Reading Past

How does one know past? Is history faithful in capturing it? Is history a discovery or an invention?

History is the study of past societies, cultures, and civilisations. Historians analyse material remains of old civilisations such as archaeological diggings, artifacts, documents, and literature to build their narrative. They write about events removed many - hundreds and thousands – of generations from their time. Cultures and civilisations are the product of human thought. And thoughts change with time

Stones do not speak. Mind, with its ideas, is not fossilised. Zeitgeist is not recorded on imperishable tablets. Sketchy written documents, if any are available, never relate a cogent, verifiable narrative. How do historians then collate history of ideas from the material evidence they study? When the evidence is so feeble, what is it that allows an historian to read the mind of historical figures, to discover intentions behind their apparent actions, to comment on their morals? Historians are wary to tread these dangerous grounds. When trespassing this territory, they do not offer views cast in iron but merely hint towards many possibilities suggested by evidence.

Historians parse the evidence to understand its significance in the context of the time it was born. Rarely is there a single thread of explanation. Each path must be painstakingly followed to see where it leads and how it gels with other known historical facts. History is a speciality that requires years of academic learning, research, and constant engagement with peers to learn new discoveries in the field and to discard the ideas that have run their course and are now jaded.

We all are amateur historians. Human mind incessantly looks for antecedence of every event. It has a weakness for cogent stories that follow linear narratives, that narrate every event as a reaction of a past action. Mind hates to grapple with more than one likelihood that could have contributed, in varying proportion, to the past happenings. We populate past with people who thought, lived, and worked like us and who shared the same values as us while differing from us only in that they were born centuries before our time.

This propensity of our minds – usually an innocent pastime – and the vulnerability of a subject like history, takes a dangerous turn when it is maliciously practiced by politicians, theologians, and ideologues to propagate and popularise their ideology. History has been used – mostly abused – by demagogues in every age and in every country. This is happening with alarming consequences in our country today. Proponent of this school of history see it through binaries of heroes and villains, virtuous and immoral, nationalists and enemies of nation. They fancy teleological reasoning in history where present is the intentioned consequence of past actions. Historians eschew this presentist view of past.

 

I recently read a book that lucidly illustrates difference between discovery and invention of past. Book is a compilation of four essays, each written by a different historian. Editor Sunil Kumar writes in the preface that though ‘attack upon the discipline of history’ is being countered by much research in the discipline, this research remains confined to professional colleagues. Public is still being fed ‘pulp history’ with a nasty intent. His hope is that these essays would begin to narrow the gap between histories as are available in the academy and ones accessible to lay public.

He has chosen the theme of temple desecration and destruction in medieval India, 8^th through 18^th centuries. All essays pertain to an aspect that is intricately linked with the theme. Authors lucidly explain the latest research on their subject. Events of the theme unfolded more than a millennia ago, but they continue to viloently agitate sentiments even today. Hence its choice. It also throws a bright light on a-historicity of political rhetoric.

 

In the first essay author discusses the significance of temple destruction in medieval India. He focuses on incidences where the desecrators were Hindu kings. In Medieval South Asia, temples were the residence of the deity of the land. King derived political authority to rule from the cosmic sovereign represented by the deity in the royal temple. When the victorious king destroyed the temple of a trounced kingdom, he usually carried away the idol of the deity. This was a symbolic gesture to publicly proclaim that now sovereign authority had been bestowed by God on the victorious king. This was as true for a Muslim ruler in medieval age as it was for a Hindu king. Idols were thus, not looted but reappropriated as symbols of changed royal patronage.

Author cites many instances of this loot. In early 9th century a Pandyan king carried away the idol of Golden Buddha from the Jewel temple of Anuradhapura that was ruled then by Sinhalese king Sena I. ‘In the early eleventh century, the Chola king, Rajendra I, furnished his capital with images he had seized from several prominent neighbouring kings: Durga and Ganesha images from the Chalukyas; Bhairava, Bhairavi, and Kali images from the Kalingas of Orissa; a Nandi image from the Eastern Chalukyas; and a bronze Shiva image from the Palas of Bengal.’ A notable follower of this tradition was emperor Krishnadevaraya of Vijayanagar. He attacked Udayagiri soon after his coronation and looted the idol of Balakrishna that he consecrated in a specially built temple in his kingdom. Idol of Vithal in Vithalswami temple in Vijayanagar was taken, most probably, when he ran a successful campaign against Adilshah of Bijapur.

