The Story of India

by Michael Wood

  As always in history, both narratives are to an extent true; yet both are distortions of much more complex realities that differed on the ground in every region. But both these narratives coexist in the minds of most Indian people, and one or other tends to come to the fore in times of peace or times of stress, especially when fomented by unscrupulous politicians for electoral gain. Certain historical facts, though, are insurmountable, the foremost being the Partition of the subcontinent on religious lines in 1947, which, however we argue, was a fundamental break with India’s past. The roots of these events lay far back in history.

  At the centre of the Old World, India had long had cultural and linguistic connections with the West and central Asia. Now Arabs, Turks, Afghans and Mongols enter the story in a new age of migrations. Islam seems to have first reached the coast of Kerala with Arab traders in the seventh century, and the earliest mosque on the subcontinent is said to be the one at Cranganore, the successor to the old Roman settlement of Muziris. In the south the migrants came peacefully, and over time became thoroughly acculturized. A military attack on Sind from the Indus delta in 711 led to Muslim settlement in parts of what is now southern Pakistan; but as late as the 980s a Persian geographer using first-hand merchants’ reports could describe, for example, Lahore, in the heart of the Pakistani Punjab, as a purely Hindu city ‘full of bazaars and idol temples’, a city whose people were ‘entirely infidels, with no Muslims’. It was not until the early eleventh century that Turkic and Afghan armies bearing the faith of Islam began to make headway against the Hindu kingdoms of northern India. These military incursions of Islamic conquerors in the Middle Ages influenced the cultures of the north forever, an intensely dramatic tale that brought about one of the biggest stories of cultural crossover in history. One concomitant, for example, was the conversion of huge numbers of Indians to Islam. This phenomenon is not yet satisfactorily explained by historians; no doubt it was partly through coercion, but in part too a reaction to the hierarchical and oppressive nature of Brahminical religion in many places towards the lower castes, and, a response to the democratic bent of Islam. But this great historical movement began with violence.

  MAHMUD OF GHAZNI

  Ghazni, eastern Afghanistan. Clouds of dust swirl around the crumbling citadel and the scorching blast of summer rises from the arid Afghan plateau. ‘A truly miserable place,’ the Mughal Babur wrote. ‘Why kings who hold Hindustan and Khurasan [Persia] would ever make such a wretched place their capital has always been a source of amazement to me.’ A few hours south of Kabul on the road to Kandahar, this was the capital of a vast Muslim empire in the eleventh century. The security advice these days is to stay only a short time. At the tomb of Sultan Mahmud, a plain stone slab with swirls of Kufic lettering, a knot of old, turbaned Afghans are at prayer. Mahmud is still remembered here as presiding over a high tide of Islam. In the sectarian struggles of recent years his name has appeared on anti-Indian and jihadist banners, and even on a Pakistani rocket. Mahmud set the pattern of foreign conquests and the spread of Islam in medieval India. On fifteen expeditions he sacked cities and temples across the north. No character in Indian history today evokes more hostility: in Afghanistan he is regarded as a philosopher prince, the conqueror of infidels; in India he has left a bitter legacy for his violent conquests. His combination of brutality and high civilization was as characteristic of medieval Islam as it was of Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe.

  A great deal of nonsense is talked these days about Mahmud’s activities. The violent energies of eleventh-century India were no different on one level from the dynastic wars of contemporary Western Europe – the murderous feuds of the Normans, Franks and Ottonians, for example. Rulers of Afghans and Turks invaded northern India, sacked cities and plundered temples to sustain, feed and reward their armies. In southern India the Cholans did the same against their Chera and Chalukya neighbours, their fellow Hindus. The motive, as in most of these wars, was loot, and the seizure of images of their enemies’ gods was both booty and humiliation. But these northern wars were also waged in the name of Islam. Although the Koran says that there should be no compulsion in religion, medieval Muslim kings nevertheless found in it ample justification for war against the infidel, just as Europeans did in the Bible, and thus it was used by Mahmud. But there were still high-ranking Hindus in his entourage, such as his general Tilak; he was still content to enter into client relations with Hindu kings; and it was still possible for Hindu, Buddhist and Jain temples to exist in his kingdom. So Mahmud’s was by no means a thoroughgoing iconoclasm. The chief aim was not conversion or iconoclasm, but plunder. However, by crushing infidels, Mahmud could also advertise himself as a man risen from slave ancestry to become a caliph, a companion of the faithful, a successor of the Prophet.

