The Great Indian Political Debate - 2

[acharya]

Book Review
Name of the Book: Temple Destruction and Muslim States
in Medieval India
Author: Richard M. Eaton,
Publisher: Hope India, Gurgaon (hope_india
@indiatimes.com)
Year: 2004
Pages: 101
Price: Rs.225
ISBN: 81-7871-027-7
Reviewed 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. <b>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.</b>

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.<b>

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.</b> 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-legitimise 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 ‘essentialized 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..<b> 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 neighbouring
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.</b>
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’.
<b>
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. </b>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 neighbouring 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 elesewhere 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’. <b>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.</b>
<b>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’.</b>

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.