by John Keay
Dahar’s son was eventually captured and killed by Junaid ibn Abdur Rahman al-Marri, who in the mid-720s seems to have recovered much of the province – and more besides. His successors fared less well, and there is evidence of the caliph’s governors being penned within fortified enclaves before again ‘seizing whatever came into their hands and subduing the neighbourhood whose inhabitants had rebelled’.6 This pattern continued to repeat itself during the early years of the Abbasid caliphate. Baghdad’s control of the entire province remained a rare phenomenon until, C870, the local governors, or amirs, gradually threw off their allegiance to the caliph and managed matters for themselves.
By the tenth century the province was divided between two Arab families, one ruling from Mansurah in the south and the other from Multan in the north. In Multan the resentment of the still largely non-Muslim population was curbed only by their Muslim masters threatening to vandalise the city’s most revered temple whenever trouble stirred or invasion threatened. If conquest had been difficult, conversion was proving even more so. Yet the obstinacy of the idolaters, if indulged, could be put to some advantage, and if condemned, always afforded an excellent justification for pillage and plunder. So it was in Sind and so it would be in Hind (i.e. India). In fact Sind’s governors had already had a foretaste of what lay ahead. Muhammad ibn Qasim may have pushed east towards Kanauj, Junaid certainly tried his luck in western India, and later governors may have followed suit.
Their experiences, in so far as they can be inferred from the scanty evidence, would not be encouraging. Al-Biladuri claims conquests for Junaid which extended to Broach in Gujarat and to Ujjain in Malwa. From a copper plate found at Nausari, south of Broach, it would appear that the Arabs had crossed Saurashtra and so must have squeezed through, or round, the Rann of Kutch. This was the incursion which put paid to the Maitrakas of Vallabhi, they of the dazzling toenails whose enemies’ rutting elephants had had their temples cleft. It was also the incursion which was finally halted by, amongst others, a vassal branch of the Chalukya dynasty. The date is thought to have been C736.
Ujjain and Malwa look to have been the target of a separate and probably subsequent offensive by way of Rajasthan.7 It too was defeated, in this instance by a rising clan of considerable later importance known as the Gurjaras. Clearly, when the subcontinent first faced the challenge of Islam, it was neither so irredeemably supine nor so hopelessly divided as British historians in the nineteenth century would suppose.
THE RISE OF THE RASHTRAKUTAS
In contemporary Indian sources these first marauding disciples of Islam are occasionally identified as Yavanas (Greeks), Turuskas (Turks) or Tajikas (Tajiks or Persians), but more usually as mlecchas. The latter term meant what it always had: foreigners who could not talk properly, outcastes with no place in Indian society and, above all, inferiors with no respect for dharma. Like all mlecchas the Muslims were seen as essentially marginal, negative and destructive, just like the Huns. There is no evidence of an Indian appreciation of the global threat which they represented; and the peculiar nature of their mission – to impose a new monotheist orthodoxy by military conquest and political dominion – was so alien to Indian tradition that it went uncomprehended.
No doubt a certain complacency contributed to this indifference. As al-Biruni (Alberuni), the great Islamic scholar of the eleventh century, would put it, ‘the Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no king like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs.’ He thought they should travel more and mix with other nations; ‘their antecedents were not as narrow-minded as the present generation,’ he added.8 While clearly disparaging eleventh-century attitudes, al-Biruni thus appears to confirm the impression given by earlier Muslim writers that in the eighth and ninth centuries India was considered anything but backward. Its scientific and mathematical discoveries, though buried amidst semantic dross and seldom released for practical application, were readily appreciated by Muslim scientists and then rapidly appropriated by them. Al-Biruni was a case in point: his scientific celebrity in the Arab world would owe much to his mastery of Sanskrit and access to Indian scholarship.
