Mahmud Of Ghaznavid And The Curious Case Of Hindu Trauma From His Somnath Attack; Electoral Bonds And Film Recommendations
And some important cartoons on Israel-Palestine.
The Indian middle class remains a largely chimerical affair to this very day. At the very top, there is a roaring trade—the reservations of short sellers such as Hindenburg Research notwithstanding—the Adanis and Ambanis scooping up all manner of contracts from airports through seaports, petroleum to edible oil. But counterpointing the skyrocketing valuations of a few conglomerates is another India. Comprising, on average, sixty percent of the population in advanced capitalist countries, the middle class can scarcely claim two percent of India’s citizens among its ranks. Only 84 million Indians make $10, or Rs 830, a day, hardly enough to acquire the accoutrements of a bourgeois existence. Even the much talked-up information technology sector—the cradle of the middle class in the contemporary imagination—employs only 5.4 million people, many of whom will, in any case, be rendered redundant by automation before the decade is out. A third of the workforce, meanwhile, is made up of footloose labourers, casually employed on farms and construction sites far removed from their homes. A tenth are child labourers.
2024 is an election year and there are going to be a lot of things happening. In this context, I was surprised to read how Nehru annexed Goa by flexing his military might against Portuguese. (Above para and below excerpt are from this piece.)
By the time of India’s third general election, a time-honoured distraction was found to rally the peasantry behind the Congress: war. Flexing his martial muscles, Nehru plumped for a “forward policy” along the Sino-Indian border, also seizing the conveniently rediscovered Portuguese enclave of Goa in the winter of 1961. Victory in the khaki election that ensued was followed by defeat at Chinese hands.
We will talk of Israel-Palestine in future, but for now, just leaving these cartoons I liked.
Mahmud of Ghazni, Raids and Somnath
Following is a tad bit too long but I would like you to take some time and read it for many reasons. One of them being how untruths are churned out by the powerful day-in-and-day-out. Also, it was not Mahmud alone who visited India on these raids and Alberuni has some insights into why India was never prepared for these types of raids. When you reach to the end of following, try to think if whatever Alberuni wrote (during Mahmud’s time), does it apply even to present time and age?
Of the campaigns within the subcontinent, the most serious was that of Rajendra Chola along the east coast, his armies coming as far north as the Ganges. From outside the subcontinent, Mahmud of Ghazni began his raids into north-western India. Each was oblivious of the other, which is curious, given that there was far more communication of news now than there had been before, and the raids of Mahmud lasted for over two decades.
To begin with, a number of small kingdoms arose with rulers of Turkish origin. Among them was the kingdom ruled from Ghazni that acquired fame under Mahmud. A principality in Afghanistan, Ghazni became prominent in 977 when a Turkish nobleman annexed the trans-Indus region of the Shahiya kingdom, together with some territories adjoining central Asia. His son Mahmud decided to make Ghazni a formidable power in the politics of central Asia and in the Islamic world, especially in the world of eastern Islam. Mahmud's ambition was to be proclaimed the champion of Islam and in this, he succeeded. For him, India was the proverbially wealthy land that had always appeared rich and attractive from the barren mountains of the Hindu Rush. Raids on Hindu temples provided him with quantities of wealth and also claims to being an iconoclast. His success in these activities needs some investigation.
The politics of Afghanistan were at this time more closely allied with those of central Asia than with India, and from Mahmud's point of view, incursions into India were essentially raids to gather wealth, but of little permanent significance. This made them different from the Arab campaigns that were more evidently a prelude to settlement in India, with participation in the local economy.
With the continuing trade between China and the Mediterranean, it was far more lucrative to hold political power in Khvarazm and Turkestan, as be Ghaznavids did for some years, than in northern India. The Ghaznavid kingdom therefore comprised parts of central Asia and Iran and was acknowledged as a power in Eastern Islam. Mahmud turned with remarkable speed from raids in India to campaigns in central Asia. Apart from religious iconoclasm, the raids on Indian towns were largely for plunder aimed primarily at replenishing the Ghazni treasury.
These raids were almost an annual feature. In AD 1000 he defeated Jayapala, the Shahiya King. The following year he was campaigning in Seistan, south of Ghazni. The years 1004-6 saw repeated attacks on Multan, a town of strategic importance in the middle Indus Plain, with access to Sind. Multan was also a nodal point in the lucrative trade with the Persian Gulf and with western India. The renowned Sun temple maintained by the merchants was seen by Mahmud as a repository of wealth. For Mahmud, the mosque maintained by the wealthy Shia'h Muslims of the town was also a target for desecration, since, as an ardent Sunni Muslim, he regarded Shiahs and Ismai'lis as heretics. Accounts of his destruction speak of the killing of 50,000 infidels and the same number of Muslim heretics, though the figures are formulaic and often repeated.
