CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION : INDIA, HINDUTVA AND HISTORY

INDIA, HINDUTVA AND HISTORY

by Suranya Aiyar 

For my children and all the children of India

May you all grow to be wise, joyous and fulfilled Indians

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 

This work discusses the history of South India in the context of claims about it by the followers of Hindutva. It is written for whoever has the patience to read it, and for which I thank you, dear reader! But it is addressed, first and foremost, to my clansmen and clanswomen, the Brahmins of Tamil Nadu, affectionately known as “Tam Brams”.

The immediate reason for writing this paper was my bewildering discovery early last year of the immense support among Tamil Brahmins for the politics of Hindutva, especially its aggressive repudiation of the idea of a historical fraternity between the Muslims and Hindus of India. I learnt on enquiry that secular-minded Tam Bram friends and relatives were experiencing the same within their own families and wider circle all over the world.

From Mylapore to Delhi to San Francisco - for my historically peripatetic people have spread far and wide in the last one hundred years - pitched battles raged over the family dining table about Mughals, temples, mosques, Pakistan, and all the other tropes of the Hindu Right.

I found this bewildering because all my life, which has been spent in Delhi, Hindutva politics has been firmly centred in North India. Its claim of centuries of Mughal oppression was cobbled together by reference to the kings of Delhi, its communal riots were up here, its rath yatras led up here, its leaders and cadres were North Indian, and when I was growing up, it was in choice idiomatic Hindi - the language of North India - that its screeching sadhvis exhorted Hindus to find their lost manhood, and establish a Hindu Rashtra.

The Mughals were never in the Deccan until the last Great Mughal, Aurangzeb, who was repeatedly humiliated there by forces much smaller than his own. So, to my mind, South India was as far as from Hindutva as sambar from seekh kebab.

Until recently, Hindutva had never extended its story farther south than Maharashtra, where it claimed Chhatrapati Shivaji as a sort of ideological forebear. Ironically though, in sharp contradistinction to Shivaji’s iconic status in the world of North Indian Hindutva, he finds no such exalted place in my ancestral homeland of Tanjore in Tamil Nadu. This, even though the Marathas sat on the throne of Tanjore for nearly two centuries!

The cause celebre of Hindutva politics is the claimed erosion of Hindu civilisation by centuries of Muslim rule. But Tamil Nadu is possibly the most visibly Hindu one-lakh-plus square kilometres on Earth. Hindus in Tamil Nadu are a majority of 90 percent, compared with the national average of 80 percent. Muslims are a minority of under 6 percent of the population of Tamil Nadu, compared with the national average of 14 percent (20 percent in Uttar Pradesh, a major centre of Hindutva politics). Even Christians are a larger percentage of the population than Muslims in Tamil Nadu.

Though other religions have existed in Tamil Nadu for centuries, a visitor observing the cuisine, language and dress there could be forgiven for thinking that it is an entirely Hindu place.

Hindutva mass agitations are built on allegations of Muslim kings having demolished Hindu temples. But in Tamil Nadu there are temples everywhere. The most striking visual experience when wandering through Tamil Nadu is of its towering, tiered temple shikharas. Every few kilometres there is a grand temple, and as you move away from it there will not be a street or alleyway without its own smaller one.

Tamil Nadu is the home of the Kanjivaram sari and Bharatanatyam. These are possibly the two most celebrated living forms of Hindu aesthetics, allowing for a moment that there is such a thing, in India and the world today.   

Hindutva politics points to the large Muslim populations of the North to complain of centuries of conversion of Hindus to Islam. I will deal with the subject of conversion and its misrepresentation in the politics of Hindutva later. Suffice it for the moment to say that you could travel the length and breadth of Tamil Nadu, and come away with the impression that it has no Muslims. You do not easily find streets or shop fronts with Muslim names in Tamil country. You never hear of a big Muslim business house based there.

The only conscious state programme of conversion to any religion in Tamil Nadu was by the Portuguese in the 17^th century. As we will see in the chapters to come, the Portuguese Jesuit missionaries were widely supported, encouraged and protected by Tamil Nadu’s ruling Hindu rajas and nayakas of the time.

