The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  In dramatic contrast with Buddhism, which was driven out of India by a combination of lack of support, persecution, and the destruction of religious monuments and monasteries (by Hindus as well as Muslims), Hinduism rallied and came back stronger than ever. Though most sultanate rulers condemned idolatry, they did not prevent Hindus from practicing Hinduism. A Hindu inscription of c. 1280 praises the security and bounty enjoyed under the rule of Sultan Balban.99 In 1326 Muhammad bin Tughluq appointed Muslim officials to repair a Shiva temple so that normal worship could resume, and he stated that anyone who paid the jizya could build temples in Muslim territories. Another Delhi sultan, ruling in Kashmir from 1355 to 1373, rebuked his Brahmin minister for having suggested that they melt down Hindu and Buddhist images in his kingdom to get the cash.100

  Indeed, in general, despite the evidence of persecution of varying degrees in different times and places, Hinduism under Islam was alive and well and living in India. The same sultans who, with what Hindus would regard as the left hand, collected the jizya and destroyed Hindu temples also, with the right hand, often married Rajput princesses, patronized Hindu artists and Sanskrit scholars, and employed Hindus in the highest offices of state. In Bengal in 1418 a Hindu actually became sultan, Raja Ganesh. His son, converting to Islam, ruled under his father’s direction until 1431. He was succeeded by an Arab Muslim, Ala-ud-din Husain (r. 1493-1519), who revered the Vaishnava saint Chaitanya, in return for which the Hindus regarded the sultan as an incarnation of Lord Krishna. On the other hand, during a war, the same Ala-ud-din Husain destroyed a number of temples, particularly in Orissa.101

  Yogis and other ascetics on the fringes of society appear to have been open to friendly exchanges with Muslims from an early date. The Persian merchant and traveler Buzurg ibn Shahriyar, writing around 953, commented that the Skull Bearer (Kapalika) ascetics of Ceylon “take kindly to Musulmans and show them much sympathy.”102 The Tibetan Buddhist historian Taranath, writing in the thirteenth century, was critical of the Nath yogis for following Shiva rather than the Buddha and for saying “They were not even opposed to the Turuskas [Turks].”103 A new generation of Indo-Aryan languages, the linguistic and literary ancestors of all the modern North Indian languages, was evolving. The new languages drew their genres, conventions, and themes from both Muslim literary languages (Persian, Arabic) and Hindu languages—classical (Sanskrit) and vernacular (dialects and Prakrits). Persian and Arabic words and concepts entered the vocabularies of Indian languages at all levels.

  SUFISM

  Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, heavily influenced and was influenced by Hinduism. By the middle of the eleventh century Sufis had reached the part of Northwest India that was under Ghaznavid control.104 Khwaja Muin-ud-din (or Moin-al-din) Chishti is said to have brought to India the Chishti Sufi order; he came to Delhi late in the twelfth century and settled in Pushkar in Ajmer, a place of Hindu pilgrimage.105 He had many disciples, both Muslim and Hindu. The Chishti Sufi masters were powerful figures in the cultural and devotional life of the Delhi Sultanate (where their followers were often influential members of the court), despite the fact that they regarded “going to the sultan” as the equivalent of “going to the devil.”106

  For many Hindus (though, of course, not for the Sufis themselves), Sufism was Islam lite, or a walking incarnation of interreligious dialogue. Early Indian Sufism proclaimed that Muslims, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Hindus all were striving toward the same goal and that the outward observances that kept them apart were false. This idea was then incorporated into Hinduism as a major strand of the bhakti movement, which was growing in both power and complexity in this period. In court literature, the Sanskrit theory of the aesthetic emotions (rasa), particularly the erotic emotion, fused with the Islamic metaphysics of the love of God to produce a Sufi narrative simultaneously religious and erotic; the Sufi romances made their hero a yogi and their heroine a beautiful Indian woman.107

  Our main subject here is the Muslim contribution to Hinduism, but we must at least acknowledge, in passing, the flow in the other direction during this period, Hindu influence on Muslim culture. Azad Bilgrami (d. 1785) attempted to prove that India was the true homeland of the Prophet,108 which is perhaps going too far, but India was indeed the homeland of many important Muslim cultural traditions. One text, The Pool of Nectar, which circulated in multiple versions and translations, made available to Muslim readers certain practices associated with the Nath yogis and the teachings known as Hatha Y oga.109 A school of Kashmiri Sufis, whose members call themselves rishis (the name that Hindus use for their pious sages), are strict vegetarians and recite the verses of Lal Ded, a fourteenth-century poet and Hindu holy woman from Kashmir. Sufis appropriated the Sanskritic poetic language of emotion and devotion from the sects devoted to the worship of Krishna and incorporated much of the philosophy of yoga.