Often, Hindu kings destroyed the images in the ensuing rampage, as must have happened in the Chalukya capital of Kalyani, when cholas levelled the city. Kalhana in his Rajtarangini describes how Gaud soldiers smashed to smithereens the silver image of Ramaswamin, in Parihasapura, Kashmir.

Hindu narratives and inscriptions of the period rarely mention this loot as a direct act of the invading Hindu king. Intentional image destruction is found in narratives after the entry of Islam in the subcontinent.

 

Next essay is on the early 11th century destruction of Somnath temple. Author looks at the facts, as are available, square in the eyes, and tries to sift history from myth. In popular perception Somnath temple has been a major centre of Hinduism for more than a millennium, a pride of the country. In 1026, Mahmud of Ghazni raided the temple of Somnath. It is believed that this marks the beginning of the Muslim/Medieval period in the subcontinent and the destruction and desecration of Hindu temples across the country. Account of Mahmud’s attack are available in Turko-Persian writings and Jain texts of the period, Sanskritic inscriptions at Somnath, debate in British parliament on the issue in mid-19^th century, and popular public opinion today. Author examines these closely to counter the mythology being woven as history around Somnath.

Somnath’s port, Veraval, was a busy port in this period, centre of trade from West Asia. Many Arab traders had settled along the coast, had married locally, some even worked in the courts of the rulers. Trade flourished, mainly in Arab horses. Temple of Somnath, it appears, had invested in the trade. Another source of temple’s income was the offerings from the devotees. Local rajas – the Chudasamas, Abhiras, Yadavas, and others routinely looted these pilgrims. Al Biruni, the Central Asian scholar, who travelled in the region in this time, has written that a stone fortress was built around the temple, 100 years before Mahmud’s attack, allegedly to protect temple’s wealth. He provides a sober account shorn of rhetorics.

Turko-Persian texts of the period and for 2-3 centuries later, celebrated Mahmud’s raid as a symbol of iconoclasm of Islam, and Mahmud was projected as the greatest devout Muslim king. These accounts differ grossly in their alleged facts. They are eulogies written for Sultans and are written in the hyperbolic Persian style of the period. Some say the desecrated image was a Lingam, some give it an anthropomorphic form, one says it was made of solid jewels, anther says of iron and suspended from the roof by a huge magnet, that gave the impression that the idol was floating in air. None mention the Arabs who had been living there for centuries before Mahmud’s attack.

Jain texts of the period mention about Mahmud’s raid on Somnath. But instead as an act of iconoclasm, this is narrated to bolster the superiority of Jains over Shaivs - Somnath was a Shaiv site – because Mahmud could not destroy temples of Jains protected by Mahaveer. Jain texts of the contemporary Chalukya reign, describe the temple being raided by rakshasas, daityas, and asuras, but not Turuskas, as the Turks were then called. The king on a visit to Somnath was dismayed to see that local rajas were plundering the pilgrims. Chalukya king Kumarapala, in 12^th century, noted that the Somnath temple had fallen into disrepair due to spray, not due to an attack. Mahmud was never mentioned in this context.

Puranas of this period mention the general dilapidation of temples in Kaliyuga when Dharma deserts people. They rarely mention destruction of temples, rather treating their pathetic state a consequence of the ravages of time in a Dharma-less Kaliyuga.

Sanskritic inscriptions at Somnatha, earliest by Chalukya kings in 12^th century, speak about protection of temple from piracy. Another from a century later, is on protection of the temple from attacks of Malwa rajas. There is no mention of Mahmud’s raid. An inscription, in the year 1264, is in Sanskrit and Arabic. It speaks of agreement about sale of land adjoining the Somnath temple, including some land that belonged to the temple, to Nuruddin Feroz, a respected Arab trader, for the building of a mosque. Local trustees of agreement included merchants, administrators, and purohita Virabhadra, the Shaiva acharya of Somnath temple. The tone of agreement, for the construction of mosque adjacent to the temple, is amiable. There is no rancour; merely 200 years after Mahmud’s desecration of temple.

