India in the Persianate Age

1000–1765

Richard M. Eaton

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780520974234
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Protected by vast mountains and seas, the Indian subcontinent might seem a nearly complete and self-contained world with its own religions, philosophies, and social systems. And yet this ancient land and its varied societies experienced prolonged and intense interaction with the peoples and cultures of East and Southeast Asia, Europe, Africa, and especially Central Asia and the Iranian plateau. Richard M. Eaton tells this extraordinary story with relish and originality, as he traces the rise of Persianate culture, a many-faceted transregional world connected by ever-widening networks across much of Asia. Introduced to India in the eleventh century by dynasties based in eastern Afghanistan, this culture would become progressively indigenized in the time of the great Mughals (sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries). Eaton brilliantly elaborates the complex encounter between India's Sanskrit culture—an equally rich and transregional complex that continued to flourish and grow throughout this period—and Persian culture, which helped shape the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire, and a host of regional states. This long-term process of cultural interaction is profoundly reflected in the languages, literatures, cuisines, attires, religions, styles of rulership and warfare, science, art, music, and architecture—and more—of South Asia.

1

The Growth of Turkic Power, 1000–1300

A TALE OF TWO RAIDS: 1022, 1025

In the early second millennium, within only three years of each other, two armies marching from opposite directions raided north India. Neither would remain to govern or colonize conquered territory. Although both expeditions were successful in their own ways, they harboured different objectives, had different martial traditions and were informed by very different political systems. The two invasions also suggest why the opening of the second millennium marked a major transition in India’s long history.

The first of the two raids was led by a general acting on the authority of Rajendra I (r. 1014–44), maharaja of the Chola empire (848–1279) towards the extreme southern end of the Indian peninsula. In 1022 his army marched 1,600 kilometres north from the Cholas’ royal and ceremonial capital of Tanjavur, moving along India’s eastern coast. After subduing kings in Orissa, Chola warriors defeated rulers in the western and the south-central districts of the Ganges delta. Then, in a fiercely fought pitched battle, they defeated Mahipala, maharaja of the Pala empire (c.750–1161), at the time the dominant power in India’s easternmost region of Bengal. The southerners crowned their victory by carrying off a bronze image of the deity Śiva, which they seized from a royal temple that Mahipala had presumably patronized [see Fig. 1]. In the course of this long campaign, the invaders also took from the Kalinga raja of Orissa images of Bhairava, Bhairavi and Kali. These, together with precious gems looted from the Pala king, were taken down to the Chola capital as war booty.¹

Major Indian dynasties, 975–1200

Before leaving the delta, however, Chola officers directed an operation unusual for military campaigns: they arranged for water from the Ganges River to be collected in pots and carried on the army’s long march back to Tanjavur. In the Godavari River delta, midway between Bengal and the Chola heartland, Rajendra, who had been consolidating Chola rule in coastal districts north of his capital, joined the victorious army. From there, the combined forces triumphantly returned to Tanjavur. The Cholas were at this time nearing the zenith of their might and glory; they would soon become the dominant power in the eastern Indian Ocean, their influence stretching across the Bay of Bengal to Sumatra. In their own estimation, they occupied the centre of the earthly and cosmic worlds.

In October 1025, not long after Rajendra Chola’s return from his conquests in Bengal, the son of a Turkish-speaking Central Asian slave marched out of Ghazni in eastern Afghanistan with 30,000 cavalry behind him. Heading south-east through the craggy ravines of the Sulaiman Mountains, he and his troops descended from the Afghan plateau into the low, lush Indus valley. Like his Chola contemporaries, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni (r. 997–1030) planned to attack a specific north Indian target – the wealthy temple of Somnath, an important pilgrimage site on the shores of the Arabian Sea on Gujarat’s southern coast. Built of stone a hundred years earlier and situated in a fortress that was surrounded by the sea on three sides, the temple of Somnath, like that of Mahipala in Bengal, was dedicated to the god Śiva. In December 1025, having crossed the Indus and marched across western India’s forbidding Thar Desert, Mahmud reached the site, successfully besieged the fortress and plundered the famous temple of its riches. He also ordered its Śiva image to be broken up and its pieces taken back to Ghazni, his capital, to be set in a floor and walked upon.²

This was not Mahmud’s first raid on north India. The sultan had already launched more than a dozen, beginning with an attack in 1001 on Peshawar, at the foot of the strategic Khyber Pass which connects the Afghan highlands with the Indus valley. Almost annually, similar offensives took place against prominent cities of the Punjab and the upper Ganges valley. In each of them, Mahmud’s men brought plundered wealth back through the mountain passes leading to Ghazni. What distinguished the Somnath raid from the others, however, was the way in which it captured the imagination of Persian chroniclers: those contemporary with the raid hailed Mahmud as an arch-iconoclast, piously responding to Islam’s prohibition against image-worship. Subsequent chroniclers even lionized him as the founder of Turkish rule and of Islamic sovereignty in South Asia, although in fact he was neither of these.