  Arabs and Iranians learned much about storytelling in India, and passed on this knowledge to Europeans; many of the same stories are told both in the Hindu Ocean of the Rivers of Story, in which the gods are Shiva and Vishnu, and in The Arabian Nights, in which there is no god but Allah; some of the stories that these two texts share (such as the plot of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well110) got to England long before the English got to India. Al-biruni made excellent use of Sanskrit and Indian scholarship111 and produced a fine study of Hindu culture.112 The Delhi sultans employed Hindu temple building techniques and Hindu artisans to build their mosques,113 which was less expensive than outsourcing to Afghanistan. As a result, some mosques are decorated with carved Hindu temple moldings that reveal, in subtle ways, “the unmistakable hand” of Indian artisans.114 This use of Hindu temple techniques not only gave employment to Hindu artisans but was also much easier on Hindus than the use of the actual stones from Hindu temples to build the mosques.

  KABIR

  Sufi mysticism heavily influenced the North Indian tradition of bhakti Sants (“saints”), who emphasized the abstract aspect of god “without qualities” (nir-guna ).115 Many of the Sants who straddled Hinduism and Islam were both low caste and rural, such as Ravidas, who was a Pariah leatherworker (Chamar); Dadu, a cotton carder; Sena, a barber.116 But not all bhaktas were of low caste; Guru Nanak (who founded Sikhism) was a Kshatriya, and Mirabai a Kshatriya princess. Sants from the thirteenth to seventeenth century in Maharashtra were drawn from all castes. 117

  The most famous of the Sants was Kabir, who was born in Varanasi around the beginning of the fifteenth century into a class of low-caste weavers who had recently converted from Hinduism to Islam.118 One early hagiography mentions that Kabir had previously worshiped the Shakta goddess, suggesting that Kabir’s Muslim family may have converted to Islam from a yogic sect related to the Shaktas, such as the Naths. His mixed birth gave rise to many different stories, some of which attempt to show that Kabir was not really a low-caste Muslim by birth but was adopted by Muslims. Sometimes it is said that Kabir was a Brahmin in a former life or that he was of divine origin but adopted by Muslim weavers of the Julaha caste, who had been Brahmins but had fallen from dharma and become Muslims. Or that he was adopted by Brahmins, worshipers of Shiva, whom some foreigners (perhaps Muslims) forced to drink water from their hands, making them lose caste and become weavers.119 One version says that a Brahmin widow conceived him immaculately, gave birth to him through the palm of her hand, and set him afloat in a basket on a pond, where a Muslim couple found him and adopted him 120 (an episode that follows the Family Romance pattern of the birth of Karna in the Mahabharata), or it is said that the Brahmin widow became pregnant when a famous ascetic blessed her, but she exposed the baby in order to escape dishonor.121 All these stories attempt to drag Kabir back over the line from Muslim to Hindu.

  Kabir is widely believed (on scant evidence) to have become one of the disciples of the Hindu saint Ramananda (c. 1370-1440), who was said to have been a disciple of the philosopher Ramanuja and who preached in Hindustani and had many low-caste disciples. There’s
a story about Kabir’s tricking Ramananda into accepting a Muslim disciple: Kabir lay down across the stairs where Ramananda bathed every morning before dawn; Ramananda tripped over him and cried out, “Ram! Ram!” thus (Kabir argued) transmitting to him Ramananda’s own mantra, in effect taking him on as a pupil.122 This Ram is not Sita’s Ram, however, but a god “without qualities” (nir-guna), whose name, evoking no story, is complete in itself, a mantra.

  Scholars believe that Kabir probably married, and indeed had a son named Kamal, but the Sadhus of the Kabir Panth insist that Kabir was celibate, just as they are.123 There are, in any case, stories about Kabir and his wife, such as this one.

