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Inscribing the Other, Inscribing the Self: Hindu-Muslim Identities in Pre-Colonial India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Cynthia Talbot
Cynthia Talbot
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin
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Extract

The nature of medieval Hindu-Muslim relations is an issue of great relevance in contemporary India. Prior to the 200 years of colonial subjection to the British that ended in 1947, large portions of the Indian subcontinent were under Muslim political control. An upsurge of Hindu nationalism over the past decade has led to demands that the state rectify past wrongs on behalf of India's majority religion.' In the nationalist view, Hindu beliefs were continually suppressed and its institutions repeatedly violated during the many centuries of Muslim rule from 1200 C.E. onward. The focal point of nationalist sentiment is the most visible symbol of Hinduism, its temples. As many as 60,000 Hindu temples are said to have been torn down by Muslim rulers, and mosques built on 3,000 of those temples' foundations. The most famous of these alleged former temple sites is at Ayodhya in North India, long considered the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. The movement to liberate this sacred spot, supposedly defiled in the sixteenth century when the Babri Masjid mosque was erected on the ruins of a Rama temple, was one of the hottest political issues of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Tensions reached a peak in December 1992, when Hindu militants succeeded in demolishing the mosque.

Type
Ideologies of Identity
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 37 , Issue 4 , October 1995 , pp. 692 - 722
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1995

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References

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 1993 Western Conference of the Association for Asian Studies meeting in Mexico City and the 1994 national meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Boston. I am deeply indebted to Richard M. Eaton and Phillip B. Wagoner, my fellow panelists on both occasions, whose ideas have so heavily influenced my own. Their editorial assistance is also gratefully acknowledged, as is the help of Susan M. Deeds.

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34 In this early period, the majority of Muslims in India most probably were either foreign immigrants or their descendants. They were thus marked with many distinctive non-Indian features in areas such as dress and food, in addition to their separate languages and religious beliefs. As the number of converts to Islam increased, the initial sense of ethnic separateness must have faded, explaining why ethnic referents were largely discarded in favor of the religious label Musalman in the Andhra of later centuries. Very little research has been conducted on conversion to Islam in medieval South India, unfortunately, so it is not possible to pinpoint when the trend emerged.

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39 People of less elevated status typically made religious gifts to temples rather than to Brahmins in this period, and had their benefactions recorded in stone at the endowed temple. The most widespread gift was that of milk-bearing animals to provide oil for temple lamps.

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58 Dun, K. Iswara, Inscriptional Glossary of Andhra Pradesh (Hyderabad: A. P. Sahitya Akademi, 1967), cxxv;Google ScholarRanjanam, Lakshmi, “Language and Literature: Telugu,” 172.Google Scholar

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62 I thank Thomas R. Trautmann for bringing the correlation between the geographical location of these lords and the distribution of horses and elephants to my attention. For more on elephants in ancient India, see Trautmann, , “Elephants and the Mauryas,” in India: History and Thought, Essays in Honour of A. L. Basham, Mukherjee, S. N., ed. (Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 1982), 263–6.Google Scholar For a discussion of the quality of horses during the medieval period, see Digby, Simon, War Horse and Elephant in the Delhi Sultanate (Oxford: Orient Monographs, 1971), 21–31.Google Scholar

63 The Kaluvacheru grant of the Reddi queen Anitalli, partially published in Somasekhara Sarma, Forgotten Chapter, 111–2. This Sanskrit inscription identifies the Lord of Elephants as the king of Utkala (a sub-region of Orissa), the Lord of Horses as the ruler of the territories in the west, and the Lord of Men as Kakatiya Prataparudra, the Andhra king. In this instance, the Lord of Horses in the west must refer to the Bahmani Sultanate, which controlled the territories to the immediate west of northern Andhra during the early fifteenth century.

64 Tidings of the King, 60–69.Google Scholar

65 Venkayya's, AndugulaNarapati Vijavama,Google Scholar cited in Ranjanam, Lakshmi, “Language and Literature: Telugu,” 165.Google Scholar

66 SII 10.753.

67 Mahalingam, T. V., ed., Summaries of the Historical Manuscripts in the Mackenzie Collection, vol. 2 (Madras: University of Madras, 1976), 36–37.Google Scholar

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69 Further expression of the idea that Muslim kings were god-like in the same manner as Hindu kings is found in an episode from the Prataparudra Caritraumu. This story, repeated in the later Rayavacakamu as well, concerns the Delhi sultan's mother, who one night viewed the sleeping bodies of her son and the captive, Kakatiya Prataparudra. The brilliant light issuing forth from their forms made her realize that both the Delhi sultan and Prataparudra were manifestations of the gods Vishnu and Shiva (Rao, Ramachandra, Prataparudracaritramu, 66–67Google ScholarWagoner, , Tidings of the King, 122–3).Google Scholar

70 SII 16.175 of 1550 C.E.; unfortunately, only the first few lines of the inscription survive. It was issued by Santa Bhikshavritti Ayyavaru, the head of the Virasaiva monastery at Srisailam, who also asserts that the three lords were his disciples.

71 Dutt, Iswara, Inscriptional Glossary, iii.Google Scholar

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74 Prior to the Kakatiya period, most inscriptions from western Andhra were composed in Kannada (the language of the Karnataka region to the west), while inscriptions in southern Andhra were often composed either in Kannada or Tamil (the language of Tamil Nadu to the south). The description of the geographical distribution of Telugu inscriptions is derived from my own work in progress. It is based on the mapping of roughly six thousand inscriptions issued within the boundaries of modern Andhra Pradesh between 1000 and 1650 C.E.

