India

by John Keay

  The one glowering exception is the sculptural colossus of Borobudur, much the most outstanding if enigmatic example of Indian cultural transference in south-east Asia. As a stepped stupa of unprecedented proportions, possible prototypes for it have been inferred from the descriptions offered by Hsuan Tsang of now vanished north Indian stupas and from archaeological evidence of massive ruins and plinths at sites like Nandangarh and Paharpur in Bengal. On the other hand, if the stupa was originally a hill which was then cut into terraces and clad with stone, local parallels with the elaborately terraced landscape of Java and its pre-Indic mountain deities may be more relevant.

  The archaeology of the building does nothing to resolve these contradictions. Apparently begun about 775, it only assumed its final shape in 840, by which time it had been frequently redesigned and even reinterpreted. ‘The monument was built in at least four different stages … it was probably begun as a Hindu temple, and was transformed into a Buddhist place of worship after its second stage.’15 However this may be, there is universal consensus that the ground-plan of Borobudur, both as originally conceived and as finally realised, represents a classic mandala. Its four sides, each about as long as the touchline of a football pitch, are progressively indented so as to round, as it were, the corners, and render the four-square outline as near circular as rectangular masonry will allow. Succeeding tiers, the inner circles on the ground plan, follow the same pattern until the three topmost, or innermost, are in fact circular. Moreover each tier is accessible only by flights of steps located in the middle of each side and which, connecting, divide the monument into four quadrants.

  A similar design can be detected in the base-plan of contemporary temples, as opposed to stupas, in both Java and India. Elevations add a further important dimension to this symbolism, as will appear from the soaring ambitions of the Chalukyas’ successors in the Deccan. Here it will suffice to note that building temples had now become a royal prerogative. All, except subsidiary shrines, were in part intended as expressions of royal paramountcy designed to impress subjects, remind vassals, and challenge rivals.

  Hence ‘the construction of a temple, Buddhist or Hindu, was an important political act,’16 indeed ‘as much an act of war as it was an act of peace’.17 It could, though, be misconstrued. As new Islamic challengers ventured across the deserts of Sind and over the Hindu Kush, India’s dynasties appeared to be woefully indifferent as they lavished all available resources not on forts and horsemen but on flights of architectural fantasy. In fact they were meeting the new threat by a gloriously defiant assertion of self-belief in their superior sovereignty.

  9

  Dharma and Defiance

  C700–C900

  THE DAWN MUEZZIN

  THE URGENCY WITH WHICH the followers of the Prophet carried his teachings out of Arabia resulted in one of the campaigning wonders of world history. Within twenty years of his death in 632, Arab forces, although lacking in military pedigree and with no prior knowledge of siegecraft, had overrun much of the Byzantine empire in Syria and Egypt and all of the Sassanid empire in Iraq and Iran. Forty years later, with the addition of North Africa, Spain, most of Afghanistan, and vast areas of central Asia, the Arab domains spanned three continents in a broad swathe of conquest which stretched from the Atlantic to the Indus and from the upper Nile to the Aral Sea. Alexander had been upstaged, Caesar overshadowed. If Muslim authors celebrated this success with the chronicles, geographies and travelogues which now constitute important source materials for the period, it was hardly surprising; evidence of Islam’s triumph was proof of Islam’s truth. By 700 China and India shared uncertain borderlands with Islamic neighbours just as did the Frankish kingdom in western Europe and what remained of Byzantium’s empire in Anatolia.

  This phenomenal rate of expansion could not be sustained. External resistance hardened, internal stresses led to the breakaway of peripheral provinces. When in 750 the Umayyad caliphate of Damascus was succeeded by the Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad a long period of consolidation and cultural distinction set in. In the east the Arabs had reached the Indus a hundred years earlier, yet only rarely had they ventured beyond it. Their Turkish successors in Afghanistan, reluctant rulers if less reticent raiders, would also for long be content merely to ravage India’s northern cities.