Hindi epics, such as Prithviraj Raso of Chandra Bardai, are in form of paeans sung in court, describing the valour of Prithviraj Chauhan. Moreover, they mention the resistance of king against Turks and Ghurids, not as a fight between Hindus and Muslims.

Thus, native documents of the period rarely, if ever, describe Mahmud of Ghazni's 11th century attack on Somnath as an attack on an iconic symbol of Hinduism. Statements of politicians like K.M. Munshi’s in 1951 referring to Somnath and Hindus, seem baffling in the background of this historical evidence – “For a thousand years Mahmud’s destruction of the shrine has been burnt into the collective subconscious of the race as an unforgettable national disaster.”

Interestingly, the first mention of ‘Hindu trauma’ after Mahmud’s attack on Somnath, was in a British parliament debate in 1843. Lord Ellenborough, the then Governor-general of India ordered the general in charge of British army in Afghanistan to return via Ghazni and bring back the sandalwood gates of Somnath that were allegedly taken by Mahmud. But there was no mention of these gates in any history. This appeared an instance of Hindu appeasement by colonial administrators and an attempt to inflame Hindu-Muslim divide. They wanted to portray Muslims – British had suffered a humiliating defeat in Afghanistan in 1842 – as uncouth plunderers. And British rulers as the benevolent protector of Hindu pride. This false and concocted reading of history of the subcontinent was the point of debate in the British parliament. This narrative spun by English to serve colonial needs was later usurped by Indian nationalists and Rightist zealots. Sometime back I saw these gates – An Imperial hoax, gates were made of local Afghan wood and not Indian sandalwood. Through a dirty glass wall, I saw the bleary image of gates in a cobwebbed dungeon in Red Fort at Agra.

Somnath does not represent a consistently linear national-memory for last thirteen centuries. Its history reveals a changing historical memory that was recorded in the contemporary documents and which conformed to the prevalent socio-cultural-political milieu. Herein lies the uniqueness of the temple of Somnath.

 

In the third essay, author deals directly with the debate surrounding temple desecration. He noted, chronological order of all the verifiable instances of temple destruction in India in medieval age. He found eighty such instances. Some Hindu nationalists suggest this to be 60,000. Author then mapped these geographically. An interesting pattern emerged. If the Central Asian invaders were zealous iconoclasts, temples should have been destroyed randomly throughout the country. But the study revealed that temples were destroyed across hostile frontiers as the advancing army faced resistance. Temples were also destroyed during revolts. Only the royal temples were destroyed, not the ones patronised by the common people. Temples in India legitimated the rule of the king. They represented bonding between king, God, temple, and land in early medieval India. Arrival of new ruler, Hindu or Muslim, obligated that this bond be disrupted to establish the new reign.

Ghaznavids rulers remained rooted in Afghanistan and looted rich cities and temples in Northern India to enrich their kingdom. This changed after arrival of Ghurids. They had come to establish an empire in North India. They now destroyed temples, not to enrich a behemoth military machine of a distant empire - as was the practice of Ghaznavids, but to delegitimate a defeated king. In early Mughal period of Babur, Humayun, and Akbar, Mughal armies fought with the Muslim rulers of North India. These rulers did not look up to deities in the temples for authority to rule. Consequently, in this period there are almost no verifiable instances of temple destruction in North India. When latter Mughals expanded their kingdom to lands ruled by Hindu kings, instances of temple desecration began to appear. Temples in Khajuraho, that have extensive carvings of human and divine forms, were not touched by the invading Muslim kings. Chandelas had deserted the temples before the arrival of Muslim invaders, and as such, temples did not serve a political purpose.

Records of the period reveal many instances where the victorious Muslim kings issued directions to protect the temples revered by the common folk in their territory and paid for their maintenance.

