Hinduism under Islam

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Hinduism under Islam (11th-19th century)

 

The challenge of Islam and popular religion

 

The phase of Indian history marked by the domination of the Muslims

in most of northern India saw great changes in Indian religion. The

advent of Islam in the Ganges Basin at the end of the 12th century

resulted in the withdrawal of royal patronage from Hinduism in much

of the area. The attitude of the Muslim rulers toward Hinduism

varied. Some, like Firuz Tughluq (ruled 1351-88) and Aurangzeb (ruled

1658-1707), were strongly anti-Hindu and enforced payment of jizya, a

poll tax on unbelievers. Others, like the Bengali sultan Husayn

Shah 'Ala' ad-Din (reigned 1493-1519) and the great Akbar (reigned

1556-1605), were well-disposed toward their Hindu subjects. Many

temples, however, were destroyed by the more fanatical rulers.

Conversion to Islam was more common in areas where Buddhism had once

been strongest--modern Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Kashmir.

 

On the eve of the Muslim occupation, Hinduism was by no means sterile

in northern India, but its vitality was centred in the southern,

Dravidian-speaking areas. Throughout the centuries, the system of

class and caste had become more rigid; in each region there was a

complex hierarchy of castes strictly forbidden to intermarry and

interdine, controlled and regulated by secular powers who acted on

the advice of the court Brahmans. The large-scale Vedic sacrifices

had practically vanished, but simple domestic Vedic sacrifices

continued, and new forms of animal, and sometimes vegetarian,

sacrifice had appeared, especially connected with the cult of the

Mother Goddess.

 

By that time, the main divinities of later Hinduism were worshiped.

Rama, the hero of the epic poem, had become the eighth avatar of

Vishnu, and his cult was growing, although it was not yet as

prominent as it later became. Similarly, Rama's monkey helper,

Hanuman, now one of the most popular divinities of India and the most

ready helper in time of need, was rising in importance. Krishna was

worshiped with his adulterous consort, Radha. Strange syncretic gods

had appeared, such as Harihara, a combination of Vishnu and Siva, and

Ardhanarisvara, a synthesis of Siva and his shakti Parvati or Durga.

 

Temple complexes

 

>From the Gupta period onward Hindu temples tended to become larger

and more prominent, and their architecture developed in distinctive

regional styles. In northern India the best remaining Hindu temples

are found in the Orissa region and in the town of Khajuraho in

northern Madhya Pradesh. The best example of Orissan temple

architecture is the Lingaraja temple of Bhubaneswar, built about

1000. The largest temple of the region, however, is the famous Black

Pagoda, the Sun Temple (Surya Deula) of Konarak, built in the mid-

13th century. Its tower has long since collapsed, and only the

assembly hall remains.

 

The most important Khajuraho temples were built during the 11th

century. Individual architectural styles also arose in Gujarat and

Rajasthan, but their surviving products are less impressive than

those of Orissa and Khajuraho. By the end of the 1st millennium AD

the South Indian style had reached its apogee in the great

Rajarajesvara temple of Thanjavur (Tanjore).

 

In the temple the god was worshiped by the rites of puja (reverencing

a sacred being or object) as though the worshipers were serving a

great king. In the important temples a large staff of trained

officiants waited on the god. He was awakened in the morning along

with his goddess, washed, clothed and fed, placed in his shrine to

give audience to his subjects, praised and entertained throughout the

day, ceremoniously fed, undressed, and put to bed at night.

Worshipers sang, burned lamps, waved lights before the divine image,

and performed other acts of homage.

 

The god's dancing girls (devadasis) performed before him at regular

intervals, watched by the officiants and lay worshipers, who were his

courtiers. These women, either the daughters of devadasis or girls

dedicated in childhood, may have also served as prostitutes. The

association of dedicated prostitutes with certain Hindu shrines can

be traced back to before the Christian era. It became more widespread

in post-Gupta times, especially in South India, and aroused the

reprobation of 19th-century Europeans. Through the efforts of Hindu

reformers the office of the devadasis was discontinued. The role of

devadasis is best understood in the context of the analogy between

the temple and the royal court, for the Hindu king also had his

dancing girls, who bestowed their favours on his courtiers.

