The Details about "Hindu Iconoclasm"

[pp. 64-76 of ELST Koenraad. 2002. The Case Against the Temple. Delhi: VOI]

A remarkable aspect of the Ayodhya debate is the complete lack of active involvement by Western scholars. Their role has been limited to that of loudspeakers for the secularist-cum-Islamist party-line denying that any temple demolition had preceded the construction of the Babri Masjid. Even those who (like Hans Bakker and Peter Van der Veer) had earlier given their innocent support to the historical account, putting the Ayodhya case in the context of systematic Islamic iconoclasm, hurried to fall in line once the secularist campaign of history-rewriting started.

Given the widely acknowledged importance of the Ayodhya conflict, one would have expected at least some of the well-funded Western academics to embark on their own investigation of the issue rather than parroting the slogans emanating from Delhi's Jama Masjid and JNU. Their behavior in the Ayodhya debate provides an interesting case study of the tendency of establishment institutions and settled academicians to genuflect before ideological authorities over-ruling scholarly procedure in favor of the political fashion of the day. This is, I fear, equally true of the one Western academic who has substansively contributed to the debate, and whose contribution we will presently discuss.

Massive Evidence of Temple Destruction

One Western author who has become very popular among India's history-writers is the American scholar Prof. Richard M. Eaton. Unlike his colleagues, he has done some original research pertinent to the issue of Islamic iconoclasm, though not of the Ayodhya case specifically. A selective reading of his work, focusing on his explanations but keeping most of his facts out of view, is made to serve the negationist position regarding temple destruction in the name of Islam.

Yet, the numerically most important body of data presented by him concurs neatly with the classic (now dubbed "Hindutva") account. In his oft-quoted paper "Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states", he gives a list of "eighty" cases of Islamic temple destruction. "Only eighty", is how the secularist history-rewriters render it, but Eaton makes no claim that his list is exhaustive. Morover, eighty isn't always eighty.

Thus, in his list, we find mentioned as one instance: "1094: Benares, Ghurid army". Did the Ghurid army work one instance of temple destruction? Eaton provides his source and there we read that in Benares, the Ghurid royal army "destroyed nearly one thousand temples, and raised mosques on their foundations". This way, practically every one of the instances cited by Eaton must be read as actually ten, or a hundred, or as in this case, even a thousand temples destroyed. Even Eaton's non-exhaustive list, presented as part of "the kind of responsible and constructive discussion that this controversial topic so badly needs", yields the same thousands of temple destructions ascribed to the Islamic rulers in most relevant pre-1989 histories of Islam and in pro-Hindu publications.

That part of course is not highlighted in secularist papers exploiting Eaton's work. Far more popular, however, is the spin which Eaton puts in this data: Islam cannot be blamed for the acts of Muslim idol-breakers, the blame lies elsewhere....

Apparently in good faith, but nonetheless in exactly the same manner as the worst Indian history falsifiers, Eaton discusses the record of Islam in India while keeping the entire history of Islam outside of India out of view. This history would show unambiguously that what happened in India was merely a continuation of Prophet Mohammad's own conduct in Arabia and his successors' conduct during the conquest of West and Central Asia.

That the Arabian precedent is ignored is all the more remarkable when you consider that the stated immediate objective for Eaton's paper was Sita Ram Goel's endeavor to "document a pattern of wholesale temple destruction by Muslims in the pre-British period". Goel's elaborately argued thesis, telling left unmentioned here by Eaton, is precisely that Islamic iconoclasm in India follows a pattern set in the preceding centuries in West Asia and accepted as normative in Islamic doctrine. Eaton's glaring omission of this all-important precedent makes his alternative explanation of Islamic iconoclasm in India suspect beforehand.

Hindu Iconoclasm?

Instead of seeking the motives of the Islamic idol-breakers in Islam, Eaton seeks it elsewhere: in Hinduism. He admits that during the Hindu re-conquest of Muslim-occupied territories: "Examples of mosque desecrations are strikingly few in number." Yet, in his opinion, Hindus had been practicing their own very specific form of iconoclasm in earlier centuries. Though they themselves seem to have lost the habit by Shivaji's time, it was this Hindu tradition which the Muslim invaders copied: "The form of desecration that showed the greatest continuity with pre-Turkish practice was the seizure of the image of the defeated king's state deity and its abudction to the victor's capital as a trophy of war."

One of the examples cited is this: "When Firuz Tughluk invaded Orissa in 1359 and learned that the region's most important temple was that of Jagannath located inside the raja's fortress in Puri, he carried off the stone image if the god and installed it in Delhi 'in an ignominous position'." And likewise, there are numerous instances of idols built into footpaths, lavatories and other profane positions. This is not disputed, but can any Hindu precedent be cited for it?

