An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

realize this assertion will rouse the sceptics, who will argue that Muslims and Hindus were slaughtering each other since at least 712 CE, when the teenaged Arab warrior Muhammad bin Qasim conquered the Hindu kingdom of Sindh. Indeed, the argument that tensions existed for 1,200 years, since the advent of Islam in north India, is often made both by Pakistanis (to justify separation) and by acolytes of the Hindutva cause, who routinely assert that as many as 60,000 Hindu temples were razed to the ground by Muslim rulers over the centuries, and mosques built on 3,000 of those temples’ foundations. That some of this happened is indisputable: one only has to visit Sultan Iltutmish’s celebrated mosque and its surrounding architecture at the Qutb Complex in Delhi to see the elaborate Hindu religious carvings that still adorn the pillars. But the work done separately by historians Cynthia Talbot and Richard M. Eaton in two different parts of India suggest that temple desecration was largely ‘a phenomenon of the advancing frontier’, occasioned by warfare and occurring mainly in the intense frenzy of armed conflict across changing territorial lines. Eaton believes that temple destruction by Turkic and other Muslim rulers throughout India occurred mainly in kingdoms in the process of being conquered; a royal temple symbolized the king’s power in Hindu political thought, and so destroying it signified that king’s utter humiliation. Talbot’s research in Andhra Pradesh at the time of M...