In 1008 Mahmud again attacked the Punjab and returned home with a vast amount of wealth. The following year he was involved in a conflict with the ruler of Ghur (the area between Ghazni and Herat in Afghanistan). Obviously, his army was both mobile and effective, or these annual offensives in different areas would not have been successful. Careful planning of the campaigns led to the arrival of his armies in India during the harvest and well before the monsoon rains. This reduced the dependence on commissariat arrangements and enhanced the mobility of the army. Mahmud's targets were the richest temples, the looting of which would provide him with ample booty as well as making him a champion iconoclast. The destruction of temples even by Hindu rulers was not unknown, but Mahmud's was a regulated activity and inaugurated an increase in temple destruction compared to earlier times.
[…]
Donation and construction of the temple was a statement of the power of its patron, indicating the generosity of his patronage, and was intended to impress this on those who visited it. Conquest was therefore sometimes imprinted by the destruction of a temple. Thus when the Rashtrakuta King, Indra III, defeated the Pratiharas in the early tenth century, a Pratihara temple at Kalpa was torn up to establish the victory. On defeating the Chaulukyas, the Paramara King of Malwa, Subhatavarma, destroyed the temples that the Chaulukyas had built for the Jainas as well as the mosque for the Arabs. Both the Jainas and the Arabs were traders of some economic consequence, hence the royal patronage.
Temples controlled an income that included the revenue received from their lands and endowments, the wealth donated to them in gold and precious stones by wealthy donors, as well as the offerings of the many thousands of pilgrims. All this added up to a sizeable sum. Some temples invested in trade and the profits from this activity came to the temple treasury. Not surprisingly therefore they were targets for greedy kings. Kalhana writes of the kings of Kashmir of this period looting temples, and one among them, Harshadeva, even appointed a special officer to supervise this activity. Kalhana uses the epithet "Turushka' for him! This would suggest that the destruction of temples by Hindu rulers was known and recorded, but such acts were viewed as more characteristic of the Turushkas Mahmud's attacks would have been resented but may not have been an unfamiliar experience. This is demonstrated in the history of the Somanatha temple, subsequent to the raid by Mahmud.
Mahmud's greed for gold was insatiable, so his raids were directed to major temple towns such as Mathura, Thanesar, Kanauj and finally Somanatha. The concentration of wealth at Somanatha was renowned, so it was inevitable that Mahmud would have attacked it.
In 1026 Mahmud raided Somanatha, desecrated the temple and broke the idol. The event is described in Turko-Persian and Arab sources, some contemporary - the authors claiming to have accompanied Mahmud - and others of later times, the story being repeated continually in these histories up to the seventeenth century. The most accurate account appears to be that of Alberuni, who stated that the icon was a lingam, the temple was about a hundred years old and located within a fort on the edge of the sea, and that it was much venerated by sailors since Veraval had maritime connections with Zanzibar and China. But there is no unanimity about the idol in other accounts. The earlier descriptions of the event identify it with the idol of Manat, a pre-Islamic goddess of southern Arabia, whose shrine the prophet Mohammad had wanted destroyed and the idol broken; others write that it was a lingam; still, others state that it was an anthropomorphic figure stuffed with jewels. Gradually a mythology was constructed around the temple and the idol, with alternative narratives. A thirteenth-century account from an Arab source gives yet another version, in which the temple and the icon are enveloped in further fantasy, presumably to make a greater impression on those who read the text.
[…]
The popular view is that Mahmud's raid on Somanatha was such a trauma for the Hindus that it became seminal to the Hindu-Muslim antagonism of recent times. Yet there is no reference in contemporary or near contemporary local sources of the raid on Somanatha, barring a passing mention in a Jaina text, nor is there any discussion of what might have been a reaction, let alone a trauma among Hindus. Jaina sources describe the renovation of the temple by Kumarapala, the Chaulukya King, and the reasons for its falling into disrepair were said to be a lack of maintenance by negligent local officers and the natural decay of age.