In striking contrast to Persian chronicles, which made so much of Mahmud’s raid on Somnath, Sanskrit inscriptions recorded by local Hindus made no mention of it at all. On the contrary, accounts dating to the months and years after the raid convey a sense of undisturbed business as usual for both the temple and the bustling seaport of Somnath, a major commercial entrepôt that imported war-horses from the Persian Gulf and exported locally produced textiles to markets around the Arabian Sea. Twelve years after the attack, a king from the Goa region recorded performing a pilgrimage to the temple, but he failed to mention Mahmud’s raid. Another inscription dated 1169 mentioned repairs made to the temple owing to normal deterioration, but again without mentioning Mahmud’s raid. In 1216 Somnath’s overlords fortified the temple to protect it not from attacks by invaders from beyond the Khyber Pass, but from those by Hindu rulers in neighbouring Malwa; apparently, such attacks were so frequent as to require precautionary measures.³ The silence of contemporary Hindu sources regarding Mahmud’s raid suggests that in Somnath itself it was either forgotten altogether or viewed as just another unfortunate attack by an outsider, and hence unremarkable.

In fact, the demonization of Mahmud and the portrayal of his raid on Somnath as an assault on Indian religion by Muslim invaders dates only from the early 1840s. In 1842 the British East India Company suffered the annihilation of an entire army of some 16,000 in the First Afghan War (1839–42). Seeking to regain face among their Hindu subjects after this humiliating defeat, the British contrived a bit of self-serving fiction, namely that Mahmud, after sacking the temple of Somnath, carried off a pair of the temple’s gates on his way back to Afghanistan. By ‘discovering’ these fictitious gates in Mahmud’s former capital of Ghazni, and by ‘restoring’ them to their rightful owners in India, British officials hoped to be admired for heroically rectifying what they construed as a heinous wrong that had caused centuries of distress among India’s Hindus. Though intended to win the latters’ gratitude while distracting all Indians from Britain’s catastrophic defeat just beyond the Khyber, this bit of colonial mischief has stoked Hindus’ ill-feeling toward Muslims ever since.⁴ From this point on, Mahmud’s 1025 sacking of Somnath acquired a distinct notoriety, especially in the early twentieth century when nationalist leaders drew on history to identify clear-cut heroes and villains for the purpose of mobilizing political mass movements. By contrast, Rajendra Chola’s raid on Bengal remained largely forgotten outside the Chola country.

On the surface, the military operations of Rajendra Chola and Mahmud of Ghazni would seem to have had much in common: both armies marched some 1,600 kilometres with a view to attacking and plundering specific north Indian sites; neither had any intent of occupation, annexation or permanent government; and both desecrated royal temples, carrying off plundered images to their respective capitals. But the differences between the two invasions are far more important than their similarities, since they highlight radically different political cultures in early-eleventh-century South Asia. The older of these two political cultures, the Chola, was informed by a body of Sanskrit texts that had circulated across India for many centuries before the rise of Chola power in south India. The other culture, informed by an analogous body of Persian texts, had come into being only two centuries before Mahmud’s day.

POLITICAL CULTURE IN THE SANSKRIT WORLD

The culture that had informed Rajendra Chola’s political actions, including his raid on Bengal, was derived from Sanskrit treatises on power, wealth and rulership. It presumed a political universe crowded with little kings, bigger kings and emperors – that is, kings of kings. It also presumed a world of shifting political sands, where rulers had neither permanent enemies nor permanent allies. In conducting the business of warfare, therefore, classical Indian thought recommended that enemies not be annihilated, but rather co-opted and transformed into loyal subordinates⁵ who could be put to use as allies against future enemies. Thus the same inscription that describes the Chola raid on Bengal records that when Rajendra returned from his victorious northern expedition:

He [then] entered his own [capital] town, which by its prosperity despised all the merits of the abode of the gods – his lotus feet [all along] being worshipped by the kings of high birth who had been subdued [by him].⁶

In reality, of the eight kings that Rajendra or his generals are said to have fought on this expedition, one was killed in battle, two others fled the battlefield and the rest were ‘conquered’. These defeated kings – or at least, the five who survived the Chola invasion – were not executed or publicly humiliated. Instead, they became loyal vassals.