Aspects of eleventh-century India which al-Biruni omitted from his catalogue of criticism were its size and its wealth. Unlike Alexander’s Greeks, Muslim invaders were well aware of India’s immensity, and mightily excited by its resources. As well as exotic produce like spices, peacocks, pearls, diamonds, ivory and ebony, the ‘Hindu country’ was renowned for its skilled manufactures and its bustling commerce. India’s economy was probably one of the most sophisticated in the world. Guilds regulated production and provided credit; the roads were safe, ports and markets carefully supervised, and tariffs low. Moreover capital was both plentiful and conspicuous. Since at least Roman times the subcontinent seems to have enjoyed a favourable balance of payments. Gold and silver had been accumulating long before the ‘golden Guptas’, and they continued to do so. Figures in the Mamallapuram sculptures and the Ajanta frescoes are as strung about with jewellery as those in the Sanchi and Amaravati reliefs. Divine images of solid gold are well attested and royal temples were rapidly becoming royal treasuries as successful dynasts endowed them with the fruits of their conquests. The devout Muslim, although ostensibly bent on converting the infidel, would find his zeal handsomely rewarded.
Thanks to the peculiarities of the caste system, Indian society also seemed admirably stable, if excessively stratified. But although in theory the ritual-and-pollution-based varna, and in practice the profession-based jati, precluded social mobility, Muslim writers seldom correctly identified the four varnas or divined the variety of the innumerable jatis. It would seem, then, that the ‘system’ was not obviously systematic. Kings of sudra or brahman origin, like those of Sind, were as common as those whose forebears were, or pretended to be, of the supposedly royal and martial ksatriya varna.
Nor was caste wholly prohibitive and repressive. Indeed it has been argued that caste membership conferred important rights of participation in the economic and political processes as well as obligations of social conformity. In other words, it was as much about being a citizen as being a subject. Through various rural and, more obviously, urban assemblies like caste and guild councils, endorsement of a particular leadership was demonstrated by attendance in the myriad rituals of state. ‘Rather than being excluded from the life of Indian polities, [castes] actively participated in it. Indeed, by doing so, they partly constituted it.’9 Such participation in, for instance, the elaborate ceremonies involved in installing a new king or launching a digvijaya signified assent to the traditional fiscal and military expedients available to such a leader. But by caste councils, as by reluctant feudatories and vassals, such connivance in the political order might always be subtly withheld or transferred.
A further argument has it that caste assumed its passive and static connotations only after the Muslim conquest, when religious discrimination and oppressive taxation conspired to remove opportunities for political participation and economic advancement. Caste membership, shorn of its influence, then became primarily a distinguishing characteristic of orthodox Indian-ness, or ‘Hinduism’. The notion of karma – whereby one’s status was determined by one’s conduct in past lives and could in subsequent lives be improved by one’s conduct in this – provided a rational explanation for the system as well as a welcome solace for those most disadvantaged by it; their prospects now depended not on the exercise of caste rights but on resignation to caste obligations. The doctrine of karma, first scouted in the Upanisads, then elaborated in Buddhist teaching, thus came, like caste, to be perceived as fundamental to Hindu orthodoxy.
Politically, according to Muslim observers, India comprised many kingdoms, each with a formidable army that included elephants and cavalry as well as infantry. According to a Baghdad adage quoted by al-Biruni, the Turks were famous for their horses, Kandahar (for some reason) for its elephants, and India for its armies. One of India’s rulers,
‘the Balhara’, was reckoned as being amongst ‘the four great or principal kings of the world’ according to the much-travelled merchant known to us simply as Suleiman (the other great rulers were the kings of Baghdad, of Byzantium-Constantinople, and of China). Admittedly ‘the Balhara’s’ claim to be India’s king of kings was constantly under threat; but in the opinion of Suleiman, who made several trips to India during the first half of the ninth century, this did not necessarily occasion great upheaval. India had learned to contain conflict and to minimise its effects.
