Cynthia Talbot Inscribing Self

Inscribing the Other, Inscribing
the Self: Hindu-Muslim Identities

in Pre-Colonial India
CYNTHIA TALBOT
Universityof Texasat Austin
The natureof medievalHindu-Muslim relationsis an issue of greatrelevance

in contemporaryIndia. Prior to the 200 years of colonial subjection to the
British that ended in 1947, large portions of the Indian subcontinentwere
under Muslim political control. An upsurge of Hindu nationalismover the
past decade has led to demandsthatthe state rectify past wrongs on behalf of
India'smajorityreligion. In the nationalistview, Hindubeliefs were continu-
ally suppressedand its institutionsrepeatedlyviolatedduringthe many centu-
ries 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 Hindutemples are said to have been torndown by Muslim rulers, and
mosques built on 3,000 of those temples' foundations.2The most famous of
these alleged formertemple sites is at Ayodhya in North India, long consid-
ered the birthplaceof the Hindu god Rama. The movement to liberate this
sacred spot, supposedlydefiled in the sixteenthcenturywhen the Babri Mas-
jid mosque was erectedon the ruinsof a Ramatemple, 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.3
Earlierversions of this article were presentedat the 1993 WesternConferenceof the Associa-
tion for Asian Studies meeting in Mexico City and the 1994 nationalmeeting of the Association
for Asian Studies in Boston. I am deeply indebtedto RichardM. Eatonand Phillip B. Wagoner,
my fellow panelists on both occasions, whose ideas have so heavily influenced my own. Their
editorial assistance is also gratefullyacknowledged, as is the help of Susan M. Deeds.
I On Hindunationalism,see Daniel Gold, "OrganizedHinduisms:FromVedic Truthto Hindu
Nation," in FundamentalismsObserved, MartinE. Martyand R. Scott Appleby, ed. (Chicago:
Universityof Chicago Press, 1991), 531-93; Peter van der Veer,Religious Nationalism:Hindus
and Muslims in India (Berkeley: Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1994).
2
Entry for the date 1688 in "HinduTimeline," HinduismToday,December 1994.
3 Fordiscussion of the
Ayodhya situation,see AsgharAli Engineer,ed., Politics of Confronta-
tion: The Babri-MasjidRamjanmabhoomiControversyRuns Riot (Delhi: Ajanta Publications,
1992); Ramesh Thakur,"Ayodhya and the Politics of India's Secularism,"Asian Survey, 33:7
(July 1993), 645-64.
Studyof Societyand History
0010-4175/95/4393-5303$7.50 + .10 ? 1995 Societyfor Comparative
692
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HINDU-MUSLIM IDENTITIES IN INDIA 693
Today, Indian Hindus and Muslims see themselves as distinct religious

communities, essentially two separate nations occupying the same ground.
Hindu nationalisthistorianshave projectedthis vision of separatenessinto the
past, statingthatIndianMuslims of the middle ages were a communitytotally
different from, and implacablyopposed to, the Hindu majorityon religious
grounds.4Moreover, IndianMuslims are defined as a social group that is not
indigenous, but of foreign, origin to the subcontinent.This implies that Mus-
lims do not belong in India and have no real rights there. Secular Indian
historianshave decriedthis interpretationas a misrepresentation,a readingof
the past that modem communal biases distort.5Since most Indian Muslims
have descendedfrom convertsand not from immigrants,how can they be cast
as an alien group whose way of life differed radically from that of their
erstwhile Hindubrethren?At least at the village level, secularhistoriansargue
that Hindus and Muslims shareda wide spectrumof customs and beliefs, at
times even jointly worshippingthe same saint or holy spot.
The dominantscholarlytrendof the past ten yearshas emphasizedcolonial-
ism's impact on identity formation. Because large-scale conflicts between
Hindus and Muslims began under colonial rule, the emergence of broadly
based community identities during the nineteenthcentury has been closely
investigated.6Communalviolence was itself a British constructin some an-
alyses because many otherkinds of social strife were labelled as religious due
to the Orientalistassumption that religion was the fundamentaldivision in
Indiansociety.7 There is a generalconsensus that it is questionablewhethera
Hinduor Muslim identityexisted priorto the nineteenthcenturyin any mean-
ingful sense.8 Paradoxically,given the currentcriticism of the colonial soci-
ology of knowledge and its emphasis on caste, most scholars of the colonial
period feel thatpre-colonialsociety was too fragmentedby subcasteand local
loyalties to have allowed larger allegiances to emerge.9 The primacy attri-
buted to colonialism in forming contemporaryIndian identities reflects the
centralrole of modernityin currenttheoriesof nationalismand the emergence
of nation-states.The work of Benedict Anderson,with its stress on the role of
4 For an older
example of Hindu nationalisthistoriography,see R. C. Majumdar,"Hindu-
Muslim Relations," in The Strugglefor Empire, vol. 5 of The History and Cultureof the Indian
People (Bombay: BharatiyaVidya Bhavan, 1957), 498.
5 Romila
Thapar, HarbansMukhia, and Bipan Chandra,Communalismand the Writingof
Indian History (Delhi: People's Publishing, 1969); HarbansMukhia, "Communalismand the
Writingof Medieval IndianHistory:A Reappraisal,"in Perspectiveson Medieval History (New
Delhi: Vikas Publishing, 1993), 33-45.
6 Sandria
Freitag, Collective Action and Community:Public Arenas and the Emergence of
Communalismin North India (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1989).
7
Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalismin Colonial North India (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1990).
8 C. A. Bayly, "The Pre-Historyof 'Communalism'?Religious Conflict in India, 1700-
1860," Modern Asian Studies, 19:2 (1985), 202.
9 Pandey, Constructionof Communalism,199.

694 CYNTHIA TALBOT
print-capitalism,has been particularlyinfluentialin promotingthe belief that

identities uniting large numbers of people could arise only after a certain
technological level had been attained.?0
No one would deny thatmodernizationhas led to the sharperarticulationof
identities encompassingbroadcommunitiesor that such identities have been
"imagined"and "invented"to a large extent. Nor can we uncriticallyaccept
the primordialistview thatpostulatesthe inherentand naturalroots of national
and ethnic identity.However, moder identitiesdo not springfully fashioned
out of nowhere. They commonly employ the myths and symbols of earlier
forms of identitywhich may be less clearly formulatedand more restrictedin
circulationbut are nonethelessincipientcores of ethnicity. Thus, this essay
joins a mere handfulof otherworks on India, both in its insistencethat supra-
local identitiesdid indeed exist in pre-colonialIndia and that these identities
themselves were historicallyconstructedand hence constantlyin flux.'2
Understandingearlierforms of Hindu-Muslimidentitiesmay help us grasp
the impulses leading to moder communalconflict. It even offers us the dim
hope of defusing present-daytensions by demonstratingthat the communities
of the past were not identicalto those of the present.For, as Sheldon Pollock
states in reference to the present Indian situation, "the symbolic meaning
system of a political culture is constructed, and perhapsknowing the pro-
cesses of constructionis a way to control it."13 Particularlycritical is the
recognition that Hindu and Muslim identities were not formed in isolation.
The reflexive impact of the Other's presence molded the self-definition of
both groups-indeed, the label Hinduwas coined by Muslims to describethe
people and cultureof the Indian subcontinent.Only after prolonged contact
with Muslims did the earlierinhabitantsof India adoptthe term. Although it
may not be possible to reconstructa detailedpictureof Hindu-Muslim inter-
actions in medievalIndiain termsof actualpracticeand behavior,we can and
must recover the history of their mutualand self-perceptions.
In asking what it meantto be a Hinduor a Muslimin middle-periodIndia, I
focus on one particularregion, AndhraPradeshin the southeasternpeninsula,
from 1323 to 1650 C.E. This periodcommenceswith the collapse of Andhra's
indigenousKakatiyadynastyunderrepeatedmilitarypressuresfrom the Delhi
Sultanateand ends at the point in time when the last majorHindu dynasty in
10
Imagined Communities:Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed.
(London:Verso, 1991).
11 Anthony D. Smith, Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford:Basil Blackwell, 1986).
12 Van der
Veer, Religious Nationalism, 12-24; John D. Rogers, "Post-Orientalismand the
Interpretationof Premodernand Modem Political Identities:The Case of Sri Lanka,"Journalof
Asian Studies, 53:1 (1994), 10-23; David N. Lorenzen, "Introduction:The HistoricalVicissi-
tudes of Bhakti Religion," in BhaktiReligion in North India: CommunityIdentityand Political
Action, D. Lorenzen, ed. (Albany: State Universityof New YorkPress, 1994), 2-13.
13 Sheldon Pollock, "Ramayanaand Political Imaginationin India,"Journalof Asian Studies,
52:1 (1993), 264.

Andhra was extinguished. In essence, the years examined span the period
from the early stages of Muslim military presence in Andhra to ultimate
Muslim dominance. The primarysources utilized consist of approximately
100 recordsinscribedin the Sanskritor Telugulanguages.14 The majorityare
situated within Hindu temple complexes, on stone slabs, pillars or walls.
Because the vast majorityof inscriptionsdocument the endowment of land
and othervaluablesto religious institutions,they are by naturethe productsof
the propertiedclass. The perspective on medieval South India that we can
obtain from these sources is strictly a privileged one, limited chiefly to the
religious and political elites; yet it is from this strata of society that pre-
modem ethnicity typically arose. By utilizing inscriptions,we can get some
idea of how the powerful and influentialsegmentsof medieval Hindu society
viewed Muslims and, conversely, how they viewed themselves.
THE MUSLIM AS DEMONIC BARBARIAN

The early centuries of Islamic expansionism left South Asia largely un-
touched. Although the lower Indus valley region of Sind in modernPakistan
was conqueredby Arabs in the early eighth century,the effects of the Arab
presence were restrictedto the western portions of the subcontinent.From
approximately1000 C.E. onward, however, majorcenters of power in north-
western India came under intermittentattack by armies of TurkicMuslims
who were based in what is now Afghanistan.These raids into Indianterritory
culminated in the seizure of the Delhi region circa 1200 C.E. and in the
establishmentof a series of Islamicdynasties, collectively known as the Delhi
Sultanate,that survivedinto the early sixteenthcentury.Much of North India
came underthe hegemony of the Delhi Sultanatein the early thirteenthcentu-
ry, while Sultanateexpeditionsbegan penetratingSouth India at the very end
of the thirteenthcentury.The most momentousera of contactbetween Islamic
and earlier peoples of the Indian subcontinentthus occurred between the
eleventh and fourteenthcenturies.
The threatfelt by Hindusociety in the face of superiorMuslim force during
these initial centuries of interactionled to the political valorization of the
ancient Ramayana epic, according to Sheldon Pollock's recent argument.
Although the story of the hero-god Rama's conflict with the demonic king
Ravana of distant Lanka had circulatedwidely throughoutthe subcontinent
and beyond in the previousmillennium,thereare few signs of a temple cult of
Rama worship prior to the eleventh century. Nor was Rama imagery often
employed in the literatureproducedat royal courts. After approximately1000
14 The
inscriptionsexamined for this study, which all contain some reference to Muslims,
were culled from a largercorpusof about 1,600 recordsissued in Andhrain this time period. The
existence of another 400 inscriptions from the same era and place has been reportedby the
epigraphicalbranchof the ArchaeologicalSurvey of India, but the majorityof these recordsare
either heavily damagedor no longer available for consultation.

