Hindu-Muslim Relations in Medieval India
The term “Mughal” comes from a mispronunciation of the word “Mongol,” but the Mughals of India were mostly ethnic Turks not Mongolians. However, Barbur (1483–1530), the first Mughal emperor, could trace his blood line back to Genghis Khan. The Muslims of Central Asia had good reason to hate the Mongols because they destroyed the Abbasid Caliphate when they sacked Baghdad in 1258. During the 300 years after the death of Genghis, the Mongol Empire had split into four parts: the Golden Horde of Russia (1242–1359), the Ilkhanate of Iran and Iraq (1256–1353), the Chinese Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) ruled by Kublai Khan, and finally the Mughal Empire of India (1527–1707).
It was Timur the Lame (known in the Europe as Tamerlane), whose “descent from Genghis Khan,” as Jack Weatherford says, was based on “flimsy evidence,”[1] who gave the Mongols the bad reputation that has come down to us. Virtually nothing good can be said of Timur’s conquests, and this fact has obscured the contributions of the Mongol Empire. While Timur tortured unmercifully and sacked cities indiscriminately, Genghis Khan abolished torture and formed alliances with people who did not resist him. As an orthodox Muslim, Timur thought that the Delhi Sultans had been very lax in enforcing Islamic law against Hindus and other non-Muslims. Just before his devastating attack on Delhi in 1398, he ordered that Muslim and Hindu prisoners be separated and then declared that “every man who had infidel prisoners was to put them to death.”[2] An estimated 100,000 Hindu prisoners were liquidated in one day.
In addition to proposing the first concept of secular international law, the Mongols generally allowed complete religious freedom in their first hundred years. Followers of Ong Khan, the adopted father of Genghis Khan, were Nestorian Christians, and these Kereyid Mongols easily assimilated Jesus as healer and shaman into their traditional beliefs. Weatherford claims that “part of the attraction of the Mongols to Christianity seemed to be in the name of Jesus, Yesu, which sounded like the Mongolian word for nine, their sacred number and the name of Genghis Khan’s father Yesugei. . . .”[3] Genghis’ four sons married Kereyid Christian women and there were many Christians among their descendents. Even with this preference for Christianity, Ogodei Khan, Genghis’ son, allowed Daoist and Buddhist temples, mosques, as well as churches to be built at his capital at Karakorum. Weatherford contends that Karakorum, where only one stone turtle is left after Ming troops destroyed the city in 1380, “was probably the most religiously open and tolerant city in the world at that time.”[4] No court in Asia would exceed this religious tolerance except for possibly that of Akbar the Great, the truly exceptional Mughal emperor who welcomed all religions to his court and engaged their sages and theologians in friendly debate.
Genghis Khan’s own religion was shamanic with a focus on the worship of the sky, and this ritual is reflected in the choice of blue, rather than the Tibetan white, for the Mongolian Buddhist hospitality scarf. He communed with this sky god before going into battle and before negotiating treaties, but at no time did he or any pre-Muslim Mongol leader force this belief on others. For centuries armies have gone to war with the blessings of their respective deities; indeed, opposing sides sometimes asked for victory from the same deity. The focus of this book, however, is the violence committed for the purpose of converting the enemy to the conqueror’s religion, systematically oppressing those who resist conversion, and destroying their temples and religious artifacts in the process.
Religious persecution did occur during the short reigns of Buddhist and Nestorian Mongol rulers of the early Ilkhanate in Central Asia, but the tables were turned with the conversion of the Mongol Ghazan to Islam in 1304. Ghazan destroyed Buddhist temples and tried to force conversion to Islam on his subjects. Genghis’ grandson Hulegu Khan was the founder of the Ilkhanate and his goal was to take Baghdad, the center of Islamic learning and culture and seat of the Abbasid Caliphate. Hulegu’s mother and two wives were Christians and this helped him forge an alliance with Christian leaders in Georgia and Armenia against the Muslims in Iraq. As Baghdad fell in 1258, Hulegu ordered that the city be evacuated before the looting began. He sent in Christian troops to secure churches and their congregants’ lives and property, but many Muslim residents chose to remain.
Weatherford describes the destruction that followed the fall of Baghdad: “The Christians inside Baghdad joined their fellow believers to loot the city and slaughter the Muslims, from whom they felt their salvation had finally come. Centuries of hatred and anger spilled out as they defiled and destroyed mosques, and turned many of them into churches.”[5] It is estimated that 80,000 people lost their lives, and the fires of the looting spread to consume the entire city. As far as I can tell, Weatherford is the only scholar who emphasizes the fact that it was Christian troops seeking revenge who sacked the city. Other accounts also report that Hulegu’s troops slaughtered the people who did attempt to leave the city.
Assimilation and accommodation, rather than destruction and displacement, are the terms most appropriate to describe the way in which Aryan warriors established their rule among India’s indigenous tribes. The resultant polity was a loose federation of tribes under the authority of a Hindu—sometimes Buddhist or Jain—king. This became the political model for Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms not only in India, but those transplanted in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Drawing on his research in Sri Lanka, Stanley Tambiah states: “The polities . . . had central royal domains surrounded by satellite principalities and provinces replicating the center on a smaller scale and at the margins had even more autonomous tributary principalities.”[6] We will see in chapter 3 on Sri Lankan Buddhism that the cultural and religious mutuality that resulted can be described as premodern organic and holistic entities rather than modernist thinking that dichotomizes and tends to make different people as alien Others.
The great advantage of such governance was the cultural and religious tolerance that it produced. It also virtually eliminated the necessary of military occupation and other oppressive measures. The aim of Aryan expansionism, as Herman Kulke explains, “was not the preaching of any revealed doctrine or salvation, but the ritualistic and bureaucratic subjugation and organization of the newly entered regions.”[7] He continues: “Although the relationships between Hindu society and the tribals was never without tensions, its generally peaceful character, especially if we compare it with the annexation of northern America by European settlers, was certainly one of the greatest achievements in Indian history.”[8] On the other hand, the principal liability of this use of “soft power” was that in the face of outside attack it was difficult to rally the provinces in the defense of the realm. This lack of loyalty to central authority would prove highly detrimental when Hindu India was subjected to repeated Muslim invasions.
In the wake of military conquest, Hindu kings typically formed political and religious alliances with tribal chiefs and priests. The result was rule by religious syncretism rather than the religious exclusivism typical of Christian and many Muslim governments. In his chapter entitled “Vaiṣṇava Influence on a Tribal Culture,” Surajit Sinha maintains that
the Vaiṣṇava gurus are . . . not concerned with replacing the traditional rituals of their clients; they are mainly interested in superimposing a few rituals of their own to make their presence as ritual specialists essential in the life of the Bhumij (tribe). The Vaiṣṇava guru is not moved by a reformist’s zeal to save the heathen souls of his clients but he is very much interested in increasing the number of his clientele.[9]
There is a stark contrast between this process of cultural integration and the demonizing of witches in medieval Europe and the destruction of the indigenous religions by European colonizers.