In Indian tradition, temples were always the natural sites for contestation of kingly authority. Turkic invaders continued this practice in medieval India. In contrast, mosques were considered a neutral ground. Deity worshipped in a mosque was not related to ruler in any way, neither it underpinned the rule of the monarch. As such, Hindu kings, when they captured a Muslim kingdom, did not destroy the mosques, as they posed no danger to their authority. Shivaji established Maratha kingdom on the ruins of Bijapur dynasty, and Vijayanagar annexed Bahamanis, but both did not disturb the mosques, rather they built their own mosques.

Thus, evidence does not support the image of Turkic-Muslim invaders after 1192 as ruthless plunderers, maniac desecrators, and zealot iconoclasts. In contrast temple destruction in this period in India emerges as an instrument in the larger context of state-building and maintenance. It does not support the ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ divide invented by the British colonial historians that was accepted and widely disseminated by Pakistani and Indian nationalist idealogues.

 

In the last essay, author, who is an art-historian, studies the mosques constructed from or on the ruins of past temples, to analyse the Muslim iconoclasm. He queries if the invading Muslim kings were the pathologic fanatic iconoclasts who destroyed every image? He found evidence to the contrary.

Ghurid aesthetics were heavily influenced by the Indic decorative forms. Masjid-e-sangi in Larvand in Afghanistan is decorated with vase-and-foliage capitals, lotus scrolls and half-lotus friezes, a clear influence of Indian architecture of temples. Author studied the Qutb Mosque in Delhi and found that only the anthropomorphic forms were mutilated while other images were left intact.  Islam prohibits every image, but the images in the mosque “included elephants, birds, and mythological creatures such as  maqaras and the kirtimukha, the horned lion, which ‘became as ubiquitous a figure [in Ghurid mosques in north India] as it had been in pre-Ghurid Buddhist stupas and Hindu temples.” He noticed that even the destruction of anthropomorphic forms was done maintaining the larger aesthetic design of the previous decoration.

 

Editor, in the end, appends a translation of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s speech in Somnath on 31 October 2001. This, in stark contrast to the previous four essays, illustrates how political rhetoric is employed to mobilize public opinion and historicise mythology for the gain of an ideology. Prime Minister said that ‘Somnath is the symbol of our sanatan sanskriti (timeless culture), our shaswat dharma (eternal religion, way of life)’. He emphasised non-existent threats to Somnath, and equated imagined enemies of the temple with terrorist ‘The manner in which we resurrected Somnath, rebuilt Somnath on  new foundations, and defeated the ones who razed it to the ground  and destroyed it – in the same manner those who want to advance on the strength of terrorism today, who do not worship idols but want  to destroy them, these people will meet the same fate as those who  had dared to break Somnath [in the past].’

 

The unimaginably sordid social consequences of politically motivated falsification of history are dispersed around us and do not require description.

It is a fact that India has had a glorious past. Many civilisations were born and flourished here. Invading and migrating people brought their culture that mingled with the native culture, giving birth to newer languages, architecture, literature, music, and art. It added splendid forms to the ways we looked at existence and added newer dimensions to our lives. Alike past in every other country, not all that was beautiful and that which we cherished, survived. Some suffered the inevitable ravage of time, and some were deliberately obliterated. We must remember both. But if we look at past through eyes blinkered by the sense of grievance and of victimhood, and take upon ourselves to avenge these alleged wrongdoings of past, we not only do injustice to a history that is mostly contrary to this narrative, we also poison our present and limit its spread. In the process, we reduce the multihued and an infinitely beautiful tapestry of our past to a drab, narrow, monochromatic strip.

 

By the way, the book is titled Demolishing Myths or Mosques and Temples. Editor Sunil Kumar is professor of medieval history in the Department of History, Delhi University. First essay titled Indian Art Objects As Loot is written by Richard H. Davies who teaches at Bard College in USA. Next essay, Somanātha: Narratives of a History, is authored by Romilla Thapar. She has worked extensively on early Indian history and is Emeritus Professor of History at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Temple Desecration in Pre-Modern India, third essay in the book, is written by Richard Eaton, who teaches at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Last essay, Islam, Iconoclasm and the Early Indian Mosque, is by an art historian, Finbarr B. Flood who is faculty at New York University.