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Jain Memory of the Tughluq Sultans: Alternative Sources for the Historiography of Sultanate India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 November 2021

STEVEN M. VOSE Open the ORCID record for STEVEN M. VOSE [Opens in a new window]
STEVEN M. VOSE*
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Abstract

Some of the earliest narratives of meetings between leaders of an Indian community and their Muslim ruler appear in the Vividhatīrthakalpa (Chapters on Many Sacred Places) of the Jain monk Jinaprabhasūri (c. 1261–1333 ce). The text depicts the monk's relationship with Sultan Muḥammad bin Tughluq (r. 1325–51) in the years 1328–33, which resulted in the sovereign issuing a number of edicts (farmāns) to protect Jains and Jain temples and which led to the return of a Jina icon (Pkt. paḍima, Skt. pratimā) and the establishment of a Jain quarter in Delhi. Over the next two-and-a-half centuries, Jinaprabhasūri's story would be retold several times, with fifteenth-century narrators shifting his interlocutor to Fīrūz Shāh Tughluq (r. 1351–88). In the process of making Jinaprabha an object of memory, Jain authors of both the monk's own and rival monastic orders (gacchas) depicted the sultans as benefactors of the Jain community. While these narratives were attempts to delineate the proper relationship between Jain monastic leaders and Muslim rulers, they also constituted a Jain memory of the Tughluq sultans that is often at odds with modern historical representations of them. Reading these narratives alongside other evidence of Jains’ relations with the Tughluqs offers historians an alternative view of these figures and their relations with their Indian subjects, helping to de-centre modern historical narratives based on selective readings of Persian and Arabic sources and a privileging of Brahmanical or colonial viewpoints of the period. However, these narratives require historians to theorise this ‘memory’ to understand them productively as historical sources.

Keywords

Delhi SultanateMuḥammad bin TughluqFīrūz Shāh TughluqJinaprabhasūriVividhatīrthakalpaHindu-Muslim encounterMedieval historiographyJain-Muslim relationsJain monasticism
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 32 , Special Issue 1: Situating Sanskrit after the Sultanates , January 2022 , pp. 115 - 139
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Royal Asiatic Society

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References

1 While European scholarship on Jains in the Mughal court goes back to V. A. Smith, ‘The Jain Teachers of Abkar’, in Commemorative essays presented to Sir Ramkrishna Gopal Bhandarkar (Poona, 1917), more recent book-length studies of Jains in Mughal-era society include P. Dundas, History, Scripture and Controversy in a Medieval Jain Sect (London, 2007), and S. Jain, Identity, Community and State: The Jains under the Mughals (Delhi, 2018). For an assessment of Jains in the Mughal court, see A. Truschke, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (New York, 2016). For a recent account of intellectual exchanges between Hindu and Muslim theologians in the Mughal era that produced a translation of the Yogavāsiṣṭha, see S. Nair, Translating Wisdom: Hindu-Muslim Intellectual Interactions in Early Modern South Asia (Oakland, California, 2020).

2 E. De Clercq and T. Detige, ‘Colossi and Lotus Feet: Paṇḍitas and Bhaṭṭārakas in the North Indian Digambara Legacy’, in Jaina Painting and Manuscript Culture: in Memory of Paolo Pianarosa, (ed.) Julia Hegewald, 3 (Berlin, 2015), pp. 303–335; Leclère, B., ‘Ambivalent Representations of Muslims in Medieval Indian Theatre’, Studies in History XXVII (2011), pp. 155–195CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As this article was going to press, a new monograph that extensively treats the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Jain prabandhas as sources of history was published, A. Truschke, The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Indo-Muslim Rule (New York, 2021).

3 J. E. Cort, ‘Who is a king? Jain narratives of kingship in medieval western India’, in Open Boundaries: Jain Communities and Cultures in Indian History, (ed.) J. E. Cort (Albany, New York, 1998), pp. 85–110.