There was a cosmopolitan ethos among the rulers of Tamil Nadu since ancient times, which was also to be found in courts elsewhere in South India. Kings have always had bigger fish to fry than religion.

Muslim merchants from Arabia came to coastal Tamil Nadu from at least the 7^th century onwards, without causing any religious or cultural disruption. If anything, the period of the 7^th to 11^th centuries was one of growing rivalry among the non-Muslim creeds of South India. First, you had the Buddhists and Jains at loggerheads for centuries. Then you had the Shaivites against the Buddhists and Jains. And finally you had the Vaishnavites against all three. This competition eventually led to the near-complete disappearance of Buddhism and Jainism from the South.

How exactly Jainism and Buddhism lost their position in South India has still not been fully discovered. But the fall was spectacular. The once great following of Jainism and, to a lessor but significant extent, of Buddhism in South India is described in detail in the chapters to follow. From being the faiths of mighty South Indian dynasties for centuries, today Jains are 0.12 percent of the population in Tamil Nadu. Buddhists are a miniscule 0.02 percent.

What accounts for the take-over of Hinduism? What it violent or peaceful? What are the implications of this take-over for the claims of Hindutva about proselytising and conversions by other faiths in India? How do we interpret the close ties between Jains and Hindus today in light of their historical conflicts? These are some of the questions that this paper invites the reader to ponder.  

Sectarian conflict in Tamil country did not end with the dominance of Hinduism over Jainism and Buddhism. The formation of divergent sub-sects within Hinduism, and internal doctrinal conflict has carried on and on down the ages in South India. In the 12^th century we had the emergence of the Virashaiva or Lingayat sect, which denounced many of the Hindu practices of the time. Even today, there is a voice among the Lingayats asking to be declared a separate faith from Hinduism.

Intra-communal hostilities erupt intermittently among Hindus to the present times. In January 2024, while the votaries of Hindutva were in Ayodhya making a great show of Hindu solidarity, there were reports of a brawl between two Iyengar sects in a ceremonial temple procession at Kanchipuram (1)!

But the story of religion in South India is by no means one of communal hostility alone. In the pages to follow, we will survey both religious conflict and concord in South India down the ages.

I will attempt to show in this paper that contrary to the Hindutva portrayal of Muslim kingship as perverse, exceptional and “foreign” to all that came before it, throughout known history in India, the rise and fall of kings, including of the Muslim ones, has followed the same pattern: A great warrior rises, and founds a dynasty. His kingdom expands in wealth, prestige and power. This growth occurs first with raids into neighbouring kingdoms, and later by their annexation.

From the earliest kingdoms, territorial expansion begins with obtaining through war, or its threat, the fealty and tribute of other kingdoms. First, this overlordship is established over neighbouring kingdoms, and then it is expanded over kingdoms farther and farther away, until vast empires on the other side of the world are annexed.

Along the way other kings are attempting to expand in the same way, and history is written as they win or lose.

There appears to be an in-built compulsion for kingdoms to expand. It is something like the compulsion of businesses to expand in order to survive in modern capitalism.

Kingly succession is a violent affair marked by fratricide and civil war. The most common mode in which kings are ousted is through the betrayal of generals and protégés. Typically, they would have risen on the strength of the exceptional affection and trust of the very king that they depose.

Wars are savage and terrifying. The brutality is aimed not only at defeating the incumbent king, but at impressing and scaring his would-be supporters into submission. The sacking and burning of cities and other civilian sites, the flaying of enemies, the display of severed heads, and so on - this was how wars were fought.

A king was expected to display his might. It was part and parcel of the incidents of kingship for legends of the king’s punishment of enemies and the ferocity of his armies to be told, embellished, and even to be made-up.

It is meaningless to tut-tut, as the followers of Hindutva do, at the real, or concocted, stories of the plunder and destruction of ancient cities, universities, monuments and temples by kings. As we will see, kings of all religions – whether Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Christian, Confucian or Muslim - did these things. Right from the start of recorded history, we see plunder, conquest and the laying-to-waste of cities as typical in the age of kings for replenishing treasuries, asserting a kingdom’s boundaries, expanding its extent and compensating soldiers.

