The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  The Brahmins were in a bind: They wanted to keep the barbarians out, but they also had to assimilate and legitimize the foreign rulers in order to keep temporal support for themselves. Their two options for the representation of mlecchas were either to legitimize them, as a contingent strategy, or to blame them for the destruction of social order. Within the first option, legitimation, lineages could be appropriated; an inscription from 1369 traces the descent of a sultan from the lineage of the Pandavas in the Mahabharata.

  As for blame, the Brahmins could always fall back on myths such as the flood, as in a late-fourteenth-century poem from South India that describes the desecrated temples: “Like the Turushkas who know no limits, the Kaveri has forgotten her ancient boundaries and brings frequent destruction with her floods.” A Chandella inscription from 1261 speaks of a king who, like Vishnu (in his avatar as the boar), lifted up the earth when it was submerged in an ocean of Turushkas; another calls the Turushkas the great burden of the earth, and likens to Vishnu as the boar the Hindu ruler who conquers them and relieves the earth’s burden.41 But the very same myth is used in reverse in another inscription, from 1491, which depicts Turushkas, Shakas (Scythians), and mleccha s as shouldering the great burden of the earth and relieving Vishnu of his worries. It is difficult to argue that chronologically one representation replaces the other.42 The negative and positive views coexisted, as did the people who held them.

  HORSES AND HORSE TRADERS

  We have noted the role played by horses in the invasion of India from the time of the Indo-Europeans and Vedic peoples, and then, at regular intervals, by horsemen from Greece, Scythia, and Central Asia. Intimacy with, and mastery of, horses are the common property of Indo-Europeans and the Turkic peoples of Central Asia.43 We have also noted in passing the constant need for native rulers to import horses into India and the importance of the horse trade in bringing Arabs and Turks (and, with them, Islam) to South India. Horses continued to play a central role in the activities of the Turkic peoples who founded the Delhi Sultanate. Here is also the place, however, to remark upon the importance of elephants,44 which supplemented horses in essential ways, the tank corps division that supported the cavalry. Elephants were far better suited to the environment, but they were even more expensive than horses (the Mughal emperor Babur complained about how much it cost to feed them: as much as two strings of camels45). Together, horses and elephants were simultaneously essential military equipment and luxury status symbols, like Cadillacs and Rolls-Royces.

  Central Asia, probably one of the first places where horses were domesticated, produced great horses as well as great horsemen and horse breeders. Mahmud of Ghazni had the advantage of having his forces mounted on Central Asian horses; the most an Indian could hope for in an encounter with them was “perhaps a fleeter horse.”46 Al-biruni remarked that the Turks were famous for their horses, Kandahar (in Afghanistan) for its elephants, and India for its armies.47 When Muhammad bin Tughluq recruited men from western and Central Asia, he made them submit to a test of equestrian skill before he signed them on.48 The Turkish conquerors introduced polo into India in the thirteenth century;49 Muhammad of Ghor’s successor was killed in 1210 when his polo pony fell on him in the course of a game. 50

  Once they got to India, the Turks had to import most of their horses rather than breed them in India. A steady stream of Central Asian imports was “seemingly vital to the virility of Muslim rule.”51 The Deccan sultans and their opposite numbers, the martial Hindu Kshatriyas of Maharashtra and the kings of Vijayanagar, imported Arabian horses on a large scale, “in order to improve the breed of cavalry horses in their own districts.”52 The best horses were imported from Central Asia (“Turki” horses), Iran or Arabia (“Tazi” horses).53 Marco Polo (1254-1324), who visited India in around 1292, remarked that the Pandyan ruler of Madurai imported two thousand horses a year, “and so do his four brothers.”54 South Indians, particularly in the vicinity of Madurai, still tell stories about the Pandyan kings’ energetic importation of horses. 55 There is ample testimony from both foreignil and Indian sources that South Indians imported as many as fourteen thousand horses a year.56 One of the sixteenth-century South Indian kings of Vijayanagar is reputed to have imported thirteen thousand horses annually for his own personal use and for his officers, 57 and ten thousand Arab and Persian horses were imported into Malabar every year. 58