It was primarily tribal goddesses who were appropriated into a Vedic religion that heretofore did not feature any dominant female deities. For example, early inscriptions from the fifth and sixth centuries in Orissa indicate royal land donations to the goddess Maninageśvarī—Lady of the Jeweled Serpent—whose shrine was located on a steep hill at Ranpur. A very respectful division of religious labor evolved in which the tribal priests were in charge of all rituals at the original idol, a formless round stone, but the king’s priests would perform pūjā at a mobile Durgā statue, which symbolized the Hindu appropriation of the indigenous deity’s power. The statue of Durgā (sometimes called Camunda) was placed near the indigenous idol, but always as a complement, never as a replacement. As Kulke states: “She represent[ed] the real overlord of the state and symbolize[d] the unifying link between the rāja and the tribe since both of them are subjects of the goddess.”[10]
Over time, while indigenous cults drew kings to the countryside for worship, villagers were soon making pilgrimages to royal temples such as the one dedicated to Jagannath in Puri, which became one of the most important pilgrimage sites in eastern India. Kings such as Anangabhima III (early thirteenth century) gained considerable fame and legitimation by sponsoring the annual cart festival that involved the direct participation of all the villages in the realm. As we shall see, both later Hindus and Muslims fought over control of the revenues of this sacred site, not necessarily for religious reasons but for financial ones.
In terms of Per Otnes’ theory of Otherness, where selves and others are reconciled by artifacts, the Hindu temple during Muslim rule served as a mediator between indigenous tribes, Muslims, and Hindus. Stuart Gordon uses Otnes’ theory as a way to explain relatively peaceful Hindu-Muslim mutuality in medieval India, proving that Otnes’ viewpoint “takes us away from essentialist problems of self and other, allowing both to be different, depending on the mediator.”[11] The concept of essential identities is a modernist idea that drove religions apart during the Protestant Reformation and caused horrific religious violence. Overcoming this essentialism is one of the goals of the constructive postmodernism that is the conceptual heuristic for this study. Influenced by “process” philosophy, constructive postmodernism agrees with Gordon’s view that “sees both self and other as works-in-progress . . . [in a] socially constructed material world.”[12]
Hindu royal power was further enhanced by the practice of granting provincial land to brahmin families who then established Hindu temples in the countryside and also introduced caste hierarchy there. It was said that King Govinda IV of Rastrakuta gave brahmins 1,400 villages along with large sums of money.[13] In many instances tribal chiefs were given kṣatriya status outright in return for their allegiance. Although these Hindu kingdoms had far less central administration than later Muslim governments, the brahmins became the first Indian bureaucrats and they extended their power beyond their traditional religious duties. The brahmins were considered well suited for the job, and, presumably because of their spiritual training, they would have fewer temptations to draw unfair advantages from their political positions.
Both ritual and military violence continued to be associated with Hindu worship, but this was not committed in sectarian ways. As recent as early medieval times there are recorded instances of villagers, primarily pregnant women, who offered themselves as sacrifices to the king if he promised to worship their heads.[14] These early human sacrifices were gradually replaced by animal sacrifices, which are still regularly offered to Durgā and Kālī, primarily in Northeast India and Nepal. Hindu kings typically went to war only after offering goats and buffalo to Durgā, who, according to Hindu mythology, was a more effective warrior than the male gods. Even today Hindu soldiers credit Durgā for their 1998 victory against Kashmiri militants (supported by the Pakistani military) in the Kargil region. (The battle cry was “Durgā Mata ki jai”—“Long Live Mother Durgā.”) When visiting Ladakh in November of 1999, I was the only non-military person on the Indian Airlines flight. On a hill near Leh, Ladakh’s capital, there was a Kālī temple that served Indian soldiers and their families. They were still holding positions on the Siachen Glacier less than 100 miles to the west on the highest battlefield in military history. Contrary to erroneous opinions, spread by uninformed radical secularists such as Sam Harris,[15] the four wars that India and Pakistan have fought were not religiously motivated. The soldiers themselves may have been motivated by sectarian animosities, but the governments of both countries definitely were not.
According to goddess theology, even the male gods drew their power from the śakti of the goddess. Whereas male power (tejas, vijra) is a zero-sum game—when the demons (asuras) had it, the gods (devas) did not—the goddess shares her śakti power with all beings.[16] Durgā pūjā is the only time of the year when all Hindus are allowed to eat meat, because ritual killing is religiously sanctioned and sacrificial flesh is not really meat. In addition, this festival was a prime occasion for the king to offer a “communion that bridges the gulf between the folk and the elite.”[17]
One legend from Orissa suggests instructive parallels to the Hebrew concept of Yahweh the Warrior, where the deity wins the battles rather than human armies. When King Hatakeshavra was attacked by the neighboring state Khandpara, the goddess Bhattarika assured him that she would take care of the enemy soldiers: “I shall go in the disguise of a milkmaid and sell (poisoned) curd. The soldiers (of Khandpara) will eat the curd and become unconscious. Holding the sword, I shall kill the soldiers of Khandpara.”[18] If the goddess is the leader of armies, then she is the female equivalent of Yahweh, Lord of Hosts (armies). This was obviously violence sanctioned by religion, just, as we shall see, as the “war” magic of Tibetan lamas was. Using Mahāyāna Buddhist texts as their authority, the lamas, including early Dalai Lamas, said that their goal was not only to save Tibetan lives, but also, by means of “compassionate” violence, to prevent the aggressors from accruing huge amounts of karma.
Let us now return to the first appearance of Muslims in South Asia. With the discovery of a 700-foot dock at Loath in Sind, the conjecture that ancient Indians traded with western Asia is now empirically verified. Arab traders sailed in Indian waters long before the birth of Muhammad. They established themselves along the southwest coast, best known as the Malabar Coast, where, until the fourteenth century, many mosques were found. From there the Muslim merchants settled in Sri Lanka (now 8 percent of the population) and finally Malaysia and Indonesia, the latter now the largest Muslim nation in the world. Indian traders had already plied these eastern routes taking Hindu influence as far as North Vietnam. The Buddhist and Hindu empires in Sumatra, Java, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Malaysia reached their zenith in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, and the spread of Islam moved eastward as rulers in Sumatra and Java were converted, mostly peacefully. Even so the merchant class remained predominantly Hindu and the island of Bali retains its Hindu culture and religion with amazing grace and integrity.
In 708 a contingent of Arab widows and children were returning from Sri Lanka where their husbands and fathers had lost their lives to disease. They were attacked by pirates off the coast of present day Karachi, and the pirates were protected by Dakar, the Hindu king of the province of Sind. When Dakar refused to release the women and children, Hajji (661–714), a viceroy of the Umayyad Empire, sent three expeditions to Sind, the first two being unsuccessful. Hajji’s forces, under the leadership of his son-in-law Muhammad bin Qasim, finally prevailed, mainly due to superior military equipment, including a siege machine requiring 500 men and the powerful Mongolian bow, plus superb leadership and unprecedented troop discipline. These military advantages would ensure repeated Muslim victories over Hindu armies until the rise of Shivaji, the great Maratha military genius in the eighteenth century. There were also religious advantages: congregational worship before going into battle, impossible in Hindu liturgy, and the concepts of military jihad were incredible morale boosters.