Two centuries after the raid, in the thirteenth century, a wealthy ship-owning merchant from Hormuz in Persia, trading at Somanatha, was given permission by the Somanatha town authorities to build a mosque in the vicinity of the now-renovated temple and to buy land and property for the maintenance of the mosque. He was warmly welcomed and received assistance from the Chaulukya-Vaghela administration, the local elite of thakkuras and ranakas, and the Shaiva temple priests. The latter would have been important participants in the deal since the estates of the temple were part of the transaction, together with properties from nearby temples. It would seem that Mahmud's raid on the Somanatha temple had not left a long-lasting impression and it was soon back to business as usual between temple priests, the local Vaghela administration and visiting Persian and Arab merchants. The silence about the raid in what would be called 'Hindu' texts remains unbroken and has been commented upon by modern historians. It remains an enigma as some comment would normally be expected. Interestingly, the earliest claim that the raid resulted in something akin to a trauma for the Hindus was made not in India but in Britain, during a debate in the House of Commons in 1843, when members of the British parliament stated that Mahmud's attack on Somanatha had created painful feelings and had been hurtful to the Hindus for nearly a thousand years. Subsequent to this, references began to be made to the Hindu trauma.
If the kings of Kashmir (mind you, these were Hindu kings) employed Turks as mercenaries, Mahmud of Ghazni had Indian soldiers and officers in his army, including one of his generals, and of whose fighting capabilities he thought well.
Mahmud died in 1030 and this brought his raids to an end. He had used the loot from India to demonstrate his ability not only to establish power but also to indulge in cultural patronage, even if his activities involved acts of ruthlessness. A library was founded in central Asia with books of an impressive range, brought forcibly from other libraries in Persia, and a mosque was built at Ghazni incorporating the finest contemporary Islamic architecture. He recognized the strength of the Persian cultural tradition and wanted to nurture it at his court. The famous poet Firdausi, who wrote the Shahnama, an epic largely on the pre-Islamic heroes and kings of Persia, was invited to Ghazni but left because of Mahmud's niggardliness. From his campaign in Khvarazm, Mahmud brought back with him a scholar by the name of Al Beruni/Alberuni, perhaps the finest intellect of central Asia. who was ordered to spend ten years in India. His observations on Indian conditions, systems of knowledge, social norms and religion, discussed in his book, the Tahqiq-i-Hind, are probably the most incisive made by any visitor to India.
Apparently, the raids of Mahmud did not make Indian rulers sufficiently aware of the changing politics of west Asia and central Asia. […] Historians have sometimes commented, perhaps more from hindsight, on why Indian rulers did not make a conjoint effort through the centuries to defend the north-western passes. Time and again invaders came through these passes, yet little was done to prevent this, the defence of the region lying arbitrarily in the hands of local rulers. It appears the construction of a series of fortifications along the passes was not thought feasible. Perhaps the need for defence was not given priority, the area being viewed as a natural frontier.
Invasions by outsiders are known in many parts of the world: the Huns attacking Rome, the Arabs invading Spain or the Spanish and Portuguese conquering Latin America. The potentialities of invasions were recognized only in hindsight. These invasions were mounted by alien peoples who were little known, if at all, to the societies they invaded. But the Turks had been a contiguous people, familiar from trade in horses and other commodities and from the Turkish mercenaries employed in some Indian armies. However, the historical scene in central Asia and west Asia had now changed, with new political ambitions after the rise of Islam. For the rulers of northern India to recognize this would have required an understanding of a wider range of politics beyond the areas enclosed by the immediate frontiers. This does not appear to have been an Indian concern. Indians who travelled to different parts of Asia on a variety of assignments wrote little about what they observed, remaining silent on the politics of other lands. It was almost as if the exterior landscape was irrelevant. Political interests therefore tended to be parochial. This marks a striking contrast to the world of the Chinese and the Arabs, both made aware of distant places through the detailed accounts of travellers and traders. The Arabs had a fascination for the geography of other lands and the Chinese were wary of happenings in their neighbourhood in central Asia.
Alberuni, in the opening chapter of his book, suggests other reasons for this lack of recording observations concerning the wider perception of the world, which one may or may not agree with:
The Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no king like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs.. They are by nature niggardly in communicating what they know, and they take the greatest possible care to withhold it from men of another caste from among their own people, still more of course from any foreigner.
— E. C. Sachau (ed, and tu.). Alberunis India, pp. 22-3
He has a more scathing assessment when he speaks of the ordering of knowledge:
They are in a state of utter confusion, devoid of any logical order, and in the last instance always mixed up with silly notions of the crowd. I can only compare their mathematical and astronomical literature to a mixture of pearl shells and sour dates, or of pearls and dung, or of costly crystals and common pebbles. Both kinds of things are equal in their eyes since they cannot raise themselves to the methods of a strictly scientific deduction.
— E. C. Sachau (ed. and tr.), Alberuni's India, p. 25
One suspects that he might have been referring here to the impressive advances in astronomy and mathematics, of which he was deeply appreciative, coupled with the travesty of this knowledge resulting from the patronage of astrology, divination and suchlike in the royal courts.
What you just read was verbatim excerpt from `Early India`, a fantastic book on history by Romila Thapar.
