Inscribing the Other, Inscribing the Self: Hindu-Muslim Identities in Pre-Colonial India

Abstract

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.

Cultural Geography of Kathak Dance: Streams of Tradition and Global Flows

“…9 The kings of the following Tuluva dynasty, among them Kr̥ ṣṇadeva Rāya, who, as was mentioned before, perhaps established the maṭha there, held the place in great esteem as well (Raman 1975: 80-81). We may deduce that in time Ahobilam became politically important from the fact that when in 1579 Ibrahim of the Qutb Shahi dynasty together with the Hindu Hande chiefs attacked it and held it for five or six years, it was recaptured by a Vijayanagara subordinate (Talbot 1995: 717, Vasantha 2001.…”

Numbers in Nirvana: How the 1872–1921 Indian censuses helped operationalise ‘Hinduism’

“…Although arguments about primordial Hinduism are quite convincing and appealing (see also Babb, 1986;Doniger, 1991;Talbot, 1995;Van der Veer, 1994;O'Connell, 1973;Wagle, 1997), the story does not seem to be so simple. Hinduism remained a religious category in the 1872 and subsequent censuses, albeit one without a substantive definition.…”

Conquering the quarters: Religion and politics in Hinduism

“…Sheldon Pollock (1993), for example, suggests that the R~rndya.na provided special imaginative resources for the demonization of invading Turks and that it was precisely this confrontation with a religious 'Other' that stimulated the rapid growth of the Rima tradition in India; an argument to which Cynthia Talbot (1995) persuasively responds by proposing that the concept of Hindu was primarily ethnic (territorial identification in addition to certain other features) and only later became 'religious.' Many would hesitate even to raise the volatile issue of 'religious' oppression of Hindus by Muslims during the late medieval period, and it is certainly true that the extent of such oppression varied in time and space.…”