Qasim and his army advanced as far north as the Punjab and was preparing to invade Kashmir when the new Caliph Suleiman recalled Qasim to Iraq. Suleiman hated Hajji, who died in 714, and Qasim was imprisoned and died there under torture. Qasim’s successes were not only due to military superiority, but also due to at least three additional factors. First, the largely Buddhist population of Sind was unhappy with their Hindu rulers and their ethics of non-violence inclined them to welcome the invaders. Second, Qasim responded positively to Buddhist and Hindu overtures of surrender and thereby avoided unnecessary bloodshed and destruction. This is all the more to Qasim’s credit because his compatriots in the first two Muslim expeditions were dealt with harshly. The third reason for Qasim’s success in Sind is that he found ready support among the lower castes, especially the Jats and the Meds, whose men bolstered the infantry of a Muslim army dominated by cavalry. (The Hindu king Chach [622–666] was particularly harsh on the Jats.) For centuries caste discrimination would haunt Hindus and would motivate tens of thousands of Indians to convert to Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity.
Qasim made another decision that would mitigate the oppression of Muslim rule in India for the next 800 years. When deciding among the four schools of Islamic law, Qasim chose the Hanafi school, the most liberal of the four in terms of treatment of non-believers. The Maliki, Shafi’i, and Hanbali schools all believed that non-believers in lands conquered by Muslim armies should be converted or be executed. The Hanafi interpretation of shari’ah permitted Qasim to treat Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains as zimmis, as People of the Book, the same status accorded to Jews and Christians. That meant that they could continue to live under Islamic rule as long as they paid their religious tax (jizyah). Zimmis were exempt from military service and this tax was payment for the security they enjoyed under Muslim rule. The fact that many Hindus volunteered for and even led the Mughal armies was the reason why it was not levied during the 106-year reigns of Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan. When the jizyah was decreed, its collection was not consistently enforced or Hindus simply refused to pay it, sometimes even killing revenue officials. When Emperor Aurangzeb attempted to reinstitute the collection of jizyah in 1679, the Hindu warrior king Shivaji, in a famous letter of protest, reminded him that Hindus had served the Mughals faithfully and for over 100 years had not been subjected to the tax.[19]
There were later Muslim rulers who were far more orthodox than Qasim, but they nevertheless allowed Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists to live as People of the Book. These sultans and emperors were restrained by the fact that, with very few exceptions, Hanafi clerics were their chief religious advisors, primarily because the Hanafi school had become dominant in Central Asia by the twelfth century.[20] But even if Muslims rulers wanted to force a stricter version of Islamic law on their subjects, they would have faced the sheer impracticality of forcing conversion, liquidating those who refused, and ruling in the face of an angry and resentful majority. At the very most, Islamic rule in India was theocentric, but never theocratic. The fact that Hindus were allowed to rule their villages and settle all disputes according to their own law logically precludes the absolute and comprehensive rule of shari’ah that an Islamic theocracy would require.
Hindus and Buddhists were not only tolerated, they were also brought into Qasim’s government as trusted advisors and military officers, a policy what would continue under the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire. A Hindu prime minister made it possible for the imprisoned Arab widows and children, the main reason for Qasim’s invasion, to return to their homes. The Hindu Kaksa was the second most powerful Hindu in Qasim’s administration. It was said that “Kaksa took precedence in the army before all the nobles and commanders. He collected the revenue of the country and the treasury was placed under his seal. He assisted Muhammad ibn Qasim in all of his undertakings. . . .”[21]
In one instance Qasim went beyond the letter of Hanafi law by allowing, with the permission of the ulama of Damascus, a Buddhist temple to be rebuilt. Of the four schools only the Hanafi clerics forbade the destruction of temples, but they usually did hold that no new places of infidel worship could be built or repaired. Elaborating on the ulama’s decision, Hajjaj, Qasim’s father, explained that the Buddhists and Hindus “have been taken under our protection, and we cannot in any way stretch out our hands upon their lives and property. Permission is given them to worship their gods. Nobody must be forbidden and prevented from following his own religion.”[22] Yet another concession to the Hindus was that, out of respect for the brahmins, Qasim decided to give them 3 percent of his government’s revenues. These early generous acts would set a precedent for Muslim rule in India that discouraged even the most orthodox Muslim ruler from enforcing stricter religious policies.
Quite apart from Akbar, most Indian medieval communities experienced harmonious relations, as Stuart Gordon explains: “No Muslim or Hindu enclaves were seized; populations were not expelled on the basis of religion. No prince publicly committed himself and all of his resources to the annihilation of the Other. Both Hindus and Muslims were routinely and without comment recruited into all the armies of the period.”[23] The great Maratha general Shivaji has been resurrected by Hindu nationalists as their hero, but, as we shall see, he does not conform to their vision of an India without Muslims; indeed, he had many of them in his army. Here is one of his more dramatic statements: “Verily, Islam and Hinduism are terms of contrast. They are [diverse pigments] used by the true Divine Painter for blending the colours and filling in the outlines [of His picture of the entire human species]. If it be a mosque, the call to prayer is chanted in remembrance of Him. If it be a temple, the bell is rung in yearning for him only.”[24] This statement contains echoes of the first Sikh Guru Nanak: “The temple and the mosque are the same, there is no difference between a Hindu worship and Muslim prayer.”[25]
Contrary to widespread belief, most Muslims in India and Indonesia were not converted by the sword. Some forced conversions did happen in India, but census data prove that most of these converts must have lapsed. The most famous examples of reconversion were the brothers Harihara and Bukka, founders of the great Hindu empire Vijayanagar (1336–1565), who were said to have converted to Islam by Muhammad Tughluq in 1327. We will see that a recent scholar has disputed this allegation. The most striking example of mass reconversion happened in Mysore, where Tipu Sultan (1750–1799) required that all his citizens convert to Islam. Today only 5 percent of the people in the Mysore area is Muslim, while the adjoining Malabar Coast has 30 percent Muslims,[26] primarily because they, as immigrant Muslims, settled this area as peaceful traders in the eighth century. With regard to voluntary conversion, one would expect a direct correlation between areas controlled by the Delhi Sultans and the Mughal emperors and the highest Muslim population, but census data does not support this reasoning either. The only correlation that holds is the discovery of higher Muslim populations wherever Sufis traveled on their missions. This explains the otherwise curious fact that East Bengal, far from the centers of Islamic power, is now the Muslim country of Bangladesh. Sufi missionaries were instrumental to the peaceful spread of Islam in Bengal, Indonesia, and Malaysia.
Let us now turn to the state of Orissa and focus on the fate of the Jagannath temple in Puri under Muslim rule. In 1230 King Anangabhima III consolidated his rule by declaring that he ruled “under divine order” and he was the “son and vassal of the Lord of Puri,” who now was the royal deity of Orissa. Anangabhima proclaimed that an attack on Orissa constituted an attack on the king’s god. He was probably under considerable external pressure because of Muslim incursions in eastern Indian. Earlier in the century the Delhi Sultan Iltutmish had conquered Varanasi, and he had continued the destruction of Hindu temples and idols that had begun under the first attack in 1194. A sign of Anangabhima’s determination to protect Hindu culture is the fact that he named his new capital in Cuttack “Abhinava Varanasi,”[27] Varanasi being the holiest city of the Hindus.