  Out of such disparate motives his career was built. From two great bases in the Punjab – the old Hindu cities of Multan and Lahore – he launched a series of winter raids into the plains of northern India, marking the beginning of a historical process that would lead to profound changes in culture, language and allegiance on the subcontinent. ‘This may sound an exaggeration,’ an old Multani told me, ‘but you could see Mahmud as the first mover behind the idea of Pakistan.’

  MAHMUD IN MULTAN

  Multan, in the southern Punjab, Pakistan. The old city is being lashed by unseasonal December rains, which are falling in torrents over the citadel, running over the floors of the blue-domed Sufi shrines that loom impressively out of the grey mist. Auto-rickshaws gingerly navigate a lake in the street outside the Haram Gate, where the shop awnings in the narrow alleys are sagging with water. The city has had Muslim rulers since the ninth century, though in those early years it remained a famous Hindu city. Ali al-Masudi, one of my favourite historians, visited the place in 912, when it lay in the frontier zone of Islam, and described the riches of the pilgrim trade protected by its Muslim governor. In 982, only a few years before Mahmud’s day, it was a ‘large town with a famous idol and people come on pilgrimage from all over Hindustan to visit it: the large cantonment of the Muslim ruler lies outside the Hindu city’. Although Mahmud made his capital at Ghazni, up in the Afghan hills, Multan would be his main base in the Punjab, from which he would make his forays into India as far as Mathura, Benares and Kannauj.

  My hosts, the Gardezi family, trace their ancestry to the very beginnings of Islam in the north of the subcontinent. I stayed with them on my journeys through Pakistan in the 1990s when I was travelling in the footsteps of Alexander. They have a wonderful manuscript library of ancient Korans and texts of poetry and history: indeed, the history of Islamic humanism is told in precious manuscripts of the Sufi mystic Amir Khusro, in Dara Shikoh’s Persian translation of the Bhagavadgita, in the epics of Nizami and Firdowsi … the latter being the Persian poet who wrote the Shahnama, the tale of Persian kings, for Mahmud himself, having been drawn to the glittering court of the Ghaznavids with the promise of New World wealth.

  The Gardezis have new houses in the suburbs now; their old family mansions in the medieval city, towering over a narrow lane behind the gate, are crumbling inside their high-walled brick compounds, women’s quarters on one side, men on the other. Through an archway in a wide courtyard open to the sky the family tombs cluster around the shrine of their Sufi ancestor Sheikh Yusef in the classic Multani blue-tiled style.

  Family tradition takes them back to the caliphate, a story that mirrors the expansion of Islam itself from the time of the Prophet to the founding of Pakistan, whose constitution of 1973 bears a Gardezi signature. Hur Gardezi fills me in further:

  Our ancestors had gone from Baghdad in the first expansion into central Asia to Bukhara. Then we came from Gardez to Multan in the late eleventh century to serve Masud, the son of Mahmud. But we still bear the family name of Gardezi, which was a little fortified town southeast of Ghazni, surrounded by mountains that were covered with snow in winter. Babur thought little of it because it had no gardens or orchards: as far as he was conce
rned, anywhere with no apples and apricots was a dead loss!

  The Gardezi family was one of many swept along in the great migrations of the Middle Ages. India was one of the richest lands on Earth: ‘the greatest country in the northern world,’ says a tenth-century Persian writer, ‘with all the amenities of civilization, a numerous population and many kings. Numerous towns lie in it. All the inhabitants are idolaters.’ Read the pages of writers such as al-Masudi and you see the fascination it exerted on outsiders. Like the conquistadors in the New World, some of the invaders were seduced by the culture of India. Al-Masudi, for example, was fascinated by the religious differences: ‘Scholars of discernment and judgement say that the ancient Indians were particularly endowed with righteousness and wisdom,’ he writes. Others speak excitedly of Indian discoveries in mathematics and astronomy, naming Hindu sacred texts.