The Indians sometimes go to war for conquest, but the occasions are rare. I have never seen the people of one country submit to the authority of another, except in the case of that country which comes next to the country of pepper [i.e. the Malabar coast]. When a king subdues a neighbouring state, he places over it a man belonging to the family of the fallen prince who carries on the government in the name of the conqueror. The inhabitants would not suffer it to be otherwise.10
Once again one is reminded of Megasthenes’ description of agriculturalists ‘ploughing in perfect security’ while armies did battle in the next field. Although the ploughmen may have had a stake in the outcome of the battle or may have contributed to the equipage of one of the protagonists, they were not expected to get involved. Warriors fought with warriors; the ploughman’s dharma was to plough.
Bearing this peculiarity in mind – and not without a deep breath – one may return to the dynastic fray as it intensified during the eighth to eleventh centuries. In the Deccan the century and a half of glorious domination by the Chalukyas of Badami came to an end around 760. Distracted if not exhausted by their endless wars in the south with the Pallavas of Kanchi, the Chalukyas had allowed one of their northern officials to accumulate considerable territory on the upper Godavari river in Berar, a region as near the dead centre of India as anywhere and now dominated by the city of Nagpur. From C735–56 the senior member of this rising family was Dantidurga and, since his function within the Chalukyas’ empire was that of rastrakuta or ‘head of a region’, the dynasty he founded is known as that of the Rashtrakutas.
After loyally serving the Chalukya Vikramaditya II in his Pallava wars and possibly also against the Arabs of Sind, Dantidurga took the opportunity of Vikramaditya’s death in 747 to enlarge his territories. In a modest digvijaya which carefully avoided the Chalukyan heartland of Karnataka, he expanded his authority to include much of Madhya Pradesh and parts of southern Gujarat and northern Maharashtra. Additionally, according to a set of copper plates from Ellora (which place he seems to have adopted as his ceremonial capital), he assumed the title of prithvi-vallabha. Vallabha means ‘husband’ or ‘lover’, while prithvi means ‘the earth’ and is also the name of the earth goddess who was one of Lord Vishnu’s consorts. Dantidurga and his successors were therefore advancing an ambitious claim to be acknowledged as Lords of the Earth and emanations of Vishnu. Incidentally, it was also this title, abbreviated to vallabha, which registered with Muslim observers and reappeared in their writings as ‘the Balhara’.
Compared to the Byzantine emperors or any of the other ‘four great or principal kings of the world’, the Balhara’s rise to fame was rapid and comparatively painless. Dantidurga completed his digvijaya by belatedly confronting the Chalukyan king who, also belatedly, had just awoken to the danger of this rival on his northern frontier. Again it was the Rashtrakuta who triumphed, although in mysterious circumstances: ‘success seems to have been due to a stratagem, for his court poet tells us that he overthrew the Karnataka army by a mere frown of his brow, without any effort being made and without any weapons being raised or used.’ The fruits of this victory, if such it was, were proportionately modest. The Chalukyas were soon back in the field and Dantidurga would frown no more. He died prematurely in C756 ‘probably owing to the pressing requests [for his company] of the heavenly damsels’, suggests one record.11
Being childless, he was succeeded on the Rashtrakuta throne by his uncle Krishna I. Krishna it was who concluded matters with the Chalukyas. In what looks to have been a rather violent battle – and which could be that to which the merchant Suleiman would refer as involving ‘the country which comes next to the country of pepper’ – Krishna decisively disposed of his family’s erstwhile suzerains; ‘the ocean of the Chalukya army’ was well and truly ‘churned’, we are told, and from its waves arose the ‘Goddess of Royal Glory’. Badami fell and all Karnataka was added to the Rashtrakutas’ territories, while subsequent campaigns secured the submission of the Konkan coast and of the eternally hard-pressed Ganga dynasty (of the Mysore area). Additionally, in the east, one of Krishna’s sons triumphed over the Chalukyas of Vengi who were a satellite branch of the Badami family. These ‘Eastern Chalukyas’ were now wedded to the Rashtrakuta cause by a matrimonial alliance.