4 While outside the scope of this essay, Cort's claim that Jain narratives about Hindu kings were about establishing a Jain theory of kingship specifically for Hindu kings is difficult to square, given that a number of the texts that discuss Hindu kings were composed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It may be better, then, to argue that several Hindu kings, such as the Caulukya king Kumārapāla (r. 1143–72), similarly became objects of ‘memory’ that invited reflection on proper kingship in a period of rule by Islamicate kings. For fifteenth-century Jain works on Kumārapāla's reign, see Ācārya Jinavijaya Muniḥ (ed.), Kumārapālacaritrasańgrahaḥ, (new edition) J. B. Śāh (Ahmedabad, 2008).

5 Jinaprabhasūri, Vividhatīrthakalpa, (ed.) Jina Vijaya (Śāntiniketan, 1934), pp. 45, 97.

6 On the narratives Tapā Gaccha monks wrote to promote Hīravijayasūri's relationship with Akbar, see Truschke, Culture of Encounters, pp. 166–191, and Dundas, History, Scripture and Controversy, pp. 53–72.

7 See, e.g., Baranī's Fatāwa-i Jahāndārī (c.1350). For a translated portion of the text, see A. M. Husain, Tughluq Dynasty (Calcutta, 1963), p. 323. “Hindū” is how Baranī refers to the non-Muslim inhabitants of al-Hind.

8 Translated in H. M. Elliot and J. Dowson, The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, vol. 3 (London, 1871), pp. 374–388.

9 All quotations in this and subsequent paragraphs of this section come from Jinaprabhasūri, Vividhatīrthakalpa, pp. 45–46, 95–97. For a detailed study of Jinaprabhasūri's accomplishments in poetry, poetics and grammar, see S. M. Vose, Reimagining Jainism in Islamic India: Jain Intellectual Culture in the Delhi Sultanate (London, forthcoming), and Vose, S. M., ‘Jain uses of citrakāvya and multiple-language hymns in late medieval India: Situating the laghukāvya hymns of Jinaprabhasūri in the “assembly of poets”’, International Journal of Hindu Studies XX (2016), pp. 309–337CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 “Malikkakāphūra” may be a reference to Malik Kāfūr, the famous slave-general of ‘Alā’ al-dīn Khaljī (r. 1296-1316), who was taken from his previous master during the conquest of the Gujarati port city of Sthambhana (modern Khambhat [Cambay]) in 1299 and who died in 1316 with the collapse of the Khaljī dynasty. It seems that Jinaprabha included this name in his narrative because it would have been well known to his Jain reading audience as a famous and powerful courtier to the sultans whose own story was well connected with the Gujarat region central to Jinaprabha's text, performing a similar kind of temporal collapsing that the fifteenth-century narratives would do to place Jinaprabha in the court of Fīrūz Shāh Tughluq.

11 Dawlatābād (Skt., Daulatābād) is better understood as a second administrative centre, as there is no indication Muḥammad bin Tughluq had any plans to abandon Delhi. Persian narratives describing a deserted Delhi are hyperbolic, in keeping with their generally unfavourable treatment of this ruler. See Vose, Reimagining Jainism, and P. D. Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (Cambridge, 1999), especially pp. 258ff.

12 Jinaprabhasūri, Vividhatīrthakalpa, p. 96. Cf. P. Granoff, ‘Jinaprabhasūri and Jinadattasūri: Two studies from the Śvetāmbara Jain Tradition’, in Speaking of Monks: Religious Biography in India and China, (eds.) P. Granoff and K. Shinohara (Oakville, Ontario, 1992), p. 16.

13 Bhaṭṭāraka is also a title used in the Digambara tradition for the monks who head so-called ‘monasteries’ (maṭha). In the Śvetāmbara tradition, it is a title of respect for the ācārya of an order and does not imply that the monk resides in a fixed abode. As the term means ‘Lord’ and in its most general sense refers to a king, ‘Bhaṭṭāraka’ can also be taken as a translation of ‘Sultan’. For more on the Digambara use of the term, see Sarah Pierce Taylor, ‘Aesthetics of Sovereignty: The Poetic and Material Worlds of Medieval Jainism’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2016).

