The Hindus (63 page)

The king saw which way the holy wind was blowing and went with Campantar. The story of the three miraculous contests is not generally challenged; it is accepted as hagiography and left at that. But the part about the impalings, which does not defy the laws of nature and has been proposed as history, is much disputed.
⁹⁴
Impaling was, as we saw in the tale of Mandavya, a common punishment in ancient India. But while Campantar himself reviles the Jainas in his own poetry, he doesn’t mention the impaling, nor does Appar (usually regarded as slightly older than Campantar), who tells only the story of the three contests, in the early seventh century. References to the impaling begin only centuries later, and this lapse of centuries casts doubt on the historicity of the impaling. Nampi Antar Nampi, in the reign of the Chola king Rajaraja I (985- 1014), refers to it, and it is illustrated in a frieze from the reign of Rajaraja II (1150-1173), in the main shrine of the Shiva temple at Taracuram (south of Kumbhakonam, in Thanjavur district, Tamil Nadu).
⁹⁵
Cekkiyar, the author of the
Periya Purana
version of the story cited above, was known for his anti-Jaina sentiments.
⁹⁶
Parancoti Munivar reworked the story in his
Tiruvilayatal Purana
, and it is illustrated in paintings in the great tenth-century Brihadishvara temple in Thanjavur.
⁹⁷
One panel shows Campantar at the left, with the river and the texts upon it; the king and his queen(s) and minister in the middle; the impaled Jainas on the right.
⁹⁸
The mass execution of Jainas is carved in frescoes on the wall of the Mandapam of the Golden Lily Tank in the temple of the goddess Minakshi in Madurai.

But there is no evidence that any of this actually happened, other than the story, and that story is told, in the ancient sources, only by the tradition that claims to have committed the violence (the Hindus), not by the tradition of the people whom the story regards as the victims (the Jainas). The only historical fact is that there is a strong tradition among Hindus celebrating their belief (right or wrong) that a Hindu king impaled a number of Jainas, that for centuries, Hindus thought that it was something to brag about and to carve on their temples, and to allude to in their poems. Telling this story both generated tension between the communities and reflected already extant tensions.

There are other stories, on both sides. Inscriptions from the sixteenth-century in Andhra Pradesh record the pride that Virashaiva leaders took in beheading white-robed (
shvetambara
) Jainas. They are also said to have converted one temple of five Jinas into a five-linga temple to Shiva, the five lingas replacing the five Jinas, and to have subjected other Jaina temples to a similar fate.
⁹⁹
An inscription at Ablur in Dharwar praises attacks on Jaina temples in retaliation for Jaina opposition to the worship of Shiva.
¹⁰⁰
A dispute is said to have arisen because the Jainas tried to prevent a Shaiva from worshiping his own idol, and in the ensuing quarrel, the Shaivas broke a Jaina idol. When the dispute was brought before the Jaina king Bijjala, he decided in favor of the Shaivas and dismissed the Jainas.
¹⁰¹
This crossover judgment of a Jaina king in favor of Hindus is matched by a case from the fourteenth century in which Jainas who were being harassed by one band of Hindus sought protection from another Hindu ruler.
¹⁰²
Evidently there were rulers on both sides who could be relied upon to transcend the boundaries of any particular sectarian commitment in order to protect pluralism. A ray of light in a dark story.

Indeed, when conflict arose at this time, it was not generally the Shaivas versus the Jainas (let alone the Vaishnavas), but the Pandyas against the Cholas, and both kings might well be Shaivas or, for that matter, Buddhists. From time to time too, Shaivas tore down Shaiva temples, or Vaishnavas Vaishnava temples, looting the temples and hauling the images home.
¹⁰³
In other words, as was the case later with the Turkish invasions, warfare had political and economic motives more often than religious ones. Yet the debate between Shaivas and Vaishnavas sometimes became quite heated. Descriptions of intersect discourse are peppered with verbs like “pummel, smash, pulverize,” and, above all, “hate.”
¹⁰⁴

Jainas and Buddhists had been conversation partners, friend or foe, with Hindus since the sixth century BCE. But from the early centuries CE, the Abrahamic religions joined the conversation, first Christianity, then Judaism, and then Islam.

According to the apocryphal
Acts of St. Thomas
(perhaps from the first century CE), the apostles drew lots and the Apostle Judas Thomas, who was a carpenter, got India. When Jesus appeared to him in a vision that night, Thomas said, “Whithersoever Thou wilt, our Lord, send me; only to India I will not go.” Jesus nevertheless eventually indentured him, for twenty pieces of silver, to an Indian merchant, who took him to work on the palace of the ruler of Gandhara, sometime between about 19 and 45 CE.
¹⁰⁵
After a second voyage, in 52 CE, Thomas landed in Kerala or Malabar and there established the Syrian Christian community that thrives there today; he then traveled overland to the east coast, where he was martyred in the outskirts of Chennai. As usual, the interchange went in both directions; in exchange for the goods and ideas that the Christians brought to India, they took back, along with Kerala’s pepper and cinnamon, always in demand in Rome, equally palatable stories—elements of Ashvaghosha’s life of the Buddha (in the second century CE), such as the virgin birth and the temptation by the devil—that may have contributed to narratives of the life of Christ.
¹⁰⁶