One of the ideas put forth in this paper is that we have misunderstood our history in ways that have subtly helped the spinning of the divisive Hindutva version of it. For instance, there is too much of a propensity when speaking of history to declare the “end” of an era with the ouster of a king. This gives the wrong impression of the shattering of a people on the replacement of their kings. In India, this understanding of history has engendered an aggressive politics that seeks to avenge imaginary civilisational traumas of the past.

In the chapters to come, I will try to demonstrate that while royal dynasties saw abrupt endings and breaks, cultures did not follow in kind. My case is that cultures never end or break. Rather, they transform over time in conversation with the events of history, and with other cultures.

Moreover, the continuity to be observed in history despite changes of kings and dynasties more often than not extends beyond the cultural to the administrative sphere as well. Over and over, and not just in India, you see on a closer study of past societies in the midst of the defeat of their ruler, that the old administration and bureaucracy is retained as the conscious policy of the new regime.

The break occurs at the level of the deposed monarch and usually extends only to his most stubborn adherents. Everything else continues. The administrative machinery of the old king is adopted by the new one. Even the courtiers might retain their positions.

Another flaw in our understanding of history is to ignore the role of dumb luck in the outcome of battles. I suppose it is natural to try and give a rationale to events. But we need to be alive to the pitfalls of such thinking.

There is too broad a tendency to declare the fallen king and his people as having been in a state of “decline” or “decadence”. This acts as fertile ground for revisionists to come in, as did the proponents of Hindutva, with theories of internal decay and external exploitation with which they manipulate people into thinking of themselves as historically stained and oppressed.

It is but a short step from here to the bitter ideas of revenge on which the thugs of Hindutva thrive.

In order to address this, what our dusty old histories sorely need is a sportsmanlike spirit. The trophy is up for grabs, and you can play to win, while still respecting your adversary. You can lose a match, and still say “well played” to the other side. We Indians need to take our history a little more like sport.

Another tendency on the part of historians which feeds into the Hindutva distortion of Indian history, is to rank rulers based on the geographical size of their domains. A closer understanding of events on the ground, especially in the highly competitive but relatively spatially constrained theatre of the Deccan, shows the geographical size of a ruler’s domains as not to be determinative of his power, prestige or historical influence.

In South India, it was typically the case that a particular king was confined to a relatively smaller area because he was equally matched by his neighbours. Such a king might well have had the wealth and fighting power of a contemporaneous one with larger lands elsewhere. Land that had been acquired owing to the relative weakness of neighbours.

Rajas of geographically small so-called “principalities” could have immense wealth and several centuries of continuous rule behind them. As a consequence, their contribution and influence on the local culture, politics, language and art, and relations with neighbouring kingdoms in their region, could be far more significant historically than any other contemporaneous ruler’s that historians might designate as “emperor” because of their geographically larger kingdoms.

Hindutva narrations exploit the emphasis on these far-off emperors to paint a picture of oppression and “foreign” rule in places that in fact functioned for centuries with complete socio-cultural and economic independence under their local rajas.   

This independence typically remained undisturbed even when a local satrap, warrior chieftain or raja was defeated by an outside ruler, and was required to pay a tribute or place his forces at the disposal of the victor. Ouster and direct rule by the victorious king was typically not the preferred option.

Even in the age of kings, direct rule was impractical. Federal administration became a necessity as kingdoms expanded. A local ruler with knowledge and support among the people was preferred for stability and effective governance. The victorious king was typically satisfied if the defeated one or his successors would agree to an annual tribute and the supply of forces when called for. In other words, a military alliance.

We have to see tributes, jizya, the pledge of forces and other agreements among kings in the aftermath of battle in this light. Furthermore, we have to see them as agreements, treaties or alliances between equals and sovereigns. This is notwithstanding differences in size and power. There is nothing peculiar about this, for this is the same way in which we view international agreements today. We look upon the participating nations to such agreements as sovereign, regardless of inequalities in size, wealth and military might.

Another correction that we need to make in our understanding of history is how we understand “King of Kings” titles like “Rajaraja”, “Rajadhiraja”, “Maharaja”, “Shahanshah”, “Emperor” and so on. There is a tendency to look upon such titles as mere vanities. But while these titles may sound grandiose to the modern ear, in the age of kings they simply described the actual arrangement among rulers of different parts of empires, which consisted of several layers of kings, chiefs, warriors and local satraps in concentric circles of allegiance leading up to the Rajaraja or Shahanshah.