  Still others, though, were as intolerant of the native religion as most of the Spanish were of Inca and Aztec religions: they regarded it as work-of-the-devil idolatry, a view that still survives in fundamentalist Christian and Muslim literature. Mahmud’s most notorious attack took place in 1023 and was directed at the wealthy pilgrimage place of Somnath on the coast of Kathiawar in Gujarat, a sea-washed promontory lapped by the waves of the Indian Ocean. While Turkic-Persian historians claim that loot was his main objective, strange stories nonetheless circulated about another motivation or, at least, public justification, that would be dismissed out of hand were it not recorded by two contemporaries who knew Mahmud and his son. This tale says that the lingam (the phallic stone of Shiva) of Somnath was actually the image of Manaat, the last of the pagan idols that had existed in Mecca before the days of the Prophet, when it had been spirited away to India. It comes from the historian Farrukhi Sistani, who went with Mahmud on the expedition that ‘emptied the land of India of fighting men and fearsome elephants’, and it is repeated by the poet Gardezi, who was in court twenty years later and knew the participants. This tale, then, was in the air at the very time of the attack, or soon after.

  Mahmud assembled 50,000 troops on the parade ground at Multan, with 1200 elephants, and 20,000 camels to carry water. He marched south during the winter season, through the desert of Thar, past Jaisalmer on the old caravan route down to Kathiawar. Somnath was sacked after a fierce battle, during which the famous temple was plundered and burnt. There are various stories about the fate of the idol, the Shiva lingam, though all may be inventions. Some said it was sent to the caliph in Baghdad with a letter acclaiming Mahmud as a fighter for Islam. Others say he took it to Ghazni, broke it to pieces and buried it in the ground at the threshold of the great mosque, to be walked over by worshippers on their way to prayers.

  The 1023 expedition, then, at least as it was construed retrospectively in the Ghaznavid historiography of his own time, was for a higher purpose in the eschatology of Islam: to complete unfinished business of the Prophet; to destroy Manaat. This was claimed to be the true meaning of the expedition, though it was perhaps a post-hoc justification, given the Koran’s injunction against aggressive war. As it says on Mahmud’s coins, ‘There is one God, Muhammad is his Prophet, and Mahmud is his companion.’ From Turkic slaves he had risen high.

  THE FIRST HISTORIAN OF INDIA

  These early conquests saw a flood of migrants into the Indus valley and the Punjab – entrepreneurs, Sufis, saints, mercenaries – and many old preconceptions were challenged and enriched. Among the migrants was Abu al-Rayhan al-Biruni, scientist, astronomer, philosopher and the greatest historian of India. Al-Biruni was a thoroughgoing orthodox Sunni Muslim, but India and its ideas had a tremendous impact on him – a pointer to the way that India would change Islamic civilization and become a heartland of the religion.

  One interesting aspect of this dialogue concerns views of time. Al-Biruni had grown up with biblical and Koranic traditions of time, but when he travelled to India and took up the study of Sanskrit and the Indian sciences he realized that these ideas were culturally specific and historically related. Biblical and Koranic ideas about the length of history were clearly absurd. The cycles of time in Indian thought were unimaginably long – billions of years – and Indian thinkers did not even believe in the Creation as Christians and Muslims conceived it, for in their theories each new age of the cosmos was formed afresh out of the debris of the last. A change of timescale inevitably brought a change of philosophical content, which even led al-Biruni to what reads like an early exposition of Darwinist theories. His remarkable portrait of India’s religions should also be mentioned. Earlier Muslim historians understood that religion in India was very different from that of the ‘Peoples of the Book’ (the Jews and Christians whose scriptures, according to the Koran, were revealed to them by God before the time of Muhammad), and that it formed a set of related belief systems unique to the subcontinent, even though there were sects such as the Vaishnavites and Shaivites, which each had tens of millions of followers, with different gods, sacred books and rituals. But al-Biruni, who learnt Sanskrit and consulted with Hindu holy men, asserted that the fundamental religious beliefs of the Indians were the same as those of Islam, and that idol worship was only a superficial issue, an aid to the poor and simple. This remarkable perception sets the pattern for future Muslim–Hindu dialogue, from the medieval Sufi saints and mystics such as Kabir and Dadu, to Dara Shikoh in the 1640s and to modern thinkers such as Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore and Jiddu Krishnamurti.