696 CYNTHIA TALBOT
C.E., the situationchangeddramaticallywith the spreadof Ramatemples and

the frequentappropriationof Rama as a model for royal behavior. Pollock
believes that this is because Rama's legendary battle against (and victory
over) the forces of evil representedby Ravana'sdemon hordes provided a
profound symbol for Indian kings beleaguered by Central Asian Muslim
warriorsentering the subcontinentin growing numbers. Unlike earlier con-
querorsor immigrantswho had been graduallyabsorbedinto Indianciviliza-
tion, Indo-Muslimsretainedthe distinctive religious and linguistic practices
derived from the high culture of Islamic civilization. Because they were
"largely unassimilating,"Muslims were the Otherpar excellence, and their
presence heightenedIndiansociety's sense of self. Since the Ramayanaepic
was "profoundlyand fundamentallya text of 'othering',"in Pollock's words,
it was the perfect vehicle for demonizing these alien and dangerous new-
comers.15
Inscriptionsfrom Andhraprovide little supportfor Pollock's thesis, as far
as the Ramayanaitself is concerned, for there are few directreferencesto the
epic story. The demonizationof Muslims thathe arguesconstitutedthe medi-
eval meaning of the epic can be perceived, however, even in the absence of
explicit allusions to Rama. The most negative representationsof Muslims in
Andhrarecordsappearin the immediateaftermathof the cataclysmic events
of 1323 C.E., when armed forces of the Delhi Sultanateswept through the
Andhra region and caused the collapse of the indigenous Kakatiya royal
dynasty. Andhra warriorsunited under the Kakatiyabannerhad repeatedly
fought the Turkicarmiesof Delhi duringthe previoustwenty years. This was
partof a largerconflict between the Delhi Sultanateand several kingdoms of
peninsularIndia that began in 1296 with the Sultanate'sattackon Devagiri,
the capital of the Yadavadynasty in moder Maharashtra.Within a roughly
quarter-centuryspan, the four regional kingdoms of peninsularIndia-those
of the Yadavas,Kakatiyas,Pandyas (of southernTamilNadu) and Hoysalas
(of southernKarataka)-disintegrated under the Sultanate'sonslaught. By
1325, virtually all of southernIndia had been subduedby Muslim military
force, and existing political networkswere thoroughlydisrupted.
The magnitudeof the sociopolitical upheavals that the early fourteenth-
centuryMuslim conquestsinducedin peninsularIndia is reflected in the tone
of Andhrainscriptionsissued soon thereafter.Particularlystrikingis the Vi-
lasa Grantof Prolaya Nayaka, a long copper-plategrant written in Sanskrit
and issued sometime after 1325 but before 1350 c.E. 6 The beginningportion
of the inscriptionpraisesthe greatnessof Andhra'spreviousKakatiyadynasty
and its last king, Prataparudra.The record then goes on to describe the
15 Pollock, "Ramayanaand Political Imagination,"282.
16 N.
Venkataramanayya and M. SomasekharaSarma,ed., "VilasaGrantof ProlayaNayaka,"
EI,32:239-68. Parts of the inscriptionare translatedin M. SomasekharaSarma, A Forgotten
Chapterof AndhraHistory (Madras:AnandaPress, 1945), 20, 35-36, 44-45.

hostilities between Prataparudra and the lord of the Turks,SultanMuhammad

bin Tughluq. After successfully fighting off the Sultan's army seven times,
Prataparudra was eventually capturedand died on the banks of the Narmada
river in centralIndia while being takento Delhi as a captive. 7 With the death
of the righteousking, KakatiyaPrataparudra, the forces of evil became ascen-
dant. In the words of the inscription, "when the sun who was Prataparudra
thus set, the pitch darkness of the Turksenveloped the world."18Various
proofs of the wicked characterof Muslim rule are next adduced-Brahmins
were forced to abandon their sacrificial rites; Hindu temple images were
overturnedand broken;tax-exemptBrahminvillages confiscated;and cultiva-
tors deprivedof theirproduce. Moreover,the vile Muslims were incessant in
drinkingwine, eating beef, and slaying Brahmins.And so, "torturedin this
way by the demon-like Yavanasoldiers, the land of Tilinga [Andhra]suffered
terriblywithout hope of relief, as if it were a forest engulfed by a rampaging
fire."'9
Although some Hindu historians of Andhra have accepted the charges
contained in the Vilasa grant as evidence of actual Muslim atrocities, the
supposeddepravityof the Muslims conforms too closely to a popularliterary
convention to be accepted as actual fact. The way that this inscriptionrepre-
sents Muslims echoes the gloomy predictionsof a body of Sanskritliterature
known as the puranas, composed duringthe first millenniumC.E. Among the
contents of the majorpuranasis the history of India, narratedin the form of
royal genealogies that end in the fourthcenturyC.E. with the dynastiesof the
Kali age, the fourth and last era in the cycle of time. In the ancient Indian
conception, truthand moralitydeclined in each successive era, and one of the
main symptoms of the Kali age's degeneracy was the growing strength of
foreign dynasties. Because political power would increasinglypass into the
hands of foreignersand non-royalIndians, the puranasprophesieda terrible
future. People would no longer have respect for the Vedas, the centralritual
texts of the Brahmanicaltradition,in a world in which the hierarchicalorder
of caste society was inverted throughthe ascendanceof low-rankingcastes
over the ritually preeminentBrahmins.20
17 The last two Sultanate

expeditionsinto Kakatiyaterritory(in 1321 and 1323 C.E.) were led
by the man then known by the title Ulugh Khan, who became SultanMuhammadbin Tughluqin
1325. The Khiljis had conducted several earlier campaignsagainst the Kakatiyas, beginning in
1303 C.E. Althoughthis inscriptionindicatesthattherewere eight Sultanatecampaignsduringthe
reign of KakatiyaPrataparudra,Muslim sources describe only five (N. Venkataramanayya,The
Early Muslim Expansion in South India [Madras:Universityof Madras, 1942], 23-24, 31-43,
83-85, 99-108, 115-19).
18 Author's translationfrom Sanskrit;Venkataramanayya and SomasekharaSarma, "Vilasa
Grant,"verse 21.
19 Author's translationfrom Sanskrit, "Vilasa Grant,"verse 28.
20 Aloka
Parasher,Mlecchas in Early India; a Study in Attitudestowards Foreigners (New
Delhi: MunshiramManoharlal, 1991), 121-4 and 240-3; Romila Thapar, "The Image of the
Barbarianin Early India," ComparativeStudies in Society and History, 13:4 (1971), 420-1.

698 CYNTHIA TALBOT
The historical memories embedded in the puranasreflect the anxieties of

their Brahmincomposers and preserversin the period between the second
century B.C.E. and the third century C.E.-a time when numerous peoples
entered India from the northwestand, simultaneously,an era when the non-
Brahmanicalreligion, Buddhism, achieved its greatest popularity. Similar
fears of a loss of statusresurfacedin the much laterVilasa grantof fourteenth-
centuryAndhra,duringanothertime of turbulence,when Brahmanicalprivi-
lege was threatened.The Turkswho invadedmedievalAndhraare said to have
oppressed Brahmins and suppressed religious practice, just as the earlier
foreign invadersof the ancientperiod supposedlyhad done. It is notable that
most of the evil acts attributedto Muslims in the Vilasa grant-confiscating
villages endowed to Brahmins, destroyingBrahmin-controlledtemples, and
ending ritual sacrifices performed by Brahmins-directly affected the
Brahminsegment of the Andhrapopulation.The majorityof the people, the
cultivators,are said to have sufferedbecause theircrops were confiscated, but
this accusationis appendedalmost as an afterthought.The depiction of Mus-
lim behaviorin the Vilasa grant is formulaic, in other words, and follows a
patternexpected of foreign groups in the Brahmanicaltradition.
In the Sanskritliteratureof ancient and medieval India, foreigners were
frequentlydescribed as mleccha. The best English translationof mleccha is
barbarian,for the word clearly connotes a lack of cultureand civilization. By
the end of the first millenniumB.C.E., mleccha was appliednot only to aliens
but also to indigenoustribes-communities who were not partof the agrarian
caste society of Indic civilization.21As RomilaThaparhas pointedout, mlec-
cha was hence primarily"a signal of social and culturaldifference."22It was a
generic category into which all social groups lacking an adherence to
Brahmanicalnormswere thrust.Among the early barbariansof foreign origin
often mentionedin the puranaswere the Yavanasand Shakas.Yavana,derived
from Ionian, originally referredto the Hellenistic dynasties that controlled
large areas of northwesternIndia and Afghanistan in the second century
B.C.E. These Indo-Greeksor Yavanas were displaced by another invading
group, the Shakasof CentralAsia, in the first centuryB.C.E. The Shakassoon
lost their hegemony over the entire northwestbut remainedentrenchedin the
Gujaratregion of western India until the fourthcenturyC.E.
The names Yavanaand Shaka were revived in medieval India to designate
Muslims, along with the characterizationof barbarian.23As with earlier
21 Parasher,Mlecchas in Early India, 45 and 213.

22 Romila
Thapar, "Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the Modem
Search for a Hindu Identity,"ModernAsian Studies, 23:2 (1989), 224.
23 North Indian uses of these terms are frequent as well, see Ram Shankar Avasty and
AmalanandaGhosh, "Referencesto Muhammadansin SanskritInscriptionsin NorthernIndia-
A.D. 730 to 1320," Journalof IndianHistory, 16 (1936), 24-26 and 17 (1937), 161-84; Pushpa
Prasad, SanskritInscriptionsof the Delhi Sultanate (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990).

Others, whetherforeign invadersor indigenous tribalpeoples, those follow-

ing the Brahmanicaltraditionwere not concerned with the specifics of Is-
lamic belief. What was significant was their common failure to uphold the
hierarchicalorder of caste or, in short, Brahmanicalprivilege. This is why
Muslims could be called by the same names as barbarianpeoples of the
ancient period, such as the Yavanasor Shakas. In anothertransposition,the
Muslim barbariancould be equated with all beings hostile to the Brahmani-
cal order. And, thus, Muslims were demonized, that is, representedas be-
ing like the demons of ancient myth who engaged in endless battle against
the forces of good. Assimilating Muslims to the mythological category of
demons and substitutingthe names of various other foreign groups for them
erased the distinctivenessof Muslims. All that mattersin this perspective is
their Otherness.
The very fact thatMuslims could be incorporatedinto a generic categoryof
barbarianspresupposes an existing sense of identity, at least among the
Brahmincomposers of Sanskritliterarytexts and inscriptions.A Brahmin, if
not Hindu, consciousness clearly predatedthe Muslim entry into the Indian
subcontinent.Upholding Brahminpreeminencein a hierarchicalsociety was
the critical featureof this orthodoxidentity.In this respect, I take my stance
with scholars like Anthony D. Smith, who believe that there are shared
elements which unify membersof an ethnic group and that the attributionof
alienness derives from a pre-existingsense of sharedexperience.24Othersput
more stress on the importanceof boundariesin the formationof ethnicity,
ratherthanon any commonly held content. For example, JohnA. Armstrong,
following the Norwegian anthropologist,FredrikBarth, thinks that groups
define themselves primarilyby exclusion. This explains how ethnic identities
can persist for so long, even when the compositionof the group changes.25
Identityformationin praxis always involves both processes-the articulation
of group boundaries that excludes others and the development of internal
criteria for solidarity. These complementaryaspects of ethnicity have been
aptly described as "us-hood"and "we-hood,"respectively, by Thomas Hyl-
land Eriksen.26In the case of pre-modernIndia, it is clear that a persistent
core of Brahminidentity-a definite "we-hood"-had existed since ancient
times.27
24
Smith, Ethnic Origins of Nations, 49.
25 JohnA. Armstrong,Nations beforeNationalism(ChapelHill: Universityof NorthCarolina
Press, 1982), 3-7. For more on boundariesbetween groups, see Kerwin L. Klein, "Frontier
Tales:The NarrativeConstructionof CulturalBordersin Twentieth-Century California,"Compar-
ative Studies in Society and History, 34:3 (July 1992), 464-90.
26 "Nationalism,Mauritian
Style: CulturalUnity and Ethnic Diversity,"ComparativeStudies
in Society and History, 36:3 (July 1994), 566-7.
27 Cynthia Kepley Mahmood, "Rethinking Indian Communalism: Culture and Counter-
Culture,"Asian Survey,33:7 (1993), 722-37; WendyDoniger, "Hinduismby Any OtherName,"
Wilson Quarterly, 15:3 (1991), 35-41.