Another misleading appellation is the use of the term “vassal” for a king who paid tribute to another. It implies a degree of subordination that does not do justice to the autonomy of the tribute-paying king. It also throws a curtain over the fact that his subjects carried on as before – their culture, beliefs and lifestyle unaffected by such tributes and treaties.

To better understand this issue, we will survey in the chapters to come the age-old prevalence in India of decentralisation and federalism.

What is true of tributes, is even more so of plunder and raids. Today we speak of raids by Mahmud Ghazni, Timur or Nadir Shah as traumatic events that shook Indian civilisation to the core. Since temples, with their vast stores of treasure were often the target of raids, Hindutva-thinking has given such raids the colour of religious crusades.

But, as I mentioned above, raids have always been among the instruments of kingship. The Pandyas, Cholas, Pallavas, Chalukyas, Rashtrakutas, Vijayanagaris and Marathas, all raided and plundered other kingdoms, including Hindu kingdoms and their temples.

Raids were a primary means of filling your coffers. In the age of kings, this was the chaotic way in which economies were managed. I suppose that we can all be grateful that we live in the age of Reserve Banks!

The other reason for raids was a show of power – to warn potential rivals off from attempting an invasion, or to obtain their tribute - another form of economic management without a full-scale war.

Raids changed nothing for the people. Their king remained and their lives carried on as before. Of all encounters between rival kingdoms, raids had the least impact on the people. They were over in a flash, and mostly affected such wealth as was in any case monopolised by palaces and temples.

Temples have always needed to guard their riches. We hear of temple treasures being stolen till today (2). The Hindu rajas of yore were probably preoccupied with safeguarding their own treasuries and palaces, leaving temples unguarded during foreign raids.

Why else did the priests of legend have to go hiding in forests and caves with their idols when the raiders came?  Why was there not a garrison of soldiers deployed by the king to protect temples? Or were temples not thought to be entitled to state protection in those days?

It is high time that we see the plunder of temples in its proper context as the inability of the reigning rajas to guard their borders, nothing more, and nothing less.  

The idea that raiding was the tool of savage barbarians who were more bandits than kings is also simply wrong. Mahmud of Ghazni, for instance, patronised a magnificent courtly literature. His darbar had an entourage of four hundred poets.

His patronage of poets extended to Firdaus, who completed his legendary work, the “Shahnama”, under Ghazni. Firdaus is considered to be the father of the post-Sassanid “New Persian” whose work spawned a transcontinental literary tradition that lives on till today (3).

In this paper we will also see how it was not unusual for temple idols to be carried off as a show of might or the booty of war by kings, including Hindu ones. I suppose that making off with a temple idol can be called “desecration”, but so was the Muslim Nadir Shah’s attempt to have the tomb of the Muslim Sultan Timur brought to Persia from Samarqand. The beautiful green jade stone under which Timur lay cracked en route, before Nadir Shah was finally persuaded to respect the peace of the grave and return it to Samarqand.

These infringements on the sanctity of temples and graves were not meant as acts of religious imposition. In the case of Nadir Shah, it was the over-enthusiasm of an admirer.

Hindu kings also carried off or broke idols when plundering rival Hindu kingdoms. Some Jain sects complain till today of their temples having been built over by Hindus.

Hindus need to be honest about their own temple-desecration, and put a lid on that whole phase of history. They should also remember that it was modern liberal thinking, and not Hindu orthodox thinking, that opened the gates of temples to many among them.

Ordinary Hindus today have much more personal wealth than in the days of the rajas. They can go ahead and build all the temples they wish, without bringing the country to a standstill over a handful of alleged temple-sites.

In the course of my researches, I found that there was a line of Tamil scholars, such as SK Aiyangar and Nilakanta Sastri, mostly writing in the British Raj or just thereafter, who speak of South Indian history as being divided between a “Hindu” age and a “Muslim” one. But I will demonstrate how the facts, including as documented by these scholars, show this to be misconceived. 

