Meenakshi Jain on Romila Thapar's Somanatha

[Guest guest]

[An important critique of a new book by Marxist historian Romila

Thapar.

Meenakshi Jain is a professor of history and an expert in the

medieval

period; she recently authored the new NCERT textbook for "Medieval

India",

class XI.]

 

 

Pioneer 21st March 2004

 

Review of

Romila Thapar?s ?Somanatha, The Many Voices of a History?

(Penguin 2004), Rs. 375

 

By Meenakshi Jain

Fellow, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Teen Murti, Delhi.

 

 

Indian Marxists, notwithstanding their claims to originality, have

always

been faithful followers of Western intellectual trends, often long

after

these were dated in the west. Thus, well after Western academics

expounded

upon European feudalism, Indian Marxists continue to search for

point-by-point parallels between post-Gupta India and the West.

Similarly

the once-in-vogue notion of ?imagined? communities continues to

bewitch our

Marxist brethren who remain committed to fitting the history of the

subcontinent to this maxim. Only the western rethinking on old

patriotisms

underpinning the new nationalisms has yet to win the allegiance of

Indian

Marxists.

 

As of now, they continue to argue that the genesis of the Hindu

community

dates back to only the nineteenth century and is inextricably linked

to the

competition for middle class employment. For a Hindu community,

Marxists

allege, became a requisite for political mobilization under colonial

rule,

when representation by religious community became the key to power

and

economic resources. Hence, Marxists want us to believe that though

the

peculiarly Hindu institution of caste existed from early historic

times, the

Hindu community itself did not then come into being. So, while

Brahmins,

Rajputs, Vaniks, Chandals and Doms evolved from amorphous entities to

identifiable groups, the Hindu community as a whole did not emerge

from its

parts. The same was true of the Hindu tradition. Shaivites,

Vaishnavites,

Shaktas, Buddhists and Jains, all stretched back into antiquity. Yet

Hinduism itself was claimed to be a nineteenth century western-

inspired

abstraction.

 

Romila Thapar?s ?Somanatha, The Many Voices of a History? (Penguin

2004),

represents one such attempt to reinvent the past. Inverting

remembered

history, Thapar dismisses notions of Hindu trauma over Islamic

iconoclasm as

a later-day fabrication. Rather, she alleges, in medieval times

Hindu kings

often vandalized temples and images, even if they did not surpass

the Muslim

record in this respect. Contemporary Hindu sources are silent about

Mahmud?s

attack on Somanatha, she assert, because ?the looting of a temple

(was) not

such an extraordinary event, given that some Hindu rulers also

attacked the

temple of those they had conquered, or in order to confiscate the

wealth of

the temple.?

 

Thapar however ignores the pertinent fact that the alleged attacks

by Hindu

kings on images and temples did not rest upon any shastric

commandment. In

the few known incidents when images were taken away from enemy

kings, the

Hindu ruler honoured the idols thus acquired and built stately

temples for

them. As for the so-called Hindu destruction of Buddhist and Jain

places of

worship, even the evidence for such acts is vague and unconvincing.

 

Strangely for a historian, Thapar takes no cognizance of the Prophet

smashing 360 idols at Kaba and the Quranic injunction: ?Fight them

until

idolatry is no more and God?s religion is supreme?. Artificially

insisting

that political and economic motivations superseded iconoclastic

compulsions,

she never explains why all Muslim (and not just Turk) attacks on

temples

always resulted in the desecration of idols. Indeed, Arab literature

on Sind

and Hind is obsessed with idolatry. The Arab rulers of Sind even sent

cartloads of idols to Baghdad in lieu of revenue. The Turkish

assault on

Hindu idols was more thorough, as their Indian encounter was

lengthier than

that of the Arabs. Iconoclasm, as Thapar well knows, was a feature of

Islamic polity till its very end; few rulers were an exception to

this rule.

 

Mahmud?s assault on Somanatha electrified the Muslim world because

it was

viewed as a sequel to the Prophet?s action at Kaba. Muslims

identified the

Somanatha idol as that of Manat, believed to have been ferreted out

of Mecca

just prior to the Prophet?s attack on its temple. By destroying

Somanatha,

therefore, Mahmud was virtually completing the Prophet?s work; hence

the act

was hailed as ?the crowing glory of Islam over idolatry?.

 

To establish economic motives for iconoclasm, Thapar contends that

exaggerated reports of wealth motivated ghazis to join Mahmud?s

Indian

campaigns. But this ignores the evidence of early migration of

Ghazis from

Central Asia to eastern Bengal in service of the Crescent. Muinuddin,

founder of the Chishti order in India, set up his headquarters in

Ajmer, the

heartland of the Hindu military aristocracy. Sufis participated in

warfare

in the Deccan during the 13th and 14th centuries, to extend the

frontiers of

Islam. The lure of lucre is difficult to discern in these cases.

 

Equally awkward is Thapar?s claim that substantial numbers of

mercenaries in

the Ghaznavid armies ?were Indians, and, presumably Hindu.? Surely

she does

not suggest that the Turkish conquest of India was a Hindu-Turk joint

venture?