700 CYNTHIA TALBOT
ETHNOGENESIS IN A FRONTIER SETTING
Althoughthe emergenceof a sense of Hinduunitycan notbe attributedsolely to

the stimulus of an opposing Muslim community, it is widely recognized
that prolonged confrontation between different groups intensifies self-
identities. While I believe thatthe Brahmanicaltraditionhad a degree of self-
awareness before the presence of Muslims, it seems that a broader, more
inclusive, Indic identity began to develop after the Muslim polities were
foundedin SouthAsia. One sign of this is the non-Muslimwriters'adoptionof
the designationHindu,whichbeginsto figurein Andhrainscriptionsfrom 1352
C.E. onward, in the title "SultanamongHindukings"(Hindu-raya-suratrana)
assumed by several kings of the Vijayanagaraempire.28To the best of my
knowledge, this is the earliest dated usage of the term Hindu in any Indian
languagesource. Hinduwas originallythe Persianname for the Indusriverof
modem Pakistan,but the Arabs first includedthe entire Indian subcontinent
under the rubric, "the land of the Hind" (al-Hind). By the eleventh century,
Hindu had come to mean "the inhabitantsof India"in Persian, the literary
languagepatronizedby the Turkishwarriorsof the Delhi Sultanate.29Whenthe
early Vijayanagarakings of mid-fourteenth-century South India invented the
title "Sultanamong Hindu Kings," they were borrowingboth a phraseand a
conception of being Indianthat had originatedin Muslim society.30
The fact that some non-Muslimscalled themselves Hindu in fourteenth-
century South India does not imply that a unified religious consciousness
developed in this period, however, contraryto the currentHindu nationalist
view. Even amongMuslims, the termHinduinitiallymeanta residentof India
ratherthan a person holding certain non-Islamicreligious beliefs. Not until
the late thirteenthcenturydid Persianliteraturewrittenin India routinelyuse
Hindu as a religious designation.31When the Vijayanagarakings said that
they were the sultansamong Hindukings, they were most probablydeclaring
their paramountstatus among the non-Turkishpolities of the peninsula. That
is, to them Hindu meant Indic as opposed to Turkish, not "of the Hindu
religion" as opposed to "of the Islamic religion." In this interpretation,the
definition of the self as Hindu can be seen as a sign of an incipient Indic
ethnicity-incorporating territorialassociations, language, a common past
and customs, as well as religious affiliation-for ethnicity is composed of
numerouselements, unlike linguistic or religious identity.Which of the sev-
eral aspectsof commonalityis most emphasizedin any particularethnicgroup
28
SII, 16.4; NDI copper-plate10 and Kanigiri23; El 13.1; N. Ramesan,"TheKrakuGrantof
HariharaII," in Epigraphia Andhrica, vol. 2, N. Venkataramanayyaand P. V. Parabrahma
Sastry,ed. (Hyderabad:Governmentof AndhraPradesh, 1974), 73-87.
29 Carl W. Ernst, Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History and Politics at a South Asian Sufi
Center (Albany: State Universityof New YorkPress, 1992), 22-23.
30 AndreWink, EarlyMedievalIndia and the Expansionof Islam, vol. 1, pp. 190 and5, of Al-
Hind: The Making of the Indo-lslamic World(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990).
31 Ernst, Eternal Garden, 24-25.

can vary considerably.32But the perceptionof sharinga whole set of traditions

that differentiatesone group from anotheris crucial to ethnic identity.
Supportfor my assertionthat the fourteenth-centuryepigraphicalmeaning
of Hinduwas not primarilya religious one comes from the negative evidence
that the terms Islam and Muslim (in its Persian variant, Musalman) never
figure in Andhrainscriptionsof the fourteenththroughmid-seventeenthcen-
turies. The Vilasa grantof ProlayaNayakainsteaduses the ethnic labels Turk
(Turushka),Persian (Parasika),and Greek (Yavana)for Muslims. Nor do we
get any allusion to Islamicreligious beliefs or doctrine,otherthanthe prohibi-
tion against eating pork. Inscriptionsfrom other areasof the Indiansubconti-
nent during the first centuries of contact are similarly silent about Islamic
religion and the Islamic affiliationof the Turks.33The Turkicintruderswere
certainlyconsideredto be a people other than the earlierinhabitants,but the
sense of difference was not groundedprimarilyon a religious base.34
If religion was not the centralfeatureof a buddingHinduself-identity,how
do we explain the demonic representationsof Muslims in early fourteenth-
centuryAndhrainscriptions?To answerthis question, we must first recognize
that these records arose in the context of an advancing zone of military
conflict. In frontierconditions such as these, large-scaledestructionof exist-
ing sociopolitical networks is common, resulting in widespreaduncertainty
and feelings of crisis. At the same time, becauseof the rapidchange occurring
in a frontiersetting, new sociopolitical groups are coalescing. Hence, fron-
tiers are prime settings for ethnogenesis-the formationof new ethnic identi-
ties.35 With war almost endemic along an active frontier,people were often
broughttogetherthroughsome type of militaryassociation. The Franksof the
late Roman Empire, for instance, were basically a confederationof warriors
assembled aroundkings claiming descent from the war god, Odin.36
32
George de Vos, "Ethnic Pluralism: Conflict and Accommodation," in Ethnic Identity:
Cultural Continuitiesand Change, George de Vos and Lola Romanucci-Ross, ed. (Palo Alto:
Mayfield Publishing Company, 1975), 9-18; Charles F. Keyes, "The Dialectics of Ethnic
Change," in Ethnic Change (Seattle: Universityof WashingtonPress, 1981), 7-10.
33
Thapar, "ImaginedReligious Communities?,"77-78; Pollock, "Ramayanaand Political
Imagination,"286.
34 In this
early period, the majorityof Muslims in India most probablywere either foreign
immigrants or their descendants. They were thus marked with many distinctive non-Indian
features in areas such as dress and food, in addition to their separatelanguages and religious
beliefs. As the numberof convertsto Islamincreased,the initialsense of ethnic separatenessmust
have faded, explaining why ethnic referentswere largely discardedin favorof the religious label
Musalmanin the Andhraof latercenturies.Verylittle researchhas been conductedon conversion
to Islam in medieval South India, unfortunately,so it is not possible to pinpointwhen the trend
emerged.
35 David A.
Chappell, "Ethnogenesisand Frontiers,"Journal of WorldHistory, 4:2 (1993),
267-75; Igor Kopytoff,"TheInternalAfricanFrontier:The Makingof AfricanPolitical Culture,"
in The African Frontier:The Reproductionof TraditionalAfrican Societies, Igor Kopytoff, ed.
(Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1987).
36 David
HarryMiller, "Ethnogenesisand Religious Revitalizationbeyond the Roman Fron-
tier: The Case of FrankishOrigins,"Journal of WorldHistory, 4:2 (1993), 277-85.

702 CYNTHIA TALBOT
In the case of fourteenth-centuryAndhra,the armedincursionsof the Delhi

Sultanatetoppled the upper level of the political system when the Kakatiya
dynasty was extinguished. But since the Kakatiyapolity was a loosely knit
organizationof warriorbands, the loss of the capitaldid not mean the elimina-
tion of all armedresistance.37ProlayaNayakaand other warriorswho were
entrenchedin the localities continuedto fight the Delhi Sultanate,which was
also beset with internalstrife. As quickly as the tide of conflict had washed
over Andhra, it receded. By the 1340s, Muslim control in Andhraextended
only over its extreme western sector. What was left behind, in this frontier
borderland,was a power vacuum.
Presumably,the principal Kakatiya military leaders either died or were
capturedin the last days of the kingdom'sdefense;for none of them appearin
inscriptionsissued afterthe demise of the Kakatiyas.Instead, a totally differ-
ent group of warriorsfigure in Andhrainscriptionsof the 1330s and later.
ProlayaNayaka, who had the Vilasa grantcomposed, was the first memberof
the Musunurilineage to leave behindhistoricaltraces. Rising from what must
have been a humblebackground,he carvedout a sizable domainfor himself in
the chaos following the Delhi Sultanate'sincursions. A second man, Vema
Reddi, is likewise the first historic figure in the KondaviduReddi lineage.
Unlike Prolaya Nayaka's lineage, which waned rapidly, the Reddi lineage
dominated coastal Andhrafor nearly a century. Both of these men alleged
prior association with the Kakatiyadynasty, and their descendants proudly
publicizedthis connection. While it is possible thatthey may have held minor
positions undersome Kakatiyasubordinate,thereis no independenttestimony
to corroboratethis assertion.It is more likely thatthe claim to have served the
Kakatiyasstemmed from a desire to bolster their own tenuous positions.
Additionally,both ProlayaNayakaand Vema Reddi emulateda classically
royal style of behaviorby making generous benefactionsto Brahmins. The
explicit purposeof ProlayaNayaka'sVilasa grantwas to documenta village
endowmentto a learnedBrahminin Kona-sima,a small areain the delta of the
Godavaririver that even today is the heartlandof Brahminscholasticism and
ritualismin Andhra.Vema Reddi's MadrasMuseumPlates of 1345 C.E. was
also a copper-plategrant recording the transferof a village to a Brahmin
recipient.38Several other upwardly mobile warriors of fourteenth-century
Andhra similarly boasted that they restoredtax-free villages confiscated by
the Turksto their rightfulBrahminproprietors.Generally,these endowments
were recordedin Sanskriton copper plates, a traditionallykingly type of gift
and inscriptionalmedium.39
37 Cynthia Talbot, "Political Intermediariesin KakatiyaAndhra, 1175-1325," Indian Eco-

nomic and Social History Review, 31:3 (1994), 261-89.
38 J.
Ramayya, ed., "MadrasMuseum Plates of Vema,"El, 8:9-24.
39 People of less elevated status typically made religious gifts to temples rather than to
Brahminsin this period, and had theirbenefactionsrecordedin stone at the endowed temple. The
most widespreadgift was that of milk-bearinganimals to provide oil for temple lamps.

In theirquest for acceptanceas legitimatekings, chiefs like ProlayaNayaka

and Vema Reddi sought the most prestigioussupportpossible. That included
not only the use of the all-Indialiterarylanguageof Sanskrit,the patronageof
Brahmins,and the memoryof the previousKakatiyadynastybut also the rich
symbolism of the age-old fight against demons and disorder. This is the
context for the Vilasa grant's demonizationof the Turks.As previously de-
scribed, this document bemoans the unfortunatestate of Andhra after the
Turksconquered the Kakatiyas. But all was not lost. The grant goes on to
inform us that the depredationsof the evil Muslims were halted by a savior,
Prolaya Nayaka, who appearedalmost miraculously,like an incarnationof
the god Vishnu descending from heaven out of pity for the peoples' suffer-
ing. Prolaya Nayaka resurrectedrighteousness (dharma) by reestablishing
Brahmin villages, reviving Vedic sacrifices, and restrictinghimself to the
lawful portion of the peasants' crops in revenue. He thereby "purifiedthe
lands of the Andhraswhich were contaminatedby sin because the Turkshad
passed throughthem."40By grantinga village to a learnedBrahmin,Prolaya
Nayakacould thus representhimself in the Vilasa grantas restoringorderto a
world that the Muslim incursionshad disordered.Vema Reddi also sought to
portray himself in the Madras Museum Plates as a protector dF Brahmins
when he boastedthat he had "recoveredall the Brahminvillageg thathad been
appropriatedby the wicked barbariankings since the time of Prataparudra,
who was the jewel in the crown of the Kakatiyaclan."41
The use of tropes drawn from the Brahmintraditiondoes not indicate that
the upstartwarriorsof fourteenth-centuryAndhrawere religiously motivated
in their actions. Nor can we assume that the pejorative language of these
inscriptionsreflects a deep hatredof the Muslim, much less proof of Muslim
atrocities. But in a turbulentsituation, where earliersources of authorityhad
been destroyed, the newly risen warriorleaders were attemptingto mobilize
public opinion and gain allegiance. One of the easiest ways of doing this was
by resortingto older Brahmanicalconceptionsof barbariansand their demon-
ic behavior. Elsewhere outside of India, pre-modernpolitical elites similarly
employed religious myths and symbols because they were the most resonant
images in a collective social memorytransmittedlargely by religious institu-
tions and specialists.42 By accentuatingthe threat from Muslims and their
strange alien ways, aspiring kings in fourteenth-centuryAndhracould suc-
cessfully cast themselves in the role of defendersof the Indic social order,the
most essential justification for kingly status. The representationsof Muslims
as demons may thereforehave been instrumental(that is, secondary)to the
primarygoal of providingAndhrawarriorlineages with a securenotion of self
40 Author's translationfrom Sanskrit;Venkataramanayyaand SomasekharaSarma, "Vilasa

Grant,"verse 37.
41 Author's translationfrom Sanskritin
Ramayya;"MadrasMuseum Plates," verse 12.
42 Smith, Ethnic
Origins of Nations, 58-67; Armstrong, Nations Before Nationalism,
201-40.

