The actual maithuna couples on Khajuraho and Konarak also partake of these general powers of fertility but may be meant to invoke, in addition, the magical efficacy that the sexual act was supposed to have to protect monuments, which may explain why the erotic images are often placed at the ritually vulnerable parts of temples.113 Alternatively, the images may have been placed at meeting points of buildings so as to play on “a visual pun between juncture and copulation.”114 The erotic couples on these temples are often said to be Tantric; Khajuraho was an important center for various Tantric sects,115 and the Chandellas were probably Tantrics.116 A few friezes at Khajuraho and more in Assam may be specific references to Tantric rituals.117 For on them, the positioning of the couples (and sometimes groups of three or more) agrees with details of some Tantric texts. Some of the gorgeous women seem to be not Yakshis or Apsarases but Tantric Yoginis, more particularly in some temples the sixty-four Yoginis that the Tantras speak of,118 some with animal faces.119 The significant number of Yogini temples constructed between the eighth and twelfth centuries lends weight to the argument that these were the places where Tantric rituals took place.120 One art historian has commented on the “curious paradox” that some of the temples at Khajuraho “can only be fully appreciated today by being viewed from the air.”121 Were they meant to be viewed by flying Yoginis?
The Chandellas built one temple at Khajuraho at the time of Mahmud of Ghazni’s first invasion of India122 and the Khandariya Mahadeva temple, the greatest of them all, during the subsequent Ghaznavid invasions, though the invading forces never came near Khajuraho. While temples were not necessarily built in response to these invasions (they are equally, if not more, a response to the erosion of Vedic ritual and the rise of new forms of sectarian worship), the building of temples took on new meaning in the presence of Islamic kingdoms and armies. The temple carvings abound in martial themes—warriors, weaponry, elephants, big horses rearing and leaping.123 To the limited extent that temple building is a political act, these temples eloquently express the Hindu rulers’ defiance of the Muslim invaders.124
It is perhaps puzzling that though the erotic images on these temples would have been anathema to pious Muslims, they were never the victims of Muslim iconoclasm. They may have been spared because the Ghaznavids did not get to Khajuraho and the Mughals got there only after the Chandellas had deserted the temples, which had then faded from prominence and weren’t marked on Aurangzeb’s maps.125 The Orissan temples, as well as the temple of Jagannatha at Puri (built during Muhammad bin Tughluq’s reign, in the late tenth to late eleventh centuries),126 may have escaped because they were too remote to attract Muslim attention. Or could it be that the Muslims, who were, after all, themselves past masters of erotic poetry and painting, cast an appreciative eye upon the carvings and simply rode by?
CHAPTER 16
FUSION AND RIVALRY UNDER THE DELHI SULTANATE
650 to 1500 CE
CHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES CE)
570-632 Muhammad lives
c. 650 Arabs reach the Indus
711-715 Arabs invade Northwest India
1001 Mahmud of Ghazni (979-1030) raids North India
1192-1206 Muhammad of Ghor establishes Ghorid capital at Delhi
1210-1526 The Delhi Sultanate is in power
1325-1351 Muhammad bin Tughluq reigns
c. 1200 Early orders of Sufis arise in North India
c. 1200 Virashaivas, including Basava, live in South India
c. 1336-1565 Vijayanagar Empire is in its prime
c. 1398-1448 Kabir lives
1469-1539 Guru Nanak founds Sikhism in the Punjab
RAMA AND RAHIM
The Hindu says Ram is the beloved, the Turk says Rahim. Then they
kill each other.
Kabir, 1398-14481
Even if I am killed, I will not give up repeating the names of Rama and Rahim, which mean to me the same god. With these names on my lips, I will die cheerfully.
Mahatma Gandhi, 1947
The prophetic words of Gandhi, which he spoke just nine months before he was killed, apparently with those names on his lips,ih turn the more cynical words of Kabir on their head. It would be good for us to keep the two sides of this paradigm in mind as we consider the history of Hindus among Muslims in India. As Hindus responded to the various cultural transformations wrought by the Muslim presence, new religious ideas also arose to challenge the Brahmin imaginary.
SUNNIS AND SUFIS AND SHAIVAS, OH MY!