 

Thapar views the construction and destruction of Somanatha as a

?counterposed legitimation,? whereby re-consecration gave legitimacy

to

Hindu kings and destruction validated the Turkish Sultans. Surely

this

proves the conflicting value systems of the two communities.

Marxists must

explain why Turkish vandalism was almost always directed at non-

Islamic

objects, but not against mosques or other sacred architecture

associated

with rival Muslim kings. For instance, when Mahmud attacked the

Ismailis of

Multan, he did not destroy their mosque.

 

Thapar makes much of the contemporary Hindu silence on Somanatha as

if,

barring it, the Hindus catalogued every other instance of Islamic

iconoclasm. The fact is that the Turkish intolerance of imagery

deeply

preoccupied Hindus. Medieval Hindu historiographical works, temple

hagiographies (mahatmyas), site histories (sthala puranas), dharma

nibandhas

and even inscriptions, all bear witness to the experience of cultural

disruption and desecration of the sacred by the Turks. Islamic

iconoclasm

lay at the heart of the psychological rejection of the Turks

(turushkas) and

is central to the remembered medieval past of the Hindus.

 

Medieval Hindu literature grapples with the searing issues raised by

Islamic

iconoclasm. In the Ekalinga mahatmaya, the sage Narada enquires of

the God

Vayu how an image of God could be destroyed by Muslims if it was

indeed God

himself. Vayu responds that just as the demons had tried to harm

Gods, so

the Yavanas had a natural tendency to destroy divine images. Though

they had

the capacity to retaliate, the Gods understood that their conflict

with the

demons was eternal and that each was fated to suffer setbacks, for

periodic

dissolution of the world was part of the natural order. The

Vimanarcanakalpa, a medieval priestly handbook of the Vaisnava

Vaikhanasa

school, lays down ritual procedures for burying images in times of

danger.

 

The rich body of medieval Jain literature is notable for its strident

assertion of the power of the faith and images to withstand the

Islamic

onslaught. Images that had retreated or gone into exile reappear more

powerful than ever, and even those mutilated reveal increased

ability to

perform miracles. Jain literature discusses the entire gamut of

problems

related to image worship in the medieval era, including the

appropriate

medium in which to fashion icons in times of Muslim threat, the

sufferings

of the true faith in an age of declining virtue, the necessity of

hiding

images for safety, the divine order to unearth images and resume

their

worship, the smashing of images by ?those wicked Muslims? and their

final

restitution through the agency of a devotee. Thapar overlooks all

these

concerns and equates Turkish iconoclasm with an imagined Hindu

vandalism.

 

Notwithstanding her attempts to invoke the class factor, medieval

Hindu

literature associates all sections of society, viz., kings, saints,

and

ordinary devotees, with the heartbreaking task of protection and

restitution

of images in temples. The recovery of buried images invariably

follows a

divine communication to a humble cowherd. In the case of the Sri

Ranganatha

image, a female devotee follows the Sultanate army all the way to

Delhi and

is instrumental in the eventually retrieval of the idol.

 

Thapar makes much of a land grant by the Hindus of Somanatha to a

trader

from Hormuz for constructing a mosque some two centuries after

Mahmud?s

raid. Yet this Hindu gesture only reinforces the opposing

perspectives of

the two sides. While the Arab trader wished Somanatha might come to

Islam,

his Hindu hosts showed no desire to convert him, and facilitated the

construction of a mosque so he could properly adhere to his faith.

Thapar?s

shoddy insistence that the gesture was dictated by the greed of Hindu

traders for a share of the Arab trade is typical Marxist drivel.

Events in

the erstwhile Soviet Union (the former Mecca of those supposedly in

the

vanguard of the proletariat) prove that man does not live by bread

alone.

The overt manifestation of Christianity in Mother Russia (briefly

the Soviet

fatherland) should convince Marxists of the need for deference to the

spiritual underpinnings of Indian civilization.

 

Going through Thapar?s bibliography, one is struck by a major

omission.

Though Thapar cites a volume recently edited by Sheldon Pollock, she

studiously ignores two of his most seminal articles on the Islamic

encounter

with India. In the first, Pollock demonstrates that the period

between the

eleventh and fourteenth centuries represented a special historical

juncture

in which a Ramayana imagery became predominant in the public

political

sphere. And the Hindu rulers of the time deliberately styled

themselves as

Rama incarnates, dedicated to complete his mission against demon

forces.

 

In the second article, Pollock shows that massive volumes of

intellectual

works emanated from the courts of Hindu kings around this time. At

one

level, these dharmanibandhas were digests on social-religious codes

of

conduct for Hindu society. In essence, however, they were a major

reaffirmation of dharma which, for the first time since the writing

of the

dharmasastras, faced in the persona of the Central Asian Turks, a

radically

different and resolutely unassimilating social and religious

formation. It

would have been interesting to know Thapar?s response to such crucial

observations.

 

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