  Vijayanagar was a conspicuous consumer of foreign imports, including “the desiderata of every Indian army, namely horses, mostly from the Persian Gulf, and some fire-arms.” Many horses died onboard ship, for they cannot throw up, and so their seasickness is almost always fatal; they develop severe colic and often die of a twisted gut. Since shipping such fragile and valuable cargo in a pitching ship was a costly and risky venture,59 to encourage people to undertake the risk of shipping horses who might well die at sea, “it was said that the Vijayanagar rulers would pay even for dead ones.”60 When Vijayanagar was at war with Portugal, the Portuguese monopoly of the horse trade simultaneously deprived Vijayanagar of important revenues and interfered with the supply of remounts.61

  The need to import horses was exacerbated, according to many foreign observers, from at least the time of the Delhi Sultanate, by the Indian habit of feeding their horses inappropriate foods.62 Marco Polo insisted that horses in India died from the climate and from unsuitable feeding; even if they bred, they produced “nothing but wretched wry-legged weeds.”63 A few centuries later Akbar’s historian Abu’l Fazl testified that in addition to grass when available, and hay when there was no grass, horses were fed boiled peas or beans, flour, sugar, salt, molasses, and, to cap it all, ghee.64 Other sources agree that lacking the right sort of fodder grasses and hay, people in India fed horses mainly wheat, barley, and gram and mixed these grains with all sorts of stuff: cow’s milk, coarse brown sugar, sometimes even boiled mutton mixed with ghee,65 to the horror of Middle Eastern and European visitors. 66

  No oats were grown in India until the nineteenth century. By that time Rudyard Kipling’s father, who was a veterinarian, concluded that the Indian diet was detrimental to the horse’s liver and caused many diseases and high mortality rates.67 Much of this criticism, from the Delhi sultans to the Kiplings, smacks of foreign prejudice and imperial self-justification. Surely the foreign horsemen could use their own good horse sense when it came to feeding, as well as bring along some of their own grooms. The ghee mash legend may be one of those canards that just got repeated over and over. On the other hand, people do tend to feed their most precious horses (and dogs) the things that they themselves like best (like chocolates), which often prove disastrous.

  The importing of bloodstock was therefore “India’s main extravagance.”68 During the sultanate period, Persian and Arabian horses were called bahri (“sea-borne”), because they were imported, perilously, by sea.69 Many were brought in overland, but they too underwent hardships and losses. Horses were far too expensive 70 to use as farm animals or beasts of burden, and in any case, the heat and humidity made them fairly useless for that sort of work,71 which was usually done by water buffalo or oxen. Horses were mostly used for war, as cavalry, supplemented by elephants.72 Thus the horse remained a Kshatriya animal, with all the negative connotations of that class—power, domination, extortion (by tax collectors who rode into the villages on horseback), death—to which was now added a major new factor: Many of these Kshatriyas were not Hindus but Muslims. Horses therefore both affected the practical relationships between Hindus and Muslims and functioned, in art and literature, as a symbolic gauge of shifting attitudes within those relationships.

  DESECRATION OF TEMPLES

  As we turn now to less positive aspects of interactions between the Delhi sultans and the Hindus, this is a moment for a hindsight alert: Nowadays the story of Hinduism as told by Hindu nationalists always includes a chapter on the Horrid Things Those Bad Muslims Did. Hindu nationalism has given prominence and importance to stories of victims and victimizers that otherwise
would have been just drops in the ocean of vicious battles that have plagued the subcontinent, indeed the planet, for millennia. Yet it is true that some Muslims did Do Horrid Things, including that great breeding ground of resentment, the desecration of temples.

  The Muslim rulers of India in this period were not all alike in their treatment of Hindu temples. Some Muslim rulers, like some Hindu rulers before them, destroyed Hindu temples.73 Desecration was not necessarily prompted by bigotry, 74 though some rulers might well have been motivated (or have claimed to be motivated) by religious fanaticism, a hatred of idolatry or polytheism or any religion but Islam. Some, lured by the legendary wealth of the temples,75 did it to get the plunder, and others went for the temples because as we saw in South India, the temples were the centers of political and economic power. Piety and greed, so often paired, operated here too: Images of gods were made of solid gold,76 and the temples were also filled with treasures that Hindu rulers had already stolen from other Hindu temples and from Buddhist stupas.77 Moreover, temples were not only places of worship and banks but also political symbols and, at times, military strongholds. They could also be hostages: In parts of Sind in the tenth century, Arab families that ruled what was still a largely non-Muslim population would threaten to vandalize the city’s most revered temple whenever “trouble stirred or invasion threatened.”78 Think “marauding nomads” rather than “fanatical Muslims.”