Hindu anxieties about further Muslim advances in Orissa proved to be well founded. In 1361 Orissa was conquered by the Delhi Sultan Firuz Shah and he destroyed the Jagannath temple and the stone idol, but the indigenous wooden image of the deity was saved. The Jagannath cult at Puri remained officially inactive, but the rituals continued at regional temples or at secret sites. Hindu kings regained control of Puri in the sixteenth century only to be attacked again in 1568 by the Afghan general Kalaphar, who managed to find the wooden image and have it burned. During this period, as Kulke explains, “more than a dozen times the priests of Puri had to hide the renewed image of Jagannath in the inaccessible mountains of south Orissa or on some islands in the Chilka Lake.”[28]
In 1590 the Mughals under the Hindu general Man Singh defeated the Afghan forces, but Singh allowed them to retained control of Orissa except for the Jagannath temple. Akbar personally intervened to stop Man Singh from attacking Ramachandra, who had renewed the Jagannath image in his own capital Khurda and was hoping to reinstall it at Puri. Akbar’s actions were not based entirely on his policy of religious tolerance, but also because of the political advantage of controlling revenues of this pilgrimage site and legitimizing it by supporting a popular Hindu king.
After the death of Akbar, Orissa again descended into chaos, but this time it was the Hindu Keso Das, appointed as governor by the Mughals, who attacked Puri, burned the temple cars and looted the temple treasury. The Jagannath priests were again able to hide the idol, but they were not able to reinstall it until Prince Shah Jahan gave them permission as he passed through Orissa in 1623. Shah Jahan reaffirmed Akbar’s position that all temples were state property and should be maintained as such. Richard M. Eaton states that by riding in the cart festival procession “Shah Jahan’s officials ritually demonstrated that it was the Mughal emperor, operating through his appointed officers, who was the temple’s—and hence the god’s ultimate lord and protector.”[29] Kulke also notes that Salbeg, a famous Muslim poet, celebrated Lord Jagannath in song. Kulke summarizes 300 years of Muslim rule in Orissa as follows: “Despite religious fanaticism there were also decades of religious tolerance and mutual cooperation for the welfare of the country.”[30]
Emperor Aurangzeb thought that Akbar had gone too far in allowing new temple construction, because Islamic law protected only existing temples and their routine maintenance. In 1659 Aurangzeb defended the right of Hindu priests, against the desire of his own officials in Varanasi, to practice their religion in their traditional sites. Interestingly enough, Aurangzeb assumed that the priests were, in addition to their regular duties, “pray[ing] for the continuance of the Empire.”[31] Eaton has made an interesting discovery about why some existing temples were in fact destroyed even though Aurangzeb allowed them to stand elsewhere. Eaton found a number of temple destructions, some beginning before Mughal rule, that have the same pattern. In each instance the temple was destroyed as punishment because of the disloyalty of Hindu officers of the Empire; the temple was state property and “as an extension of the officer” was “liable for punishment.”[32] It would seem, however, that the general Hindu population would not understand this subtle legal point, and they would perceive this act as an outrage against their religion.
Eaton also offers a new interpretation of Aurangzeb’s decree of 1669 that “the schools and places of worship of the irreligious be subject to demolition.”[33] Most historians have interpreted this as decree that was to be carried out across the empire. Eaton argues that Aurangzeb’s focus was actually quite specific: the emperor was responding to charges that Hindu priests had been teaching “false books” in Thatta, Multan, and Varanasi and that local officials should check to see if it was the case in other regions. Eaton’s theory may explain the curious fact that Aurganzeb’s orders were carried out only selectively.
In 1692 Aurangzeb did send a direct order that the Jagannath temple be demolished, but local officers were bribed, and all that was accomplished was the closing of the temple, which was reopened after Aurangzeb’s death in 1707. In 1724 the temple was again threatened, but Ramachandra II faked a conversion to Islam and managed to, once again, hide the idols. A new Muslim governor brought the image back, primarily so the pilgrim tax would not be disrupted. The governor calculated that nine lakhs of rupees were lost during this time. Once again, economic and political pressures prevented even the most orthodox Muslims from fulfilling the requirements of Islamic law or complying with imperial decrees.
There are many magnificent archaeological sites in India, but the ruins of Vijayanagar at Hampi are some of the most extensive and impressive. In its peak of glory ca. 1500, with a population of about 500,000 and sixty square miles in area, Vijayanagar was the second largest city in the world behind Beijing. It was the capital of a great Hindu empire, 140,000 square miles at its apex, that ruled a large part of southern India from 1336–1646. European travelers stood in awe of this great city and described in great detail its lush gardens and extensive water works. Even after its destruction by Muslim armies in 1556, a twenty-foot stone statue of Narasimha, the man-lion incarnation of Viṣṇu, a full scale stone chariot with moving wheels, and many other marvels are still standing. The land grant that made the Vijayanagar Empire possible was given by the Delhi Sultanate, and it has been widely held this happened because the Hindu founders Harihara and Bukka, two of the five sons of a warrior named Sangama, converted to Islam. The standard story is they went back to their Hindu faith once they occupied the land. Phillip Wagoner, however, has argued that this view is “a composite pastiche based on the modern historiography constructions. . . [which] are based on a wide body of disparate and contradictory sources . . . leavened with a strong measure of modern Hindu-Muslim communal sentiment.”[34] Wagoner’s strongest point is that none of the Muslim sources, those most likely to mention it, report the alleged conversion, and that the stated reasons for the land grant was that the Sultan was impressed with the brothers’ trustworthiness. There is in fact no evidence of any rebellion toward the Delhi Sultanate and the belief that Vijayanagara was a militant bastion of Hindu orthodoxy is a myth.
Scholars have been hard pressed to explain why presumably these devout Hindu kings called themselves “sultans.” Ruling from 1344 to 1377 Bukka I had the following titles: “the prosperous great tributary, punisher of enemy kings, Sultan among Hindu Kings [hindurājasuratrāna], vanquisher of kings who break their word, lord of the eastern and western oceans, the auspicious hero.”[35] Puzzled by the phrase, Kulke proposes that Bukka is using the term “sultan” only to suggest that he is equal in stature to other Muslim rulers in India. Wagoner disagrees:
both titles, “Sultan” and “Sultan among Hindu kings,” were used in a much more literal and direct sense as a means of proclaiming that the Vijayanagara ruler could actually be considered a Sultan, not in terms of relative political standing, but in concrete terms of substance and style. In particular, the title hindurājasuratrāna would have served to differentiate its bearer from ordinary Hindu (i.e., Indic) kings by signaling his willingness to participate in the political discourse of Islamicate civilization.[36]
The main focus of Wagoner’s article is an examination of the Sangama kings’ dress. Not only did they call themselves “sultans,” they also adopted the same dress as their Muslim counterparts. Wagoner is quick to state that he is not suggesting a Hindu-Muslim religious syncretism—Harihara, Bukka, and their followers remained devout Hindus. Rather, he explains that
selected Indic cultural forms and practices were replaced in key “public” contexts with analogues drawn from a more universal, Islamicate culture . . . not as some inevitable consequence of “the onslaught of Islam,” but quite the opposite, as the result of conscious and deliberately calculated acts by creative individuals seeking to maximize their opportunities in an ever-widening world.[37]
A contemporary parallel would be non-European leaders adopting “suit and tie,” certainly not because they were inclined to accept any European religion, but only to “maximize their opportunities in an ever-widening world.” (Many women leaders wear “power suits” for the very same reason.) I now realize why some of my Indian friends (not all) are puzzled by my wearing Indian dress. I never thought that it might have lowered my status as a man and scholar among them. I will never forget the look of dismay on the face of the former editor of Gandhi Marg, when I entered a University of Idaho classroom in kurta pajama and sandals to introduce him in tweed suit, tie, and oxfords in ninety degree heat. I suspect that my students joined Professor Mahendra Kumar in thinking that I was acting rather silly.