14 The narratives of Jinaprabhasūri's encounters with Muḥammad bin Tughluq appear in Chapters 22 and 51 of the VTK. For more on Jinaprabha's careful management of the way in which he speaks about himself in the VTK and how he defers superlatives about himself to another author, see Granoff, ‘Jinaprabhasūri and Jinadattasūri’. Elsewhere, I argue that Jinaprabhasūri's original title for the text, Kalpapradīpa (A Light on the Age), indicates that his main rhetorical purpose in composing and gathering these narratives of various pilgrimage places (tīrthas) is to comment on the times and events of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries through a Jain view of time and to propose a new way forward, guided by his lineage's leadership. The name ‘Vividhatīrthakalpa’ first appears in a seventeenth-century MS and shows how the text continued to remain important in new contexts; variants such as “Tīrthakalpa” appear as early as a fifteenth-century MS (see Vose, Reimagining Jainism).

15 Roughly two-thirds of the chapters are in Māhārāṣṭrī Prakrit, while the remainder are in Sanskrit. The chapters narrating the monk's relationship with the sultan are both in Prakrit, which facilitated rendering a number of Persian terms in an Indic idiom, including farmān, which is rendered in Prakrit as phuramāṇa, which could also mean something that is ‘waving’ (Skt. sphuramāṇa), such as a banner.

16 Jinaprabhasūri, Vividhatīrthakalpa, p. 46. In Jain cosmology, there are six eras of diminishing length in each half-cycle of time; we are presently in a descending half-cycle (avasarpiṇī), in which the world becomes ever more degraded morally and physically. Since the death of the disciple Jambū, we have been in the fifth ‘spoke’ (ara) or era, known as the ‘Unhappy’ Era (duḥṣama kāla), in which omniscience and liberation are impossible due to the overall corruption of the times. Mahāvīra and 22 other Jinas (all but the first Jina, Ṛṣabhanātha) lived in the ‘More-Unhappy-than-Happy’ Era (duḥṣama-sūṣama kāla), the fourth ‘spoke’ (ara) of time. Jinaprabha and other Jain writers of his period also frequently use the more normative kali kāla (Kali Era) to refer to their present. For more on the importance of the trope of time in the VTK, see Vose, Reimagining Jainism.

17 Although this chapter was written by the junior monk, it appears that Jinaprabha had final editorial control over the chapters that were included in the text, as Vidyātilaka closes his narrative by stating that Jinaprabha is still alive and well, living in Delhi, teaching the darśanas and going to court. The ambiguous ending suggests that Jinaprabha may have lived for a while beyond his assumed date of death, though we have no texts by him dated after 1333.

18 The earliest lineage texts we have in the Śvetāmbara tradition that use this title are those written about Kharatara Gaccha ācāryas, which were composed starting in the mid-thirteenth century. See, e.g., Kharataragacchabṛhadgurvāvali, (ed.) Acharya Jina Vijaya Muni (Bombay, 1956).

19 Jinaprabhasūri, Vividhatīrthakalpa, pp. 96–97; cf. Granoff, ‘Jinaprabhasūri and Jinadattasūri’, p. 16.

20 Baranī, Fatāwa-i Jahāndārī, c.1350, quoted in Husain, Tughluq Dynasty, p. 323.

21 Jinaprabhasūri is mentioned in the 1336 Nābhinandanajinoddhāraprabandha of the Upakeśa Gaccha ācārya Kakkasūri (Palitana, 1929). Therein, Jinaprabha's final pilgrimage from Delhi to Hastināpura is mentioned, including that he obtained a farmān from the sultan to lead it, though the layman who sponsored the pilgrimage (saṅghapati) is not the same one as mentioned in the VTK's narrative about this pilgrimage (Jinaprabhasūri, Vividhatīrthakalpa, p. 96).