  Mahmud of Ghazni, an observant Sunni, took a great deal of gold, silver, and precious stones from the images of the Mathura temple in 1004 and then burned it to the ground.79 In 1026 he attacked the temple of Somanatha (Somnath), which held a famous Shiva linga; this much, at least, seems to be historical fact. Then comes the mythmaking. According to some versions of the story but not others, he stripped the great gilded linga of its gold and hacked it to bits with his sword, sending the bits back to Ghazni, where they were incorporated into the steps of the new Jami Masjid (“Friday Mosque”).80 Triumphalist early Turko-Persian sources paid a great deal of attention to this event; medieval Hindu epics of resistance created a countermythology in which the stolen image came to life and eventually, like a horse returning to the stable, returned to the temple to be reconsecrated;81 and British historiographers made much of it for their own purposes (such as the claim that they had rescued the Hindus from oppression by Muslims). Other sources, including local Sanskrit inscriptions, biographies of kings and merchants of the period, court epics, and popular narratives that have survived, give their own versions of the event.82 Here is a good example of history making mythmaking history.

  When Muhammad of Ghor routed the Rajputs in 1192, his armies massacred the people and plundered and destroyed many monuments.83 In Varanasi, according to the rather boasting accounts of some of the Arab chroniclers, his forces demolished the idols in a thousand temples, carted away fourteen hundred camel loads of treasure, and rededicated the temples “to the worship of the true God.”84 They left intact the exquisite Jaina temples carved out of near-translucent white marble between 950 and 1304 CE in Gujarat, most famously at Mount Abu, the exterior of which is rather plain, not unlike a mosque. The plain façade may have been an intentional reversal of the pattern of Hindu temples, which kept the interior plain and saved all the ornamentation for the outer wall, and may have been intended precisely as “a protection against Turko-Afghan attacks.”85

  Ala-ud-din, who had left Devagiri more or less intact in 1296, two years later attacked Somnath (which the Hindus had rebuilt after Mahmud of Ghazni’s depredations more than 250 years earlier) and, allegedly, redemolished it, again hammering the (replacement) linga into fragments to pave the ground for Muslim feet, this time in Delhi.86 (Romila Thapar’s study of Somnath87 documents the Hindu claim that the Muslims destroyed the same shrine again and again.88) In Citamparam, Ala-ud-din’s forces attacked the Nataraja temple and destroyed the lingas that “the kick of the horse of Islam,” as one Indo-Persian poet put it, had not previously attempted to break.89 Ala-ud-din’s successor, the redeemed slave Kafur, conquered Andhra, rich in diamonds, which was ruled by a queen acting as regent for her grandson; he stripped the temple cities of Madurai, Shrirangam, and Citamparam of their solid-gold idols, and carried off 612 elephants and 20,000 horses.90 The attack on Shrirangam inspired a rich mythology, according to which, when the image of Vishnu as Ranganatha was captured by the sultan’s army and taken north, it came to life by night and seduced the sultan’s daughter (who, in one account, died of a broken heart and in another was absorbed into the image), and was eventually returned to the Shrirangam temple, often with the help of the theologian Ramanuja. To this day the Ranganatha image receives daily puja in the style of the sultan’s court, complete with food cooked in the North Indian style.91

