The Raids of Mahmud of Ghazni and Rajendra I were Not At All Comparable

Perry Anderson, LRB, August 2012:

“…Compared with the fate of Pakistan after the death of Jinnah, India was fortunate. If the state was not truly secular – within a couple of years it was rebuilding with much pomp the famous Hindu temple in Somnath, ravaged by Muslim invaders, and authorising the installation of Hindu idols in the mosque at Ayodhya – it wasn’t overtly confessional either…”

John Keay, ‘India: A History: Revised and Expanded Edition’, 2011:

“…From this campaign Mahmud returned with booty valued at twenty million dirhams, fifty-three thousand slaves and 350 elephants…

…Somnath’s fort looked more formidable. It seems, though, to have been defended not by troops but by its enormous complement of brahmans and hordes of devotees. Ill-armed, they placed their trust in blind aggression and the intercession of the temple’s celebrated lingam (the phallic icon of Lord Shiva). With ladders and ropes Mahmud’s disciplined professionals scaled the walls and went about their business. Such was the resultant carnage that even the Muslim chroniclers betray a hint of unease. What one of them calls ‘the dreadful slaughter’ outside the temple was yet worse.

Band after band of the defenders entered the temple of Somnath, and with their hands clasped round their necks, wept and passionately entreated him [the Shiva lingam]. Then again they issued forth until they were slain and but few were left alive … The number of the dead exceeded fifty thousand.

Additionally twenty million dirhams-worth of gold, silver and gems was looted from the temple. But what rankled even more than the loot and the appalling death-toll was the satisfaction which Mahmud took in destroying the great gilded lingam. After stripping it of its gold, he personally laid into it with his ‘sword’ – which must have been more like a sledgehammer. The bits were then sent back to Ghazni and incorporated into the steps of its new Jami Masjid (Friday Mosque), there to be humiliatingly trampled and perpetually defiled by the feet of the Muslim faithful….”

 Richard Eaton has written a book 'India in the Persianate Age: 1000-1765'. The title is interesting and I intend to read it all.

But this post is about just one chapter in the book 'A TALE OF TWO RAIDS: 1022, 1025', 2019 where he compares raids of Rajendra I (r. 1014–44), maharaja of the Chola empire (848–1279), on Orissa and Bengal and Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni (r. 997–1030) on India. Both armies had traveled approximately 1600 km.

It's a fairly longish chapter and worth reading but I was left very unsatisfied because he does not talk about  three aspects of both the raids:

1. how were captured women - both ordinary citizens as well as royalty- treated?

2. were there religious conversions because of the raids?  

3. How were the new slaves- created because of the campaigns- treated?

He however clearly states this:

"...Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni  also ordered its Śiva image to be broken up and its pieces taken back to Ghazni, his capital, to be set in a floor and walked upon.

 The southerners (led by Rajendra I) crowned their victory by carrying off a bronze image of the deity Śiva, which they seized from a royal temple that Mahipala had presumably patronized. In the course of this long campaign, the invaders also took from the Kalinga raja of Orissa images of Bhairava, Bhairavi and Kali. These, together with precious gems looted from the Pala king, were taken down to the Chola capital as war booty. Before leaving the delta, however, Chola officers directed an operation unusual for military campaigns: they arranged for water from the Ganges River to be collected in pots and carried on the army’s long march back to Tanjavur..."

 Richard Eaton also writes: "... The silence of contemporary Hindu sources regarding Mahmud’s raid suggests that in Somnath itself it was either forgotten altogether or viewed as just another unfortunate attack by an outsider, and hence unremarkable...In fact, the demonization of Mahmud and the portrayal of his raid on Somnath as an assault on Indian religion by Muslim invaders dates only from the early 1840s..."

I don't think so because a lot of India's history has remained unrecorded for most of its history and what Mahmud of Ghazni did was not just connected to the religion but arguably it had large impact on its culture.  

Therefore,  I feel that that the raids were really not comparable.  

 courtesy: the cover artist and the writer

Katsushika Hokusai@260

#KatsushikaHokusai260 

'Woman Looking at Herself in a Mirror, 1805'

Artist:Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)

Christopher Benfey, NYR, July 2015:

“....The woman admiring herself in the mirror in an early hanging scroll seems to have her mouth slightly open, as though she’s about to speak. But if you look closely—and you always have to look closely at Hokusai’s work—you’ll see that she’s holding a tiny fruit (the hoozuki, or ground cherry, a symbol of summer) in her mouth, and perhaps making a sound with her tongue on its hollow skin, adding auditory detail to visual. “Hokusai’s beauty may be whistling softly to herself as she admires her red lipstick,” (Sarah E.) Thompson writes, “with a green shimmer on the lower lip where it is applied most thickly, and teeth neatly blackened for maximum contrast with her white-powdered face.”...”

Vision of the Monstrous Mindlessness of the Cosmos...Kafka or Carroll

Martin Gardner, 'The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition', 1983:

“...The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician. At the heart of things science finds only a mad, never-ending quadrille of Mock Turtle Waves and Gryphon Particles. For a moment the waves and particles dance in grotesque, inconceivably complex patterns capable of reflecting on their own absurdity. We all live slapstick lives, under an inexplicable sentence of death, and when we try to find out what the Castle authorities want us to do, we are shifted from one bumbling bureaucrat to another. We are not even sure that Count West-West, the owner of the Castle, really exists. More than one critic has commented on the similarities between Kafka’s Trial and the trial of the Jack of Hearts; between Kafka’s Castle and a chess game in which living pieces are ignorant of the game’s plan and cannot tell if they move of their own wills or are being pushed by invisible fingers.