22 Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, The Reḥla of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa (India, Maldive Islands and Ceylon), translated by M. Husain (Baroda, 1976), pp. 165, 266ff.

23 A photograph of this document, taken from a distance and which originally appeared in the now defunct newspaper, The Statesman, appears in Husain, Tughluq Dynasty, pp. 363–364. There was a cottage industry of sorts of fabricating farmāns at least from the Mughal period onward, so the question of this document's authenticity is an important matter to assess. See Vose, Reimagining Jainism, for a detailed discussion of this document.

24 B. C. Law, Historical Geography of Ancient India (Delhi, 1976), p. 3.

25 Indeed, the Kharataragacchabṛhadgurvāvali describes a pilgrimage route from Delhi to Śatruñjaya in Gujarat; it also mentions specific merchants who travelled from Delhi to Dawlatābād for business. Many Jains in these narratives and chronicles appear to have had a strong social and trade network and a wide ambit of circulation.

26 D. LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, 1983).

27 Kharataragaccha Paṭṭāvalī Saṅgrahaḥ, (ed.) M. Vinay Sagar (Jaipur, 2000), p. 5.

28 Ibid., p. 11.

29 Dundas, History, Scripture and Controversy, pp. 116-117.

30 Granoff, ‘Jinaprabhasūri and Jinadattasūri’, pp. 22, 27.

31 The text appears in the Kharataragacchabṛhadgurvāvali, pp. 89–96.

32 ‘Vṛddhācāryaprabandhāvali’, Kharataragacchabṛhadgurvāvali, p. 94.

33 Granoff, ‘Jinaprabhasūri and Jinadattasūri’, p. 26.

34 Purātana Prabandha Saṅgraha, (ed.) Jinavijaya Muni (Santiniketan, 1936), pp. 30–32.

35 Granoff, ‘Jinaprabhasūri and Jinadattasūri’, p. 36.

36 Ibid.

37 Somadharmagaṇi, Upadeśasaptatiḥ (Mumbai, 2045 vs [1988 ce]), pp. 50 (recto) –51 (verso).

38 Śubhaśīlagaṇi, Pañcaśatīprabodha (Prabandha) Sambandhaḥ (Prabandha-Pañcaśatī), (ed.) Muniśrī Mṛgendra Munijī (Surat, 1968), pp. 2–5, 7–8, 175–176.

39 The monastic names of Kharatara Gaccha ācāryas in the period usually begin with “Jina-”, while those of the Tapā Gaccha begin with “Vijaya-”. Śubhaśīlagaṇi, Prabandha-Pañcaśatī, pp. 175–176.

40 Śubhaśīlagaṇi, Prabandha-Pañcaśatī, pp. 7-8. See also Granoff, ‘Jinaprabhasūri and Jinadattasūri’, p. 38.

41 “1399 varṣe perojasāhena paridhāpitaḥ ḍhillyāṃ”, Vividhagacchīyapaṭṭāvalīsaṃgraha, Prathama Bhāga [Part 1], (ed.) Jinavijaya Muni (Bombay, 1961), p. 51.

42 Dundas, P., ‘Jain perceptions of Islam in the early modern period’, Indo-Iranian Journal XLII (1999), p. 37Google Scholar.

43 Dundas, History, Scripture and Controversy, p. 117. Dharmasāgara, it should be noted, was censured by his ācārya for his invectives against Jinaprabhasūri. Nevertheless, the damage was done; no further narratives of Jinaprabhasūri would be composed by Tapā authors.

44 Vose, Reimagining Jainism.

45 For more on the ascendancy of Śatruñjaya as the foremost pilgrimage site for Śvetāmbara Jains in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, see ibid., Chapter 4, and, for a contrasting view that places the rise several centuries earlier, see E. De Clercq, ‘Biographies of Ṛṣabha and the Rise of Śatruñjaya’, unpublished paper, https://www.academia.edu/27650303/BIOGRAPHIES_OF_%E1%B9%9A%E1%B9%A2ABHA_AND_THE_RISE_OF_%C5%9AATRU%C3%91JAYA (accessed 28 March 2021).

