Anirudh Kanisetti is a self-confessed “public historian”. The same way, Romila Thapar is a self-confessed “public intellectual”. (Read her book, The Public Intellectual in India, published by Aleph.) One wonders what the term ‘public’ has to do with a historian or an intellectual, but it’s undeniable that there are similarities between the kind of history-writing the two indulge in: Being selective, if not manipulative, with the truth!
So, here’s the latest from Kanisetti, the public historian, who in a recent article finds out the commonalities between “a Hindu king and a Muslim sultan”: “Both looted Kashmir’s temples,” he writes matter-of-factly. As one begins reading the article, one hopes to find a long litany of Hindu rulers indulging in temple looting, if not destruction.
“Kashmiri royals didn’t care about looting temples that they had not personally set up — it was wealth for the taking, which they needed for their own projects,” he writes.
But as it turns out, Kanisetti mentions just one name — King Harsha. Before someone confuses him with the more famous Harsha Vardhan of Thanesar, it must be said that this Harsha belonged to Kashmir and was indeed infamous for looting Hindu temples. But where are other ‘iconoclastic’ Hindu rulers about which Kanisetti hinted at the beginning of the article?
Maybe he forgot to mention them! Maybe there was no one else to write about!
As one ponders over this, one is again reminded of Romila Thapar and the old ruse adopted by eminent historians, especially in India, to normalise Islamist vandalism: If one cannot deny temple destruction by Muslim rulers in medieval India, then accuse Hindu rulers of doing the same in ancient times.
While reviewing Thapar’s book, Early India, in May 2003 for London’s Financial Times, senior journalist Edward Luce wrote, “Romila Thapar’s masterful recent book, Early India… makes it plain that the destruction of temples — a highly combustible issue in today’s India — was also the normal thing for incoming Hindu dynasties to do… Well before Islam appeared in India, Hindu dynasties had erased almost all the Buddhist and Jainist temples of early dynasties.”
Interestingly, it was Thapar, in the august company of fellow historians Harbans Mukhia and Bipan Chandra, who first invented the Hindu intolerance theory in a 1969 booklet called Communalism and the Writing of Indian History. In this 60-odd-page booklet, Thapar questions the “assumption” that “only a Muslim would despoil temples and break idols since the Islamic religion is opposed to idol worship”. She continues, “Little attempt is made to search for further explanations regarding Mahmud (of Ghazni)’s behaviour. Other reasons can be found when one turns to the tradition of Hindu kings and enquires whether any of them were despoilers of temples and idol-breakers.” Thapar then, just like Kanisetti, talks about King Harsha of Kashmir. And again like Kanisetti, she too mentions this one Hindu king alone to paint the entire Hindu kingship black.
Writes Kanisetti, “Since Kalhana was a Brahmin, Harsha’s temple-sacking directly attacked his kin networks, so he angrily accused the king of incest (VII.1148) and even of having an officer for looting temples (VII. 1091).”
What Kanisetti doesn’t say is that Kalhana, in Rajataringini, while mentioning that King Harsha of Kashmir plundered Hindu and Buddhist temples, accused him of acting “like a Turushka (Turk)” and also that he was “prompted by the Turushkas in his employ”. This one statement makes it amply clear that temple looting/desecration was not an Indic phenomenon, and if someone like King Harsha of Kashmir committed it, it was an aberration for which he was severely criticised.
The fact of the matter is that India’s Left-‘liberal’ historians have traditionally peddled the temple theory based on half-a-dozen vague, largely untenable, stories — of Kalinga king Kharvela, Pallava king Narasimhavarman, King Harsha of Kashmir, and King Shashank of Gauda. One can also add the names of Pushyamitra Sunga and a Pandya ruler to the list, but their sources are so distant and discredited that even Leftist historians use them sparingly.
In Flight of Deities and Rebirth of Temples, historian Meenakshi Jain talks about Kharavela and Narasimhavarman to demolish the iconoclast Hindu myth. “Almost without exception, Hindu rulers honoured the images they acquired, thereby reaffirming a shared sense of the sacred. In the Islamic case, seizure of an image entailed its very dismemberment,” she writes as she explains how Kharavela (2nd-1st-century BC) and Narasimhavarman (7th century AD), after vanquishing their adversaries, took the murtis of a Jaina Tirthankar and Lord Ganesh, respectively, and placed them with honour in a shrine in their respective kingdoms.
Jain also draws upon the Purva Karana Agama to explain why a victorious king would bring deities from the vanquished kingdom and arrange for their worship in his own state in an appropriate manner. This would divest the defeated ruler of divine protection. Also, it was obligatory for the vanquished king to try and retrieve the images within a span of three years. This explains the ‘iconoclastic’ tendencies of Hindu rulers.
As for King Shashank of Gauda, he had been accused of persecuting Buddhists, destroying their places of worship, and even cutting the sacred Bodhi tree. But even in his case, the evidence presented, as per historian R.C. Majumdar, is “extremely unsafe”. So, apart from King Harsha’s “Turuska-like” temple act, other examples are far from being reliable, based on sources that are flawed and untenable. In that way, the theory of Hindu kings indulging in temple destruction is as mythical and make-believe as the Aryan invasion/migration theory of the yore. But it continues to survive, if not thrive, especially among Leftist scholars, thanks to its propaganda value.
Coming back to Kanisetti’s article, it doesn’t stop at Hindu kings destroying temples. He goes on to explain how “Kashmiri Brahmins employed by the Sultans presented their temple attacks as the natural progression of the activities of Shaivite kings”; how they would vie with each other to declare Zain-ul-Abidin, a 15th-century Muslim ruler in Kashmir, an avatar of Vishnu.
The answer, ironically lies in his statement itself: For, these Brahmins were employed by the Sultan(s) and they would invariably speak their master’s voice. One saw something similar during Mughal rule too when a number of Hindus patronised by “Akbar and sons” wrote glowingly about them. Just the same way, Jews were working for Hitler even as he was on a Jew annihilation spree. In fact, as American historian Bryan Rigg writes in his book Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, “thousands of men of Jewish descent and hundreds of what the Nazis called ‘full Jews’ served in the military with Hitler’s knowledge… The Nazis allowed these men to serve but at the same time exterminated their families”.
And in Mughal India, one finds Aurangzeb, and not Akbar, employing the maximum number of Hindus — interestingly, the former had taken upon himself the task of dismantling the Akbar-ian structure that created space for Hindu-Muslim collaboration.
Kanisetti, who has otherwise written a much readable book on Deccan kingdoms, suffers from a typical Indian historiographical shortcoming of treating aberration as routine. And in this he is, quite unfortunately, treading the beaten path of Romila Thapar and others. Indian history has had enough of this progressive historiography that is agenda-driven, (Leftist) ideology-oriented and politically-influenced. Instead, we need to put in place a historiography that doesn’t let truth be a casualty to progressive worldview, that won’t push facts under the carpet of Leftist correctness, and that would never give in to the notion of minorities having the ‘first right’ to the nation’s history.
Indian historiography must strive to get what it truly needs — an honest, candid history, Sir Jadunath Sarkar-like, based on truth and historical facts, howsoever politically incorrect they may be. Any other obsession, especially with the 3Ps — Public, Politics and Party— as has been the case so far, would only be hurting the craft and cause of history. History needs historians, good, old Sarkar-like historians, and not politically correct ‘public’ intellectuals… err historians.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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