In dealing with all but the earliest periods of Indian history, we gave up even the semblance of tracing any single historical center and settled for a selection of peripheries. We still have those peripheries, more than ever, in both the Hindu and the Muslim worlds, though now we also have two moments when there are serious contenders for a center, first the Delhi Sultanate and then the Mughal Empire. But even when there was a center for government, there was never a center for religion. Here, as so often, the main action, and the main evidence, are to be found not so much among the ruins of Delhi and in the chronicles of its sultans as in the records and remains of a dozen other capitals scattered across the subcontinent—Jaunpur, Ahmedabad, Mandu, Chitor, Vijayanagar, Gaur, and many others.2 Both the Hindu and the Muslim rulers are plural, not only in generally succeeding one another rather quickly but in being very different one from another. The messages from Delhi were therefore very different at different periods, and so were the messages sent back to Delhi.
Just as the term “Hindu” dissolved upon closer examination at the very start of this story, so now does the category of “Muslim.” Historians often invoke terms like “Hindu kingdom” in contrast with “Muslim sultanate,” but “Hindu” and “Muslim” are seldom the most basic way to distinguish one group from another. For religious differences were often overridden by differences in language, ethnicity, food, clothing, and much more. Most of our sources refer to ethnicities, not to religion; the Hindus generally thought of the Delhi sultans and their people not as Muslims but as Arabs and, later, Turks, often confusing the two groups, calling them all (Arabs as well as Turks) Turks (“Turuskas”) and regarding them all, like all non-Hindus, as barbarians (mlecchas). The Hindus also had very different attitudes toward the rulers, on the one hand, and the resident traders and clerks, on the other; though some Turkish or Arab rulers destroyed Hindu temples, breeding lasting resentment, the ordinary Muslims who worshiped in mosques and Sufi shrines were seldom a problem for Hindus, who had high regard for most Arab and Turkish traders, particularly horse traders.
The terms by which Hindus (more precisely, the people we call Hindus) referred to the people we call Muslims suggest assimilation rather than hostility. The term “Mus-ala-mana” (“one who submits to Allah”) is seldom used; this left Hindus the options of designating Muslims by their different ethnic and spatial origins or by using any of several generic terms for non-Hindus. Inscriptions and Sanskrit texts have no single term for the foreigners that the Hindus knew, but use Yavana (“Ionian” or “Greek”), mleccha (“barbarian”), and Turuska (“Turk”) interchangeably for Greeks, Persians, and Turks. There is irony in the fact that the stereotype of the Turk who destroys temples and idols, appropriates the temple lands of Brahmins, and eats beef became so clichéd, so generalized to the Terrible Other,3 that the Kashmir chronicle, in 1148 CE, describing a Hindu king who plundered temples and had excrement and wine poured over the statues of gods called him a Turk (Turuska).4
Some Hindus assimilated the Turks by creating ingenious, and positive, Sanskrit glosses for Arabic words and names: Thus the Ghorids became the Gauri-kula (“family of fair people” or “family of the golden goddess [Parvati]”), sultans became Sura-tranas (“protectors of the gods”), and Muhammad (or Mahmud) became Maha-muda (“great joy”). An inscription, in Sanskrit and Arabic, from 1264 CE about the construction of a mosque in Gujarat, at Somnath (a place of great historical controversy, as we will see), describes the mosque in Hindu terms, as a site of dharma (dharma-s
thana), where people did puja in order to gain merit ( punya karma).5 Most significantly, the inscription begins by using the same wordii to denote both Shiva and Allah, invoking (“Om! Namah!”) Shri Vishvanatha (“Lord of the Universe”), meaning both the Hindu god Shiva as Somanatha and “the divinity to whom those whose prophet (bodhaka) was Muhammad were attached ( pratibaddha).”
On the other side, the Arabs and Turks usually did not think of the Hindus as Hindus;ij they thought of them as Vaishnavas, or Bengalis, or brilliant artists or airheads, as the case might be. Yet they certainly did notice that there were in India people who belonged to religions different from their own, including Buddhists, and they labeled themselves now with a word for Muslim (or, more particularly, Sunni or Sufi), in contrast with the general Hindu sectarian labels (Vaishnava or Shaiva) or, more likely, specific Hindu sects (Virashaiva or Sahajiya). With this initial caution, let us proceed, still using the indispensable terms “Hindu” and “Muslim” but attempting, wherever possible, to nuance them.