  Some of the theft, rather than destruction, of Hindu images by Muslim conquerors was a kind of recycling, Indian style. Like cannibalism, consuming the parts of someone else’s religious monument may either dishonor the source (destroying and desecrating it) or honor it (taking to yourself the power and status of the source). But putting the stones on the ground to be trodden on by people of another religion was unequivocally adding insult to injury. It was the order of the day to destroy other people’s religious monuments and steal their treasures; the Muslims had no monopoly on that. The whole basis of Hindu kingship, beginning with the cattle raids of the Rig Veda, was the desire for land and plunder. In the sultanate period, an invading army was expected to loot the local temple, and when people told stories about invasions, they always mentioned such looting, whether the teller was a court historian or an old fellow in the local toddy shop, and whether the looting had happened or not. Certainly there was exaggeration. With each telling, the temple got richer and richer, and the army had more and more elephants.92 Not surprisingly, these acts provoked some resistance, and the tall stories provoked both taller deeds and taller stories, such as the claim, made by contemporary Muslim sources, that a Hindu named Bartuh killed 120,000 Muslims in Awadh in Uttar Pradesh in around 1220.93

  “Here be dragons,” the maps of medieval Europe used to say, and a map of medieval India should certainly say, “Here be monsters.” The landscape was peopled by inhuman human rulers on both sides. The difference is not merely that some Muslims may have had the additional incentive of iconoclasm but that for the most part during this period the Turks had more power to destroy Hindus than Hindus to destroy Turks. But the will, including, in many quarters, goodwill, was there on both sides.

  ON THE OTHER HAND . . .

  In addition to the monsters on both sides, there were on both sides if not angels at least people who resisted the infinite regress of bloodbaths and retributions, who respected other people’s religions or, at the very least, were indifferent to them. Dear reader, you will not be surprised to learn that some of the Delhi sultans were horrible, and others were decent blokes. Some of the Muslim rulers of India have been called “India-oriented, mystical and inclusive,” while others were “Mecca-oriented, prophetic and exclusive.”94 The conquests, like most conquests, were pretty brutal: temples sacked, people murdered. But when the battles ended, the conquerors, dramatically outnumbered, had to administer a gigantic territory, and compromises were made. The situation itself was unbalanced; one group had power over the others. But individual rulers shifted the balance for better or for worse. And the same Hindu political theory that caused so much of the trouble (“the country on my border is my enemy; the enemy of my enemy is my friend”) also mitigated some of it; the Rashtrakutas, for instance, encouraged Hindu-Muslim relations and protected Muslim merchants, not through any particularly liberal principles of tolerance but because their enemies, the Gurjara Pratiharas, were the enemies of the Arabs of Sind, making said Arabs the Rashtrakutas’ natural allies.95

  In the culture at large, Hindus adopted a number of Muslim social customs. When the royal women of the Turks and the Rajputs first met, the Muslim women did not keep particularly rigidly to purdah; they joined in the drinking part
ies and literary salons (as we know, for instance, from Babur’s memoirs). It was after they had lived in India for a while and encountered the Rajput codes of modesty and honor that the women were more strictly concealed by the curtain of purdah and the zenana (harem) and at the same time also adopted some aspects of the Hindu caste system. Hindu women, in turn, adopted a modified version of the Muslim purdah. What a pity that each side took the worst of both worlds; why not ditch both purdah and caste? How very different world history would have been if they had. Even within these restrictions, however, some women asserted themselves; the ten thousand women allegedly sequestered in the harem of one sultan set up what has been called a feminist republic, with their own administration, militia, manufacturing system, and market.96

  This was a time when agricultural frontiers expanded, extensive commercial networks developed, gradual technological change took place, and new political and religious institutions (including Hindu ones) developed.97 Even under Muhammad bin Tughluq, most trade, industry, and financial services remained in Hindu hands, and some Hindu converts to Islam achieved particularly high office. Throughout the Delhi Sultanate, Hindus controlled the royal mints and generally ran the economy. Hindu bankers got rich by helping Muslims, newly arrived from Central Asia, to buy slaves, brocades, jewels, and even horses (previously imported from Central Asia) that they would then present to the sultan. Particularly among working people, among artisans, cultivators, and the commercial and secretarial classes, Indian Muslims and lower-caste Hindus lived and worked together and changed each other.98 Women circulated like money (as is generally the case); many Muslims took Hindu wives. And when you add in the gardens and melons and fountains that the Mughals gave to India, not to mention the art and architecture, the picture of cultural exchange brightens considerably.