704 CYNTHIA TALBOT
and legitimate authority.In other words, the self-identity of an emerging

warriorelite in Andhrawas strengthenedthroughrecourseto traditionalno-
tions of the enemy Other.
COLLABORATION AND ACCOMMODATION ON THE OPEN FRONTIER
For the past severaldecades, historianshave extendedthe frontierparadigmto

many societies outside of the United States.43Yet, unlike its westerncounter-
part, the Christian-Islamicfrontierin medieval Europe, the Muslim-Hindu
frontier in medieval India has been virtually overlooked. One exception is
RichardM. Eaton's work on Bengal.44He differentiatesthe political frontier
of Islam, which moved eastwardmost rapidly,from the religious frontierof
allegianceto Islam. A furtherfrontierwas an agrarianone in which forest land
was broughtundersettled agriculture.Wherethe agrarianand religious fron-
tiers coincided for the most part, groups only recently introducedto settled
agricultureidentified Islam as a civilization-buildingideology, a religion of
the plow. As a result, the majorityof the rice-cultivatingpopulationin eastern
Bengal (moder Bangladesh) eventually became adherentsof Islam. Islam
never attainedsuch religious dominancein South India, however, where the
numberof Muslims remainedfairly low. Nonetheless, Muslim regimes were
embeddedin the peninsula'sgeo-politicallandscapeafterthe early fourteenth
century.The continuingSouth Indianpolitical frontierbetween Muslim and
Hinducan be characterizedas "open,"since neitherside hadcompletehegem-
ony.45
Fromthe early fifteenththroughmid-sixteenthcenturies,a relatively stable
balance of power was maintainedbetween three majorpower centers in the
peninsula.A Muslimpolity of some sortoccupiedthe northwesternportionof
the peninsulain what is today Maharashtraand northernKarnataka.The first
to be establishedwas the Bahmanisultanate,which broke off from the Delhi
sultanatein 1347. Subsequently,several other sultanateswere formed out of
portionsof the Bahmanirealm. Of these, the Adil Shahi kingdom of Bijapur
and the Qutb Shahi kingdomof Golkondahad the biggest impacton Andhra.
Opposed to the sultanates of the peninsula's northwesterncorer was the
Vijayanagaraempire. Underits first threedynasties, Vijayanagaracontrolled
43 For example, DietrichGerhard,"TheFrontierin ComparativeView," ComparativeStudies
in Society and History, 1:3 (1959), 205-29; RobertBartlettand Angus MacKay,ed., Medieval
FrontierSocieties (Oxford:ClarendonPress, 1989); HowardLamarand LeonardThompson,ed.,
The Frontier in History: North American and SouthernAfrica Compared(New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1981); William H. McNeill, "The Great Frontier:Freedomand Hierarchyin
Modem Times," in The Global Condition(Princeton:PrincetonUniversityPress, 1992), 5-63.
44 The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier,1204-1760 (Berkeley:Universityof California
Press, 1993). An additionalexception is John F. Richards, "The Islamic Frontierin the East:
Expansioninto South Asia," SouthAsia n.s., 4 (October 1974), 90-109.
45 LeonardThompsonand HowardLamar,"Comparative FrontierHistory,"in TheFrontierin
History: North American and SouthernAfrica Compared,H. Lamarand L. Thompson, ed., 7
and 10.

most of the southernportion of the peninsula, the area south of the Krishna
river encompassing much of modern southernKarnataka,southernAndhra,
and the Tamilcountry.Two successive Hindudynasties-the EasternGangas
and Gajapatis-held sway over the northeasternportion of the peninsula
along the Orissa-Andhraborder.The areas in between were hotly contested
and vulnerableto militarycampaignsthatcould lead to temporaryextensions
of borders, but the nuclearzones of these respectivepowers remainedintact.
Within Andhra itself, the Muslim presence was confined primarilyto the
northwesternportion of the modernstate's expanse.46
In this context of relative stability,quite differentrepresentationsof Mus-
lims surface in Andhrainscriptions.Throughoutthe fifteenth and early six-
teenth centuries, Muslims figure mainly as mighty warriors.Victories over
Muslims were lauded in the heroic titles of Hindukings and chiefs or praised
in theirgenealogies. Sometimesspecific Muslimkings or generalsare named,
but more often generic labels for Muslims were used. So, for example, it was
said of Devaraya I of the Vijayanagaraempire in 1465 C.E. that "even the
powerfulTurkswere driedup in the fire of the prowess of this king."47In this
type of reference, one gets little sense that the Muslim is any more than a
typical, if respected, foe. Inscriptionaleulogies of the Tuluvakings of Vi-
jayanagara'ssecond dynasty list the Turkalong with non-Muslim enemies
conqueredby the dynastic founder, such as the Chera, Chola, and Gajapati
kings.48 In other words, Muslims are depicted as respectedpolitical rivals,
just like the other majorHindu powers of the peninsula.
Phillip B. Wagonersuggests thatshifts in the balanceof power affectedthe
attitudeof South Indianelites towardMuslims and delineatesthreephases on
that basis. From roughly 1300 to 1420 C.E., Hindu polities were on the
defensive, and an anti-Turkicpolemic was widespread. During the second
phase (from circa 1420 to 1565), however, greater appreciationof Turkic
culture is expressed in Hindu literature.This state of affairs correspondsin
time with the apex of the Vijayanagaraempire. The sacking of the Vi-
jayanagaracapital by a confederacy of Muslim states in 1565 ushered in
anotherperiod of defensive polemics. Yet by the time this third phase oc-
curred,many aspects of Islamic materialcultureand administrativetechnique
had been assimilated by the non-Muslimpeoples of South India.49Inscrip-
46 John F. Richards, Mughal Administrationin Golconda (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1975),
7-8.
47 Based on translationof T. A.
GopinathaRao, "SrisailamPlatesof Virupaksha:Saka Samvat
1388," EI 15:24.
48 SII 16.47; P. V. ParabrahmaSastry,"The Polepalli Grantof Achyutaraya,"in Epigraphia
Andhrica, vol. 4, P. V. ParabrahmaSastry, ed. (Hyderabad:Governmentof AndhraPradesh,
1975), 133-40; N. Ramesan, ed., "The JadavalliGrant of Sadasivaraya,"in Copper Plate
Inscriptions of the State Museum, vol. 2 (Hyderabad:Governmentof AndhraPradesh, 1970),
21-28.
49 Phillip B. Wagoner,"UnderstandingIslamat Vijayanagara" (Paperpresentedat the meeting
of the Association for Asian Studies, Boston, April 1994).

706 CYNTHIA TALBOT
tional datafrom Andhraconfirmsthe generalvalidityof Wagoner'sthesis that

the representationsof Muslims varied according to the success of Hindu
polities in restrainingMuslim power. The anti-Muslimrhetoricof the Vilasa
grant occurred during phase one, when Andhrasociety was in a defensive
posture. But, from the early fifteenth throughmid-sixteenthcenturies, there
was little dramaticchange in the power balance, and tensions subsided mo-
mentarily.Hence, in this second phase, we witness no demonizationof the
Muslim. Ratherthan an anti-Muslimpolemic, the inscriptionalsources dis-
play a tolerance of Muslim warriorsand political power. Along the quiet
frontierof fifteenth-centurySouth India, the Muslim presence was accepted
ratherthan rejected.
FrederickJacksonTurner'svision of the frontieras an uninhabitedwilder-
ness subduedby heroic individualismhas long been rejected in favor of an
understandingof frontiersas broad zones in which two societies encounter
each other.50Their contact may be violent in nature,particularlyduring the
initial stages of encroachmentby membersof the intrudingsociety. But it is
not uncommonfor frontiersocieties to maintainan equilibriumfor consider-
able periodsof time, once this first violent confrontationis over. At aboutthe
same time that Hindu-Muslim relationsin South India were going througha
tranquilphase, the frontierbetween the IberianChristiankingdom of Castile
and the Muslim kingdom of Granadawas stationary(1369 to 1482 c.E.).51
Faced with the practicalrealityof coexistence, a numberof institutionsspeci-
fically designedto facilitatemutualtransactionswere developedthere, includ-
ing procedures for negotiating truces and redeeming captives. Among the
elite, alliances were formed that ignored differencesin religion, while com-
mon people sometimes crossed the frontierand even converted to the other
religion. Knowledge of each other's ways was widespread-in effect, a sub-
stantialdegree of acculturationhad taken place.
Since a majorityof medievalSouth India'spopulationcontinuedto be non-
Muslim populationeven within the regions where Muslims were politically
dominant,the two societies always overlapped.A certainamountof coopera-
tion and collaborationis to be expected in this setting.52The Muslim polities
of the peninsula were dependent on Hindu officials and warriors for tax
collection and maintenanceof order in the countryside.53Poets of Andhra's
50 Robert I. Bums, "The Significance of the Frontier in the Middle Ages," in Medieval
FrontierSocieties, R. Bartlettand A. MacKay,ed., 307-12.
51 Jose
EnriqueLopez de Coca Castaner,"Institutionson the Castilian-Granadan Frontier,"in
MedievalFrontierSocieties, R. Bartlettand A. MacKay,ed., 127-50; Angus McKay,"Religion,
Cultureand Ideology on the Late Medieval Castilian-Granadan Frontier,"217-22.
52 For more positive coverage of Hindu-Muslimrelationsin medieval India, see H. K. Sher-
wani, "CulturalSynthesis in Medieval India," Journal of Indian History, 41 (1963), 239-59;

W. H. Siddiqi, "ReligiousToleranceas Gleanedfrom Medieval Inscriptions,"in Proceedingsof
Seminaron MedievalInscriptions(Aligarh:Centreof AdvancedStudy,Dept. of History,Aligarh
Muslim University, 1974), 50-58.
53 Stewart Gordon, The Marathas, 1600-1818 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,
1993), 41-58; Richards,Mughal Administrationin Golconda, 18-33.