 

Parallels between the temple and the royal palace also were in

evidence in the rathayatras (shrine processions). As on festival

days, when the king issued from his palace and paraded around his

city, escorted by courtiers, troops, and musicians, so also the god

paraded around his city in a splendid procession, together with the

lesser gods of the minor shrines. The god rode on a tremendous and

ornate moving shrine (ratha), which was often pulled by large bands

of devotees. Rathayatras still take place in many cities of India.

The best-known is the annual procession of Jagannatha ("Juggernaut"),

a form of Vishnu, at Puri, Orissa.

 

The great temples were (and still are) wealthy institutions. They

were supported by the transfer of the taxes levied by kings on

specific areas of the nearby countryside, by donations of the pious,

and by the fees of worshipers. Their immense wealth was one of the

factors that encouraged the Ghaznavid and Ghurid Turks to invade

India after the 11th century. They were controlled by self-

perpetuating committees--whose membership was usually a hereditary

privilege--and by a large staff of priests and temple servants under

a high priest who wielded tremendous power and influence.

 

The great walled temple complexes of South India were (and still are)

small cities, containing the central and numerous lesser shrines,

bathing tanks, administrative offices, homes of the temple employees,

workshops, bazaars, and public buildings of many kinds. Directly and

indirectly they played an important part in the economy, as they were

among the largest employers and greatest landowners in their areas.

They also performed valuable social functions because they served as

schools, dispensaries, poorhouses, banks, and concert halls.

 

The Muslim occupation brought India into close contact with a

different, more aggressive, religion. In such circumstances, the

absence of a central religious authority in Hinduism was a source of

strength. The purohitas, or family priests who performed the domestic

rituals and personal sacraments for the lay people, continued to

function, as did the thousands of ascetics. In Muslim-occupied

territory the temples suffered the most. In the sacred cities of

Varanasi (Benares) and Mathura, no large temple remains from any

period before the 17th century. The same is true of most of the main

religious centres of northern India, but not of the regions where the

Muslim hold was less firm, such as Orissa, Rajasthan, and South

India.

 

Sectarian movements

 

Before the time the Muslims invaded the subcontinent, the new forms

of South Indian bhakti were spreading beyond the bounds of the

Dravidian south. Certain Vaishnava theologians of the Pa–caratra

and

Bhagavata schools, including Ramanuja, a Tamil Brahman who was for a

time chief priest of the Vaishnava temple of Srirangam, near

Tiruchchirappalli (Trichinopoly), taught in the 11th century. They

gave the growing Vaishnava bhakti cults a philosophical framework

that also influenced some Saivite schools.

 

Two other Vaishnava teachers deserve mention. Nimbarka, a Telugu

Brahman of the 12th or 13th century, spread the cult of the divine

cowherd and his favourite gopi (cowherdess, especially associated

with the legends of Krishna's youth), Radha. His sect survives near

Mathura but has made little impact elsewhere. More important was

Vallabha (Vallabhacarya; 1479-1531), who took the Vaishnava doctrine

of grace and emphasized its erotic imagery.

 

His sect is noteworthy because it stresses absolute obedience to the

guru (teacher). Early in its existence it was organized with a

hierarchy of senior monks (gosvami), many of whom became very rich.

The Vallabhacarya sect was once very influential in the western half

of North India, but it declined in the 19th century, in part because

of a number of lawsuits against the chief guru, the descendant of

Vallabha.

 

The Saiva sects also developed from the 10th century onward. In South

India there emerged the school of Saiva-siddhanta, still one of the

most significant religious forces in that region, and one that,

unlike the school of Sankara, does not admit the full identity of the

soul and God. A completely monistic school of Saivism appeared in

Kashmir in the early 9th century. Its doctrines differ from those of

Sankara chiefly because it attributes personality to the absolute

spirit, who is the god Siva and not the impersonal brahman.