Such an outcome conformed to well-defined norms of inter-state politics long canonized in classical Indian thought.⁷ According to these norms, territory was imagined as something like a large chessboard on which kings manoeuvred with allies and against rivals with a view to creating an idealized political space called the Circle of States, or mandala. The term referred to a series of concentric circles, where one’s own capital and heartland was at the centre, surrounded by a second circle of one’s allies, and a third circle of one’s enemies. Beyond that lay a fourth circle occupied by one’s enemies’ enemies, understood as potential allies with whom a king endeavoured to ally himself. With all of India’s major dynastic houses playing by the same geostrategic rules, the result was not only intense political jockeying and perpetual conflict, but overall stalemate and equilibrium.⁸ No single dynastic house could achieve lasting dominance over large tracts of territory within India, much less over South Asia as a whole. Indeed, it is hardly surprising that chess itself originated in India around the sixth century, just when these geopolitical ideas were taking hold.⁹

Rajendra’s father Rajaraja (r. 985–1014) is widely acclaimed as the greatest of Chola emperors, as judged by his conquests and the literature and art he patronized, including his building of one of the grandest temples in south India, the Rajarajeśvaram (or Brihadeśwara) Temple in his capital of Tanjavur. The temple was designed to replicate cosmic space and to situate itself at the centre of that space; one of its names is ‘Daksinameru’, or the southern Mt Meru – that is, the axis of the universe.¹⁰ Much of the wealth necessary for patronizing the king’s cultural projects derived from his successful deployment of the mandala strategy on India’s geopolitical chessboard. From the Cholas’ heartland in the fertile Kaveri delta, Rajaraja had waged a series of victorious military campaigns, defeating in turn the Pandya kings of Madurai to his south and the Cera kings of Kerala to his west. Since these two dynasties had been allied with the Buddhist kings of Sri Lanka, Rajaraja launched a naval expedition to the island kingdom and sacked its ancient capital of Anuradhapura, making him the first Indian king to embark on overseas conquests. Just as importantly, these conquests validated Rajaraja’s claims to being a universal emperor (chakravartin) since, according to classical Indian political thought, such an emperor had to perform a digvijaya, or ‘conquest of the quarters’ – that is, kingdoms to the south, west, north and east.

In 1014, when Rajaraja died, Rajendra, who had been co-emperor at the end of his father’s reign, became Chola emperor in his own right. One of Rajendra’s inscriptions records that he soon thereafter ‘turned his attention to the conquest of the quarters [digvijaya] backed by a powerful army’. In 1017 he launched a fresh invasion of Sri Lanka, conquering the entire island, of which his father had occupied only the northern portion. The next year he reconquered the Pandya king to his south and the raja of Kerala to his west. In 1021 he attacked the Chalukyas of Kalyana, an ascendant dynasty based in the heart of the Deccan plateau. Having defeated that house, Rajendra returned to his capital before moving his army towards Bengal, thereby continuing his clockwise digvijaya. But the inscription discloses another rationale for the expedition to Bengal. ‘This light of the Solar race [Rajendra],’ it says,

laughing at Bhagiratha who had brought down the Ganga [to the earth from heaven] by the power of [his] austerities, wished to sanctify his own country with the waters of the Ganga [i.e. the Ganges] carried thither through the strength of [his] arm. Accordingly [he] ordered the commander of the army who had powerful battalions [under his control], who was the resort of heroism [and] the foremost of diplomats – to subdue the enemy kings occupying [the country on] the banks of that [river].¹¹

This passage refers to a Hindu myth, visually narrated in a stunning seventh-century seaside bas-relief at Mahabalipuram (or Mamallapuram, near modern Chennai), according to which the ascetic Bhagiratha, by performing rigorous austerities, induced the great god Śiva to water the parched earth by bringing the Ganges down from heaven. The parallel between Bhagiratha and Rajendra is clear: if an ascetic had mythically brought the river down from heaven to earth, King Rajendra would ritually bring it down from north India to Tanjavur.

Rajendra attached great importance to his raid on Bengal and the pots of Ganges water that he brought south to his capital. Not only did he assume the title Gangaikonda-Chola (‘the Chola who took the Ganges River’), but he built a new capital in the Kaveri delta named Gangaikonda Cholapuram, or ‘the city of the Chola who took the Ganges’. This he embellished with a colossal temple to Śiva whose central, nine-storey shrine soars to a height of fifty-six metres. Inside, he had a well dug for the sacred Ganges water into which was placed a statue of a lion, a Chola dynastic symbol. Completed in 1035, the temple served to publicize Rajendra’s military successes in conquering not just neighbouring kingdoms, but – symbolically – all In...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Maps
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Growth of Turkic Power, 1000–1300
• 2 The Diffusion of Sultanate Systems, 1200–1400
• 3 Timur’s Invasion and Legacy, 1400–1550
• 4 The Deccan and the South, 1400–1650
• 5 The Consolidation of Mughal Rule, 1526–1605
• 6 India under Jahangir and Shah Jahan, 1605–1658
• 7 Aurangzeb – from Prince to Emperor ‘Alamgir, 1618–1707
• 8 Eighteenth century Transitions
• Conclusion and Epilogue
• Notes
• Index