  KABIR, HIS WIFE, AND THE SHOPKEEPER

  Kabir had no food to give to the dervishes who came to his house; his wife promised the local shopkeeper that she would sleep with him that night if he gave them the food on credit. When she hesitated to keep her promise, Kabir carried her to the shopkeeper that night, as it was raining and muddy; when the shopkeeper learned of this, he was ashamed, fell at Kabir’s feet, gave everything in his shop to the poor, and became a sadhu.124

  This is also a story about the exploitation of women and the lower castes by men of the higher castes. Despite his casual attitude to his wife’s fidelity in this story, Kabir often used a wife’s impulse to commit suttee, in order to stay with her husband forever, as a positive metaphor for the worshiper who surrenders his ego to god.125 And he described Illusion (maya) as a seductive woman to whom one becomes addicted and from whom one must break away.126 Women evidently meant several different things to him.

  Kabir preached in the vernacular, insisting, “Sanskrit is like water in a well; the language of the people is a flowing stream.” With the social identity of a Muslim and both the earlier family background and the belief system of a Hindu,127 being a weaver, he wove the woof of Islam onto the warp of Hinduism (or, if you prefer, the reverse) to produce a religion of his own that emphatically distanced itself from both. He once described the two religions, disparagingly, in terms of the animals that Hindus offered to the goddess Kali and that Muslims killed at the end of a pilgrimage: “One slaughters goats, one slaughters cows; they squander their birth in isms.”128 Not surprisingly, both groups attacked him during his life; more surprisingly, both claimed him after his death. For this is the sort of thing that he said:

  Who’s whose husband? Who’s whose wife?

  Death’s gaze spreads—untellable story.

  Who’s whose father? Who’s whose son?

  Who suffers? Who dies? . . . If God wanted circumcision,

  why didn’t you come out cut?

  If circumcision makes you a Muslim,

  what do you call your women?

  Since women are called man’s other half,

  you might as well be Hindus. . . .

  If putting on the thread makes you a Brahmin,

  what does the wife put on?

  That Shudra’s touching your food, pandit!

  How can you eat it?

  Hindu, Muslim—where did they come from?

  Who started this road?

  Look in your heart, send out scouts:

  where is heaven?129

  Religious affiliation was just window dressing, as far as Kabir was concerned:

  Veda, Koran, holiness, hell, woman, man. . . .

  It’s all one skin and bone, one piss and shit,

  one blood, one meat. . . .

  Kabir says, plunge into Ram!

  There: No Hindu. No Turk.130

  Kabir challenged the authenticity of the amorphous word “Hindu” in part because it was beginning to assume a more solid shape at this time, precisely in contrast with “Turk” (standing for Turks, Arabs, and other non-Hindus).

  Kabir regarded caste as irrelevant to liberation,131 and many stories are told about his challenges to the caste system. For instance:

  KABIR AND THE PROSTITUTE

  When Kabir became famous, he was mobbed by so many visitors that he had to get rid of them. So he went to the house of a prostitute, put his arm around her neck, grabbed a vessel of holy water as if it were liquor, and drank; then he went to the bazaar with her, and the townspeople laughed at him, and his devotees were very sad. The Brahmins and traders reviled him, saying, “How can low-caste people engage in bhakti? Kabir tried it for just ten days and now has taken up with a prostitute.” The king showed him no respect, and everyone was astonished.132

  The willful seeking of dishonor bears a striking resemblance to the methods used by the Pashupatas, though for an entirely different purpose.

  Another story about caste is also a story about talking animals:

  KABIR AND THE BUFFALO

  One day Kabir and some of his disciples came among Ramanuja’s spiritual descendants, all Brahmins who would not eat if even the shadow of a Pariah fell on their cooking places. They did not want Kabir to sit and eat with them. Rather than say this outright, and knowing that low-caste people were forbidden to recite the Veda, they said that only someone who could recite Vedic verses could sit with them. Kabir had a buffalo with him. He put his hand on the buffalo’s head and said, “Listen, buffalo! Hurry up and recite some of the Veda!” The buffalo began to recite. Everyone was astonished and begged Kabir to forgive them.133

  But the strongest testimony to Kabir’s attitude to caste comes from his own poetry:

  Tell me where untouchability

  came from, since you believe in it. . . .

