweeping away of all prior political
authority in newly conquered territories. When such authority
was vested in a ruler whose own legitimacy was associated with a
royal temple, typically one that housed idol of ruling dynasty's
state-deity, that temple was normally looted or destroyed or
converted into a mosque, which succeeded in 'detaching the
defeated raja from the most prominent manifestation of his
former legitimacy'. Temples that were not so identified were
normally left untouched. Hence, Eaton writes, it is wrong to
explain this phenomenon by appealing to what he calls as an
'essential zed theology of iconoclasm felt to be intrinsic to
Islam'.
Royal temple complexes were pre-eminently political
institutions, Eaton says. The central icon, housed in a royal
temple's garba griha or 'womb-chamber' and inhabited by the
state-deity of the temple's royal patron, expressed the 'shared
sovereignty of king and deity'. Therefore, Eaton stresses,
temple-breaking, especially of temples associated with ruling
houses, was essentially a political, rather than simply
religious, act. As proof of this thesis he cites instances of
the sacking of royal temples of Hindu rulers by rival Hindu
kings as early as the sixth century C.E.. In AD 642 CE the
Pallava king Narashimhavarman I looted the image of Ganesha from
the Chalukyan capital of Vatapi.. 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 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 eleventh
century the Chola king Rajendra I furnished his capital with
images he had seized from several neighboring Chalukya, Kalinga
and Pala rulers. 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. In
addition to looting royal temples and carrying off images of
state deities, some Hindu kings, like some of their later Muslim
counterparts, engaged 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 Jamuna River), patronized by the
Pratiharas, but, Eaton writes, 'took special delight in
recording the fact'.
This and other such evidence clearly suggests, Eaton argues,
that 'temples had been the natural sites for the contestation of
kingly authority well before the coming of Muslim Turks to
India'. Hence, the Turkish invaders, in seeking to establish
themselves as rulers, followed a pattern that had already been
established before their arrival in India. Yet, the iconoclastic
zeal of the Muslim rulers of India must not be exaggerated,
Eaton says. He claims that based on evidence from epigraphic and
literary evidence spanning a period of more than five centuries
(1192-1729), 'one may identify eighty instances of temple
desecration whose historicity appears reasonably certain', a
figure much less than what Hindutva ideologues today claim.
In judging these incidents, extreme caution is necessary, Eaton
suggests. These temples were destroyed not by 'ordinary'
Muslims, but, rather, by officials of the state. Further, the
timing and location of these incidents is also significant. Most
of them occurred, Eaton says, on 'the cutting edge of a moving
military frontier', in the course of military raids or invasions
of neighboring territories ruled by Hindu kings. Once Muslim
rulers had conquered a particular territory and incorporated it
into their kingdom typically such incidents were few, if at all.
When Muslim rulers grew mainly at the expense of other Muslim
ruling houses, temple desecration was rare,which explains, for
instance, why there is no firm evidence of the early Mughal
rulers Babar and Humayun, whose principal adversaries were
Afghans, in engaging in temple desecration, including,
strikingly, in Ayodhya. Certain later Mughal and other rulers
are said to have engaged in the destruction of royal temples and
building mosques on their sites in territories ruled by rebel
chieftains. These acts were intended to be punishments for
rebellion, and once rebellions were quelled few such incidents
took place.
Whatever form they took, Eaton says, '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'. Eaton
cites in this regard a contemporary description of a 1661 Mughal
campaign in Kuch Bihar, northern Bengal, which resulted in the
annexation of the region, makes it clear that Mughal authorities
were guided by two principal concerns: to destroy the image of
the state-deity of the defeated Raja, Bhim Narayana and to
prevent Mughal troops from looting or in any way harming the
general population of Kuch Bihar. Accordingly, the chief judge
of Mughal Bengal, Saiyid Muhammad Sadiq, was directed to issue
prohibitory orders that nobody was to touch the property of the
people. Sayyid Sadiq, Eaton tells us, 'issued strict prohibitory
orders so that nobody had the courage to break the laws or to
plunder the property of the inhabitants. The punishment for
disobeying the order was that the hands, ears or noses of the
plunderers were cut'. In newly annexed areas formerly ruled by
non-Muslims, as in the case of Kuch Bihar, Eaton goes on, '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'.
The theory that politics, rather than simple religious zeal, lay
behind most instances of temple-breaking by Muslim rulers is
strengthened by the fact that, as Eaton points out, once Hindu
Rajas were defeated by Muslim kings and their territories
annexed, pragmatism dictated that temples within the Emperor's
realm remained unharmed. This was the case even with the Mughal
Emperor Aurangzeb, generally projected as the epitome of Muslim
iconoclasm. Eaton quotes an order issued by Aurangzeb to local
officials in Benares in 1659 to provide protection to the
Brahman temple functionaries there, together with the temples at
which they officiated. The order reads:
In these days information has reached our court that several
people have, out of spite and rancour, harassed the Hindu
residents of Benares and nearby
places, including a group of Brahmans who are in charge of
ancient temples there. These people want to remove those
Brahmans 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 Brahmans or other Hindus of that region,
so that they might remain in their traditional place and pray
for the continuance of the Empire.
Justifying this order, Auragnzeb asserted, 'According to the
Holy Law (shari'at) and the exalted creed, it has been
established that ancient temples should not be torn down'. At
the same time, he added that no new temples should be built, a
marked departure from the policy of Akbar. However, Eaton says
that this order appears to have applied only to Benares because
many new temples were built elsewhere in India during
Aurangzeb's reign.
Eaton thus seeks to dismiss the notion that various Muslim
rulers in India wantonly engaged in destroying Hindu temples,
allegedly driven by a 'theology of
iconoclasm'. Such a picture, he insists, cannot, sustained by
evidence from original sources from the early thirteenth century
onwards. Had instances of
temple desecration been driven by a 'theology of iconoclasm', he
argues, this 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'. In contrast, Eaton's meticulous
research leads him to believe that 'the original data associate
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 desecration also
occurred when Hindu patrons of prominent temples committed acts
of treason or disloyalty to the Indo-Muslim states they served'.
Otherwise, he notes, 'temples lying within Indo-Muslim sovereign
domains, viewed normally as protected state property, were left
unmolested'.
This slim volume is a path-breaking book, a passionate protest
against the horrendous uses to which the notion of the 'theology
of iconoclasm' has been put by contemporary Hindutva ideologues
to justify murder in the name of avenging 'historical wrongs'.
It urgently deserves to be translated into various Indian
languages and made readily available at a more affordable price.
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