  Islam’s Indian frontier would therefore come to assume a near permanence. Running roughly up the Indus from Sind in what is now Pakistan to Kabul in Afghanistan, it would scarcely advance for three centuries. Kanauj and India’s other front-line kingdoms had, like Constantinople, ample time to become acquainted with their new neighbours, with the faith they held so dear and with the tactics they used so well. None would seem invincible. Moreover, a catastrophe that takes centuries to materialise loses some of its menace. Illusions of successful resistance were nursed; prospects for co-existence were explored. The India which finally succumbed to Muslim dominion in the thirteenth century, though politically more divided than ever, would be both more resilient and more receptive than the brittle dynastic structures of the eighth century. Similarly the Islamic conquerors who would eventually hoist their standards over Delhi, though no more tolerant of idolatry than their Arab predecessors, had few illusions about the mass conversion of India’s multitudes, but real expectations of a fruitful and lasting Indian dominion.

  Arab forces, possibly including a few grey-bearded disciples who had prayed with the Prophet himself, had first ventured onto Indian soil by crossing the Bolan pass (near Quetta in the Baluchistan province of Pakistan) in C663. The pass provides comparatively easy access from southern Afghanistan into valleys which thread their way down to the Indus in upper Sind. Much further south, on the coast of lower Sind, desultory naval raids had preceded this assault. Maritime objectives would remain important. In fact twenty years earlier the first Muslims to reach India had been newly converted Arab merchants trading across the Arabian Sea to India’s west coast. Their destinations included the port-cities of the Maitrakas in Saurashtra, of the Chalukyas in Maharashtra, the Cheras in Kerala, and even the kings of Sri Lanka. By the mid-seventh century there were sizeable communities of Muslims in most of these ports. Without provoking undue hostility amongst already cosmopolitan populations, the newcomers rapidly engrossed the valuable carrying trade in Arabian horses to India and in Indian and south-east Asian spices to Arabia. The protection of this route and those who sailed it was thus an early Arab priority; and it called for particular attention to the coastal regions of Sind, whose estuarine inlets provided a muddy sanctuary amidst the mangroves for scavenging sea tribes and hereditary pirates.

  Whether it was also the Arabs’ intention to use Sind as a springboard for the invasion of India is less certain. The idea would surface in the eighth century, but in the seventh the more usual route to India via Kabul and the Khyber Pass seems to have been preferred and had already resulted in a succession of abortive Arab raids directed at the Kabul valley. Sind, on the other hand, was something of a dead-end as well as a backwater. This was because any eastward progress was largely barred by the Thar, otherwise the Great Indian Desert, where now runs the Indo – Pakistan border. Even history, as if aware that the lower Indus would have more than its fair share of exposure after the Harappan discoveries, has little to report of the region during the thousand years since Alexander and his men had come sailing downriver. That it was then already Aryanised is clear from the ferocious opposition which the Macedonians encountered even from brahman communities.

  Subsequently Buddhism had also claimed many followers in Sind and seems to have become the predominant creed. Hsuan Tsang, writing only twenty years before the first Arab incursion, found innumerable stupas, amongst them perhaps those in the vicinity of Mohenjo-daro which thirteen centuries later would attract the first glimmer of archaeological interest in Harappan prehistory. He also reported on Sind’s ‘several hundred sangharamas occupied by about ten thousand monks’. Admittedly the monks, being of the Hinayana school of which the Chinese Mah
ayanist heartily disapproved, seemed somewhat ‘indolent and given to indulgence and debauchery’. But the people as a whole were ‘hardy and impulsive’ and their kingdom, then one of Harsha’s confederate states, was famed for its cereal production, its livestock and its export of salt.1

  Unfortunately Hsuan Tsang’s generally reliable, if partisan, account says nothing about the political situation, only that Sind’s unnamed king was of sudra caste. He was also ‘an honest and sincere fellow’ who, not unexpectedly after such a character reference, ‘reverenced the law of the Buddha’. Presumably he was of the Rai dynasty, and probably the last of that dynasty for, according to Muslim sources, in C640 the throne of the Rais was usurped by a brahman named Chach. For an infidel, Chach would be rated highly by Muslim writers. In the Chach-nama, an Islamic history of Sind compiled in the thirteenth century but supposedly based on contemporary accounts, he is said to have immediately set out ‘to define the frontiers of his kingdom’.2