The work for which Indian secularists are most grateful to Eaton, is his digging up of a few cases of what superficially appears to be of Hindu iconoclasm: "For, while it is true that contemporary Persian sources routinely condemn idolatory (but-parasti) on religious grounds, it is also true that attacks on images patronized by enemy kings had been, from about the sixth century A.D. on, thoroughly integrated into Indian political behavior." Because a state deity's idol was deemed to resonate with the state's fortunes (so that its accidental breaking apart was deemed an evil omen for the state itself), the generalization of idol worship in temples in the first millennium A.D. oddly implied that "early medieval history abounds in instances of temple desecration that occurred admidst inter-dynastic conflicts."

If the "eighty" (meaning thousands of) cases of Islamic iconoclasm are only a trifle, the "abounding" instances of Hindu iconoclasm, "thoroughly integrated" in Hindu political culture, can reasonably be expected to number tens of thousands. Yet, Eaton's list, given without reference to primary sources, contains, even in a maximalist reading (i.e., counting "two" when one king takes away two idols from one enemy's royal temple), only 18 individual cases. This even includes the case of "probably Buddhist" idols installed in a Shiva temple by Govinda III, the Rashtrakuta conqueror of Kanchipuram, not after seizing them but after accepting them as a pre-emptive tribute offered by the fearful king of Sri Lanka.

In this list, cases of actual destruction amount to exactly two: "Bengali troops sought revenge on king Lalitaditya by destroying what they thought was the image of Vishnu Vaikuntha, the state deity of Lalitaditya's kingdom in Kashmir", and: "In the early tenth century, the Rashtrakut monarch Indra III not only destroyed the temple of Kalapriya (at Kalpa near the Jamuna river) patronized by the Rashtrakutas' deadly enemies the Pratiharas, but took away special delight in recording the fact."

The latter is the only instance of temple destruction in the list, even though rehotical sleight-of-hand introduces it as representative of a larger phenomenon: "While the dominant pattern here was one of looting royal temples and carrying off images of state deities, we also hear of Hindu kings engaging in the destruction of royal temples of their adversaries."

So, what is the "dominant pattern" in the sixteen remaining cases? As we saw in the case of the Lankan idols in Kanchipuram, the looted (or otherwise acquired) idols were respectfully installed in a temple in the conqueror's seat of power, e.g., a solid image of Vishnu Vaikuntha, seized earlier by the Pratihara king Herambapala, "was seized from the Pratiaharas by the Candella king Yasovarman and installed in the Lakshamana temple of Khajuraho". So, the worship of the image continued, albeit in a new location; and the worship of the old location was equally allowed to continue, albeit with a new idol as the old and prestigious one had been taken away. In both places, the existing system of worship was left intact.

This is in radical contrast with Islamic iconoclasm, which was meant to disrupt Hindu worship and symbolize or announce its definite and complete annihilation. There is no case of an Islamic conqueror seizing a Hindu idol and taking it to his capital for purposes of continuing its worship there. Hindu conquerors did not want to destroy or even humiliate or disrupt the religion of the defeated state. On the contrary, in most cases, the winning and the defeated party shared the same religion and were in no mood to dishonor it in any way. The situation with Islamic conquerors is quite the opposite.

That is why Eaton fails to come up with the key evidence for his thesis of a native Hindu origin of Muslim iconoclasm. He can show us not a single document testifying that a Muslim conqueror committed acts of iconoclasm in imitation of an existing local Hindu tradition. On the contrary, when Islamic iconoclasts cared to justify their acts in writing, it was invariably with reference to the Islamic doctrine and the Prophet's precedents of idol-breaking and of the war of extermination against idolatry.

No advanced education and specialist knowledge is required to see the radical difference between the handful of cases of alleged Hindu iconoclasm and the thousands of certified Islamic cases of proudly self-described iconoclasm. It is like the difference between an avid reader stealing a book from the library and a barbarian burning the library down. In one case, an idol is taken away from a temple, with respectful greetings to an officiating priest, in order to re-install it in another temple and restart its worship. In the other case, an idol is taken away from the ruins of a temple, with a final kick against the priest's severed head, in order to install it in a lavatory for continuous profanation and mockery. Of the last two sentences, a secularist only retains the part that "an idol is taken away from the temple", and decides that it's all the same.

For Prof, Eaton's information, it may be recalled that an extreme willful superficiality regarding all matters religious is a key premise of Nehruvian secularism. While such an anti-scholarly attitude may be understandable in the case of political activists parachuted into academic positions in Delhi, there is no decent reason why an American scholar working in the relative quiet of Tuscon, Arizona, should play their game.