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Foundation, NJ U. S. A
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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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