46 The 1336 Sanskrit Nābhinandanajinoddhāraprabandha by the Upakeśa Gaccha ācārya, Kakkasūri, gives more detail about the destruction and restoration of Śatruñjaya in its third and fourth chapters; an undated but prior source in Old Gujarati, Ambadevasūri's Samarārāsu, also details Samara's relationship with Alp Khān and the restoration of the site. See O. Qvarnström, ‘The Story Behind the Story: Jain Identity and Patronage as Narrated by Kakkasūri in the Nābhinandanajinoddhāraprabandha’, in The Gift of Knowledge: Patterns of Patronage in Jainism, (eds.) Christine Chojnacki and Basile Leclère (Bengaluru, 2018), pp. 196-208. See also Vose, Reimagining Jainism, and J. E. Cort, Framing the Jina: Narratives of Icons and Idols in Jain History (London, 2010), especially Chapter 3.

47 Jinaprabhasūri, Vividhatīrthakalpa, pp. 1-5 (see esp. vv. 119-20 and v. 132, p. 5).

48 Ibid., pp. 46 (line 8), 96 (lines 30-31).

49 Gaṇi Siddhicandra Upādhyāya, Bhānucandragaṇicaritra, (ed.) Mohanlal Dalichand Desai (Ahmedabad & Calcutta, 1941), 3.32-71, pp. 24-27.

50 Ibid., 4.119-122, p. 35.

51 Ibid., 4.152-157, pp. 37-38.

52 See Vose, Reimagining Jainism.

53 P. Prasad, ‘The Jain community in the Delhi Sultanate’, Islamic Culture LXX (1996), pp. 49-61.

54 The inscriptional records collected by P. Prasad, Sanskrit Incriptions of the Delhi Sultanate (Oxford, 1990) show little activity among Śvetāmbara Jains in the fourteenth century. Most of those that she collected are Digambara records from Deogarh and Ajayagaḍh, which discuss new images consecrated or record special fasts conducted by notable monks. Still, they show that in areas immediately surrounding the heart of Sultanate territory, religious activities carried on as usual.

55 O. Qvarnström, ‘The story behind the story: Jain identity and patronage as narrated by Kakkasūri in the Nābhinandanajinoddhāraprabandha’, in The gift of knowledge: Patterns of patronage in Jainism, (eds.) Christine Chojnacki and Basile Leclère (Bangaluru, 2018), pp. 196–208; Husain, Tughluq Dynasty, p. 323.

56 A manuscript of eight hymns (gīta) and short verse works (pada, gāthā kulaka) about Jinaprabhasūri, dated to c.1368–94 ce (1400–25 vs), includes one work that places the monk in the court of one “Kudubudīnu”, which may be a reference to Qutb al-din Mubarak Shah (r. 1316–20), the last ruler of the Khaljī dynasty. This collection of verse works is edited by A. Nāhṭā and B. Nāhṭā and appears in the prefatory essay, ‘Śāsanprabhāvak ŚrīJinprabhsūri’, in Jinaprabhasūri, Vidhimārgaprapā, (ed.) M. Vinaysagar (Jaipur, 2000), pp. 22-24. The fourth verse of the fourth hymn reads:

asapati kudubudīnu mani raṃjiu, dīṭhali jinaprabhasūri e /

ekaṃtihi mana sāsaü pūchaï, rāyamaṇoraha purī e // Lord of Horses, Qutb al-Din, got the idea in his mind to see Jinaprabhasūri,

With single-minded purpose to ask about the teachings; the king's desire was fulfilled.

