Abdur Razzak on musicians in Vijayanagar: ‘The singers were for the most part young girls, with cheeks like the moon, and faces more blooming than the spring, adorned with beautiful garments, and displaying figures which ravished the heart like fresh roses. They were seated behind a beautiful curtain opposite the king. On a sudden the curtain was removed on both sides, and the girls began to move their feet with such grace that wisdom lost its senses, and the soul was intoxicated with delight.’
‘The contrast between the Hindu temples and the Muslim mosques could hardly have been more striking,’ writes John Marshall, an early twentieth century British archaeologist in India. ‘The shrine of the former was relatively small and constricted; the prayer chamber of the latter was broad and spacious. One was gloomy and mysterious, the other light and open to the winds of heaven. The Hindu system of construction was trabeate, based on column and architrave; the Muslim system was arcuate, based on arch and vault. The temple was crowned with slender spires or pyramidal towers; the mosque with expansive domes … [Hindu] monuments were enriched with countless idols of its deities; Islam rigidly forbade idolatry or the portrayal of any living thing. Decorative ornament in Hindu architecture delighted in plastic modelling; it was naturalistic … and … exuberant; Islamic ornament, on the other hand, inclined to colour and line or flat surface carving, and took the form of conventional arabesques or ingenious geometric patterning.’
Amir Khusrav on the new fort that Ala-ud-din Khalji built in Delhi: ‘It is a condition that in a new building blood should be sprinkled; he therefore sacrificed some thousands of goat-bearded Mughals for the purpose.’
Kabir: ‘Sanskrit is like water in a [deep] well; the language of the people is like a flowing stream.’
Tirupati, one of the most sacred Hindu shrines in modern India, acquired its prominence around the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century.
Odoric on Kerala: ‘All the inhabitants of that country do worship a living ox, as their god, whom they put to labour for six years, and in the seventh year they cause him to rest from al his work, placing him in a solemn and public place, and calling him a holy beast. Moreover … every morning they take two basins, either of silver or of gold, and with one they receive the urine of the ox, and with the other its dung. With the urine they wash their face, their eyes, and all their five senses. The dung they put into both their eyes, then they anoint the … cheeks therewith, and thirdly their breast: and then they say that they are sanctified for the whole day. And as the people do, even so do their king and queen.’
Ramananda, a thirteenth century Vaishnava sage: ‘I had an inclination to go with sandal and other perfumes to offer worship to Brahman. But the guru revealed to me that Brahman was in my own heart.’
The word sufi is derived from the word for wool: suf. Sufis wore wool instead of cotton or silk as an act of self-mortification. Sufis gained prominence in Persia around the tenth century.
The regions of India where Islam was most successful in winning converts were the regions where Buddhism still had a prominent presence in early medieval times. In time these regions came to have Muslim majorities, and they eventually, in the twentieth century, became independent Muslim states: Pakistan and Bangladesh. Muslims remained a minority in the Indo-Gangetic Plain, the heartland of Muslim power in India. In all, Muslims in the subcontinent at the time of India’s independence constituted a quarter of its population.
The Portuguese brought the Inquisition to India. Those condemned by the inquisitor were burned.
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Acknowledgements
While working on the penultimate draft of this book, I had the good fortune to have two perceptive readers, Jayashree Nambiar and Priya Vijayaraghavan, to look through the draft and make suggestions. I had this help from Jayashree for my last book also, but Priya is someone whom I had never met or even spoken to on the phone. She had sent me an email a couple of years back commenting on my previous books, and we have been in touch with each other on and off by email since then. When I finished the draft of this book I requested her to read through it, and she readily agreed.
It is important for a writer to have his text checked by a discerning reader, for quite often what is crystal clear to the writer is confusing to the reader. In this I was blessed with having the comments of Jayashree and Priya.
On the publisher’s side, I am grateful to Chiki Sarkar and Paromita Mohanchandra of Penguin for their help and advice. I am also greatly indebted to Meena Bhende, whose meticulous copy editing of my text has been invaluable to me.
A COUPLE OF years ago, when I was working on an early draft of this book, I had a surprise visitor, a close friend of mine of my student days, now a phenomenally successful businesswoman in a faraway country, whom I had not seen for well over forty years. That evening, when we were strolling on the boulevard along the beach in Pondicherry, she asked me to tell her the most moving incident I had come across while researching for this book.
So I told her about Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan traveller who had spent several years in Delhi in the mid-fourteenth century as a courtier of Sultan Muhammad Tughluq, and was then sent to China by the sultan as his ambassador.
On his way to China, Battuta spent a few months in Maldives, and there, on a tiny island which had just one little mud hut, he came across the only man living there. ‘He had,’ recounts Battuta in his memoirs, ‘a wife and children, a few coco-palms, and a small boat which he used for fishing … The island also had a few banana trees … I swear I envied that man, and wished that the island had been mine, that I might have made it my retreat until the inevitable hour should befall me.’
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