vernacularlanguage, Telugu, were generously patronizedat the court of the

sixteenth-centuryQutb Shahi kingdom that also issued many of its inscrip-
tions in a bilingual format.54Conversely, Muslim expertise in military and
administrativeaffairswas admiredand adoptedby their rival Hindu polities.
The Vijayanagaraarmyincludedcontingentsof Muslim on horseback,a tacit
acknowledgmentof Muslim superiorityin cavalry warfare.55Many secular
structuresat the Vijayanagaracapitalexhibit an originalIndo-Islamicstyle of
architecture,complete with domes and arches.56Adaptationsof Muslim dress
were also featuredon formalcourtoccasions.57Nor did the ostensible demar-
cation between Hinduand Muslim preventmilitaryand maritalalliances from
being formed across religious boundariesin this periodof South Indianhisto-
ry. These centuries of contact and interactionalso resulted in an influx of
Persian and Arabic words into the Telugulanguage.58Many parallelscan be
drawn between medieval Spain and medieval South India, in terms of the
prevalence of culturaladaptationsand borrowing.
In one significant aspect, however, the Hindu-Muslim encounterin medi-
eval South India differedfrom those of Christiansand Muslims describedby
Charles J. Halperin.59Two of Halperin'scase studies involve the Christian
conquest of Muslims (thirteenth-centuryValencia in Spain and the crusader
kingdom of Jerusalem), whereas the two others are examples of Muslim
intrusion into Christian regions (the absorption of Byzantine territory by
Arabs, Seljuk Turksand Ottomans;and the rule of the Mongol Golden Horde
over Russia). According to Halperin, cultural synthesis and tolerance were
displayed primarilywhen the intrudershad not yet established total superi-
ority. It was thus a functionof the practicalneed for compromise.Cooperation
violated the exclusivist thrustof Christianityand Islam, however, and so was
never publicly discussed. In theory, the two groups remained implacably
opposed, despite the considerablecollaborationin practice. The ideology of
silence concerning mutual influence and borrowing enabled medieval reli-
gious frontiersocieties to ignore the contradictionbetween theory and prac-
tice.
In contrast to the ideological negation of the other society found within
54 K. Lakshmi
Ranjanam,"Languageand Literature:Telugu,"in Historyof MedievalDeccan,
vol. 2, H. K. Sherwaniand P. M. Joshi, ed. (Hyderabad:Governmentof AndhraPradesh, 1974),
161-3. An example of a bilingual inscriptionis ARIE No. 48 of 1970-71.
55 Stein, Vijayanagara,29; K. NilakantaSastriand N. FurtherSources of
Venkataramanayya,
VijayanagaraHistory, 3 vols. (Madras:University of Madras, 1946), vol. 1, 106-8 and 267.
56 JohnM. Fritz, George Michell, and M. S. NagarajaRao, WhereKings and Gods Meet: The
Royal Centreat Vijayanagara,India (Tucson:Universityof Arizona Press, 1984), 122-45.
57 Phillip B. Wagoner,"'Sultan among HinduKings': Dress, Address,and the Islamicization
of HinduCultureat Vijayanagara"(Paperpresentedat RockefellerHumanitiesWorkshop,"Shap-
ing Indo-MuslimIdentity in Pre-Modem India," Duke University, Durham, NC, April 1995).
58 K. Iswara Dutt, Inscriptional Glossary of Andhra Pradesh
(Hyderabad:A. P. Sahitya
Akademi, 1967), cxxv; Lakshmi Ranjanam,"Languageand Literature:Telugu," 172.
59 "The Ideology of Silence: Prejudiceand Pragmatismon the Medieval Religious Frontier,"
ComparativeStudies in Society and History, 26:3 (1984), 442-66.

708 CYNTHIA TALBOT
Christian-Muslimfrontierzones, an explicit scheme of accommodationcan

be found in the Hindu sources of medieval Andhra. This paradigm, which
incorporatedMuslim polities, appears from the early fifteenth century on-
ward. It posits the existence of three majorkings-the Ashvapatior Lord of
Horses, the Gajapatior Lord of Elephants,and the Narapatior Lord of Men.
Each element of the triad-horses, elephants, and men-forms a contingent
in the traditionalIndianarmy.Royal titles proclaiminga single king to be lord
of the cavalry, elephant corps, and infantry are found elsewhere in India
duringthe middle ages.60But late medieval South Indiawas unique in divid-
ing the various parts of an army and assigning each to a particulardynasty.
The first of the titles to be assumedwas Lordof the ElephantCorps, adopted
by the Eastern Ganga kings of the Orissa-Andhraregion as early as the
thirteenthcentury.61The subsequentkings of this northeasternportionof the
peninsula(fl. 1434-1538 C.E.) used the epithetGajapati,or Lordof Elephant
Forces, so frequentlythat it has become their dynasticlabel in moder histo-
riography.The heavily forestedOrissa-Andhracoast had indeed been famous
since ancienttimes for the excellence of its elephants. By a logical corollary,
kings of northwesternIndia, where the best horses in the subcontinentwere to
be found, deserved to be called the Lord of Horses or Cavalry.62A dynasty
without access to superiorelephants or horses-as was the case in the dry
interiorof South India-would by default gain the epithet, Lord of Infantry.
The conception of a geo-political universe divided into three realms, each
ruled by a king laying claim to superiorityin one contingentof an army, is
first witnessed in an Andhra inscriptionof 1423 C.E.63The most detailed
treatmentis found in a Telugu chronicle of the late sixteenth century, the
Rayavacakamu. In this work, the Lord of Men (Narapati)is the king of
Vijayanagara,the Lord of Elephants(Gajapati)is the Orissanking, and the
60 Phillip B. Wagoner,Tidingsof the King: A Translationand EthnohistoricalAnalysis of the

Rayavacakamu(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), 178 n. 49; Prasad, SanskritIn-
scriptions, 56.
61 C. V. Ramachandra Rao, Administrationand Society in MedievalAndhra(A.D. 1038-1538)
under the Later Eastern Gangas and the SuryavamsaGajapatis (Nellore: ManasaPublications,
1976), 85-86.
62 I thankThomas R. Trautmannfor
bringingthe correlationbetween the geographicalloca-
tion of these lords and the distributionof horses and elephants to my attention. For more on
elephants in ancient India, see Trautmann,"Elephantsand the Mauryas,"in India: History and
Thought, Essays in Honour of A. L. Basham, S. N. Mukherjee,ed. (Calcutta:Subarnarekha,
1982), 263-6. For a discussion of the quality of horses duringthe medieval period, see Simon
Digby, WarHorse and Elephantin the Delhi Sultanate(Oxford:OrientMonographs,1971), 21-
31.
63 The Kaluvacherugrant of the Reddi queen Anitalli, partially published in Somasekhara
Sarma, ForgottenChapter, 111-2. This Sanskritinscriptionidentifies the Lord of Elephantsas

the king of Utkala(a sub-regionof Orissa),the Lordof Horsesas the rulerof the territoriesin the
west, and the Lordof Men as KakatiyaPrataparudra, the Andhraking. In this instance, the Lord
of Horses in the west must referto the BahmaniSultanate,which controlledthe territoriesto the
immediatewest of northernAndhraduringthe early fifteenth century.

Lord of Horses (Ashvapati) is the Mughal emperor of northernIndia. The

Mughals had replaced the Delhi Sultanateas the supremeMuslim polity in
the subcontinent in the first half of the sixteenth century. Previously, the
Rayavacakamutells us, the sultanof Delhi was the Lord of Horses. The text
calls the Lords of Horses, Elephants, and Men the occupants of the "Three
Lion Thrones," as opposed to other petty kings who lacked legitimacy. Not
only did the Lords of Horses, Elephants, and Men possess authorityas the
rulers of ancient and prosperouskingdoms, but they also exemplified royal
righteousness. As the text's translator,Phillip B. Wagoner,points out, the
three Lion Thrones were regardedas emanationsof the three main gods of
Hinduism-Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva.64
More commonly in Andhrasources, the Lordof the Horses designatednot
a North IndianMuslim dynastybut a local Muslim polity of the peninsula. At
times the title was appliedto the Bahmanisultansin oppositionto the Gajapati
kings of Orissa and the Narapatikings of Vijayanagara.65 Or it could refer to
any of the leaders of the successor states that arose after the division of the
BahmaniSultanate.In otherwords, the Lordof Horses was a designationthat
could signify any Muslim king. The Qutb Shahs of western Andhra even
appropriatedthe title in a Telugu inscriptionof 1600 C.E., in which we are
informedthatKing Mahmudwas rulingfrom the Lordof the Cavalry'sthrone
at Golkonda.66The concept of a triadof lords must have been widely known,
indeed, for a Muslim polity to use it in reference to itself. Allusions to the
three lords occur as late as circa 1800 C.E., when Andhravillage histories
were collected under the direction of Colin Mackenzie.67The notion of a
triple division of power is also embodied in the PrataparudraCaritramu,a
Telugu prose history of the Kakatiyadynasty composed in the early to mid-
sixteenth century.68
The tripartitescheme of the Lords of Horses, Elephantsand Men can be
interpretedon one level as a pragmaticacceptanceof the geo-politicalrealities
of the Indianpeninsuladuringthe fifteenthand sixteenthcenturies. When the
Bahmani Sultanate was established in 1347 C.E., the Muslim presence in
the area had become firmly entrenched;it was now an inescapablefact. Yet
the natureof this three-foldclassification also suggests that Muslim polities
were viewed as legitimate powers, ranking equally with the great Hindu
dynasties of Orissa and Vijayanagara.Just as the Hindu Lords of Elephants
and Men were granteddivine sanctionin the Rayavacakamu,which described
64 Tidings of the King, 60-69.
65
Andugula Venkayya'sNarapati Vijayamu,cited in Lakshmi Ranjanam,"Languageand
Literature:Telugu," 165.
66 SII 10.753.
67 T. V.
Mahalingam,ed., Summariesof the Historical Manuscriptsin the MackenzieCollec-
tion, vol. 2 (Madras:University of Madras, 1976), 36-37.
68 C. V. Ramachandra
Rao, ed., EkamranathuniPrataparudracaritramu (Hyderabad:Andhra
PradeshSahitya Akademi, 1984), 59-71.

710 CYNTHIA TALBOT
them as emanationsof the gods, so too was the MuslimLordof the Horses.69
One Andhrainscriptionfrom the mid-sixteenthcenturyclaims that all three
lords worshippedthe god at Srisailam,Andhra'smost renownedShaiva tem-
ple.70 Besides being valid in their possession of royal power, the Muslim
kings were seen as an integralcomponentof the politicalorder.No memberof
this triadof lords could exist in the absenceof the othertwo, in the same way
that an army would be incomplete without the three contingentsof cavalry,
elephantcorps, and infantryor thatthe universewould be stagnantwithoutthe
triple processes of creation, preservation,and destruction. Far from being
alien intruderswhose very existence was abhorrentto the naturalorderof the
universe, as the early fourteenth-centuryVilasa grantportrayedthem, Mus-
lims were now representedas an essentialelement in the sociopoliticalworld.
THE GROWTH OF TELUGU ETHNICITY

While Muslims, on the one hand, were increasinglyviewed as intrinsicto the
peninsula, the identitiesof non-Muslimgroupswere at the same time becom-
ing more firmly differentiated.These identities had emerged in the pre-
Muslim era with two, largely congruent,focal points: languageand territory.
Andhrawas understoodas the territorywithin which Teluguwas spoken. The
associationbetween region and languageis clearlydrawneven in the eleventh
century,when the term Andhralanguagefigures in referenceto Telugu.71It
was in the eleventh century that the earliest extant Telugu literaturewas
produced, although another century elapsed before numerous works were
composed.72
As the Telugu linguistic sphere expanded over time, the conception of
Andhra'sregionalextentgrew larger.At firstthe territoryencompassedwithin
the Telugurealm of Andhrawas quite small. In the eleventh century,Andhra
was defined as the region extending from southernOrissa down along the
coast almost to the moder state's southernborder.But the westernboundary
of Andhra was severely truncated,reaching only about halfway across the
moder state.73This restrictednotionof Andhramirrorsthe paucityof Telugu
69 Further
expressionof the idea thatMuslimkings were god-like in the same manneras Hindu
kings is found in an episode from the PrataparudraCaritraumu.This story,repeatedin the later
Rayavacakamuas well, concerns the Delhi sultan's mother,who one night viewed the sleeping
bodies of her son and the captive, KakatiyaPrataparudra. The brilliantlight issuing forth from
their forms made her realize that both the Delhi sultanand Prataparudra were manifestationsof
the gods Vishnu and Shiva (RamachandraRao, Prataparudracaritramu,66-67; Wagoner,Tid-
ings of the King, 122-3).
70 SII 16.175 of 1550 C.E.; unfortunately, only the first few lines of the inscriptionsurvive. It
was issued by Santa BhikshavrittiAyyavaru,the head of the Virasaivamonasteryat Srisailam,
who also asserts that the three lords were his disciples.
71 Iswara
Dutt, InscriptionalGlossary, iii.
72 N. Venkataramanayya and M. SomasekharaSarma,"TheKakatiyasof Warangal,"in Early
History of the Deccan, G. Yazdani,ed. (London:Oxford University Press, 1960), 691.
73 K. Sundaram,Studies in Economicand Social Conditionsof MedievalAndhra(Machilipat-
nam and Madras:Triveni Publishers, 1968), 1.