57 M. B. Jhavery, Comparative and Critical Study of Mantrasastra (Ahmedabad, 1944), p. 236.

58 Ibid.

59 Jackson, Delhi Sultanate, p. 168.

60 Unless otherwise indicated, this paragraph is based on the work of S. R. Sarma, ‘Yantrarāja: The astrolabe in Sanskrit’, Indian Journal of History of Science XXXIV (1999), pp. 145-158; and idem, ‘Sulṭān, Sūri and the Astrolabe’, in The Archaic and the Exotic: Studies in the History of Indian Astronomical Instruments, (ed.) S. R. Sarma (New Delhi, 2008 [orig. pub. 2000]), pp. 179-198.

61 Husain, Tughluq Dynasty, p. 323; and A. K. Chatterjee, A Comprehensive History of Jainism, vol. 2, (New Delhi, 2000 [1978]). Chatterjee cites the notoriously shaky M. D. Desai, whose 1933 Gujarati history of Jain literature has been challenged for its factual accuracy on a number of occasions. However, unlike the reference for the teacher Guṇabhadra, the reference to Munibhadra gaining honours from the sultan appears solid by his reference to v. 9 of the praśasti of the Śāntināthacarita (p. 141 n.23). Interestingly, Chatterjee notes, “This [honour] seems somewhat strange, as that Muslim monarch was one of the greatest enemies of non-Muslims, and was very well-known [sic] for his iconoclastic zeal” (pp. 125–126).

62 H. von Glasenapp, Jainism: An Indian Religion of Salvation, translated by Shridhar B. Shrotri (New Delhi, 1999 [1925]), p. 74. More details are elaborated in the Collected Works of R. G. Bhandarkar, vol. 2 (1927–1933).

63 The term āgama has a specific meaning in the Śvetāmbara tradition, referring to the canonical texts; the term is also used in the titles of many tantric works. One wonders, then, if this text and the knowledge contained therein was controlled in some way. The text is edited by Kṛṣṇasaṃkara Keiavarama Raikva as Yantrarāja of Mahendra Sūri, together with the commentary of Malayendu Sūri and Yantraśiromaṇi of Viśrāma (Bombay, 1936). See Sarma, ‘Yantrarāja’ and ‘Sulṭān, Sūri and Astrolabe’.

64 Sarma, ‘Yantrarāja’; and idem, ‘Sulṭān, Sūri and Astrolabe’, pp. 190ff.

65 Sarma, ‘Sulṭān, Sūri and Astrolabe’.

66 Flood, F., ‘Pillars, palimpsests, and princely practices: Translating the past in Sultanate Delhi’, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics XLIII (2003), pp. 95–116Google Scholar. Flood follows William McKibben's interpretation of the placement of the Iron Pillar in the middle of the Quwwat al-Islām mosque in Delhi not as a trophy of conquest, but as an homage to the illustrious history of Indian rulers, in which Iltutmish was trying to place himself. Fīrūz Shāh, then, was not inventing a new vocabulary of a hybrid Indo-Muslim kingship; rather, he was continuing a practice established by previous sultans from over a century before they came to power.

67 Shams al-Dīn ‘Afif, Tārikh-i Fīrūz Shāhī, translated H. M. Elliot, in The History of India as Told by its Own Historians, Vol. 3, (ed.) John Dowson (London, 1871), p. 352.

68 Husain, Tughluq Dynasty, pp. 421-422.

69 S. A. A. Rizvi, The Wonder That Was India, Volume 2: From the Coming of the Muslims to the British Conquest, 1200-1700 (London, 1987), p. 52.

70 S. H. Hodivala, Studies in Indo-Muslim History (Bombay, 1939), p. 331.

71 The Persian is: سِیْوَرَگان

72 Husain, Tughluq Dynasty, p. 363.

73 Additionally, Jackson notes that in a ms. collection of his legal decisions (Fatāwā-yi Fīrūz Shāhī), Fīrūz makes several references to dhimmīs, “by which it clearly means Hindus” (1999, p. 282 and n.34).