  No charters of his reign survive, but it may be supposed that what Muslim historians saw as an exercise in border demarcation Chach intended as a traditional digvijaya. Nor, as ‘conquests of the four quarters’ go, was it inconsiderable. In the north, we learn, he reached ‘Kashmir’. Even if this meant not the Kashmir valley but Kashmir territory, which then extended down to the plains of the Panjab, he must at least have entered the Himalayan foothills, for he marked his frontier by planting a chenar, or plane tree, and a deodar, or Himalayan cedar; both are native to the hills. Heading west he laid claim to Makran, the coastal region of Baluchistan where he planted date palms, and heading south he reached the mouth of the Indus. Chach’s kingdom lacked only the erstwhile Gandhara in the north-west to qualify as a proto-Pakistan. Similarly, as a digvijaya, his conquests were incomplete only in respect of the mandala’s eastern quadrant where lay the fearful sands of Thar.

  As if to make up for this omission, it was Chach, or his governor in upper Sind, who successfully saw off the Arab attack of 663 via the Bolan pass. No further assaults materialised, and in C674, after what was undoubtedly a glorious reign, Chach ‘died and went to hell’, this being the invariable fate of even the noblest infidel in Muslim histories. It was therefore his son, Dahar (Dahir), who in C708 faced the next and more determined Arab invasion.

  This time the trouble is specifically attributed to a flagrant act of piracy. A ship from Sri Lanka, whose Basra-bound passengers included a bevy of maidens, had been waylaid off the port-city of Debal (in the vicinity of modern Karachi) by the dreaded Meds. The Meds were pirates while the maidens, all daughters of deceased Muslim merchants, had been intended as a courtesy from the king of Sri Lanka to al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, the Caliph’s governor of Iraq and viceroy for the eastern empire. In what reads like an early-eighth-century version of quarrels which would recur in the late eighteenth century over the policing of the Arabian Sea, al-Hajjaj demanded that King Dahar of Sind secure the release of the maidens. But Dahar, even if willing, was unable to oblige. As he explained, ‘They are pirates who have captured these women, and over them I have no authority.’3 Unsatisfied with this reply, al-Hajjaj despatched a naval force to Debal. It was defeated and its commander killed. Another armada met a similar fate. Whether or not Dahar took an active part in these skirmishes, he was clearly doing nothing to restrain his coastal subjects. Al-Hajjaj therefore continued to hold him responsible and resolved on the all-out amphibious offensive of C708.

  Command of the caliph’s forces was given to Muhammad ibn Qasim, al-Hajjaj’s cousin and an able leader, who was to be supplied with siege engines by sea and with six thousand crack Syrian troops for the march through Makran. Nothing was left to chance; according to al-Biladuri, one of the earliest Muslim chroniclers, ibn Qasim ‘was provided with all he could require, without omitting even thread and needles’. Although apparently just a figure of speech, this reference to needlecraft would be of some significance for Muhammad ibn Qasim.

  More immediately the siege engines came into their own. The land forces had effected a rendezvous with the seaborne reinforcements outside Debal, but they were unable to force entry to the city. Even the manjanik, a gigantic martinet, or calibrated catapult, which required five hundred men to operate it, was ineffective against Debal’s stout walls. But by shortening its chassis so that it aimed high, the manjanik was trained on a flagstaff whose bright red flag fluttered defiantly from the top of Debal’s temple tower. After no doubt several misses, the manjanik-master struck lucky and the flagstaff was shattered, ‘at which the idolaters were sore afflicted’. In fact, they threw caution to the wind and, issuing forth to avenge this sacrilege, were easily routed. ‘The town was thus taken by assault and the carnage endured for three days,’ says al-Biladuri. The temple was partly demolished, its ‘priests’ (who may have been Buddhists or brahmans) were massacred, and a mosque was laid out for the four-thousand-man garrison which was to remain in Debal.

  Meanwhile ibn Qasim moved inland, then up the west bank of the Indus. Some ‘Samanis’ (presumably sramanas, or Buddhist monks) of ‘Nerun’ (perhaps the Pakistani Hyderabad) were reminded of their vows of non-violence and came to terms with the invader. Thanks to these ‘Buddhist fifth-columnists’,4 as an eminent Indian historian mischievously calls them, Nerun capitulated. On the opposite bank of the river, a despondent Dahar was apparently safe since ibn Qasim seemed unable or unwilling to cross the flood. Eventually orders came from Governor al-Hajjaj in Baghdad to do just that. A bridge of roped boats was assembled on the west bank. With one end released into the current, it swung into place and the Arabs began crossing immediately.