The Sangama dynasty started by Bukka and Harihara ended in a series of military coups, but Vijayanagara underwent renewal and expansion under the Tuluva kings. In 1565, during the Battle of Talikota, sixty miles from Vijayanagara, eighty-year-old King Rāma Rāja led his troops onto the field against the Deccan Sultanates. His artillery was manned by Portuguese and Muslim gunners. The Sultanates had three times the number of cavalry as Rāma Rāja, but the latter had 40,000 more foot soldiers. The Hindu Maratha King Ghorpade provided most of the infantry forces for the Muslim generals. Defying contemporary sectarian perceptions of Muslim versus Hindu, military and political allies in medieval India crossed ethnic and religious divisions. For example, in 1557 Rāma Rāja joined forces with the Sultan of Bijapur to attack the Golkonda Sultanate. Earlier the Sangama kings of Vijayanagar allied themselves with troops of the Delhi Sultanate against the Muslim rule of the Deccan Plateau.
In the first phases of the Battle of Talikota, the Sultanate forces were pushed back, but two divisions of Muslim soldiers under Rāma Rāja changed sides and attacked from the rear. The king was wounded by shrapnel from his own cannon and was taken to the Sultanate generals. They demanded that he convert to Islam, but he dramatically affirmed his allegiance to Kṛṣṇa. He was beheaded and the sight of their great leader’s head on a spear caused Rāma Rāja’s troops to flee. An estimated 100,000 of his men died in the chaos of retreat. Both Muslims and Hindus joined in burning and looting the “City of Victory,” the literal meaning of Vijayanagara. The betrayal of Rāma Rāja’s Muslim troops is sadly ironic because the city was known for its large and thriving Islamic quarter and its tolerance for all religious sects. Until the twentieth century sectarian violence and the destruction of temples and mosques were overwhelmingly instigated by Muslims not Hindus.
Recent scholarship has shown that personal identity and political allegiance among Indians up to the colonial period was primarily ethnic and social and not religious. (In chapter 7 we will learn that Sikhs self-identified as Punjabi Hindus until the British convinced many of them that their “monotheistic” faith was superior to Hinduism.) In a careful analysis of original texts Wagoner tells the story of a certain ‘Ain al-Mulk, who left the Bijapur Sultanate to work in the administration of Vijayanagara, where he was highly honored by Rāma Rāja. ‘Ain al-Mulk’s primary identity for modern scholars is Muslim, but his contemporaries did not type him according to his religion. Muslims such as ‘Ain al-Mulk were, as Wagoner explains, described in terms of “social class . . . mastery of military skills . . . and the ability to command economic and social resources.”[38] Wagoner states: “An individual’s particular religious affiliation and leanings appear to have been matters of little interest.”[39] He adds that Rāma Rāja started his career in the court of the Golconda Sultanate, which, as we have learned above, he made an enemy later in his life. Wagoner also relates that when in Bijapur ‘Ain al-Mulk made a donation to a Sufi shrine, but while in Vijayanagara he financially supported a village of brahmins. Finally, Wagoner analyzes the inscriptions in what appears to be a mosque in Vijayanagar. The patron is a Muslim warrior serving the Hindu king, to whom he gives the highest praises, but the building is actually called a “Dharma Hall.” In fact, the original scholarship on this building identified it as a Hindu temple. To my mind this is a superb example of religious syncretism, going beyond the cultural and political accommodation that Wagoner found in the use of the title sultan.
Stewart Gordon, working with Maratha documents from the eighteenth century, reports that other than the fact that some regions had Hindu kings and others had Muslim kings, none of the sectarian differences that led to tensions, conflict, and war in Europe are found in medieval India. After summarizing various theories of otherness and alterity, Gordon states:
Both Catholics and Protestants represented all that the Other hatred, feared, and suspected. Dress bifurcated, with Protestants favoring severe dark colors and white; Catholics favoring bright colors and as much finery as the purse permitted. Military alliances strictly followed religion; military recruitment largely did. Religious tracts railed against the Other. The Catholic index of prohibited books denied Protestant texts in Catholic areas. Towns and town councils were either Catholic or Protestant.[40]
We have already seen that official Indian dress was the same across the country, military forces were a blend of Muslim and Hindu, and a rich Islamicate literature developed across religious lines.
Gordon submits that there is “no evidence of trade following religion,” as it did in Reformation Europe. His own analysis of records in the Maratha city of Burhanpur demonstrates no discrimination against Muslims as it passed to Hindu administration in the 1750s. In fact, Muslim traders still held certain advantages in Burhanpur as well as other towns under Hindu control. For example, Gordon found that “the ‘Musalman’ paid 2.5 percent ad valorem transit duty, while the ‘Hindu’ paid 5 percent.”[41] Significantly, Gordon adds that this is the only reference to Muslims and Hindus that he found in all the administrative records he has studied. The sectarian differences show up only in the titles of people who received government grants. In 1765 the Hindu government in Burhanpur gave over a third of its religious grants (some 400 rupees per year) to faqīrs, shaykhs, or qāẓīs. In addition to all the Hindu festivals, the Muslim holy days also received financial support from the Hindu government.
The only conflicts that appears sectarian were efforts, continuing from 1751–55, by the Maratha army to clear out the remainder of the Muslim resistance to Hindu control and to expropriate the land of Muslim army officers. Gordon, however, found that these actions were not religiously motivated because “many Hindu Rājpūt military grantees in the area were displaced with the same vigor and thoroughness as the Muslim grantees. . . . The Marathas simply could not leave heavily armed units residing in the countryside and have any hopes of establishing credible peace and tax collection.”[42] Gordon goes on to document several other instances in which the Marathas conquered Hindu areas in Mararathstra and made sure that the dissident factions were neutralized. In the 1760s the Marathas attacked Hindu Rājpūt states—constant enemies—and followed the same policy of military security.
In the next chapter we will learn that the Hindu nationalist B. G. Tilak was responsible for resurrecting Shivaji Bhosale as a symbol for the preservation of the true and pure Hindu identity. Shivaji was most assuredly a nationalist, but his idea of a Hindu nation included all of its religions on equal footing, not Hinduism lording over all. We have just seen that medieval South India was a multicultural community of princely states where there was a rich and complex cultural interpenetration of Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains, and Europeans. Just as in the Mughal and the Indian Sultanate administrations, Hindus and Muslims served with honor and distinction. They also joined European mercenaries wherever they found their own advantage and glory. At least fifty of Shivaji’s most trusted generals were Muslims; Darya Sarang was in charge of his armory; and Siddi Ibrahim was head of his artillery. Shivaji’s navy was led by Darya Darang and its sailors were primarily Muslims, and half of his cavalry was Muslim.