This vision of the monstrous mindlessness of the cosmos (“Off with its head!”) can be grim and disturbing, as it is in Kafka and the Book of Job, or lighthearted comedy, as in Alice or Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday...”

Artist: B E Kaplan, The New Yorker, January 2018

Before , After

जॉन ल कॅरे यांचे 'हेर जो थंडीतून आत आला'....The Triple-strand of Wire and the Cruel Hooks Which Held It

"...The watch tower’s searchlight began feeling its way along the wall towards them, hesitant; each time it rested they could see the separate bricks and the careless lines of mortar hastily put on. As they watched the beam stopped immediately in front of them. Leamas looked at his watch.

“Ready?” he asked.

She nodded.

Taking her arm he began walking deliberately across the strip. Liz wanted to run, but he held her so tightly that she could not. They were half-way towards the wall now, the brilliant semi-circle of light drawing them forward, the beam directly above them. Leamas was determined to keep Liz very close to him, as if he were afraid that Mundt would not keep his word and somehow snatch her away at the last moment.

They were almost at the wall when the beam darted to the north, leaving them momentarily in total darkness. Still holding Liz’s arm, Leamas guided her forward blindly, his left hand reaching ahead of him until suddenly he felt the coarse, sharp contact of the cinder brick. Now he could discern the wall and, looking upwards, the triple-strand of wire and the cruel hooks which held it. Metal wedges, like climbers’ pitons, had been driven into the brick. Seizing the highest one, Leamas pulled himself quickly upwards until he had reached the top of the wall. He tugged sharply at the lower strand of wire and it came towards him, already cut.

“Come on,” he whispered urgently, “start climbing.”

Laying himself flat he reached down, grasped her upstretched hand and began drawing her slowly upwards as her foot found the first metal rung.

Suddenly the whole world seemed to break into flame; from everywhere, from above and beside them, massive lights converged, bursting upon them with savage accuracy...."

(John le Carré's 'The Spy Who Came in From the Cold', 1963)

 जॉन ल कॅरे यांचे 'द स्पाय हू केम इन फ्रॉम द कोल्ड' हे मी त्यांच्या वाचून संपवलेल्या पुस्तकातील एक आहे! त्यांची वाचायला सुरु केलेली पण न संपवलेली  अनेक पुस्तके आहेत. मला 'द स्पाय'ची अतिशय देखणी अशी हार्डबाऊंड आवृत्ती मुंबईच्या स्ट्रॅन्ड बुकशॉप मध्ये १९८४-८५ च्या सुमारास अतिशय कमी किमतीत मिळाली होती. 

 

“Now he could discern the Wall and, looking upwards, the triple strand of wire and the cruel hooks which held it.”

Artist: Matt Taylor

CrimeReads.com:

"...but the power of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is its ability to endlessly fascinate and inspire new generations of readers and spy fiction connoisseurs.

This year, The Folio Society has released a new edition of le Carré’s classic, introduced by the author and illustrated by the artist Matt Taylor. The artwork in this new volume evokes a noir world slowly spilt over with grayish blues and flashes of startling color. Espionage-crazed readers that we are, we wanted to share some of these illustrations with you. Here, then, is an artist’s vision of le Carré’s bleak midcentury world, a new rendering of a classic story..."

 

बा सी मर्ढेकरांच्या बहुतेक कवितांना शीर्षक नाही.....'Untitled' my foot!

बा सी मर्ढेकरांच्या बहुतेक कवितांना शीर्षक नाही, त्यावरून हे कार्टून आवडले....

Artist: (Most likely)  Jack Ziegler, 

Raja Ravi Varma and Navaratri

घटस्थापना २०२०

राजा रवी वर्मा आणि दीनानाथ दलाल हे महाराष्ट्रातील दोन सर्वात जास्त लोकप्रिय चित्रकार असावेत... त्यांच्या प्रतिमा आपल्या समोर नेहमी येत असतात...

राजा रवी वर्मा यांच्या कलेचा तर हिंदू धर्मावर मोठा प्रभाव आहे असच म्हणावे लागेल... जगात एका १९-२०व्या शतकातील चित्रकाराचा एवढा मोठा प्रभाव एका प्रमुख धर्मावर असण याच दुसर उदाहरण मला तरी माहित नाही

२०१७सालच्या "The Hindu" दैनिकात आलेली माहिती पहा:

"But it is the artist Raja Ravi Varma, who perhaps had the greatest influence on Navaratri dolls. His oleographs, found in the puja rooms of most households set off an unprecedented demand for images/sets/friezes of the same kind. A prized possession in many homes is a set of six scenes from the Ramayana, all directly copied from Ravi Varma. These comprise the breaking of the bow, the crossing of the Ganga, the killing of Jatayu, Sita in Ashoka Vana, the crossing of the ocean and the Pattabishekam. Similarly, the iconic Lakshmi and Saraswathi as depicted by the painter became the standard for all clay dolls of these two goddesses.
As for Adi Sankara, the only image we have of him is as depicted by Ravi Varma. The seer, either alone or with four disciples as seen in the painting, is a fixture in most kolus. Much rarer, but still to be found in a few homes are the porcelain dolls inspired by the postures struck by Ravi Varma’s heroines. All of these were made in Germany in the pre-Second World War years. Today’s China-made Hindu idols are therefore nothing new. The demand exists and so supply will happen, from somewhere or the other! Ravi Varma’s Sakuntala and Menaka, Ahalya, Hamsa Damayanti and Saraswathi were all made in porcelain and shipped out."