[Reader-list] Annotations to the History of Iconoclasm in Kashmir - III

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

ANNOTATIONS TO THE PRLIMINARY HISTORY OF ICONOCLASM IN KASHMIR - III

What Does Kalhana Say about Temple Destruction and Intolerance ?
(contd.) - A Short List of 'Eminent' Kings


1. Jalauka
The first mention of the destruction of Buddhist shrines in Kashmir in
Kalhana's Rajtarangini is in connection with Jalauka, who succeeded
Ashoka (the Mauryan emperor) as the ruler of Kashmir. Jalauka's
destruction of Buddhist shrines is mentioned in slokas 140 of the first
Taranga (first book) of Kalhana's Rajtrangini. Kalhan tells the story of
how Jalauka was put to a test by a Krtyadevi - a Buddhist sorceress, and
then persuaded by her to repent and atone for his previous misdeeds of
destroying Buddhist shrines and favouring the devotees of Shiva, by
agreeing to build Buddhist viharas and chaityas, and repairing the ones
already damaged by him (and so, we infer, follow the example set by his
father, the Emperor Ashoka)

(Page 25 in the R S Pandit translation published by Sahitya Akademi)

2. Abhimanyu I
During the reign of Abimanyu I, Kalhana refers to conflicts between
Buddhists and others. He says (in slokas 177-181 of the first Taranga)

"During this era, the power of the Buddhists, whom the wise Bodhisattva
Nagarjuna had protected predominated in the land. These disputants, who
were opponents of the Vedas, having defeated all the learned men in open
debate, had cut at the root of the religious rites prescribed in the
Nilamatapurana. The country having drifted into confusion about the
customary observances of the Nagas, whose sacrificial offerings had been
cut off, caused loss of human life by heavy falls of snow. As heavy
snow-falls occurred year after year, the king, during winter, resided
for six months in Davabhisara and other places. During this period, due
to some indescribable spiritual power, the Brahmans, who made votive
offerings and sacrifices, were not destroyed, but the Buddhists
perished." (R.S.Pandit translation, Book 1 Pgs. 29-30)

R. S. Pandit in his footnote to slokas 180-181, says "this (the snow
storms that killed the Buddhists) is perhaps a poetical description of
the persecution of Buddhists during this era"

3. Nara
The second instance of the destruction of Buddhist shrines is mentioned
in slokas 199 and 200 of the first Taranga, in the account of the reign
of King Nara. Kalhana tells us about how a certain Buddhist monk had
seduced the king's lover, and how, "enraged by this, he (King Nara)
caused thousands of viharas to be burnt down and had their (the
Buddhists) villages occupied by the Brahmans residing in Madhyama Matha."

(Page 32 in the R S Pandit translation)

4. Mihirakula
The third instance of the destruction of Buddhist shrines can be
inferred in slokas 289 - 293 of the first Taranga, in the description of
the terrible reign of the Ephthalite Hun King Mihirakula who ruled
Kashmir. Here we enter the terrain of a strictly historical account of
iconoclasm in Kashmir. Kalhana describes Mihirakula as a 'God of
Destruction' and says 'his approach became known by the sights of
vultures, crows and the like, eager to feed on those being massacred by
his encircling army, to the population fleeing before him'. Kalhana,
always mindful of being even handed, does mention that 'this foul minded
man founded the temple of Mihiresvara', and that "when the country had
lost religion, he had promulgated the observance of religious conduct by
settling the people from the land of the Aryas...giving one thousand
Agraharas in gift to the Brahmanas born in the Gandhara country at
Vijayeswara'

R S Pandit, in his footnote to sloka 289 of the first Taranga, gives us
a brief account of Mihirakula, saying "Mihirakula, the king of the
Ephtalite of White Huns, was the Indian Attila. The Huns carried out a
terrible persecution of Buddhism, destroying Stupas and Viharas and
massacring the monks...Although the Huns were hostile to Buddhism, they
protected Savisim and their kings built temples in honour of Siva"

(Pg. 40. of R.S. Pandit's translation )

5. Jayapida
We also have mention of how conflict between the King Jayapida of the
Karkota dynasty and Brahmins led ninety nine Brahmins to seek death in
the water of the Tulamulya River. This act is said to have persuaded the
king from refraining from further confiscation of the 'agraharas' of the
Brahmins, but conflict with Brahmins remained a feauture of his reign. (
See Slokas 620-657of the fourth Taranga, Pages 174-177 of the R.S.
Pandit translation)

King Ksemagupta (950-58) was a weak, vice-  ridden ruler whose most
noteworthy acts were the destruction of the Buddhist Jayendravihara in
Srinagar and the construction of a temple of Ksemagaurisvara with the
help of stones from the ruins. Thirty-six villages belonging to the
former vihara were given "into the tenure" of a neighbouring king and ally.

Kalhana details the reign of Ksemagupta with considerable narrative
flourishes, focusing especially on the promiscuity and lassitude of his
court. However, that need not concern us here. What we are interested in
is the account of the destruction of one of the most significant places
of Buddhist worship by him. Here are the translations of the relevant
verses that refer to this event.