  ‘The dreadful conflict which followed was such as had never been heard of,’ reports al-Biladuri. It does, though, bring to mind Alexander’s titanic struggle with Poros; for again the Indian forces displayed exceptional bravery and again the outcome hung in the balance until decided by the ungovernable behaviour of panic-stricken elephants. The beast ridden by Dahar himself, a rather conspicuous albino, was hit by a fire-arrow and plunged into the river. There Dahar made an easy target. He fought on with an arrow in his chest but, dismounting, was eventually struck by a skull-splitting sword blow. It was towards evening, according to al-Biladuri, and when Dahar ‘died and went to hell’, ‘the idolaters fled and the Mussulmans glutted themselves with massacre’.

  Muhammad ibn Qasim then resumed his march upriver. Brahmanabad (the later Mansurah), then Alor (Rohri) and finally Multan, the three principal cities of Sind, were either captured or surrendered, probably during the years 710–13. Astronomical casualty figures are given, yet both al-Biladuri and the Chach-nama agree that ibn Qasim was a man of his word. When he offered, in return for a peaceful surrender, to spare lives and guarantee the safety of temples he was as good as his promise. Hindu and Buddhist establishments were respected ‘as if they were the churches of the Christians, the synagogues of the Jews or the fire temples of the Magians [Zoroastrians]’. The jizya, the standard poll-tax on all infidels, was imposed; yet brahmans and Buddhist monks were allowed to collect alms, and temples to receive donations. Ibn Qasim was no mindless butcher. When he was disgraced and removed following the death of his patron al-Hajjaj, it may well be that ‘the people of Hind wept’.

  Al-Biladuri merely explains that Muhammad ibn Qasim was sent back to Iraq as a prisoner and there tortured to death because of a family feud with the new governor. The Chach-nama gives a different story and much more detail. Apparently ibn Qasim had previously captured two of Dahar’s virgin daughters and sent them to Baghdad as an adornment to Caliph Walid’s seraglio. There one of the young princesses, Suryadevi, caught the caliph’s eye; but when he deigned to draw her near, ‘she abruptly stood up’. As she very respectfully explained, she felt unworthy of the royal couch since both she and her sister had been similarly favoured in Sind during their detention by Muhammad ibn Qasim. The caliph was not pleased. ‘Overwhelmed with love and letting slip the reins of patience’, he immediately dictated a missive ordering the perpetrator to ‘s
uffer himself to be sewed up in a hide and sent to the capital’.

  The order was obeyed to the letter; the needles and the thread were at last put to good use and ibn Qasim, trussed and labelled, was despatched to Baghdad. Two days into this long and excruciating journey ‘he delivered his soul to God and went to the eternal world’. When finally the unsavoury package was delivered to Walid, the princesses were invited to bear witness to the caliph’s awesomely impartial justice. Not without glee they surveyed the grisly cadaver and then bravely, if unwisely, revealed that Muhammad ibn Qasim had in fact behaved with perfect propriety.

  But he had killed the king of Hind and Sind, destroyed the dominion of our forefathers, and degraded us from the dignity of royalty to a state of slavery. Therefore, to retaliate and revenge these injuries, we uttered a falsehood and our object has been fulfilled.

  So Muhammad ibn Qasim had been stitched up in more ways than one. Again the Caliph was mightily displeased, ‘and from excess of regret he bit the back of his hand’. Then he consigned the princesses to lifelong incarceration.5

  Like most good stories, this one has not always been endorsed by professional historians, although why a Muslim should have fabricated a tale so creditable to the infidel is not explained. It does, moreover, offer a plausible reason for the downfall of Sind’s respected and highly successful conqueror. His like would be hard to find. The next Arab governor of the province died on arrival, and his successor seems to have made little impact on a situation which had already declined, with Brahmanabad back under the control of Dahar’s son. The latter, in C720, accepted Baghdad’s offer of an amnesty whereby in return for adopting Islam he was granted immunity and the chance to participate in government. But this looks to have been a tactical move for, as a succession crisis engulfed the Umayyad caliphate, the Sindis happily discarded both their allegiance and their new faith.