The nature of medieval Hindu-Muslim relations is an issue of great relevance in contemporary India. Prior to the 200 years of colonial subjection to the British that ended in 1947, large portions of the Indian subcontinent were under Muslim political control. An upsurge of Hindu nationalism over the past decade has led to demands that the state rectify past wrongs on behalf of India's majority religion.' In the nationalist view, Hindu beliefs were continually suppressed and its institutions repeatedly violated during the many centuries of Muslim rule from 1200 C.E. onward. The focal point of nationalist sentiment is the most visible symbol of Hinduism, its temples. As many as 60,000 Hindu temples are said to have been torn down by Muslim rulers, and mosques built on 3,000 of those temples' foundations. The most famous of these alleged former temple sites is at Ayodhya in North India, long considered the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. The movement to liberate this sacred spot, supposedly defiled in the sixteenth century when the Babri Masjid mosque was erected on the ruins of a Rama temple, was one of the hottest political issues of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Tensions reached a peak in December 1992, when Hindu militants succeeded in demolishing the mosque.
India is a land of enormous diversity. Cross-cultural influences are everywhere in evidence, in the food people eat, the clothes they wear, and in the places they worship. This was especially the case in the India that existed from 1200 to 1750, before the European intervention. The book takes the reader on a journey across the political, economic, religious and cultural landscapes of medieval India, from the Ghurid conquests and the Dehli Sultanate to the great court of the Mughals. This was a time of conquest and consolidation, when Muslims and Hindus came together to create a unique culture which still resonates in today's India. As the first survey of its kind in over a decade, the book is a tour de force. It is beautifully illustrated and fluently composed, with a cast of characters which will educate students and general readers alike.
Although the caste system is thought to have dominated the society of traditional India, people who commissioned inscriptions in Kakatiya Andhra (a.d.1175–1324 ) mentioned their clan or lineage affiliation far more often than their varna. Status titles based on occupation were widely used and could vary from generation to generation within a family, demonstrating that social identities were linked to individual achievement. There were many opportunities for both travel and social mobility due to the prevalence of military activity, long distance trade, and herding. Inscriptions cast further doubt on the alleged rigidity of traditional Indian society by revealing the presence of collectives of people brought together by ties other than kinship or locality and of many women who were wealthy enough to make temple donations.
The common model of the Hindu temple of South India has stressed its significance as the main integrative factor binding the disparate elements of precolonial society into one social fabric. As a focal point for economic redistribution, the South Indian temple was the conduit through which exchange occurred: material goods were transformed into the symbols of prestige and influence known as temple honors (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1976). The legitimacy of the medieval South Indian ruler rested on his role as the donor par excellence, and his sovereignty had a ritual basis that was far stronger than his more mundane methods of control (Stein 1980: 45–46). The foremost reason South Indian temples were able to perform this integrative function was their wide appeal in the society—their ability to incorporate members of different communities into one community of worship. By providing employment to artisans, peasants and shepherds and by lending money to agriculturalists in their vicinities, South Indian temples also redistributed the property of the wealthy to other segments of society (Spencer 1968:292). The widespread approval accorded to patrons of temples meant that, during the later Vijayanagara age, religious gifting could be used as a strategy by outside warriors for creating allegiances on the local level in Tamil Nadu (Appadurai 1977:55–59).
The desire to have their charitable deeds documented in permanent form led thousands of Hindu temple donors in the Andhra Pradesh region of South India to get the details of their gifts inscribed on stone pillars, rock slabs, and temple walls. Using these records of what people actually did, Cynthia Talbot reconstructs the precolonial past as it existed in practice during the era when India's distinctive regional societies were taking shape. The medieval Andhra that emerges from the perspective of inscriptions is a vibrant and mobile world inhabited by a wide range of individuals including herders, merchants, and women, as well as landed peasants, kings, and Brahmans. Precolonial India in Practice begins with an examination of the historical processes that prompted Andhra's long age of inscriptions (c.1000–1650), a time when the religious patronage of temples both reflected and stimulated an expanding agrarian economy and a growing regional culture. It moves on to an in‐depth analysis of the society, temples, and polity of the Kakatiya era (1175–1325) – a formative period in which the Telugu‐speaking region was politically unified by the upland warriors who continued to dominate its society for centuries. The enduring cultural significance of the Kakatiya period for later Telugu society is demonstrated in a final section dealing with historical memories of the Kakatiyas. Talbot's interpretation of medieval Andhra as an era of dynamic change characterized by extensive social and physical mobility and a militaristic ethos offers a significant alternative to earlier depictions of the history and society of medieval India. In serving as a corrective to models of the Indian past derived only from Brahmanical literature, modern ethnography, and colonial observation, this case study of a neglected time period and region has important ramifications for our general understanding of precolonial India.
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