ISLAM IN INDIA BEFORE THE DELHI SULTANATE
There is abundant and fascinating evidence, an embarrassment of riches, about the relationship between Hindus and Muslims in India from shortly after the time of the Prophet Muhammad, in the seventh century CE. The sources now include many more foreign visitors; in place of the occasional Greeks or Chinese in earlier periods, we now have a full Arabic and Persian historiography, beginning with Al-biruni (973-1048), who came to India, learned Sanskrit, translated Hindu texts, and wrote about the religion (sic: he regarded it as unified) of India. After him came a succession of other great historiographers of India who wrote in Persian and Arabic, such as Ziya’-ud-Din Barani (1285- 1357), Abu al-Malik ’Isami (d. 1350), and Ibn Batuta (1304-1368/1377).6 After the first few more or less contemporary Turko-Persian chroniclers, it was later Arab rather than Turkish historians who generally kept the record of the times (often in retrospect), even for the Turkish rulers.
Islam in India began not with the political conquest of India by Mahmud of Ghazni but much earlier, when the Muslims entered India not as conquerors but as merchants. We have noted the Arab presence in South India from before the time of the Prophet. Before 650, Arabs had made desultory raids by sea on the lower Sind, to protect the trade route carrying Arabian horses to India and Indian spices to Arabia. By 650 Arabs had also reached the Indus River, and though they rarely crossed it,7 their ideas swam across. In the sixty years after Harsha’s death in 647, Arabs established a Muslim bridgehead in Sind, a region that the Huns had devastated, Harsha had later infiltrated, and now was largely Buddhist.8 Then, in around 663, Arab forces crossed the Bolan pass (near Quetta in Pakistan)9 from Afghanistan into Sind.10 Peacefully, they traded horses for spices. Only later did the martial invasions come, first by Arabs and then by Turks (from many parts of Central Asia) and Mongols.
In 713, Muhammad ibn Qasim invaded Sind, offering terms of surrender that included a promise to guarantee the safety of Hindu and Buddhist establishments and to allow Brahmin and Buddhist monks to collect alms and temples to receive donations. Hindus and Buddhists were allowed to govern themselves in matters of religion and law; Ibn Qasim’s people did not regard non-Muslims as heathens who had to be subdued.11 He kept his promises, though he did imposed the jizya,12 a tax on male adults who would have been liable to military service if they had been Muslims; non-Muslims were excused from this duty but required instead to pay for their military protection. His forces could not hold Sind, but the soldiers stayed on, intermarried, and brought Muslim teachers and mosques into the subcontinent. At the same time, in the wealthy Gujarati port of Bhadreshwar, the local Jaina rulers, eager to trade with the Arabs, had allowed the resident Ismaili merchants to build mosques in that area.13
THE DELHI SULTANATE
Almost three centuries later, the Turks, Persians, and Afghans entered India through the traditional routes of the northwest. On November 27, 1001, the Turkish Mahmud of Ghazni (in Afghanistan) successfully invaded India, near Peshawar. The ruler whom he captured bought his freedom for fifty elephants but acknowledged the loss of caste implicit in capture, abdicated in favor of his son, and climbed on his own funeral pyre.14 In 1004 Mahmud crossed the Indus, fought again, and established a base in the Punjab, from which he continued to carry out raids; in 1018 he sacked Mathura (a great pilgrimage center on the Yamuna River, for worshipers of Krishna) and then Kanauj (which had been Harsha’s capital) and is said to have come away with fifty-three thousand slaves and 350 elephants.15 Turkish communities were also established in the region of Varanasi and elsewhere.16 It was a boom area for immigration from Persia and Central Asia, and this greatly added to the cosmopolitanism of the subcontinent, since culture under what became the Ghaznavid Empire in India (that is, the empire ruled by people from Ghazni) was “a blend of Greek philosophy, Roman architecture, Hindu mathematics, and the Persian concept of empire.”17
For the next four centuries, the northern and central part of the subcontinent saw an almost bewildering array of kings and dynasties, with constant warfare between (and within) them, punctuated by sibling power struggles. From 1192 to 1206 Muhammad of Ghor ruled from his capital at Delhi. One of his successors was a woman named Raziya, who ruled for four years, ending in 1240. She was said to be wise, just, and generous, as well as an effective general, and she brought peace to the country. Disdaining the veil, she went among her people in a cap and coat, like a man. She appointed as her personal attendant an Abyssinian who was probably once a slave and definitely an African.18 Conspirators captured her, killed her Abyssinian friend, and imprisoned her. She married one of the conspirators and marched with him (and with an army in which there were many Hindus) on Delhi, where she let her ally play the general, badly; she was much more at home than he in the saddle. They were defeated.19 In 1350, a century after Raziya’s death, the historian Isami objected to her blatant interracial liaison,20 remarking that a woman’s place was at her spinning wheel (charkha). This may be the earliest reference in India to a spinning wheel, which the Turks apparently imported from Iran. (The sexism they already had in India, thank you.)