Although Shivaji was a devout Hindu, he, like millions of Hindus then as well as now, admired the Sufi saints and prayed at their tombs. During his wide-ranging military campaigns, no mosques were ever destroyed and very few non-combatant Muslims were molested or killed. Muslims were allowed to keep their land and businesses, and thousands of them, as we have seen, joined his military forces. After Shivaji’s troops would take a fort—hundreds changed hands during these years—there was no mass slaughter of the residents. After Shivaji’s famous raid on the English merchants in Surat, the French traveler Francois Bernier learned that he had commanded that the Catholic mission should not be attacked. Dutch traders, praised by Shivaji as “charitable men,” were not targeted,[43] because the expedition was planned, in addition to general plunder, to punish the English for sending an artillery battery against him during the siege of Paavankhin in 1660. Shivaji held four British traders prisoner for about three years to stress the point that they were not to intervene in his affairs.
Let us return to Shivaji’s beginnings to see the full scope of this remarkable man’s career. Sahahji Bhosale, Shivaji’s father, followed the example described by Gordon above: a talented and creative Hindu who sought “to maximize [his] opportunities” in the wide world of the Deccan Sultanates and the Mughal Empire. Until his death he retained his land grant and small army in Bijapur, but as an experienced military man Sahahji moved extensively in the service of various Muslim rulers, including the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan. When Shivaji was eleven years old, he and his mother were sent to Pune, where he spent his formative years. In 1645, at the age of fifteen, he had already called himself “king” (rāja), asserted authority over a thousand men, taken one fort, and had built another. In a letter to a local Hindu official, dated April 17, 1645, Shivaji wrote that he and his men took an oath “that it is God’s wish that we should establish our own rule and be independent.”[44] In the Abrahamic religions acting on God’s commands in too many instances led to religiously motivated violence, but in Shivaji’s case it did not.
In April of 1657, Shivaji formed an alliance with Aurangzeb, a son of Emperor Shah Jahan, and as a gift Aurangzeb gave him new lands near Bijapur. Within a month Shivaji turned on Aurangzeb and attacked his imperial forces, captured forty forts, and soon had possession of northern Konkan, northwest of Bijapur. Aurangzeb was of course upset with Shivaji’s betrayal, but, as he was being recalled to the north, he could not mount an offensive against this rash rebel. He settled on a few raids into Shivaji’s territory before he returned to Agra. Aurangzeb mollified him in a letter dated February 24, 1658, in which Shivaji was allowed to keep the areas he had taken and most of the forts if he would provide 500 cavalry for his imperial campaigns in the north. If Shivaji agreed, Aurangzeb promised that he would “not take cognisance of your past actions.”[45]
On June 5, 1659, Aurangzeb was crowned emperor and he did not return to the Deccan plateau for twenty-four years. From 1682 onward he would spend most of his time fighting the forces of the Maratha Empire that Shivaji had founded. From this secure base near the Sahyadri Mountains, Shivaji would wage both guerrilla and conventional war against Hindu and Muslims enemies for next twenty-three years. Aurangzeb referred to him derisively as the “Mountain Rat,” and he spent many years pursuing him. The Persian king Shah Abbas II wrote a taunting letter to Aurangzeb: “You call yourself Padishah, but cannot subdue a mere zaminidar like Shiva. I’m going to India with my army to teach you your business.”[46]
The Bijapur Sultanate, which still employed Shivaji’s father, was left to contend with the young rebel. R. D. Palsokar, a retired Indian colonel, analyzes the military strategy of Shivaji in terms of guerrilla warfare. “From now on Shivaji’s men could move freely amongst the people—like fish in water. The people supplied information, soldiers, horses, arms, money, rations, forage and shelter. Those who plied their vessels on the high seas joined his ranks and few his flag.”[47] From his many forts and mountain hideouts, Shivaji raided the lands of the Bijapur Sultanate at will. An exasperated Sultan Ali Adil Shah sent a military force after Shivaji under the command of Afzal Khan, who called himself “destroyer of the kafirs and rebellious idol breaker.”[48] On his way northwest to the Konkan, Afzal Khan, living up to his iconoclastic reputation, destroyed a temple in Tuljapur, one dedicated to Tulja Bhavani, Shivaji’s mother’s personal deity, and another temple in Pandharpur.
Shivaji led the overconfident Afzal Khan into a trap near his fort at Pratapgad. Maratha sources exaggerated the number of Khan’s forces—35,000 infantry, 12,000 cavalry, and 500 cannons—so as to embellish Shivaji’s reputation, but English sources more accurately indicate only 10,000 foot and horse. Khan’s soldiers were unwisely strung out along the Koyna River below the fort. After about a two-month siege, Shivaji sent word that he wanted to parley, and Khan wrongly assumed that he was going to negotiate surrender. Khan agreed to a meeting at 2 PM on November 10, 1659. After some initial greetings Khan tried to stab Shivaji, but he, uninjured because of his concealed armor, stabbed Khan to death. Shivaji’s body guards overwhelmed and killed Khan’s attendants, and by dark the Bijapur soldiers, constrained by the narrow river valley, were soundly defeated by Shivaji’s men as they attacked from above.
After winning two more major battles against the Bijapur Sultanate, Shivaji had to contend with renewed attacks from Aurangzeb’s imperial army, which now joined forces with the Sultan’s soldiers. The Mughal general Shaista Khan used his superior manpower to his advantage and took the major city of Pune. When Shaista Khan moved out from Pune in 1661, Shivaji was able to win a major victory against him in the Battle of Umberkind. In response Aurangzeb sent the famous Hindu general Jai Singh against Shivaji and this time the Mughals were able to force Shivaji to sign the Treaty of Purandar on June 11, 1665. The peace lasted only five years, and Shivaji returned to successful military campaigns and was crowned Mahārāja and Chhatrapati (“paramount sovereign”) in 1674. By 1680 the new Maratha Empire included the current states of Maharasthra, Karnataka, and parts of Tamil Nadu. In 1697 Aurangzeb withdrew his forces from the Deccan, and left the Marathas, under five more emperors, to rule over much of India until 1761.
There are indications that Shivaji’s troops did not always honor his orders to protect holy places and those who sought refuge there. In 1678 Maratha soldiers entered Bijapur and they looted the suburbs. As Sarkar reports: “Near the tomb of Shaikh Ahmad Khawas-Khani, [Shivaji’s men] killed Ali Raza and wounded Siddi Yaqut.”[49] As they reached the tomb of Ibrahim Adil Shah, the fifth ruler of the Bijpur Sultanate, they were turned back by Mughal artillery before they could do any damage. During the attack on Jalna in December of 1679, Shivaji’s troops did follow his command that no holy men be harmed, but they did wound and rob, in violation of the principle of religious refuge, rich merchants who had hidden in the hermitage of Sayyid Jan Muhammad.[50] These few examples of disrespect for Islamic sites pale in comparison to the great destruction of temples and general persecution of Hindus by Muslims over 500 years. Shivaji died of dysentery on March 24, 1660, and while Hindus then and now praise him as a great national hero, many Indian Muslims claim that his death was caused by the curse that Sayyid Jan Muhammad placed on him after his troops raided his hermitage in Jalna.