There was no universal idea of a “Hindu” kingdom at this time. The Hindu rajas of South India battled each other more or less continuously throughout history, till they were ousted by the British. They continued to fight each other even when Muslim rulers joined the theatre of the Deccan in the 14^th century. Very often, powerful Hindu and Muslim monarchs rose in South India by allying with each other against their rivals. These rivals could equally be Hindu or Muslim.

The Vijayanagar and Bahmani empires, though led respectively by Hindu and Muslim kings, rose in virtual synchronicity by capitalising on the collapse of Sultan Mohammad bin Tughlaq’s hold of the Deccan.

When the Bahmani Sultanate split into the five Deccan Sultanates, the new Sultans, the Vijayanagar rajas and their respective internal challengers – ambitious commanders and rival family members – all became players on the chessboard of the Deccan. From the 14^th to 17^th centuries different combinations of them formed diplomatic, military and marital alliances that crossed religious, ethnic and linguistic divides.

This continued into the age of the Nayakas, Marathas, Mughals and Tipu Sultan.

One of the central notions of Hindutva that this paper attempts to challenge is of diversity being inimical to social cohesion, and of different cultures and religions being irretrievably antagonistic to each other.

This paper extensively surveys the history and evolution of South Indian languages, literature, art and culture to demonstrate that cultures are not solid blocks. They are fluid, porous, non-uniform, and influenced by other cultures, even at their height.

Cultures are best understood as epicentres of language, aesthetics, living habits, and all the other incidents of culture, which can co-exist with other such epicentres. This co-existence can occur in the same continent, country, city or person.

In the discussion to follow, we will see through numerous examples from Indian history that cultures are capable of holding contradictory ideas. Cultures, no less than friends, families or individuals, have access to a host of instruments, such as humour, irony, affection, past good memories, honouring rules in the breach, paying lip service, a spirit of tolerance, turning a blind eye, choosing not to fight and so on, whereby mutually contradictory ideologies and faiths can be accommodated, and disagreements smoothed-over.   

This paper will also attempt to show that cultures are not contiguous with the geographical domain of kings. A particular culture may span an area larger or smaller than a king’s domains of the time. Kings may patronise the culture of their domains, but cultures have a life of their own. The end of a dynasty does not signal the end of the culture associated with it.

Cultures have flowered even in the end days of kingdoms. For example, the most prolific and influential phase in the development of Carnatic Music was also the time of steeply waning Maratha rule in Tanjore under the reign of Tulajaji II. It was from his court that the so-called “Carnatic Trinity” - of Thyagaraja, Syama Sastri and Muthuswami Dikshithar - rose in the late 1700s (4).

The Carnatic Trinity gave South Indian classical music the form in which it is performed today. Thyagaraja’s father was a court musician to the Marathas in Tanjore. He was given land by Tulajaji II in the estate of Thiruvayuru on the banks of the River Kaveri. The temple in which Thyagaraja is said to have attained samadhi stands there till today. It is the site of the famous annual Thyagaraja Music Festival, the largest and most prestigious Carnatic Music festival of South India, till today. Incidentally, Thiruvayuru abuts my ancestral village of Karguddi.

Another example of the flowering of culture in the declining days of kings is Hindustani classical music. This is one of the most robust cultural bequests of the Mughals to North India that is a living tradition till today. It found its current forms of Khayal and Thumri under the Mughal Emperor Muhammad Shah Rangeela and Nawab Wajid Ali Shah of Awadh. That is, at the very last days of the Mughal and Nawabi eras, respectively.

Over and over again we will see in the millennia of history that this paper describes, that cultures do not die with kings. And, like individual creativity, they emerge and transform in eccentric ways that cannot be predicted, and should simply be enjoyed. 

This is wonderfully illustrated by the whimsical tale of the Theosophical Society of Madras. This was a worldwide society begun by renegade Europeans searching for an alternative vision of society to their own aggressively industrialising and imperialistic ones. Impressed by Eastern mysticism, especially that of India, the Theosophical Society made a home in Madras, attracting a host of cranks, freethinkers, and some genuinely talented people, such as Annie Besant and AO Hume.

