India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765 Quotes

“the two largest states in South Asia, India and Pakistan, have remained bitter rivals,”
― Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765

“As Pakistan’s President Zia-ul-Haq stated in 1981,”
― Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765

“Take Islam out of Pakistan and make it a secular state; it would collapse.”
― Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765

“the sole criterion of its national identity.”
― Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765

“with one of them making Islam a state religion”
― Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765

“religion as the primary force that had ‘always’ divided South Asia’s inhabitants.”
― Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765

“contemporary Indians to describe the conquerors was not ‘Muslim’ but ‘Turk”
― Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765

“but as ‘the Muslim conquest’,”
― Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765

“towards the end of the twelfth century not as a Turkish conquest”
― Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765

“But generations of historians have referred to the equally momentous events that took place in India”
― Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765

“Although the dominant pattern here was one of looting and carrying off the images of state deities, we also hear of Hindu kings destroying their enemies’ temples.”
― Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age: 1000-1765

“['A]lamgir [Aurangzeb] came to formulate a very different model of sovereignty for himself and for the empire he ruled. In this new dispensation, the kingdom would be governed not by a charismatic, semi-divine king, but by a impersonal law -- namely, the 'shar'ia' of Hanafi Sufis -- administered by a reconstituted and vastly empowered judiciary guided by a reformed, thoroughly codified legal style. [...] In the courts of local judges in Gujarat, Hindu artisans, merchants and Brahmins commonly invoked the 'shar'ia' in transactions pertaining to buying, selling, renting and mortgaging property, or in pursuing litigation in law courts. Hindu women in particular used Islamic law in their attempts to resist patriarchal domination. The same held true further north. In the Punjabi town of Batala, writes the historian J. S. Grewal, 'the brahmin, the Khatri, the goldsmith and the Hindu carpenter frequented the qazi's court as much as the sayyid and the Muslim mason'. And in Malwa, the vast majority of attesters in court documents, excepting those dealing with Muslim marriages, were non-Muslims. While acknowledging religious difference, moreover, such courts did not draw legal boundaries around India's ethnic or religious communities. Significantly, the word 'shari'a' as used in local courts was not understood as applying to Muslims only, as it is today. Rather it carried the ordinary and non-sectarian meaning of 'legal'. Until the 1770s, when East India Company officials codified separate legal systems for Muslims and Hindus, Islamic law as it was administered in Mughal courts had functioned as common law. 'Alamgir's project of basing Mughal governance and sovereignty on a standardized codification of that law therefore built upon legal practices that, even though applied differently across the empire, were already in place in the Indian countryside.”
― Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765

“Akbar's Rajput policy, however, did not result from any grand, premeditated strategy. Rather, it began as a response to the internal politics of one of the Rajput lineages, the Kachwaha clan, based in the state of Amber in northern Rajasthan. In 1534 the clan's head, Puran Man, died with no adult heir and was succeeded by his younger brother, Bharmal. Puran Mal, however, did have a son who by the early 1560s had come of age and challenged Bharmal's right to rule Amber. Feeling this pressure from within his own clan, Bharmal approached Akbar for material support, offering in exchange his daughter in marriage. The king agreed to the proposal. In 1562 the Kachwaha chieftain entered Mughal service, with Akbar assuring him of support in maintaining his position in the Kachwaha political order, while his family entered the royal household. Besides his daughter, Bharmal also sent his son Bhagwant Das and his grandson Man Singh (1550-1614) to the court in Agra. For several generations thereafter, the ruling clan continued to give its daughters to the Mughal court, thereby making the chiefs of these clans the uncles, cousins or even father-in-laws of Mughal emperors. The intimate connection between the two courts had far-reaching results. Not only did Kachwaha rulers quickly rise in rank and stature in the Mughal court, but their position within their own clan was greatly enhanced by Akbar's confirmation of their political leadership. Akbar's support also enhanced the position of the Kachwahas as a whole -- and hence Amber state -- in the hierarchy of Rajasthan's other Rajput lineages.

Neighbouring clans soon realised the political wisdom of attaching themselves to the expanding Mughal state, a visibly rising star in North Indian politics. [...] Driving these arrangements, though, was not just the incentive of courtly patronage. The clans of Rajasthan well understood that refusal to engage with the Mughals would bring the stick of military confrontation. Alone among the Rajput clans, the Sisodiyas of Mewar in southern Rajasthan, north India's pre-eminent warrior lineages, obstinately refused to negotiate with the Mughals. In response, Akbar in 1568 led a four-month siege of the Sisodiyas' principal stronghold of Chittor, which ultimately fell to the Mughals, but only after a spectacular 'jauhar' in which the fort's defenders, foreseeing their doom, killed their women and gallantly sallied forth to meet their deaths. In all, some 30,000 defenders of the fort were killed, although its ruler, Rana Pratap, managed to escape. For decades, he and the Sisodiya house would continue to resist Mughal domination, whereas nearly every other Rajput lineage had acknowledged Mughal overlordship.”
― Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765

“In addition, Sultan Iltumish, for all his rhetoric of being India's sole legitimate Muslim ruler, continued to issue coins with the old bull-and-horseman motif and a Sanskritized form of his name and title: 'Suratana Sri Samsadina', the latter referring to his given name, Shams al-Din. He also enlarged Delhi's Qutb mosque by three times in order to accomodate the many immigrants from beyond the Khyber who had flocked to Delhi during his reign. And he added three storeys to the city's famous minaret, the Qutb Minar. Notably, he placed a seven-metre iron pillar in the centre of the mosque's oldest courtyard, on a direct axis with its main prayer chamber. Originally installed in a Vishnu temple to announce the military victories of a fourth-or-fifth century Indian king, the pillar was now associated with Iltumish and his own victories. In transplanting the pillar in this way, the Sultan broke with Islamic architectural conventions while conforming to Indian political traditions. For in 1164, within living memory of Iltumish's installations of the Vishnu pillar in Delhi's great mosque, Vigraharaja IV Chauhan (r. 1150-64) recorded his own conquests on the same stone pillar on which the emperor Ashoka had published an edict back in the third century BC.”
― Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765