inscriptions in the inland area. The expansion of Telugu inscriptions into the
interior zone contiguous to the coast occurred during the heyday of the Ka-
katiya dynasty from the late twelfth to the early fourteenth centuries. The
spread in the geographic distribution of Telugu inscriptions can be partly
attributed to the increased tempo of agricultural settlement in interior Andhra.
But the dynamism of the Kakatiya polity is another contributing factor. As the
sphere of Kakatiya influence enlarged, Telugu inscriptions increasingly ap-
pear in areas where other epigraphical languages (and other political elites)
had previously been prominent.74 By the time Kakatiya Prataparudra was
proclaimed the lord of Andhra in early fourteenth-century inscriptions, the
conceptual dimensions of the region encompassed about three-quarters of the
moder state's territory.
When Turkic armies entered peninsular India, the basic contours of the
current Telugu linguistic community had thus already been established. The
other language communities of the peninsula had similarly emerged in forms
that roughly approximate modern distributions. Each of the four regional
kingdoms conquered by the Delhi Sultanate in the early fourteenth century
corresponded with a separate linguistic realm: the Marathi-speaking area in
the case of the Yadavas, the Telugu area of the Kakatiyas, the Kannada area of
the Hoysalas, and the Tamil area for the Pandyas. Despite losing their respec-
tive political centers under Muslim attack, the nascent linguistic identities of
these four communities continued to evolve in subsequent centuries.
From the fifteenth century onward, in fact, Andhra inscriptions display a
heightened sense of being Telugu. Whereas earlier references occurred in
isolation, Telugu identity was now frequently juxtaposed on other regional
and ethnic identities. One inscription dated 1485 C.E., for instance, appends a
phrase at the end to state that "if an Orissan king, a Turkic king, a king of
Karnataka, a Telugu king, or anyone who works for these kings should seize
these (donated) cows, they will incur the sin of cow-killing and of Brahmin-
killing."75 Similar verses are widespread in Andhra inscriptions, the one differ-
ence being that the Muslim king is generally threatened with a more relevant
curse. For example, an inscription from the early sixteenth century warns, "if
any Orissan king or Telugu king should violate this charity, they will incur the
sin of killing cows on the banks of the Ganges; if any Turkic kings should
violate (this charity), they will incur the sin of eating pork."76 Greater contact
74 Prior to the Kakatiyaperiod, most

inscriptionsfrom western Andhra were composed in
Kannada (the language of the Karnatakaregion to the west), while inscriptions in southern
Andhra were often composed either in Kannadaor Tamil (the language of Tamil Nadu to the
south). The descriptionof the geographicaldistributionof Teluguinscriptionsis derivedfrom my
own work in progress. It is based on the mappingof roughly six thousandinscriptionsissued
within the boundariesof moder AndhraPradeshbetween 1000 and 1650 C.E.
75 Author's translationfrom Telugu, 11. 12-15 of SII 4.659.
76 Author's translationfrom
Telugu, 11. 157-162 of El 6.22.

712 CYNTHIA TALBOT
with other areas and polities of the peninsulamay accountfor the increasing
tendency to formulateTelugu identity in terms of its others.
In twentieth-centuryIndia, linguistic allegiance has been a highly charged
political issue capableof mobilizingmillions. Popularmovementsdemanding
homelandsfor particularlanguagecommunitieshaveresultedin the redrawing
of many administrativeboundariesto correspondwith linguistic distributions.
Echoing the modernistview of Benedict Anderson,scholarsof colonial India
have recentlycast doubton the existence of these languagecommunitiesprior
to the nineteenthcentury.Both David Washbrookand David Lelyveld believe
that boundedlinguisticpopulationsarose out of the Britishcolonial projectto
count, classify, and control Indian society.77The nineteenth-centurypreoc-
cupation with language as the cementing bond of social relations and the
belief that races or nations were situatedin set territoriallocations were the
underlyingimpetus. Indiansgraduallyadoptedtheir colonizer's view of lan-
guage and incorporatedit as one of the bases of a new social identity,accord-
ing to Lelyveld and Washbrook.
To be sure, in the days before mass communication, the perception of
sharedcommonalitieswould be far more attenuatedthan today, whether we
are speaking of language, caste, or religious or regional affiliation. The ten-
dency to identify one's spoken tongue as belonging to a major language
recognized by linguists is certainlya new phenomenon.Moreover,the com-
pilation of dictionaries, productionof textbooks, and developmentof print,
radio, and film media since the nineteenthcentury has led to considerable
standardizationof India's various languages. But even today, bounded lin-
guistic populationsare moreof an abstractionthanan observablereality.As in
pre-colonial times, in modem India the dialects spoken at home are numer-
ous, the line of demarcationbetween one language and anothervague, and
multi-lingualismwidespread.
More relevant than the question of whether territoriallybased language
communitiesexisted in pre-colonialIndia is the issue of linguistic allegiance.
Certainlythe numberof people who thoughtof themselves as membersof a
particularlinguistic culture may have been quite small in the pre-colonial
period. The depth of their attachmentto a language may also have been
relativelyshallow when comparedto the situationin moder India. As Sudip-
ta Kavirajobserves:
Earliercommunitiestend to be fuzzy in two ways in which no nationcan affordto be.
First, they have fuzzy boundariesbecause some collective identitiesare not territorially
77 David Washbrook,"'To Each a Languageof His Own': Language, Culture,and Society in

Colonial India,"in Language, History and Class, PenelopeJ. Corfield, ed. (London:Blackwell,
1991), 179-203; David Lelyveld, "TheFate of Hindustani:Colonial Knowledge and the Project
of a National Language," in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, Carol A.
Breckenridgeand Petervan der Veer,ed. (Philadelphia:Universityof PennsylvaniaPress, 1993),
189-214.

based. . . . Secondly, part of this fuzziness of social mapping would arise because
traditionalcommunities, unlike moder ones, are not enumerated.78
Because their boundaries were far more blurred, pre-moder communities

were less likely to engage in collective action thanmoder ones. That is, they
were not self-conscious to the same extent as in moder nationalisms, with
their focused and intense allegiances.
The sharplyarticulatedidentitiesof modem nationalismare, thus, far from
being the only forms of collective identity.It is untenableto argue that there
was no sense of linguistic community in pre-colonial Indiajust because the
population involved was a limited or ill-defined one. To be fair, Lelyveld
mentions the earlier histories of literary languages, while Washbrookcon-
cedes thatpre-moder grammariansviewed languagesas objects thatcould be
classified.79 But their main intention is to refute the notion of language
communitiesas inherentnaturalentities by stressingthe impactof nineteenth-
century ideology and technology. In the process, they downplay the impor-
tance of pre-moder linguistic identities, at least at the literary level. Al-
though peasants may not have consciously named the language they spoke,
poets and scribes were indisputablyawareof theirlinguistic heritage, as were
the wealthy patronswho financed their literaryproduction.
In pre-colonial India, as in other pre-moder societies, social identities
were most stronglydeveloped among the privileged. Smith describesthe elite
sense of belonging in medieval Europe as "lateral-aristocratic" ethnicity in
contrastto the "vertical-demotic"ethnicityof the modernperiod.80Medieval
Europeanethnicity was centeredin the aristocraticclass, spanninggeographic
boundariesbut staying within the strict confines of the upper social strata.
Ethnicityin late medieval South Indiamust have also been an elite phenome-
non. Certainly, the social identities displayed in inscriptionspertain to the
propertiedclass, the only people who could commission expensive recordsto
document their religious endowments. They were no less meaningful for
being elite in nature, nonetheless. A case in point is the Kakatiyadynasty's
switch in epigraphicusage. While the Kakatiyaswere nominally subordinate
to the WesternChalukyadynasty of Karnataka,the bulk of their recordswas
inscribedin Kannada,the languageof Karataka. Once the Kakatiyasceased
acknowledging Chalukyan overlordship, they immediately stopped issuing
inscriptionsin Kannada.81The Kakatiyashift to Teluguand Sanskritinscrip-
78
SudiptaKaviraj,"The ImaginaryInstitutionof India,"SubalternStudies VII, ParthaChat-
terjee and GyanendraPandey,ed. (Delhi: Oxford UniversityPress, 1992), 26. Kavirajdoes not
believe that languageformedthe basis for pre-modemcommunitiesin India, however. Whatever
the situation might have been in the Bengali-speakingarea, which was Kaviraj'scase study, I
believe that the medieval South Indianevidence sufficiently demonstratesthe existence of elite
linguistic identities there.
79
Lelyveld, "Fateof Hindustani,"201; Washbrook,"To Each a Language," 180.
80 Smith, Ethnic Origins of Nations, 79-84.
81 Early KakatiyarecordsareHAS 13.6, 7, 12;IAP-Knos. 14, 15, 19, 22, 24; IAP-Wnos. 14,

714 CYNTHIA TALBOT
tions had a certainpolitical significance, of course, but was also a symptomof

a solidifying Teluguethnicity.
Linguisticaffiliationwas a large, but not the only, componentin the forma-
tion of South Indianethnicities. Region of residence and religion were also
constituentelements reflected in the categories of Turk, Orissan, or of the
Karataka region (sometimes"theland of the Kannadalanguage"82)found in
Andhrainscriptions.But, despite the growthof an Andhraidentityderived at
least partially from linguistic unity, the land of the Telugu speakers was
politically fragmentedafter the fall of the Kakatiya capital, Warangal, in
1323. In the absenceof a regionalkingdomthatwas exclusively and uniquely
Telugu, Andhrawarriorsincreasinglyrelied on the memoryof the Kakatiyas
to constructa legitimizing past that providedthem with both authorityand a
feeling of community.It is this emergenceof a sharedhistorythatmost clearly
justifies calling the medieval Telugusense of self an ethnic identity.And for
Andhra society of later centuries, the Telugu past led straightback to the
Kakatiyas.83
A striking illustrationof the role of the Kakatiyas in Andhra historical
consciousness is providedby the manknown as ChittapaKhana.Althoughhis
name is a Sanskritizedform of the Persian name, Shitab Khan, Chittapa
Khanais called an infidel in Muslim chroniclesand was clearly not a Muslim.
He owed his appointmentas governorof the northernAndhraterritoriesthat
had formedthe core of the Kakatiyapolity to HumayunShah of the Bahmani
Sultanate.84In 1504 C.E., Chittapa Khana cast off his allegiance to the
Bahmanisand portrayedhimself as an independentmonarchin an inscription
situatedat Warangal,the formerKakatiyacapital. Like ProlayaNayaka and
Vema Reddi of the fourteenthcentury,ChittapaKhana'santecedentsare ob-
scure. To secure royal prestige, ChittapaKhanadrew an explicit linkage with
the Kakatiyasof two centuriespast in the statement:
The great and prosperousking Chittapa Khana ... capturedthe beautiful city of
[Warangal]
Ekashilapuri formerlyruledby a numberof virtuouskingsbelongingto the
for
Kakatiyafamily, the sakeof worshippingthe godsandBrahmins.85
In effect, ChittapaKhan was engaged in a form of culturalrevival, for he
tried to recreatethe greatnessof the Kakatiyas-the Golden Age of Andhra
warriors-through his own acts. The purpose of the inscriptionis to com-
22, 25, 29. LaterKakatiyainscriptionsare ARIEno. 126 of 1958-59; HAS 13.3, 56; IAP-Wno.
37; SII 4.1071, 1095, 1107; SII 6.212.
82 SII 6.796.
83 For some otherhistoricalmemoriesof the Kakatiyas,see Talbot,"PoliticalIntermediaries,"
281-3.
84 HiranandaSastri, Shitab Khan of Warangal,HyderabadArchaeologicalSeries No. 9 (Hy-
derabad:H. E. H. the Nizam's Government, 1932), 3 and 10.
85 Based on translationof Ibid., 23.