When Krishna I died in C773 the Rashtrakutas were undisputed masters of the entire Deccan. Further conquests could only be made at the expense of the kingdoms of the extreme south or by crossing the Vindhya hills into the Gangetic plains. No Deccan-based dynasty had yet tried its luck in the hallowed and hotly contested arya-varta but under Dhruva, who in C780 ended a short and chaotic reign by his brother, the Rashtrakutas did just that. Dhruva first secured his southern flank by again rubbishing the Gangas and rattling the Pallavas. Then in C786 he forded the Narmada, a veritable Rubicon, and led his best troops north. Malwa quickly submitted. Following the Chambal river along the well-worn trail once known as the Daksinapatha, Dhruva crossed into the Gangetic basin and headed for Kanauj.
THE KANAUJ TRIANGLE
Centrally sited and beside the holy Ganga, Kanauj had been acknowledged as the seat of northern empire ever since Harsha’s day. By the ninth century, though, it was a capital without much of a kingdom, its ruler being generally a puppet of one or other of the two great powers that were contesting the hegemony of the north. These were the Palas from eastern India and the Gurjara-Pratiharas from western India. With the eruption onto the scene in C786 of the Rashtrakutas from the Deccan this became a three-sided contest. It would last for two centuries and, though its details are anything but clear, the evidence suggests glorious interludes during which one or other of the contestants successfully performed a digvijaya, laid claim to Kanauj, and grandiloquently advertised his universal paramountcy. Hence the period is sometimes called the ‘Imperial Age of Kanauj’. But the chronology is too confused for anything but a conjectural narrative, and of the temples and fortifications of Kanauj itself too little remains to inspire even a hopeful reconstruction.
More interesting than the power struggle is the very different provenance of the participants. All three are noticed by Muslim writers who understandably have least to say about the remotest, namely ‘Rahma’, ‘Rahmi’ or ‘Ruhmi’. The word may derive from Dharmapala who ruled C775–810, and certainly it seems to refer to his dynasty, that of the Palas of Bengal. The Pala country, we learn, was on the coast but stretched well inland; it produced very fine cottons and aloe wood, and the king possessed fifty thousand elephants and more troops than either of his rivals. Dharmapala was the son of Gopala, who looks to have founded the dynasty in C750. Unusually, but not uniquely since similar claims are made for one of the Pallavas and for a king of Kashmir, Gopala’s elevation is said to have been the result of a selection, if not an election, process. Perhaps already a minor king of northern Bengal, he was invited to assume sover-eignty over the whole of Vanga, or eastern Bengal, and then rapidly consolidated his rule throughout Bengal and Bihar.
Dharmapala continued his father’s expansionist policies. Excepting for Sasanka’s brief and uncertain challenge in Harsha’s day, this was the first Bengali bid for control of arya-varta, and it began badly. But eventually, taking full advantage of the disruption caused by the first Rashtrakuta incursion, Dharmapala reached Kanauj and there held a great ceremony at which his chosen candidate was installed as a tributary king. The loan of Dharmapala’s own golden pitcher for the sacred ablutions essential to this in
duction neatly demonstrated his primacy. Kings from all over north India, including an unexplained ‘Yavana’ (possibly a Muslim from Sind), witnessed the event and ‘paid homage with the bending down of their quavering diadems’.12
Through as many setbacks as triumphs, the Palas clung to their supremacist claims for the best part of a century. As with the Guptas, this was partly thanks to their longevity. Dharmapala reigned for forty years and Devapala, his son, seems to have lasted quite as long (C810–50). To their collection of ‘quavering diadems’ were briefly added those of the kings of Kamarupa (Assam), Utkala (an Orissan kingdom) and possibly other kings from lands as far-flung as the deep south and the extreme north-west. This, however, temporarily exhausted the Palas’ taste for earthly dominion. Although there would be a brief revival in the eleventh century, in the tenth their role was simply as a whipping boy for their rivals. ‘The Pala empire, shorn of its plume, lay tottered,’ writes an Indian historian.13 Seemingly it disintegrated under a succession of rulers of a ‘pacific and religious disposition’.14 One renounced the throne to become an ascetic, others attended to their spiritual advisers and to the welfare of the monastic establishments which still flourished in the Pala heartland of Bihar and Bengal.
