Richard Eaton: "Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim Rule"

[Neha.Kulkarni]

Here, Richard, Eaton. "Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim Rule"


Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20180729...m/11-3-283.pdf


Quote:

"In recent years, especially in the wake of the destruction of the Baburl

Mosque in 1992, much public discussion has arisen over the political
status of South Asian temples and mosques, and in particular the issue
of temples desecrated or replaced by mosques in the pre-British
period. While Hindu nationalists like Sita Ram Goel have endeavoured to document a pattern of wholesale temple destruction by
Muslims in this period, few professional historians have engaged the
issue, even though it is a properly historical one. This essay aims to
examine the available evidence of temple desecration with a view to
asking, What temples were in fact desecrated in India's pre-modern
history? When, and by whom? How, and for what purpose? And
above all, what might any of this say about the relationship between
religion and politics in pre-modern India? This is a timely topic, since
many in India today are looking to the past to justify or condemn
public policy with respect to religious monuments.
Much of the contemporary evidence on temple desecration cited by
Hindu nationalists is found in Persian materials translated and
published during the rise of British hegemony in India. Especially
influential has been the eight-volume History of India as Told by its
Own Historians, first published in 1849 and edited by Sir Henry
M. Elliot, who oversaw the bulk of the translations, with the help of
John Dowson. But Elliot, keen to contrast what he understood as the
justice and efficiency of British rule with the cruelty and despotism of
the Muslim rulers who had preceded that rule, was anything but
sympathetic to the 'Muhammadan' period of Indian history. As he
wrote in the book's original preface:
The common people must have been plunged into the lowest depths of
wretchedness and despondency. The few glimpses we have, even among the
short Extracts in this single volume, of Hindus slain for disputing with
Muhammadans, of general prohibitions against processions, worship, and
ablutions, and of other intolerant measures, of idols mutilated, of temples
razed, of forcible conversions and marriages, of proscriptions and confiscations, of murders and massacres, and of the sensuality and drunkenness of the
tyrants who enjoined them, show us that this picture is not overcharged ...
2
With the advent of British power, on the other hand, 'a more stirring
and eventful era of India's History commences ... when the full light
of European truth and discernment begins to shed its beams upon the
obscurity of the past.'3
Noting the far greater benefits that Englishmen
had brought to Indians in a mere half century than Muslims had
brought in five centuries, Elliot expressed the hope that his published
translations 'will make our native subjects more sensible of the
immense advantages accruing to them under the mildness and the
equity of our rule.'4
Elliot's motives for delegitimizing the Indo-Muslim rulers who had
preceded English rule are thus quite clear. Writing on the pernicious
influence that this understanding of pre-modern Indian history had on
subsequent generations, the eminent historian Mohammad Habib
once remarked: 'The peaceful Indian Mussalman, descended beyond
doubt from Hindu ancestors, was dressed up in the garb of a foreign
barbarian, as a breaker of temples, and an eater of beef, and declared
to be a military colonist in the land where he had lived for about thirty
or forty centuries ..."

"This centre became Muhammadan first by him [i.e., 'Abdullah Shah Changal],
(and) all the banners of religion were spread. (I have heard) that a few persons
had arrived before him at this desolate and ruined place. When the muazzin
raised the morning cry like the trumpet-call for the intoxicated sufis, the infidels
(made an attack from) every wall and each of them rushed with the sword
and knife. At last they (the infidels) wounded those men of religion, and after
killing them concealed (them) in a well. Now this (burial place and) grave of
martyrs remained a trace of those holy and pious people.
When the time came that the sun of Reality should shine in this dark and
gloomy night, this lion-man ['Abdullah Shah Changal] came from the centre
of religion to this old temple with a large force. He broke the images of the
false deities, and turned the idol-temple into a mosque. When Rai Bhoj saw
this, through wisdom he embraced Islam with the family of all brave
warriors. This quarter became illuminated by the light of the Muhammadan
law, and the customs of the infidels became obsolete and abolished."

#SitaRamGoel