memoratethe restorationof two divine images. One was Krishna"who was

removed from his place by the strengthof the wicked." The other was the
goddess who "was the font of prosperity [Lakshmi] for the throne of the
Kakatiya kingdom" but "had been removed from her place by the wicked
Turks."86Although it is unlikely that these images actuallydated back to the
Kakatiyaperiod, thatis clearly irrelevantto the symbolic meaningof Chittapa
Khana's acts, which are intendedto close the gap in historicaltime between
the present and the pre-Muslimpast. The inscriptionends with a vision of
ChittapaKhanadaily worshippingthe Warangaldeity who was the protector
of the Kakatiyadynasty.
Even in an era of relative political stability, when Muslims were widely
depicted as a naturalelement in the South Indiansociopolitical universe, the
symbolismof Muslims as evil enemies of the gods andof Brahminscould still
be resonant.ChittapaKhana, in declaringhimself and Warangalfree from the
nominal control of a Muslim polity, utilized the longstandingBrahmanical
tropeof the barbarian.Yet, the primaryintentof ChittapaKhana'sinscription
is not to denigratethe Muslim per se but to evoke continuitywith a glorious
Telugupast in orderto substantiatehis own claim to kingship.The pejorative
characterizationof Muslims in this instance is a by-productof the process of
identity formation. Muslims are what Telugu warriorsare not, but the main
emphasis is on what a true Telugu warrioris-a spiritualdescendant, so to
speak, of the Kakatiyadynasty.
The shifting use of the title Lordof Horses for both a NorthIndianMuslim
polity and for one of the smaller Muslim polities of the peninsula indicates
that non-Muslimsdid have some sense of Muslims as a distinct and unified
group, regardlessof their exact political affiliation. From a militaryperspec-
tive, of course, the variousMuslim polities could indeed have been perceived
as sharinga similartechnology and emphasison cavalry,justifying grouping
them togetherin one largercategory.Andhrainscriptionsalso use the various
ethnic labels of Turk,Persian, and Arab interchangeablyin referenceto any
given group of Muslims. The effacement of ethnic differences is further
evidence that Muslims were seen as composing one common category.Con-
versely, the term Hindu continued to occasionally appear in inscriptionsin
opposition to Turk.87But in the peninsularIndia of circa 1500 C.E., more
relevantthan any sharedHinduidentitywere the emergingidentitiesbased on
common languageand region of origin. And in the evolutionof these incipient
ethnicities, the constructionand articulationof a commonpastplayed a signif-
icant part. Excluding the Muslim other was one way throughwhich Telugu
ethnicitywas consolidated,but the evoking of a sharedhistorycenteredon the
Kakatiyaswas an equally importantmeans.
86 Based on translationof Ibid., 24. P. V. Parabrahma.
87SII 26.622; P. V. ParabrahmaSastry,Select Epigraphsof AndhraPradesh, AndhraPradesh
Archaeological Series No. 31 (Hyderabad:Governmentof AndhraPradesh, n.d.), 76-77.

716 CYNTHIA TALBOT
TEMPLE DESECRATION
The balanceof power between Hinduand Muslim polities in South India was
abruptlyshatteredin 1565 when the peninsularsultanateslaunched a com-
bined attackagainstVijayanagara,leading to its defeat and the sacking of the
capital city in Karnataka.The Vijayanagarakings of the fourth or Aravidu
dynasty retrenched in southern Andhra but saw the territory under their
control diminish rapidly over the next ninety years. The central portion of
coastal Andhra fell to one Muslim polity-the Qutb Shahs of Golkonda/-
Hyderabad-in the 1580s. Successful campaigns in southernAndhra were
conducted in the 1620s by anotherMuslim polity, that of the Adil Shah of
Bijapur, and again in the 1640s by the Qutb Shahi armies. The last Vi-
jayanagaraking, SrirangaIII, eventuallyhad to flee the region entirely; and
by 1652 C.E. all of Andhrawas underthe hegemony of Muslim polities.
After 1565, therefore, we witness a second rapid expansion of frontiers,
parallelingin enormitythe events of the early fourteenthcentury.For a second
time, existing political networks were shattered, and several new Telugu
warriorlineages came to prominencein Andhrathat were nominally subordi-
nate to the tatteredremnantsof the Vijayanagaraimperium. Somewhat sur-
prisingly, Andhra inscriptionsof this period are silent on the catastrophic
events of 1565. Nor do they rail against the demonic Muslim enemy, unlike
what we find in the fourteenthcentury.88One reason for the absence of anti-
Muslim rhetoricmay simply be the small quantityof inscriptionsissued in
Andhraafter 1565.89This paucityof inscriptionsis itself a consequenceof the
political instability that plagued Andhra in the decades following the Vi-
jayanagaradefeat. With anarchisticconditions prevailing, temple patronage
declined abruptly,and thereforefew donative inscriptionswere issued. Wor-
ship may have been suspendedat many Hindutemplesdue to the loss of lands
and valuables that supportedregulartemple services.
At severallargertemple complexes with sufficientprestigeand resourcesto
survive in the long run, there are reports of disturbancesin the course of
continuing Muslim expansion in Andhraafter 1565. From these reportsand
other evidence, it appearsthat temple desecrationwas on the rise duringthis
third phase of the Hindu-Muslim encounterin Andhra. Unfortunately,it is
very difficult to gauge the extent of damagewroughton Hindutemples with-
out systematic and unbiased study of the subject, a project that has not yet
88 However, other
types of sources do engage in an anti-Muslimpolemic. Notable among
these are the Rayavacakamu(Wagoner,Tidingsof the King) and the village, family, and temple
histories (kaifiyat)collected by Colin Mackenziearound1800, many of which mention anarchy
and destructionin the decades after the battle of 1565 (NilakantaSastri and Venkataramanayya,
FurtherSources, 2:245-50).
89 In contrastto the 862 recordsoriginatingin the eight decades between 1490 and 1570 C.E.,
the eighty-yearspan from 1570 to 1650 C.E. yields only 318 inscriptions-a mere third of the
earliertotal.

been conducted.90My general impression, based upon inscriptionsand the

secondaryliterature,is that some Hindu sites in Andhrawere demolished in
the fourteenthcentury in the initial Turkicconquest and shortly thereafter.
Most notable among these are the temples in the Kakatiyacapital, Waran-
gal.91However, thereare few verifiablecases of Andhratemple destructionor
desecrationin the following period, when the balanceof power was relatively
stable (Wagoner'sphase two from 1420 to 1565 C.E.). Maharashtraunderwent
a similarexperience-temple destructionoccurredthereprimarilyin the four-
teenth century.92
The long lull in attackson Hindu temples seems to have ended in the late
sixteenth century.93The best-documentedincident pertains to the popular
Ahobilam temple (Kumool district). An inscriptiondating from 1584 C.E.
tells us that Ibrahimof the Qutb Shahi dynastycapturedthe Ahobilamtemple
with the help of the Hindu Hande chiefs in 1579 and held it for five or six
years.94 The record commemorates the recapturingof the site by a Vi-
jayanagarasubordinatewho is said to have restored the temple to its past
glory. The traditionalaccountof Ahobilam additionallystates that those jew-
els and silver or gold vessels belonging to the temple that survived a raid in
1565 were looted in the 1579 attack.95Local folklore reportsthat the main
Ahobilam image was broughtbefore IbrahimQutb Shah, who vomited blood
and died as a result.96
Evidence also exists for the plunderingof anothermajor Andhra temple
site, Srikurman(Visakhapatnamdistrict). An inscriptionissued by a Muslim
generalof the QutbShahs in 1599 C.E. claims thathe damagedthe temple and
90 At present, lists of sites where Hindu temples were destroyed and mosques or tombs
(dargah) built in their place are being circulatedby nationalistscholars. The data upon which
these lists are based are not always provided, making the evidence suspect. Muslim chronicles
and Perso-Arabicinscriptions are sometimes utilized, but neither of these types of sources is
totally reliable. Sita Ram Goel is one scholar compiling such lists, see his "Let the Mute
Witnesses Speak," in Hindu Temples: WhatHappened to Them, A PreliminarySurvey, Arun
Shourie et al., ed. (New Delhi: Voice of India, 1990), 88-181; and Hindu Temples: What
Happened to Them, Pt. 2 The Islamic Evidence (New Delhi: Voice of India, 1991). Thanks are
due to RichardM. Eaton for acquaintingme with these works.
91 George Michell, "City as Cosmogram:The CircularPlan of Warangal,"SouthAsian Stud-
ies, 8 (1992), 12.
92 Sherwani, "Bahmanis,"208.
93 Although I believe Goel's lists are greatlyinflated, this statementwould be trueeven by his
reckoning. In the approximately 140 sites of temple desecration that he records for Andhra
Pradesh("Letthe Mute Witnesses Speak,"88-95), the dates for the alleged incidentsare given in
sixty instances. Five date from the fourteenthcentury(phase one), six come from phase two, and
nineteen date from 1565 to 1650 C.E. (phase three). The remainingthirtyor so cases stem from
the century after 1650, with a notablebunchingof incidentsin the late 1600s, when the Mughal
empire was absorbingthe former Qutb Shahi kingdom of Golkonda.
94 SII 16.296.
95 The Ahobilam Kaifiyat is summarizedin NilakantaSastri and Venkataramanayya, Further
Sources of VijayanagaraHistory, 3:246.
96 P.
Sitapati, Sri Ahobilia Narasimha Swamy Temple(Hyderabad:Governmentof Andhra
Pradesh, 1982), 15.

7I8 CYNTHIA TALBOT
constructeda mosque there.97The temple can not have suffered substantial

destruction,however, as this inscriptionremainson its walls alongside many
others. Furthermore,a mere five years later, another subordinateof the
Qutb Shahs-this time a Hindu chief-recorded his gift of a village to the
temple.98Srisailam, a famous temple in the Nallamallaihills, seems to have
been affectedseveraldecades later,when the territorysurroundingit fell under
Muslim control. Around1625 C.E., the Hinduchief who ruledthis areaof An-
dhra'sinteriorwas defeatedby Adil Shahi forces from Bijapurin Karnataka.
Srisailam'straditionalaccounttells us thatthis led to the appropriationof Brah-
min and monastic lands, forcing many people to leave the area and resulting
in curtailmentof ritualservices.99At Ahobilam,also affectedby this particular
advance of Muslim forces, temple valuables were again taken away.100
Two salient points arise out of the reports of temple desecration at
Ahobilam, Srikurman,and Srisailam. The first is that all the incidents took
place in contested territory.Ahobilam was plunderedonce when the Qutb
Shahi forces were on a campaign against Vijayanagaraand a second time
when Adil Shahi armies were moving further into southern Andhra. The
Srikurmanincidentoccurredduringa QutbShahiexpeditioninto northeastern
Andhra.At no time do we get reportsof temples well within Muslim spheres
of influence being looted or damaged,only of those situatedalong the lines of
conflict. Templedesecrationin Andhrais thus a phenomenonof the moving
frontier, an activity occurring primarilyin the highly charged moments of
armedencounter.RichardM. Eatonbelieves thattemple destructionby Turks
and otherMuslimrulersthroughoutIndiawas motivatedby political, far more
than religious, considerations.The temples destroyedlay either in kingdoms
in the process of being conqueredor within the realms of rebels. Because a
royal temple symbolizedthe king's power in Hindupoliticalthought,destroy-
ing it signified that king's utterhumiliation.The characterizationof Muslims
as rabidiconoclastsdrivento destroyidols becauseof religious ideology is far
from the truth, in Eaton's opinion.101The situationin medieval Andhraap-
pears to supportEaton's thesis.
A second implicationof the Andhraevidence is that violence to temples
often only involved the appropriationof movable propertyrather than the
97 SII 5.1312.
98 SII 10.755 and SII 5.1260. The same chief
additionallygranteda village to the famous
temple at Simhacalam,also in northeasternAndhra.This leads K. Sundaramto surmisethat the
Simhacalamtemple had been plunderedat the same time as Srikurman(The SimhacalamTemple
[Simhacalam,A.P.: SimhacalamDevasthanam, 1969], 33 and 104).
99 P. Sitapati,SrisailamTempleKaifiyat,2 vols. (Hyderabad:Governmentof AndhraPradesh,
1981), 13.
'00 Sitapati, Ahobila Temple, 16; NilakantaSastri and Venkataramanayya, FurtherSources,
3:246.
101"TempleDesecrationand the Image of the Holy Warriorin Indo-MuslimHistoriography"
(Paperpresentedat the annualmeetingof the Associationfor Asian Studies, Boston, April 1994).

