It also virtually eliminated the necessary of military occupation and other oppressive measures. 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 Muslim governments. It was primarily tribal goddesses who were appropriated into a Vedic religion that heretofore did not feature any dominant female deities. 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 puja at a mobile Durga statue, which symbolized the Hindu appropriation of the indigenous deity's power.
The statue of Durga sometimes Camunda was placed near the indigenous idol, but always as a complement, never as a replacement. 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 13 th 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 later, both Hindus and Muslims fought over control of the revenues of this sacred site. 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 villages along with large sums of money.
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. Both ritual and military violence continue to be associated with Hindu goddess worship.
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.
These early human sacrifices were gradually replaced by animal sacrifices that are still regularly offered to Durga and Kali, primarily in Northeast India and Nepal. Hindu kings in South Asia typically went to war only after offering goats and buffalo to Durga, who, according to Hindu mythology, was a more effective warrior than the male gods.
For example, many Hindu soldiers credit Durga for their victory against Kashmiri militants in the Kargil region. According to goddess theology, even the male gods drew their power from the shakti of the goddess.
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. 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.
The soldiers of Khandpara will eat the curd and become unconscious. Holding the sword, I shall kill the soldiers of Khandpara. This is obviously violence sanctioned by religion, but it is not done for the purpose of converting the enemy to the conqueror's religion. This former rationale in no way excuses the violence done, but it limits violence to the military campaign, and it does not necessarily produce a general policy of religious intolerance and oppression.
Let us now return to the first appearance of Muslims in South Asia. With the discovery of a foot dock at Lotha 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, and from there they 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-Hindu empires in Sumatra, Java, Malaysia reached their zenith in the 13 th , and the spread of Islam move eastwards as rulers in Sumatra and Java were converted.
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 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 Dahar, the Hindu king of the province of Sind.
When Dahar refused to release the women and children, Hajjaj , a viceroy of the Umayyad Empire, sent three expeditions to Sind, the first two being unsuccessful. These military advantages would insure repeated Muslim victories over Hindu armies until the rise of Shivaji, the great Maratha military genius in the 18 th 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 Sulaiman recalled Qasim him to Iraq. Sulaiman hated Hajjaj, who died in , and Qasim was imprisoned and died there under torture.
First, the largely Buddhist population of Sind was unhappy with their Hindu rulers and their ethics of nonviolence inclined them to welcome the invaders. Second, Qasim responded positively to Buddhist and Hindu overtures of surrender and thereby avoided unnecessary bloodshed and destruction. For centuries caste discrimination would haunt Hindus and would motivated tens of thousands of Indians to convert to Islam and Christianity.
Qasim made another decision that would prove crucial to the relatively benign way in which Muslims ruled India for the next 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. That meant that they could continue to live under Islamic rule as long as they paid their religious tax jiyah.
Under some Islamic rulers jiyah was not required, and even when it was, collection was not consistently enforced or Hindus simply refused to pay it, sometimes even killing revenue officials. There were later Muslim rulers who were far more orthodox than Qasim, but they nevertheless conceded that Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists be allowed 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 12 th Century.
At the very most Islamic rule in India was theocentric, but never theocratic. 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. 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. Permission is given them to worship their gods. Nobody must be forbidden and prevented from following his own religion. 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.
Politics, Religion, and the Mughal Emperors. I would like to turn to the state of Orissa and focus on the fate of the Jagannath temple in Puri under Muslim rule. In 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 had continued the destruction of Hindu temples and idols that had begun under the first attack in Hindu anxieties about further Muslim advances in Orissa proved to be well founded. In 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 16 th Century only to be attacked again in 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.
In the Mughals under the Hindu general Man Singh defeated the Afghan forces, but he 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 Shahjahan gave them permission as he passed through Orissa in As emperor Shahjahan reaffirmed Akbar's position that all temples were state property and should be maintained as such.
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