“[D]uring the years 1219-21 Genghis Khan, the founder of the Mongol empire in eastern Asia, burst into western Asia. Offended by the insolent behaviour of the same ruler of Khwarazm who a few years earlier had annihilated the Ghurids, the Mongol leaders personally marched across Asia to punish the impudent monarch. In the course of this expedition, Mongol cavalry inflicted fire and fury throughout Central Asia and Khurasan, driving many thousands of terrified town-dwellers and semi-nomadic peoples into India, where they sought and found refuge. It was a propitious moment both for them and for Iltumish, who needed men skilled in civil and military affairs in order to govern his fledgling kingdom. The influx of a host of refugees in search of a stable state with a successful and generous Muslim ruler boosted the Sultan's claims to being precisely that sort of sovereign. For Iltumish and the youthful Delhi sultanate, then, the Mongol holocaust in Central Asia proved a timely book, unlike the catastrophy it represented for millions in Asia and the Middle East.”
― Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765

“Gujarat's temple of Somnath [...] had been fortified in 1216 to protect it from attacks by Hindu rulers in neighbouring Malwa. Recorded instances of Indian kings attacking the temples of their political rivals date from at least the eighth century, when Bengali troops destroyed what they thought was the image of Vishnu Vaikuntha, Kahsmir's state deity under King Lalitaditya (r. 724-60). In the early ninth century Govinda III, a king of the Deccan's Rashtrakuta dynasty (753-982), invaded and occupied Kanchipuram in the Tamil country. Intimidated by this action, the king of nearby Sri Lanka sent Govinda several (probably Buddhist) images that the Rashtrakuta king then installed in Śiva temple in his capital. At about the same time the Pandya King Śrimara Śrivallabha (r. 815-62) also invaded Sri Lanka and took back to his capital at Madurai, in India's extreme south, a golden Buddha image -- a symbol of the integrity of the Sinhalese state -- that had been installed in the island kingdom's Jewel Palace. In the early tenth century, King Herambapala of north India's Pratihara dynasty (c.750-1036) seized a solid-gold image of Vishnu Vaikuntha when he defeated the king of Kangra, in the Himalayan foothills. By mid-century the same image had been seized from the Pratiharas by the Chandela King Yasovarman (r. 925-45), who installed it in the Lakshmana Temple of Khajuraho, the Chandelas' capital in north-central India. In the mid eleventh century the Chola King Rajadhiraja (r. 1044-52), Rajendra's son, defeated the Chalukyas and raided their capital, Kalyana, in the central Deccan plateau, taking a large black stone door guardian to his capital in Tanjavur, where it was displayed as a trophy of war. In the late eleventh century, the Kashmiri King Harsha (r. 1089-1111) raised the plundering of enemy temples to an institutionalized activity. In the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, kings of the Paramara dynasty (800-1327) attacked and plundered Jain temples in Gujarat. Although the dominant pattern here was one of looting and carrying off images of state deities, we also hear of Hindu kings destroying their enemies' temples. In the early tenth century, the Rashtrakuta monarch Indra III (r. 914-29) not only demolished the temple of Kalapriya (at Kalpi near the Jammu river), patronized by the Rashtrakutas' deadly enemies the Pratiharas, but took special delight in recording the fact.”
― Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765

“Deprived of their direct ties with Central Asia -- and with it their access to Turkish slaves, mercenaries and war horses -- the later Ghaznavids lost their wider, imperial vision an acquired the character of a regional, North Indian state. They were certainly not seen as menacing aliens who might have posed a civilzational threat to Indian culture. Contemporary Sanskrit inscriptions refer to the Ghaznavids not as Muslims but as 'turushkas' (Turks), an ethnic term, or as 'hammiras', a Sanskritized rendering of 'amir' (Arabic for commander), an official title. For their part, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries Ghaznavid rulers in India issued coins from Lahore bearing the same legends that had appeared on those of their Indian predecessors, the Hindu Shahi dynasty (c.850-1002). These included Śiva's bull Nandi and the Sanskrit phrase 'śri samanta deva' (Honourable Chief Commander) inscribed in Devanagari script. Such measures point to the later Ghaznavids' investment in establishing cultural and monetary continuity with North Indian kingsdoms. Moreover, despite the dynasty's rhetoric about defending Sunni Islam, religion posed no bar to military recruitment, as Indians had always been prominent in Ghaznavid armies. In 1033 Mahmud of Ghazni gave the command of his army stationed in Lahore to a Hindu general, and in Ghazni itself Indian military contingents had their own commanders, inhabited their own quarter of the city, and were generally considered more reliable soldiers than the Turks.
Crucially, the Ghaznavids brought to the Punjab the entire gamut of Persianate institutions and practices that would define the political economy of much of India for centuries to come. Inherited from the creative ferment of tenth-century Khurasan and Central Asia under the Samanid rulers of Bukhara, these included: the elaboration of a ranked and salaried bureaucracy tied to the state's land revenue and military systems; the institution of elite, or military, slavery; an elaboration of the office of 'sultan'; the courtly patronage of Persian arts, crafts and literature; and a tradition of spiritually powerful holy men, or Sufis, whose relations with royal power were ambivalent, to say the least.”
― Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765

“[T]he demonization of Mahmud [of Ghazni] 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 Indian 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 being the Khyber, this bit of colonial mischief has stoked Hindus' ill-feeling toward Muslims ever since. 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.”
― Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765