actual demolishing of idols and buildings. The Andhraincidents described

above dating from the late sixteenth and early seventeenthcenturies are in-
stances of temple desecrationand not actual destruction,unlike the situation
during the fourteenthcentury.However, the symbolic value of temple dese-
crationwas far greaterthanthe materialloss experiencedandwas exploitedby
both Hindus and Muslims. At Ahobilam, for example, the recapturingof the
site in 1584 is representedas a majorobjective of Vijayanagarastrategy,and
its successful conclusionis celebratedthroughthe conferralof temple honors.
The Srikurmancase, on the other hand, clearly illustratesthe gap between
reality and rhetoric in Muslim sources. It is ironic, indeed, that a Muslim
warriorwould have used a slab on which numerousendowments were in-
scribed to record his own attack, of which no visible evidence remains.102
This last example should warnus to be more cautiousabouttakingMuslim
claims at face value. The rhetoricof religious war in Indo-Turkishhistorical
chroniclesfrequentlyserved to eitherinflate the importanceof minormilitary
campaignsor to maskthe raw political ambitionof rulers.103And not until the
sixteenthand seventeenthcenturiesdoes the image of the holy warrior(ghazi)
actually figure in Indo-Muslimwriting, although this status was then attri-
butedretroactivelyto numerousindividualsof earliercenturies.104Tragically,
the medieval Muslim rhetoricof iconoclasm is today being interpretedliter-
ally by Hindunationalistsand used as a weapon againstIndianMuslims. Yet,
just as anti-Muslimpolemic in Hindusources like the Vilasa grantof Prolaya
Nayakahad self-servingmotives, so too shouldthe boasts of Muslim warriors
at the edge of the Islamic frontierbe regardedas effortsto enhancelegitimacy.
In any case, it is evident that much more researchneeds to be carried out
before we can make any definitive statementsaboutthe extentto which Hindu
temples were damagedor demolished by Muslim armies in medieval India.
CONCLUSION
In this essay, I have arguedthatthe medievalHindu-Muslimencountershould
be viewed as a process occurringin a frontierzone. The intensityof contact
varieddramaticallyover time along the SouthIndianfrontier,from the devas-
tation of the first armedconflict througha period of equilibriumand mutual
borrowingto a renewedera of advancingmilitarybordersand culturalhostili-
ty. Only throughunderstandingthe changingcontextsof Hindu-Musliminter-
action can we account for the diversity in Hindurepresentationsof Muslims.
Images of Muslims as demon-like barbariansdid occur in medieval Andhra
but primarilyin the aftermathof severe military strife. Reports of temple
desecrationlikewise surfacemainly along the edges of an advancingfrontier.
102 The other inscriptionson this slab are publishedas SII 5.1289-1311.
103
Ernst, Eternal Garden, 22-29 and 38-59.
104 RichardM. Eaton, "IslamicIconoclasmin India-Some Case Studies"(Paperpresentedat
Annual Conferenceon South Asia, Madison, WI, November 1994).

720 CYNTHIA TALBOT
When times were more peaceful and the atmospheremore accepting, a con-
ceptual scheme that incorporatedMuslim polities circulated widely in An-
dhra. But bothdenigratingand tolerantrepresentationsco-existed at any given
phase-medieval Andhraconceptions of the Muslim were never monolithic
or uniform.
While Muslims were often cast as the Otherin medieval Hindu discourse,
Andhrainscriptionsnever placed Islam in the foregroundas the basis of the
Muslim's alien character.The Muslim warriorsof Turkicorigin who invaded
and settled in peninsularIndia were certainly a separateethnic group, com-
prising their own social unit and possessing their own culture. But their
Othernessincludedmanydistinctfeaturesbeyondsimply religion-language,
costume, marriagecustoms and fighting styles, to name but a few. This is not
to say that the non-Musliminhabitantsof Indiawere unawareof the particu-
lars of Islamic beliefs andpractice.Popularworksby devotionalpoet-saintsof
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries explicitly contrastnumerousaspects of
Hinduismand Islam, often in the setting of a religious debate.105But for the
political elites who financed the compositionof inscriptions,religious differ-
ences were of no greatimport. Farmore significantwere the militaryskills of
the Turksand the administrativeheritageof the Islamic civilization that they
introducedinto the peninsula.
Because the initial Andhraencounterwith Islamic peoples took place in a
context of confrontation,we witness a sharpdelineationbetween Muslim and
non-Muslimin discourse. In my interpretation,bothsides used the languageof
us-versus-themto strengthenemergent identities in a fluid and constantly
changing sociopolitical milieu. Neither the parvenuAndhrawarriorsof the
fourteenthcentury nor the Turkicintrudersof the Delhi Sultanate, relative
newcomersto Islam, had much statureas authorityfigures. Whatbetterway to
shoreup shakyclaims to legitimacythanto exploit the ancientsymbols of their
respective religious traditions?New Andhra leaders could draw on earlier
Brahminimages of the struggle against demons and the godless, while the
CentralAsian Turkscould presenttheir activities within the paradigmof the
Islamicjihad. But the rhetoricof the destroyerof templesin the case of Muslim
elites and of the protectorof temples and Brahminsin the case of Hinduelites
can be misleadingin suggestingthatthe primarymotivationsfor conflict were
religious in nature. Instead, I believe that these representationsshould be
understoodas strategiesaimed at consolidatingcommunityallegiance.
While the presence of a markedly different Turkic people undoubtedly
facilitated the formationof a Hindu or non-Muslim identity, the growth of
105 This is true of the North Indian

poet-saints, Kabir and Guru Nanak (Lorenzen, "Vicissi-
tudes of Bhakti," 12) as well as Eknath from Maharashtra(Eleanor Zelliott, "A Medieval
Encounterbetween Hindu and Muslim: Eknath'sDrama-PoemHindu-TurkSamvad,"in Images
of Man: Religion and Historical Process in South Asia, Fred Clothey, ed. [Madras:New Era
Publications, 1982]).

regional identities in medieval South India was more striking. Though re-
strictedto the elite segment of the population,the medieval definitionof self
in terms of region was a precursorof regional loyalties in the twentieth
century. Because the core elements of medieval regional identity included
collective memoriesof the past, as well as a commonlanguageand homeland,
it can be classified as an early form of ethnicity.For Andhrawarriorsduring
the late middle ages, unity was fostered through constructionof a shared
history in which the Kakatiyadynastyplayed a seminal role. By focusing too
exclusively on religion as a source of difference,scholarshave overlookedthe
significance of other attributesdifferentiatingthe medieval communities of
India. And by failing to contextualizethe developmentof Hindu and Muslim
identitieswithin the historicalprocesses of migrationand a moving frontier,a
static and simplisticview of identityformationin SouthAsia has prevailedfor
too long.
The ethnic identities of elite groups in pre-modem India may differ from
modem nationalismsin their restrictedsocial range and rallying power. But
too much has been made of the distinctionbetween traditionaland modem
societies in this, as in many other, respects. Whether we are speaking of
medieval India or modem India, the sense of communityevolved througha
twofold process-the distancingof the group from others whose alienness is
highlighted, on the one hand, and the elaborationof a set of common social
attributes,on the other. In the developmentof an ethnicity,earliermyths and
images were often appropriatedto provide an all-importantillusion of conti-
nuity with ancienttimes. By representingthemselves as extendingfar back in
time, communities could claim to be naturalentities, inherentto the social
world. Although the antiquityof many ethnic groups is suspect, in terms of
the continuityof actual membership,the symbols that representthe commu-
nity's cohesion may indeed possess prior histories. In both pre-modem and
modem societies, in other words, the imaginingof the past was an on-going
creative process.
APPENDIX
In citing inscriptions,the following abbreviationshave been used:
ARIE Annual Report on Indian Epigraphy (New Delhi: Archaeological Survey of In-
dia).
EI EpigraphiaIndica (New Delhi: ArchaeologicalSurvey of India).
HAS 13 P. Sreenivasachar,ed., A Corpus of Inscriptions in the TelinganaDistricts of
H.E.H. TheNizam'sDominions, Pt. II, HyderabadArchaeologicalSeries No. 13
(Hyderabad:H.E.H. The Nizam's Government, 1940).
IAP-K P. V. ParabrahmaSastry,ed., Inscriptionsof AndhraPradesh: KarimnagarDis-
trict, AndhraPradeshGovt. EpigraphySeries No. 8 (Hyderabad:Governmentof
AndhraPradesh, n.d.).


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Inscribing the Other, Inscribing

the Self: Hindu-Muslim Identities

Universityof Texasat Austin

The natureof medievalHindu-Muslim relationsis an issue of greatrelevance

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Today, Indian Hindus and Muslims see themselves as distinct religious

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print-capitalism,has been particularlyinfluentialin promotingthe belief that

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THE MUSLIM AS DEMONIC BARBARIAN

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C.E., the situationchangeddramaticallywith the spreadof Ramatemples and

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hostilities between Prataparudra and the lord of the Turks,SultanMuhammad

17 The last two Sultanate

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The historical memories embedded in the puranasreflect the anxieties of

21 Parasher,Mlecchas in Early India, 45 and 213.

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Others, whetherforeign invadersor indigenous tribalpeoples, those follow-

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ETHNOGENESIS IN A FRONTIER SETTING

Althoughthe emergenceof a sense of Hinduunitycan notbe attributedsolely to

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can vary considerably.32But the perceptionof sharinga whole set of traditions

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In the case of fourteenth-centuryAndhra,the armedincursionsof the Delhi

37 Cynthia Talbot, "Political Intermediariesin KakatiyaAndhra, 1175-1325," Indian Eco-

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In theirquest for acceptanceas legitimatekings, chiefs like ProlayaNayaka

40 Author's translationfrom Sanskrit;Venkataramanayyaand SomasekharaSarma, "Vilasa

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and legitimate authority.In other words, the self-identity of an emerging

COLLABORATION AND ACCOMMODATION ON THE OPEN FRONTIER

For the past severaldecades, historianshave extendedthe frontierparadigmto

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tional datafrom Andhraconfirmsthe generalvalidityof Wagoner'sthesis that

wani, "CulturalSynthesis in Medieval India," Journal of Indian History, 41 (1963), 239-59;

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vernacularlanguage, Telugu, were generously patronizedat the court of the

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Christian-Muslimfrontierzones, an explicit scheme of accommodationcan

60 Phillip B. Wagoner,Tidingsof the King: A Translationand EthnohistoricalAnalysis of the

Sarma, ForgottenChapter, 111-2. This Sanskritinscriptionidentifies the Lord of Elephantsas

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Lord of Horses (Ashvapati) is the Mughal emperor of northernIndia. The

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THE GROWTH OF TELUGU ETHNICITY

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74 Prior to the Kakatiyaperiod, most

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77 David Washbrook,"'To Each a Languageof His Own': Language, Culture,and Society in

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Because their boundaries were far more blurred, pre-moder communities

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tions had a certainpolitical significance, of course, but was also a symptomof

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