74 The three are: the Futūḥāt, Baranī's Ta'rīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī, and an anonymous history composed by a court panegyrist (Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate, p. 155). Though ‘Afif served in his court, his Ta'rīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī was composed in the early fifteenth century, over a decade after Fīrūz's death.

75 Baranī was the “representative of a family that had served Balaban's officers and ‘Alā’ al-Dīn Khaljī. His paternal ancestors may have been Turkish; more probably they were of Persian stock”. His paternal grandmother was a sayyid. I. Habib argues that, unlike ‘Iṣāmī, Baranī is not so much anti-Hindu on religious grounds as on their low status; like his embittered contemporary, however, he thinks that Islam is imperfectly implanted in Indian converts, who will shed their faith in the first sign of danger, regardless of the rank to which they had ascended (Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate, p. 292).

76 Notable among these recent efforts are Flood, ‘Pillars, palimpsests’; F. Flood, Objects of translation: Material culture and the medieval ‘Hindu-Muslim’ encounter (Princeton, 2009); R. H. Davis, Lives of Indian images (Princeton, 1997); Talbot, C., ‘Inscribing the other, inscribing the self: Hindu-Muslim identities in pre-colonial India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History XXXVII (1995), pp. 692–722CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and R. M. Eaton, ‘Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states’, in Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking religious identities in Islamicate South Asia, (eds.) D. Gilmartin and B. B. Lawrence (Gainesville, 2000), pp. 246-281.

77 Works that espouse these views are numerous and stretch back well before Elliot and Dowson's eight-volume series, The history of India as told by its own historians, published between 1867 and 1877, the purpose of which was, in their own words, to “make our native subjects more sensible of the immense advantages accruing to them under the mildness and equity of our rule” (quoted in Metcalf, B., ‘Presidential address: Too little and too much: Reflections on Muslims in the History of India’, Journal of Asian Studies LIV (1995), p. 954Google Scholar). These colonial-era narratives were taken up nearly whole cloth by Hindu nationalist historians. The clearest connection between the colonial and the nationalist historiographical models comes in the form of Sita Ram Goel's two-volume Hindu temples: What happened to them (New Delhi, 1990-1). Reading Persian chronicles (in Elliot and Dowson's translation) in the second volume, Goel purports to give a factual account of widespread destruction of Hindu temples straight, as one section heading puts it, “from the horse's mouth”. Metcalf, Talbot, Eaton and others have pointed out the numerous interpretive and epistemological problematics of both Elliot and Dowson's as well as Goel's projects.

78 Davis, Lives of Indian Images, makes this argument in detailing military-related plunder among South Indian Hindu kings, while Eaton, ‘Temple desecration’, shows a broader historical trend in which temples for which we have proof of destruction at the hands of a sultan or other Muslim leader were only attacked within the context of conquest.

79 Take, for example, the varying strategies used by different Muslim rulers over several centuries toward a major Hindu pilgrimage temple in Multan, discussed in Friedmann, Y., ‘The temple of Multan: A note on early Muslim attitudes to idolatry’, Israel Oriental Studies II (1972), pp. 176–182Google Scholar.

80 See the essays in D. Gilmartin and B. B. Lawrence (eds.), Beyond Turk and Hindu (Gainesville, 2000).

81 For a fulsome treatment of the range of meanings of ‘iconoclasm’ in Islam, see J. J. Elias, Aisha's cushion: Religious art, perception, and practice in Islam (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2012).

82 P. K. Gode, ‘Use of Ganges water by Muslim rulers from A.D. 1300 to 1800’, in Studies in Indian Cultural History, vol. 3 (Poona, 1969), pp. 141-142; and Ibn Baṭṭūṭa. The Travels of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, A.D. 1325-1354. vol. 3. translated H. A. R. Gibb (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 594-595.

83 If we take the hint from the VTK seriously, it may also be the case that the water around Dawlatābād was not good. See Granoff, ‘Jinaprabhasūri and Jinadattasūri’, p. 13.