It is a significant irony that the concepts for which Hinduism is much known and praised are non-Vedic and non-Aryan. The law of karma, reincarnation, the practice of yoga (now disputed by White in his book Sinister Yogis), ahiṃsā (non-injury), the worship of major goddesses, phallus, and snake worship are not found in the Vedas. The god Rudra is of course found in the Vedas, but the Śiva we know, merged in the tradition with Rudra, as sitting in the lotus position and as Lord of Animals is found as an Indus seal predating Aryan influence in India. (The identity of the figure has now come into question in White’s new analyses.) Scholars have speculated that the “Third Eye” of meditation can be seen in depictions of the Indus priests. We have already discussed the way in which an evolving Hinduism took over local goddess sites all over India and made them into various manifestations of Mahādevī. What happened in ancient India is the one of the deepest and most extensive exercises of religious syncretism in world history.
Religious syncretism has occurred wherever different religions have met, but the Abrahamic religions are generally loath to recognize the influences of other faiths upon them. This emphasis on a false revelational purity has unfortunately led to much religiously motivated violence on their part. Asian peoples have been much more inclined to accept others’ beliefs, and they, consciously or unconsciously, happily practice these mixed religious traditions. The Muslim Meos, who live southwest of Delhi, not only celebrate Diwali and Dasehra, which are now national holidays, but they also observe the birth of Kṛṣṇa and honor the monkey god Hanuman. So immersed are these Muslims in Hindu culture that many of them cannot recite the Kālīmah, the seven-fold affirmation of the Islamic faith. The Mina tribe, who live in the same region, are Muslims who worship Hanuman and a tantric form of Śiva. North of Delhi there are Muslims who offer prayers to Kālī and Allah at their own household shrines.
The Husaini brahmins of Gujarat, who take their name from Muhammad’s grandson Husain, consider the Vedic Atharvaveda their sacred book. Mujeeb speculates that “it could be said that they were not really converts to Islam, but had adopted such Islamic beliefs and practices as were not deemed contrary to the Hindu faith.”[51] Next door in the Pakistani province of Sind, Muslim followers of the Agha Khan consider him the tenth incarnation of Viṣṇu and their rituals contain an odd mix of Hindu and Islamic ideas. There is also the great faith of the Sikhs, which has been erroneously described as a mixture of Hinduism and Islam. In truth the influences on Guru Nanak, inspired by the syncretistic “sant” tradition, were much more Hindu than Islamic. Images from Hindu mythology were painted on the walls of the Golden Temple in Amritsar until they were whitewashed by fundamentalist Sikhs. Indeed, the Sikhs called themselves Hindus until the British convinced many of them to fashion their own, more militant, religious identity.
Even though Tipu Sultan’s attempt to convert Mysore to Islam was, in the end, a failure, the people there, as well as Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains across the Indian Subcontinent, have shown high regard for Muslims saints. In November 2005, my Hindu host at the University of Rajasthan was most keen to take me to the tomb of a great Sufi saint Hazrat Moinuddin Chishti in Ajmer. Emperor Shah Jahan prayed here for his first son and Prince Dara Shikoh was conceived soon thereafter. The most dramatic example of Hindu-Muslim cooperation is a shrine on a hill in Mysore dedicated to the Hindu sage Dattatreya. The Hindus in charge of the shrine could not stop bickering among themselves, so they chose a Sufi saint, Baba Qalandar Shah, to take over the rites at the site. Even though the service is a garbled mixture of Arabic and Sanskrit, pilgrims today still receive prasad, prepared by Hindu priests elsewhere, from a descendant of the Baba Shah.[52] It is instructive to note that, because of conflict among the various Christian denominations in Jerusalem, the Muslim Nuseibeh family has had the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher since the Muslim general Saladin chose them for the task in 1192.
The most deliberate intellectual attempt to bring Hinduism and Islam together was undertaken by Prince Dara Shikoh, older brother to Emperor Aurangzeb. After reviewing his luckless efforts as a general in the Mughal army and losing two major battles over succession to his aggressive younger brother, one could easily conclude that Dara was a much better philosopher and theologian. While an imperial official in Allabad and an initiate in the Qadri Sufi sect, Dara came under the influence of the Islamic pantheist Muhibullah, whose works Emperor Aurganzeb ordered burned. The first Mughal emperors Babur and his son Humayan were fervent supporters of the Sufi mystics. Babur penned the following quatrain:
Though I be not related to the Dervishes,
Yet I am their follower in heart and soul.
Do not say that the rank of king is remote from the Dervishes.
I am a king, but yet a slave of the Dervishes![53]
Dara’s spiritual preference for the Sufis had strong Mughal precedents. Nevertheless, he was severely criticized and declared a heretic by Sunni fundamentalists. Here are two specific charges of Mirza Muhammad Kazim: “[Dara] thought that their [Hindus’] books . . . were the word of God revealed in heaven and he called them ‘excellent ancient books.’ . . . He spent all his time in this impious work and concentrated all his attention on the content of these wretched [Hindu] books. In place of the sacred name of God, Allah, he adoptred the Hindu name Prabhu (master), whom Hindus consider a saint. . . .”[54]
Later Dara became a disciple of Hazrat Miyan Mir, a Qadri Sufi of Lahore, and he was the saint that Sikh Guru Arjan Dev chose to lay the foundation stone of the Harmandir Sahib, the “Golden Temple” in Amritsar. Sadly, Arjan Dev was beheaded in 1606 by orders of Emperor Jahangir after five days of torture. While pursuing his Sufi spiritual life, Prince Dara must have despaired of his brother’s persecution of Sikhs and Hindus. In 1675, when Sikh Guru Teg Bahadar agreed to accompany sixteen brahmins on a quest to stop Mughal persecution of Hindus, they were arrested and commanded to convert to Islam on pain of torture and death. They all refused, and from November 8 to 11, 1675, Mati Das was sawed in half, Dayal Das was boiled alive, Sati Das was burned alive, and Teg Bahadar was beheaded.
Finding the pantheism of the Upaniṣads congenial, Dara translated fifty-two of them from Sanskrit to Persian, finishing the work in 1657. In order to accomplish this intellectual feat he learned Sanskrit and consulted with Hindu scholars in Benares, present day Varanasi. He also translated the Bhagavad-gītā and the Yoga Vasiṣṭha. (An 1801 Latin translation of Dara’s Upaniṣads was one of the earliest introductions of Hindu philosophy to Europeans.) He conjectured that when the Qur’an mentions a “protected book,” which “none shall touch but the purified ones,”[55] the reference is to the Upaniṣads. (Dara entitled his translation of the Upaniṣads “The Great Secret.”) Dara thought that this theory was further backed up by the Quranic declaration that there are no people “without the Book.”[56]
Seeking theological unity in the way that Shivaji and Guru Nanak did, Dara believed that God “dwells in the Ka’aba and in Somnath [a famous Shaivite temple].”[57] Dara was convinced that the Sufis and other non-Muslim mystics had discovered “the best path of reaching Divinity,” understood as a divine One. Using the principle of tauhid, which would strip away all of the contingent elements of culture, language, and ritual, Dara was convinced that Hinduism and Islam could be brought together in a grand theological synthesis. His book Majma ul-Bahrain—“The Mingling of the Two Oceans [of Hinduism and Islam]”—was composed when Dara was forty-two-years-old and it best expresses his theological quest.