Besant and Hume were great early advocates Indian nationalism. Hume was among the founders of the Indian National Congress, which was formed in 1885, to work toward better representation for Indians in the British Empire.

Besant was of Irish descent. Hers was the time of the Irish Home Rule movement at the other end of the British Empire, which, no doubt, influenced her sympathy for Indian nationalism. She even underwent a period of arrest in Madras for her strident activism against the British colonial government. She was voted President of the Indian National Congress in 1917.

Besant made a mission of bringing about an Indian cultural assertion as a riposte to the injustice of British rule here (5). She was one of the founders of the Benares Hindu University which was conceived along with other Indian nationalists such as Pt. Madan Mohan Malviya, with the idea of awakening young Indians to their own history, literature and culture, while at the same equipping them with a Western education, so that they could speak more effectively to the Empire for their rights. These ideas were beautifully expressed by Annie Besant herself in her speech at the Founding Ceremony of the Benares Hindu University.

Among the Indian members of the Theosophical Society, was the father of Rukmini Devi Arundale. She married George Arundale, a fellow English member of the Theosophical Society, and while travelling with him happened to watch a performance by the famous Russian ballerina, Anna Pavlova (6).

This sparked off a passionate interest in dance. At the suggestion of Pavlova, Rukmini Devi began to study South Indian dance. This flowered into the magnificent project of the revival of South Indian classical dance in the form of Bharatanatyam that we all know and love today.

All this happened when India was still under British Rule in the 1930s. Interestingly, conservative Madras society took a while to warm up to her ideas. Had the disapproving mamis prevailed, we might not have had Bharatanatyam!

With the support of George Arundale, Rukmini Devi established Kalakshetra in Madras, which remains the leading institution for the propagation and study of Bharatanatyam in India till today.

So Bharatanatyam, the iconic symbol of Tamil Nadu, turns out to have flowered under the influence of many places, people and events who were not Tamil or Brahmin or even Indian.

This story demonstrates the tender, gentle, unexpected, singular and playful ways in which cultures emerge. This is something that Hindutva’s totalising vision of society completely misses (7). Carnatic Music too has far off influence from North India, which we will read about in the pages to follow.  

So, these are the broad outlines of my thesis.

Before starting the discussion, I wish to set out a few more points about the motivation and idea behind this work.

I began this work around February last year, that is 2024, under a real sense of siege by the censorship, arrests and communal politics of the Modi Regime. I had just experienced personally what it was to cross the Hindu Right with my stand on the Ram Mandir event in January that year.

The Hindutva-minded Tamil elders in my family never once thought to send a word of concern, though I was issued death threats on national television, and abused in the most vulgar way on social media by their ideological brethren for weeks on end.

It is unpleasant to speak of this so publicly, but I think it is important for people to see the depth of the madness fostered in ordinary people, elders no less, by Hindutva-thinking in the last few years. 

There were threats of police action. I had to tell my twelve-year-old son in boarding school that “Mama might have to go to jail”. I had to field calls from my husband’s friends offering to send private security guards to accompany my daughter to school after they read filthy comments by Hindutva trolls on the You Tube channels of our national television broadcasters.

My husband is a Jat Sikh. Jats are a famous warrior community of India. I could not help contrasting the bluff protectiveness of his clan towards me with the shabby attitude of the would-be founders of a militant Hindu State among my Tamil Modi Bhakt elders.

So fired-up were they by Hindutva-laced WhatsApp forwards, that one distant relation in Tamil Nadu lost all sense of proportion and the appropriate behaviour expected of a family elder to feel free to send me needling messages and double entendre memes, even in the midst of this public assault.

I was deeply hurt, angry, and frankly appalled that elders could behave in this way. I am still smarting under these feelings.

But this work, begun in anger, has ended on a very different note. I had intended only to look up the history of my ancestral home of Tanjore. But I soon found that to properly understand that, I had to extend my enquiries to the whole of Tamil Nadu.

As I read on, Tamil Nadu’s boundaries began to lose their meaning, and my study expanded into Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Then I found the horizon of my study expanding as much in time as in space. I found myself going further and further back in time, trying to find the beginning of the historical incidents and epochs that I was reading about.