75 Author's translation from Telugu, II. 12–15 of SII 4.659.

76 Author's translation from Telugu, II. 157–162 of El 6.22.

77 Washbrook, David, “‘To Each a Language of His Own’: Language, Culture, and S??iety in Colonial India,” in Language, History and Class, Corfield, Penelope J., ed. (London: Blackwell, 1991), 179–203;Google ScholarLelyveld, David, “The Fate of Hindustani: Colonial Knowledge and the Project of a National Language,” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, Breckenridge, Carol A. and Veer, Peter van der, ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 189–214.Google Scholar

78 Kaviraj, Sudipta, “The Imaginary Institution of India,” Subaltern Studies VII, Chatterjee, Partha and Pandey, Gyanendra, ed. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 26. Kaviraj does not believe that language formed the basis for pre-modern communities in India, however. Whatever the situation might have been in the Bengali-speaking area, which was Kaviraj's case study, I believe that the medieval South Indian evidence sufficiently demonstrates the existence of elite linguistic identities there.Google Scholar

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80 Smith, , Ethnic Origins of Nations, 79–84.Google Scholar

81 Early Kakatiya records are HAS 13.6, 7, 12; IAP-K nos. 14, 15, 19, 22, 24; IAP-W nos. 14, 22, 25, 29. Later Kakatiya inscriptions are ARIE no. 126 of 1958–59; HAS 13.3, 56; IAP-W no. 37; SII 4.1071, 1095, 1107; SII 6.212.

82 SII 6.796.

83 For some other historical memories of the Kakatiyas, see Talbot, , “Political Intermediaries,” 281–3.Google Scholar

84 Sastri, Hirananda, Shitab Khan of Warangal, Hyderabad Archaeological Series No. 9 (Hyderabad: H. E. H. the Nizam's Government, 1932), 3 and 10.Google Scholar

85 Based on translation of Ibid., 23.

86 Based on translation of Ibid., 24. P. V. Parabrahma.

87 SII 26.622; Sastry, P. V. Parabrahma, Select Epigraphs of Andhra Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh Archaeological Series No. 31 (Hyderabad: Government of Andhra Pradesh, n.d.), 76–77.Google Scholar

88 However, other types of sources do engage in an anti-Muslim polemic. Notable among these are the Rayavacakamu (Wagoner, Tidings of the King) and the village, family, and temple histories (kaifiyat) collected by Colin Mackenzie around 1800, many of which mention anarchy and destruction in the decades after the battle of 1565 (Sastri, Nilakanta and Venkataramanayya, , Further Sources, 2:245–50).Google Scholar

89 In contrast to the 862 records originating in the eight decades between 1490 and 1570 C.E., the eighty-year span from 1570 to 1650 C.E. yields only 318 inscriptions—a mere third of the earlier total.

90 At present, lists of sites where Hindu temples were destroyed and mosques or tombs (dargah) built in their place are being circulated by nationalist scholars. The data upon which these lists are based are not always provided, making the evidence suspect. Muslim chronicles and Perso-Arabic inscriptions are sometimes utilized, but neither of these types of sources is totally reliable. Sita Ram God is one scholar compiling such lists, see his “Let the Mute Witnesses Speak,” in Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them, A Preliminary Survey, Shourie, Arun et al., ed. (New Delhi: Voice of India, 1990), 88–181;Google Scholar and Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them, Pt. 2 The Islamic Evidence (New Delhi: Voice of India, 1991). Thanks are due to Richard M. Eaton for acquainting me with these works.Google Scholar

91 Michell, George, “City as Cosmogram: The Circular Plan of Warangal,” South Asian Studies, 8 (1992), 12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

92 Sherwani, , “Bahmanis,” 208.Google Scholar

93 Although I believe Goel's lists are greatly inflated, this statement would be true even by his reckoning. In the approximately 140 sites of temple desecration that he records for Andhra Pradesh (“Let the Mute Witnesses Speak,” 88–95), the dates for the alleged incidents are given in sixty instances. Five date from the fourteenth century (phase one), six come from phase two, and nineteen date from 1565 to 1650 C.E. (phase three). The remaining thirty or so cases stem from the century after 1650, with a notable bunching of incidents in the late 1600s, when the Mughal empire was absorbing the former Qutb Shahi kingdom of Golkonda.

94 SII 16.296.

95 The Ahobilam Kaifiyat is summarized in Sastri, Nilakanta and Venkataramanayya, , Further Sources of Vijayanagara History, 3:246.Google Scholar

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97 SII 5.1312.

98 SII 10.755 and SII 5.1260. The same chief additionally granted a village to the famous temple at Simhacalam, also in northeaster Andhra. This leads K. Sundaram to surmise that the Simhacalam temple had been plundered at the same time as Srikurman, (The Slmhacalam Temple [Simhacalam, A.P.: Simhacalam Devasthanam, 1969], 33 and 104).Google Scholar

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101 “Temple Desecration and the Image of the Holy Warrior in Indo-Muslim Historiography” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Boston, April 1994).

102 The other inscriptions on this slab are published as SII 5.1289–1311.

103 Ernst, , Eternal Garden, 22–29 and 38–59.Google Scholar

104 Richard M. Eaton, “Islamic Iconoclasm in India—Some Case Studies” (Paper presented at Annual Conference on South Asia, Madison, WI, November 1994).

105 This is true of the North Indian poet-saints, Kabir and Guru Nanak (Lorenzen, , “Vicissitudes of Bhakti,” 12Google Scholar) as well as Eknath from Maharashtra (Zelliott, Eleanor, “A Medieval Encounter between Hindu and Muslim: Eknath's Drama-Poem Hindu-Turk Samvad,” in Images of Man: Religion and Historical Process in South Asia, Clothey, Fred, ed. [Madras: New Era Publications, 1982]).Google Scholar