Several of Muhammad of Ghor’s successors were regarded as slaves,ik and their dynasty as a slave dynasty, because they had once been Turkish captives.21 Ala-ud-din Khalji, an Afghan who ruled from Delhi for twenty years (1296- 1316), captured, redeemed, and made a senior commander a Hindu eunuch and slave named Kafur, who converted to Islam. 22 Holy wars (jihads) flared up from time to time, more often politically motivated than religiously inspired, but playing the religion card to rally support, and royal policy toward Hinduism and Islam during these five centuries varied widely. Ala-ud-din sacked and plundered Devagiri but then made peace, married a Maharashtra woman, prohibited the sale and consumption of alcohol, and left the kingdom and its religions otherwise intact.23 His son is best remembered for parading a line of naked prostitutes on the terraces of the royal palaces and making them pee on the nobles as they entered below.24
Then came Muhammad bin Tughluq, whom some regarded as a cruel, bloodthirsty, lunatic tyrant, others as a philosopher king and a genius.25 He challenged the Muslim ulama (the arbiters of Shari‘a law, a kind of Muslim conservative supreme court), the intellectual elite, by promoting Indian Muslims of low-caste origin, newcomers to the court,26 both because he was not a religious bigot and because he saw the advantage of accommodating non-Muslims in India.27 He took a great interest in Jainas, one of whom was very influential at his court.28 One thing that can be said of Tughluq is that although many suffered under his rule, at least he was even-handed.29
His successor, Feroz Shah Tughluq (1351-1388), desecrated the shrine of Jagannath at Puri, was said to have massacred infidels,30 and extended the jizya to Brahmins (who had been, until then, exempt). On the other hand, Feroz Shah redeemed a number of Hindu slaves as well as an African eunuch slave who founded the Sharqi kingdom of Jaunpur;31 the eunuch’s successors, whom he had to adopt, being unable to beget them, were also of Africa
n origin and became a powerful dynasty.32 The sultanate continued until Babur founded the Mughal Empire in 1526.
In general, the sultanate rulers did not attempt a mass conversion of Hindus, 33 but many Hindus did convert to Islam during this period, usually but not only low-caste laborers and craftspeople and, frequently, captives.34 On the northwest frontier, some Hindus switched both political allegiance and religion and fought for the Ghaznavids.35 In the course of conversion, Islamic figures (such as gods and saints) and concepts might be added to Hindu ones, identified with Hindu ones, or, occasionally, taken up in place of Hindu ones, eliminating them from the pantheon.36
The Delhi sultans levied the jizya, graduated according to income, with exemptions for people at both ends of the social spectrum, the poorest37 and (until Feroz Shah changed the rule) the purest, the Brahmins.38 There is also evidence of the existence of a “Turkish” (Turuska) tax, which may have been a poll tax on Muslims in India, a Hindu equivalent of the Muslim jizya.39 Taxes under the Delhi Sultanate seem to have been motivated much more by the need for revenue than by religious sentiments. Some Hindus also responded to the presence of Islam by a series of measures designed to strengthen their own religion, such as enormous land grants to Brahmins, which meant more taxes to generate revenues that could be converted into those grants (exacerbating social oppression and caste discrimination40), as well as endowing temples and providing social services on the local level (which mitigated that same oppression and discrimination).
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