Things I saw and liked:
I strongly want you to watch Neru.
Half an hour into Jeethu Joseph’s Neru, almost all the cards are on the table, unlike the filmmaker’s previous outings. We know almost everything about the crime. We know the accused, and the court proceedings have started. No groundbreaking reveal happens in the two hours that follow, as we have come to expect in his films. Yet, it leaves one with a sense of satisfaction. — The Hindu
Jeethu Joseph’s Neru is your straightforward courtroom drama — among other things, about navigating the complicated corners of the Indian judicial system. And there’s nothing really wrong with an ousted advocate (Mohanlal) fighting for the justice of a young woman (Anaswara Rajan) violated by a man who comes from wealth, even if we’ve seen it play out on the screen many times. But what Jeethu and Santhi (whose expertise in law lends Neru a unique touch) do with this film is what makes this a memorable fixture in this genre. It takes all the tropes of the courtroom drama, nodding along with every stock reactionary shot and heavily vitriolic defence lawyer, only to open our eyes and ears to an ingenious take on a woman’s right to consent. — Film Companion
I saw back to back three stand-up specials from Ricky Gervais, and liked all of the three.
If stand-ups are not your thing, I also suggest you watch his fine show ‘After Life’ on Netflix.
Oh Fisk is a good show.
Electoral Bonds
Anjali Bhardwaj: When the electoral bonds were brought in; before the electoral bonds scheme came in, there were amendments that were made through the finance act to four laws.
The RBI act was amended to say that bonds can exist because they're basically promiscery notes.
The income tax act was amended.
The representation of people's act was amended. This was amended to say that political parties will no longer need to report on how much money they are getting through electoral bonds.
There was an amendment made to the companies act.
So four laws were amended. These were very regressive amendments if you look at it from the point of view of democracy and people's rights. We've always had a system where by cash people can contribute to a political party. They can continue to do so even now. We can contribute through a check, through a demand draft or any other way that can also continue. Now these electoral bonds are the ones that have been introduced which are supposed to be completely anonymous. You buy a bond from the SBI and it's supposed to be completely anonymous as to who's buying the bond and then you go and give it to a political party. This is supposed to be entirely anonymous.
Manisha: Except that the government can always know.
Anjali: So basically, electoral bonds, they say are bonds, that can't be traced And when the then finance minister Mr. Arun Jaitley introduced it, he said, we are doing it because we want to give anonymity to donors who don't want to give money because they're worried that they'll be targeted, basically by the ruling party if they get to know and therefore they give in cash. So black money is generated. So they said, therefore we want to give anonymity there.
Now it’s very open secret that, these bonds, carry a number, which is visible under the UV light. And of course, now even in the courts, they're not making any bones about it. The SBI is, of course, you know, it's a government entity. And of course, the SBI is saying, we don't give it to anybody but if the government so wants they can ask for it to be shared. So yes, the whole premise that we want to give anonymity to donor so that they can actually donate via, you know, banking channels without the fear of any kind of action against them just falls flat.
Above exchange is from Newslaundry’s weekly hafta, do listen in: Hafta 457: Electoral bonds, Apple notification on ‘state-sponsored’ cyber attacks
DEAR SHAHID, I am writing to you from your far-off country. Far even from us who live here. Where you no longer are. Everyone carries his address in his pocket so that at least his body will reach home. Rumors break on their way to us in the city. But word still reaches us from border towns: Men are forced to stand barefoot in snow waters all night. The women are alone inside. Soldiers smash radios and televisions. With bare hands they tear our houses to pieces. You must have heard Rizwan was killed. Rizwan: Guardian of the Gates of Paradise. Only eighteen years old. Yesterday at Hideout Café (everyone there asks about you), a doctor-who had just that morning treated a 16-year-old boy released from an interrogation center-said: / want to ask the fortunetellers: Did anything in his line of Fate reveal that the webs of his hands would be cut with a knife? This letter, insh’Allah, will reach you, for my brother goes south tomorrow where he shall post it. Here one can’t even manage postage stamps. Today I went to the post office. Across the river. Bags and bags-hundreds of canvas bags-all of undelivered mail. By chance I looked down and there on the floor I saw this letter addressed to you. So I am enclosing it. I hope it’s from someone you are longing for news of. Things here are as usual, though we always talk about you. Will you come soon? Waiting for you is like waiting for spring. We are waiting for the almond blossoms. And, if God wills, O! those days of peace when we all were in love and the rain was in our hands wherever we met. -- Agha Shahid Ali
That’s all for this one. Do take care of yourself, do read more and more; write to me if you find anything lovely. Drink lots of water; stay hydrated.