That point – the beginning – I was never able to discover. But I found myself travelling more than two millennia into the past, happily noting along the way, as so many more arguments notched up against Hindutva, the multiplicity of languages and beliefs that seem ever to have co-existed in India; the different races that ruled here, and the extensive exchange of ideas, music, art and literature with distant civilisations.

I read on and on, one thing leading to another; or rather, one king leading to another, one people leading to another, one history spilling into another, and so on, until I found myself leaving the deep South for the northern parts of the Deccan Plateau, and then going over the Vindhyas, and into Delhi!

But I did not stop here for long. Very soon I had left India altogether and found myself north of the Gobi Desert, among the tribes of Mongolia. Did you know that the title “Khan” came not from any Muslim peoples, but the sky-worshipping tribes of Mongolia, as did the words “Turk” and “Khatun”? 

I followed the migrating waves of Mongolian tribes into Central Asia, and then over the ancient River Oxus into Persia, to the era of the Zoroastrian Sassanids, locked in war with Christian Byzantine.

Then I witnessed the birth of Islam. I stopped awhile in Medina and was interested to learn that sufis were not a later innovation in Islam, but had been companions of the Prophet Mohammed himself. I read on to the time when Arab tribes and wandering sufis headed for the world outside Arabia to Damascus and Baghdad.

I read about the deep interest of the Abbasid Caliphate, with its capital in Baghdad, in the writing and thought of the ancient Greeks and Indians, which they had translated into Arabic (8, 9). I followed the lives of the iconoclastic sufis, who crossed their monarchs almost from the start, and exchanged ideas with travelling Jewish and Christian merchants and priests, and wandering Buddhist, Jain and Hindu ascetics.

Then I found the story went back above the Gobi Desert where I witnessed the rise of Chengiz Khan and the astonishing success of his Mongol warriors against every power in their wake, east and west, until they had defeated the Arabs in the west, and the Chinese in the east.

The advance of the Arabs was thus dramatically stopped by the Mongols, but the sufis continued to spread across the world, drawing people, commoners and kings, into their gentle beliefs wherever they went in Turkey, Khurasan, Khwarizm, Rum, Transoxiana, Balkh, Ghazn, Herat, Gandhara, Sindh, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and Bihar.

I noted with interest the slow and informal adoption of the sky-worshipping Tsengrist Mongol tribal chiefs of the religion of their subjects wherever they found themselves – the Western branches becoming Muslim, and the Eastern, Buddhist. I saw Russia before the Tsars, feeling an irresistible, though admittedly illogical, surge of pride when I read of Russian princes paying tribute to the sons of Chengiz!

The Mongols are unfairly accused of barbarism. Mongol culture has never been given its due, for they kept their history secret, and we only know their story from the petrified and resentful Europeans, Arabs, Persians and Turks whom they roundly defeated.

But I will show in this work evidence of the liberalism and open-mindedness of the Mongols from the way they governed their conquered domains. They were exceptionally tolerant of all religions, and extended equal protection to Christianity, Buddhism, Manichaeism and Islam in all their lands. This was an important inheritance of the Mughals, which, along with the influence of the sufis, goes some way in explaining the open and accepting nature of their rule in India.

I saw with deep sentiment, for it reminded me of the story of India, how the culture and language of Sassanid Persia survived all its vicissitudes to evolve into a sub-continental culture.

I found the concept of a cultural “cosmopolis”, as developed by scholars such as Sheldon Pollock, to be a very useful framework for viewing the civilisations of the Orient. In the “cosmopolis”, a particular language acts as a vehicle of transmission for a culture, whose sphere of influence spans numerous kingdoms, empires and ages.

The Persian Cosmopolis reached India where it met another magnificent sub-continental culture – that of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis. I believe, perhaps predictably, that the Mughal Age took the tryst of the Sanskrit and Persian Cosmopoleis to spectacular heights of aesthetic, artistic, literary and philosophical achievement.

I also discovered that the first efflorescence of this encounter did not occur under the Mughals, but centuries earlier in the age of the Delhi and Deccan Sultanates. An example of this is the miniature art of the Deccan Sultanates. Deccan or, to give it its proper name, Dakkhani miniature art combines the idiom of various schools of South Indian mural and scroll art with that of Turko-Persian art. It has an exuberance, whimsy and expressive creativity that surpasses the whole repertoire of the later Mughal, Rajput and Pahari miniature art (10).