  EMPIRES OF THE SOUTH

  So the twin figures of Mahmud and his philosopher-scientist al-Biruni represent the opposite poles of the first meeting of Islam and India. But this is another moment to note the synchronicities of history. In the year 1010 Mahmud of Ghazni marched across the Punjab and attacked the Jumna valley, sacking Ghur, and in 1011 Thanesar, the great ancient city at the site of Kurukshetra. Those years loom large in northern historiography, but the great centres of civilization in the south and east were untouched by these predatory forays. Also in 1010, a great emperor in the tropical south marked his conquests in the Maldives and Sri Lanka by dedicating the greatest building in India. Two years after Mahmud’s 1017 attack deep into the Ganges plain, the son of that ruler – a Hindu king and devotee of Shiva – led an expedition that marched, incredibly, 1000 miles or more as the crow flies up the coast of Andhra and Orissa as far as the Ganges. The Bengalis were no doubt as surprised to meet an invading army from the deep south, speaking an unintelligible southern tongue, as they were to meet Mahmud of Ghazni’s Turkic conquistadors from the Indus valley.

  In the deep south the late tenth century had seen the rise of a vast empire untouched by events in the West and central Asia. As discussed in Chapter 3, the Ashokan age knew of the Cholans, along with the other great dynasties of the south – the Pandyas of Madurai and the Pallavas of Kanchi. The Cholas grew to be the pre-eminent power in the south of the peninsula in the tenth century, and remained so until the late thirteenth century. In the eleventh century they captured the Andaman and Nicobar islands, off the shores of Burma, which remain Indian today; they also occupied parts of Java, and exchanged embassies with China, where they left merchant colonies. One of the great civilizations of the day, its heartland was the valley and delta of the Cavery, the sacred river of southern India. To get there you must head towards the southern tip of India down the Coromandel Coast: Chola mandalam, the land of the Cholans.

  JOURNEY TO TANJORE

  I arrive in Tanjore with the late autumn monsoon. From my hotel roof by the station, a great bank of indigo clouds hangs over the town, and a curtain of rain moves across the damp green landscape to distant rumbles of thunder.

  Tanjore stands just below the apex of the Cavery delta. From here forty streams spread out to irrigate the rice fields, the foundation of the wealth of the dynasties who shaped southern Indian history. The British thought this the most fertile province of their empire; for Marco Polo, who came here at the very end of the Cholan golden age, it was the ‘richest province on Earth’. Over
the town rears the huge pyramid of the temple of Rajaraja the Great, finished in 1010, and symbol of the Cholan Empire that dominated southern India from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, and sent its armies to Sri Lanka and the Ganges.

  It was an age of brilliant artistic and cultural achievement, often compared with that of the ancient Athenians. The Tamil culture went back into the deep past and they produced music, dance, poetry and sculpture as expressive as any on the planet. And despite the erosions of time, and the depredations of colonialism and modernity, the culture is still alive. If you hanker to know what it is like to belong to a traditional civilization, southern India is the place: the Cavery delta is its fertile heartland, and Tanjore its imperial city.

  The founder of the Cholan Empire was Aditya, whose dynasty traced its ancestry to pre-Roman times (as we saw, the Cholans are mentioned in the edicts of Ashoka). Aditya, who ruled from 871 to 907, consolidated the kingdom and is described in the poetic words of the royal inscriptions as ‘building a row of great stone temples to Shiva down the banks of the Cavery river, all the way from the elephant-haunted Sahya mountains down to the ocean, where the moon plays on the folds of its restless waves’. But up until the mid-tenth century the Cholan kingdom was still a local one, mired in conflicts with its peninsular neighbours. The architect of the expansion was Arulmoli, subsequently known as Rajaraja (king of kings), who came to the throne in 985. As he grew in self-assurance, he sent his navy to conquer new lands, including the Maldives and northern Sri Lanka, while his son Rajendra sent the army to the Ganges and actually occupied parts of Java and the Malacca straits to protect the sea trade route to Cambodia and Sung dynasty China. Rajaraja created a state with a strong administration and a powerful army, which allowed the Cholans to dominate the south for three centuries, and left a mark on the culture and religion of the Tamils that persists to the present day.