Dara’s most remarkable achievement was his seven conversations, held in 1653, with the heterodox Hindu ascetic Baba La’l Das of Lahore, who was profoundly influenced by the Sufi tradition. Dara’s sincere desire to understand Hindu philosophy is exhibited in the nature of his probing but respectful questions. Louis Massignon describes it well: “What strikes us most in these discourses is their tone; the exchange of trustful views, sincere and amicable overture, with no trace of sharp and deceptive verbal duels strewn with cuts, and dummy moves of an ordinary apologetic tournament.”[58] This does not mean that Dara did not object to some Hindu doctrines: (1) he does not believe in the transmigration of souls; and (2) he rejects the idea that Hindus must go to Benares (Varanasi) to order to secure liberation from the cycle of birth, rebirth, and death. The language of the dialogues between Dara and La’l Das is highly poetic, obviously influenced by the same sant tradition that began with Kabir and that is also reflected in the writings of the Sikh gurus. Almost without exception the theological questions are answered with rich metaphors and similes, which are sometimes quite obscure. For example, to the question of the difference between Islamic and Hindu scripture, La’l Das answers that it is the same as that between a king “when he ordains and the order he enacts.”[59] Dara asks his interlocutor to define dhyana and samadhi, and a more analytic thinker might conclude that La’l Das does not actually answer the question by comparing the human heart with a captured gazelle, which gradually “acquires knowledge of the grain and straw which nourishes it.”[60]
In conclusion, I offer the conjecture that a natural Indian openness to new religious ideas convinced many immigrant Muslims that a life of peaceful coexistence should be the preferred option. The fact that Indian Sunnis have tolerated the presence of their Shia minority better than anywhere else in the Islamic world, and also allowed Sufi missionaries freedom to proselytize everywhere, are clear indications that Indians may have indeed taught immigrant Muslims the advantages of religious tolerance, and even more deeply, mutual respect. At the same time, credit must be given to liberal Muslims and Sikhs who were also naturally inclined to dialogue with their Hindu colleagues. One is left to imagine what the course of Indian history might have been if Prince Dara Shikoh had ascended to the Mughal throne rather than his fundamentalist brother Aurangzeb.
Jack Weatherford, Chinggis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004), 252.
From Timur’s autobiography cited in The Delhi Sultanate, ed. R. C. Majumdar (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1967), 119.
Weatherford, Chinggis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, 135.
Ibid.
Ibid., 183.
Stanley J. Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 173.
Hermann Kulke, Kings and Cults: State Formation and Legitimation in India and Southeast Asia (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001), 258.
Ibid., 4.
Surajit Sinha, “Vaishnava Influence on Tribal Culture” in Milton Singer, ed., Krishna, Myth, Rites, and Attitudes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 72.
Kulke, Kings and Cults, 136.
Stewart Gordon, “Hindus, Muslims, and the Other in Eighteenth-century India,” International Journal of Hindu Studies 3:3 (December 1999): 224.
Ibid.
Kulke, Kings and Cults, 13.
See ibid., 118.
Sam Harris, The End of Faith (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 26–28.
See N. F. Gier, “The Yogi and the Goddess,” International Journal of Hindu Studies 1:2 (June, 1997): 265–87. Reprinted as chapter six in Gier, Spiritual Titanism: Indian, Chinese, and Western Perspectives (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000).
Kulke, Kings and Cults, 16.
Ibid., 119.
See Sir Jadunath Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 2nd revised edition, 1920), 367.
M. Mujeeb, The Indian Muslims (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1967), 58.
H. M. Elliot and John Dowson, The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians (London, 1867–1877), vol. 1, 203.
Cited in ibid., 185–86.
Gordon, “Hindus, Muslims, and the Other in Eighteenth-century India,” 221.
Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 370.
Dasam Granth, 51
S. M. Ikram, Muslim Civilization in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 124.
See Kulke, Kings and Cults, 17.
Ibid., 34–35.
Richard M. Eaton, “Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States,” Frontline 17:26 (December 23, 2000), accessed at www.frontline.in/static/html/fl1725/17250620.htm on January 16, 2014.
Kulke, Kings and Cults, 33.
Order to Abu’l-Hasan in Varanasi in 1659, found in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1911), 689–90; quoted in Richard M. Eaton, Temple Desecration and Muslim States in Medieval India (New Delhi: Hope India Publications, 2004), chap. 5, note 9. No pagination given in GoogleBooks version.
Ibid., chap. 6.
Eaton, “Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States.”
Phillip B. Wagoner, “Sultan among Hindu Kings: Dress, Titles, and the Islamicization of Hindu Culture at Vijayanagara,” The Journal of Asian Studies 55:4 (November 1996): 873fn.
Quoted in ibid., 861.
Ibid., 863. Wagoner’s transliteration from the Kannada language is changed to transliterated Sanskrit to avoid confusion.
Ibid., 875.
Phillip B. Wagoner, “Fortuitous Convergences and Essential Ambiguities: Transcultural Political Elites in the Medieval Deccan,” International Journal of Hindu Studies 3:3 (December 1999): 246.
Ibid.
Gordon, “Hindus, Muslims, and the Other in Eighteenth-century India,” 225.
Ibid., 228.
Ibid., 233.
Francois Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656–1668, ed. Archibald Constable and trans. Irving Brock (Edinburgh: T. and T. Constable, 1891), 188.
Cited in R. D. Palsokar, Shivaji: the Great Guerrilla (Dehra Dun: Natraj Publishers, 2003), 52.
Ibid., 75.
See Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 424.
Ibid., 78.
Ibid., 81.
Ibid., 364.
Ibid., 378.
Mujeeb, The Indian Muslims, 16. All these examples of religious syncretism are taken from Mujeeb.
Agehananda Bharati, The Tantric Tradition (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1970), 186.
Annemarie Schimmel, The Empire of the Great Mughals: History, Art and Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 130.
Louis Massignon, “An Experiment in Hindu-Muslim Unity: Dara Shikoh” in On Becoming an Indian Muslim: French Essays on Aspects of Syncretism, trans. and ed. M. Waseem (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 96.
Sura 56:77–80.
Sura 57:25; see Massignon, “An Experiment in Hindu-Muslim Unity,” 114.
Quoted in Yoginder Sikand, “The Tauhidic Basis for Inter-community Peace and Justice: Lessons from Dara Shikoh (April 19, 2010), posted at TwoCircles.net, accessed on September 22, 2013.
Massignon, 99.
Ibid., 100.
Ibid., 102.