Judaism was there in South India too. We have noted Solomon’s probable Malabar connections, and according to legends, Jews have resided there since the period of the destruction of the Second Temple (c. 70 CE).
¹⁰⁷
The earliest surviving evidence of a Jewish presence, however, is a set of copper plates, dated between 970 and 1035 CE, written in Tamil, and referring to the settlement of Jews in a town north of Cochin, on the Malabar Coast in Kerala; the plates grant one Jacob Rabban various privileges, including the rights to hold a ceremonial parasol and to bear weapons.
¹⁰⁸
The Angadi synagogue, the oldest in India, was built in 1344; a second synagogue was constructed in 1489.

Islam too was established on the Malabar Coast during this early period. Arabs came to India before there was such a thing as Islam, trading across the Arabian Sea to India’s southwest coast, to the cities of the Chalukyas and Cheras, and to Sri Lanka. Arab horses were a major item of trade, imported by land in the north and by sea in the south, to the Kerala coast. Shortly after the Prophet’s death, a group of Arabs, whom the Indians called Mapillai (“newly wed grooms” or “sons-in-law”), settled in the northern Malabar area of Kerala; when Arab merchants, newly converted to Islam, arrived there later, they converted many of the Mapillai to Islam, and they have remained there to this day. By the mid-seventh century there were sizable communities of Muslims in most of these ports.
¹⁰⁹

Islam thus came to India when the bhakti movement was first developing, long before Islam became a major force in the Delhi Sultanate in the eleventh century CE. These first Muslims had opportunities both to provide positive inspiration and to excite a response in opposition, to interact with South Indian bhakti on the individual and communal level. A text often appended to the tenth-century Vaishnava
Bhagavata Purana
contains a much-quoted verse that has been used to epitomize the negative relationship between bhakti and Islam. Bhakti herself speaks the verse: “I [Bhakti] was born in Dravida [South India] and grew up in Karnataka. I lived here and there in Maharashtra; and became weak and old in Gujarat. There, during the terrible Kali Age, I was shattered by heretics,
^hg
and I became weak and old along with my sons. But after reaching Vrindavana I became young and beautiful again.”
¹¹⁰
Who are these heretics (
pakhandas
)?
¹¹¹
They may very well be Jainas,
¹¹²
the traditional enemies of Shaivas in South India, but this is a Vaishnava text and probably northern rather than southern (Vrindavana being the center of pilgrimage for worshipers of Krishna in North India). The “shattering” is not mentioned until Bhakti has moved to North India, to Gujarat (an important Jaina center). Yet the verse has traditionally been interpreted to be referring to Islam, not to Jainism, as the villain of the piece.

At the same time, there were many opportunities for positive interactions between Islam and bhakti in South India. For instance, the idea of “surrender” (
prapatti
), so important to the Shri Vaishnava tradition of South India, may have been influenced by Islam (the very name of which means “surrender”). More generally, the presence of people of another faith, raising awareness of previously unimagined religious possibilities, may have inspired the spread of these new, more ecstatic forms of Hinduism and predisposed conventional Hindus to accept the more radical teachings of the bhakti poets.

It is not always appropriate to refer to shifts in religious affiliation, between Buddhism, Jainism, and the Vaishnava and Shaiva bhakti sects, as “conversion”; it is generally better to reserve that term for interactions with religions that have jealous gods, like Islam and Christianity. For ordinary people in ancient South India, religious pluralism was more of a supermarket than a battlefield. Laypeople often gave alms to Buddhist monks or, later, prayed to Sufi saints and still visited Hindu temples. But there were some people who really “converted,” in the sense of reorienting their entire lives in line with a distinctive worldview and renouncing other competing worldviews; these were the relatively small numbers of monks, nuns, or saints, as well as the members of certain philosophical sects and—the case at hand—some of the more fanatical bhaktas.

Though Buddhism and Jainism were proselytizing religions from the start, Hinduism at first was certainly not; a person had to be born a Hindu to be a Hindu. But the renunciant religions and, after them, some of the heterodox, bhakti, and philosophical sects argued that you might be born one sort of a Hindu and become another sort or even that you could be born a Jaina (or, later, a Muslim or a Protestant) and then belong not to some sort of umbrella Hinduism but to a particular ascetic or bhakti sect. And so some of the bhaktas proselytized like mad, and this made them a threat to the other religions in India in ways that Vedic Hinduism had never been. This zealous proselytizing, I think, justifies the use of the word “conversion” in some instances. The possibility of shifting allegiance entirely, from one Hindu sect to another or even to a non-Hindu religion, may be encoded even in the refrain of the god-mocking poem with which this chapter began: “Can’t we find some other god?”

The bhakti authors even mocked their own proselytizing:

The violent power of bhakti, which overcame even the god, transfigured the heart of religion in India ever after.

CHAPTER 14