  We eat by touching, we wash

  by touching, from a touch

  the world was born.

  So who’s untouched? asks Kabir.

  Only she

  who’s free from delusion.134

  Yet Kabir was not a revolutionary in any political or even social sense. Iconoclastic, yes; anti-institutional, to be sure; poor and low in status, you bet, but not concerned about putting an end to poverty. His goal was spiritual rather than economic or political liberation.135

  HINDUISM UNDER THE DELHI SULTANATE

  Hinduism in this period turned in new directions not only in response to Islam, though that too, but in response to new developments within the Hindu world itself, some of which were and some which were not directly influenced by the Muslim presence. Because of the importance of Vijayanagar and the abundance of available light there, let us let it stand for all the other Hindu kingdoms that thrived at this time.

  VIJAYANAGAR

  Vijayanagar (“City of Victory”), the capital of the last extensive Hindu empire in India, between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, had an estimated population of five hundred thousand and was the center of a kingdom that controlled most of southern India, from the uplands of the Deccan plateau to the southernmost tip of the Indian subcontinent, and, at various times, the Doab, the Deccan, Orissa, and points east and west.

  Located just south of the Tungabhadra River in Karnataka, in South India, Vijayanagar, five kilometers square, was founded in 1336136 by Harihara I (r. 1336-1357), a warrior chief from the Sangama dynasty, and Harihara’s brother Bukka (r. 1344-1377). The story goes that that the brothers had been captured by the army of the Delhi sultan and hauled up to Delhi, where they converted to Islam and accepted the sultan as their overlord. The Delhi sultan then sent them back home to pacify the region. Upon their return south, they promptly shed their allegiance to the sultans, blocked Muslim southward expansion, and were reinstated as Hindus, indeed recognized as reincarnations of Shiva.137

  Vijayanagar is a sacred site, which many Hindus regarded as the location of the kingdom of the monkey Hanuman, studded with spots identified with specific places mentioned in the Ramayana, an identification that didn’t politicize the Ramayana so much as it polis-ized it, turned it into a city-state. Inscriptions, historical narratives, and architectural remains suggest that the concept of Rama as the ideal king, and Ayodhya as the site of the Ramayana legend, came alive in central and North India in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, but only during the Vijayanagar Empir
e did the cult of Rama become significant at the level of an imperial order.138 The Ramayana had long been an important source for the conceptualization of divine kingship, but now for the first time historical kings identified themselves with Rama and boasted that they had destroyed their enemies as Rama destroyed Ravana; in this way, they would demonize—more precisely, Ravana-ize—their enemies. Scenes from the Ramayana appear in temple wall friezes from at least the fifth century CE, but the figure of Rama was not the object of veneration, the actual installed icon, until the sudden emergence of a number of temples at this time.139 Now Rama and Hanuman became the focus of important sects in northern India, especially around Janakpur, regarded as Sita’s birthplace, and Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, regarded as Rama’s birthplace.

  But this was only in part a reaction to the Muslim invasions and the rapid expansion of the Delhi Sultanate. True, Devaraya I (1406-1422) built the first Rama temple at Vijayanagar in the midst of the power struggle with the Delhi sultans. But the story of Rama’s defeat of Ravana was celebrated in rituals before the rise of Islam in India, and there are no anti-Muslim statements in any inscriptions relating to the Vijayanagar temples. The fact that Shri Vaishnavas built many of the Rama temples in Vijayanagar,140 with endowments by a variety of groups, including royal agents, subordinate rulers, private citizens, and merchant guilds, suggests that the cult of Rama had a life of its own, with theological motivations, in addition to its significance for the ideology of kingship.141

  The Vijayanagar temples may well have been built in part as a response to theological challenges posed by the Jainas, for there was still considerable conflict at this time between Jainas (who were now on the decline) and both Shaivas and Vaishnavas (from the fast-growing sects of Basava and Ramanuja). When the Jainas complained to Bukka I, in 1368 CE at Vijayanagar, about the injustice done to them by the Shri Vaishnavas, the king proclaimed that there was no difference between the Jaina and Vaishnava philosophies and that the Shri Vaishnavas should protect the Jaina tradition.142 The king would not have to have made an edict urging the Hindus to treat the Jainas well if they hadn’t already been treating them badly.