The paintings and wonderful Dakkhani texts that came from this age, such as the Bijapuri Kitab-e-Nauras and Pem Nem, and the Golconda Sultanate’s Telugu ‘Tapati and Samvarana’, bear eloquent testimony to the warmth and mutual admiration of the meeting of the cultures of South India and the Turko-Persians under the Bahmanis and the Deccan Sultanates.

Dakkhani art gave many bequests to India of which we are little aware. For instance, though we all know of Pahari ragamala paintings where the ragas music are depicted pictorially, how many of us know that the first ragamala paintings came from the Deccan (11)?    

If the Sanskrit Cosmopolis was magnificent, and commanded a tremendous multi-national following, then Brahmins can take pride in that many of its most eloquent, profound and celebrated exponents came from their ranks. For centuries, the court Brahmin helped to build the fabulous repertoire of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis as poet, scholar, teacher, connoisseur, expert, aesthete, dramatist, musician, warrior and minister.

Ancient texts attributed to the Brahminical or Vedic tradition such as the Vedas, the Valmiki Ramayana, Vyasa’s Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgita, to name only a few, are not only sacred texts for Hindus, but are masterful as literary works. More worldly Sanskrit works such as the Natyashastra and the writings of Kalidasa belong to the same superlative literary tradition.

I suggest that Brahmins today should speak from a place of this extraordinary, and in many ways defining contribution to Indian civilization. This was not just a bequest to India but to the world. There is no need for Tamil Brahmins to hitch their wagon to the unlettered street politics of North Indian Hindutva to claim their place in India or anywhere.

We, if you will allow me for a moment to speak as one of you, have the resources and history to make a far better, more dignified and more just case for ourselves than the Sangh Parivar’s hateful hodgepodge of Hindu chauvinist revisionist history. 

By now the reader will have gleaned that I have been on quite a journey. It was indeed an exhilarating trip halfway around the world that quickly swept away the anger and frustration of the moment in which I had commenced this work.

What a lesson to learn that the story of that one place, a mere dot on the map – Tanjore - would turn out to be the story of half the world – and half of humanity!

Who would have thought that we were all so connected, and so similar, even thousands of years ago?

I suspect that had I taken my researches just a bit farther west from Iran, and east from Mongolia, this would have become the story of the whole world, with all of humanity and all of history.

All my worries about communalism, repression and violence in today’s India drop away whenever I let the eye of my mind roam across the vast expanse of history and peoples opened up by this work. Then I find myself swept away by one heady revelation after the other about India; of the beauty that we have created; of the great men and women we have spawned; of the epic transformations that we have undergone; of the way in which some fine and delicate things have survived in the teeth of all this change; of the moral magnificence that we have displayed at our best; of the bold sweep of our imagination in hurdling some of humanity’s knottiest problems; and of the deep and abiding love that India awakens in the best of people and which has, so often, reigned her in from giving in to humanity’s worst instincts.

Can all this ever be lost? I do not think so. At least, not utterly.  

I started to write this work with the intention of delivering a stinging rebuttal to those who would support Hindutva in Tamil Nadu. But though this paper remains a refutation of Hindutva, it became much more than that. In the end, I offer this paper not as the riposte that it was intended to be, but as an invitation to join in the wonder of India.  

A final preliminary point - this is not a history. I do not write as a historian, but as a citizen of India addressing my fellow citizens. I have used the work of historians, and knowledge acquired from my own work in the arts to make my case, but had the facts been different, my conclusion would still have been the same – that India must be secular, plural, compassionate and peace-loving. To this end, Indians must draw support from history, without being tied to it.

I believe that it is something like marriage. We have the choice to be angry or forgiving, to see the best or the worst of each other, to be understanding or judgmental, and to think of our children, or only of ourselves. I say that we must always, for the sake of all that is good and beautiful, choose to give the best interpretation of the past, and of each other. I believe that the history that I will tell in the pages to follow teaches us the wisdom of making this choice. 

Bibliography & Index

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