 

An important and interesting sect, founded in the 12th century in the

Kannada-speaking area of the Deccan, was that of the Lingayats, or

Virasaivas ("Heroes of the Saiva Religion"). Its traditional founder,

Basava, taught doctrines and practices of surprising unorthodoxy: he

opposed all forms of image worship and accepted only the lingam of

Siva as a sacred symbol. Virasaivism rejected the Vedas, the Brahman

priesthood, and all caste distinction. Several Lingayat practices,

now largely abandoned, such as the remarriage of widows and the

burial of the dead, are deliberately antinomian.

 

An important development of Saivism in North India was brought about

by Gorakhnath (Goraksanatha), who in the 13th century became leader

of a sect of Saivite ascetics known as Natha ("Lord") from the title

of their chief teachers. The Gorakhnathis were particularly important

as propagators of the practices of hatha-yoga, a form of yoga that

requires complex and difficult physical exercises and that has become

popular in the West. These yogis, who are still numerous, influenced

the teaching of several of the bhakti poets.

 

Bhakti movements

 

The poets and "saints" of medieval bhakti appeared throughout India.

Although all have their individual genius, the bhakti lyricists share

a number of common features whatever their language. The Sanskrit

education needed for authors of Sanskrit texts limited them largely

to the Brahman class and thus put a definite stamp on them. Because

bhakti poets could use any language, they might come from any class.

They brought to their poetry a familiarity with folk religion unknown

or ignored in the Sanskrit texts.

 

The use of the spoken language, even though it was formalized, made

possible the immediate expression of an unmediated vision that needed

no further context; thus the lyrics are short, intensely personal,

and precise. These works illustrate the localistic and reformist

tendency evidenced throughout India in the vernacular literatures,

especially in Tamil, Bengali, and Hindi.

 

The origin of the new forms of Hinduism has been attributed to the

influence of Islam, but the proposition that the rise of popular

emotional bhakti was a response to Islam is impossible, for the

practice of singing ecstatic hymns in the current local language was

well-known in South India even before Muhammad. All the features of

this form of bhakti are found in the Bhagavata-Purana and in the

commentaries of Ramanuja.

 

The earliest bhakti literature in a living Indo-Aryan language is

from Maharashtra and was composed before Muslims occupied the area.

Thus, passionate bhakti existed long before the Muslim conquest.

However, the presence of rulers of alien faith and the withdrawal of

royal patronage from the temples and Brahmanic colleges may have

encouraged the spread of new, more popular forms of Hinduism. The

psychological effect of the Muslim conquest may also have predisposed

the people to accept the powerful teachings of the poets, but Islam

was only a contributory factor in the spread of the new movements.

 

Much has been said about the synthesis of Hinduism and Islam in the

period of Muslim dominance, but, as far as the Hindus were concerned,

this was generally a matter of superficial observances. Thus, purdah

(parda), the strict seclusion of women, became commonplace among the

Hindu upper classes of northern India, numerous Muslim social customs

were adopted, and Persian and Arabic words entered the vocabularies

of Indian languages. The fundamental theology of Hinduism, however,

was unaffected by Islam, even in the teachings of such men as Basava

and Kabir, who may have been somewhat influenced by Muslim

observances and social customs.

 

What synthesis did take place came from the Muslims, most of whom

were Indian by blood. In Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, and

Marathi there is much poetic literature, written by Muslims and

commencing with the Islamic invocation of Allah, which nevertheless

betrays strong Hindu influence. Thus, there are texts that proclaim

Krishna as being in the line of the prophets of Islam and as the

teacher of the unity of God. Much mystical poetry, though written by

authors with Muslim names, uses Hindu imagery and Hindu terminology.

 

This literature originated in the accommodating character of early

Indian Sufism, which, well before Kabir, proclaimed that Muslim,

Christian, Jew, Zoroastrian, and Hindu were all striving toward the

same goal and that the outward observances that kept them apart were

false. Some of the Indian Sufis were greatly influenced by Hindu

customs. For example, a school of Kashmir Sufis, whose members call

themselves rishis, after the legendary Hindu sages (rsi), respect and

repeat the verses of Lal Ded and are strict vegetarians.