When upon an attack by assassins, the Damara Samgrama had taken refuge
in the holy Jayendra Vihara (a Buddhist temple in Srinagar), the
merciless king (Ksemagupta) in order to kill him, had it burnt down.
(Sloka 171, Sixth Taranga, Page 243 of the R.S.Pandit translation)


6. Harsha (11th Century A.D.)

Readers will recall, that the main emphasis in my earlier posting on
iconclasm in pre Islamic Kashmir was on the discussion of Harsha's
reign. Still, at the risk of repetition, let me quote at some length
from Kalhana on Harsha. He occupies a lot of space in the seventh
Taranga. I quote below from R.S.Pandit's translation of slokas 1089 to 1095.

"In course of time, the king, who had got accustomed to expenditure upon
the different departments of the army, fixed his mind for the sake of
its efficiency upon robbing the properties of the gods. Thereafter the
treasures granted by the former kings which were a marvel of the world,
the greedy minded one carried away from all the shrines of the gods.
When all the treasure had been seized, to remove the images of the gods,
he appointed one Udayaraja, "officer of uprooting of the gods". On their
(the gods) faces he caused ordure, urine and the like to be thrown, to
ruin the images, by naked mendicants whose noses and toes of the feet
and hands had rotted. The statues of the gods case from gold, silver and
other metals rolled like bundles of fuel on the roads even in
excrements. The images of the gods with ropes at the ankles were dragged
and covered with spittle in lieu of flowers by the mamimed, the lepers
and the rest. In no village, or town, or in Srinagara there was not one
temple which was not despoiled of its images by the Turk king Harsha.
There were however, two puissant gods who wre not insulted by him, the
holy Ranaswamin and Martanda. Two images of Buddha, out of the colossal
statues were saved by chance, the king having been "beseeched in a
liberal mood he was engaged in granting favours; the one at Parihaspura,
the place of his birth by the singer named Kanaka, and by Kusalasri the
Sramana at Srinagara"

The Debate over the Word - 'Turushka', with reference to Harsha of Kashmir
Here, the word Turk (turushka) has been the subject of some controversy,
and it occurs in sloka 1095 of the seventh taranga. It has been taken at
times (by Aurel Stein as well as Pandit Jia Lal Kilam, for instance,
whom we will discuss later) to mean that Harsa was somehow under the
influence of Muslims (glossed from 'Turks') . This is highly unlikely,
as at the time of Harsha's reign, the rise of Islam in Kashmir is still
two centuries in the future. There is some speculation that Harsha's
army had Muslim soldiers, settlers who had been inducted into his army.
But the word Turushka is not yet synonymous with Muslim, in Kalhana's
time. Words like 'Turushka', (Turk(, 'Yavan' (Greek) and 'Mleccha' (of
unintelligible tongue, barbarians) are used often interchangably in
Sanskrit sources to signify either foreigners, or behaviour alien to
accepted custom. So, we have numerous instances of Muslims in general,
being called 'yavan' or 'Greek' , which is hardly accurate. (Try calling
a Turk a Greek, or a Greek a Turk, and see what happens!) So we need to
be a little circumspect when apellations like 'Turk' are used liberally
in Sanskrit texts. The exiled Hindu-Shahi kings of Kabul and their
retinue, (who were not Muslim) who had for long been settled in Kashmir,
and who had close relationships of marriage with the royal families of
Kashmir, are also people who may have been described as 'Turk' or
'Turushka'. The word may be glossed pejoratively, or may be read in a
totally neutral register, (simply as 'foreigner') depending entirely on
the context in which it is embedded.

The desire to read the prefix 'Turushka'  (the exact word is
'TurushkaRajena' solely as 'Muslim' or 'Muslim influenced' in sloka 1095
of the seventh Taranga tells us more about the viewpoint of the reader
than it does about the world in which it was written. Harsha is a
difficult king for any ideologue interested in constructing the chimera
of injured Hindu innocence to deal with. He destroyed more temples and
places of worship than we can account for easily, hence, the only way to
speak of him (if not to pass over him in silence) is to say that he was
influenced by 'Turushka' hordes, who must have been Muslim.

We could have been in agreement with such a reading, had Kalhana used
the word 'Turushka' only in one sense, and only in relation to the
context of the presence of Muslims. But that is not the case.

In fact Kalhana uses the word 'Turushka' also to describe the Kushan
kings Hushka, Jushka and Kanishka, and is full of praise for them, for
their patronage of the Hindu and Buddhist religions.

The 170th sloka of the first taranga says (while referring to Hushka,
Juskha and Kanishka's 'good works') - "te turushkanvayodbhuta api
punyashraya nrpah"  ("these Turks/descended from Turks, too were kings
who took refuge in good works" ). "Good works" here means the building
of 'mathas' and 'viharas' - places of worship for Buddhists and Shaivites.

  In fact, it is during the reign of the 'Turushka' king Kanishka that
the great fourth Buddhist council, which formulated a great deal of what
would come to be Mahayana doctrine, took place in Srinagar under royal
patronage. Thus, we have to abandon the idea that the word 'turushka' in
sloka 1095 of the seventh taranga is necessarily synonymous with Muslim.
If it is, then it can be only as a later interpolation. In any case, it
would be difficult to imagine how Harsha, could be under Muslim
influence and still be a devotee of the deities Ranaswamin and Martanda.
Clearly, his iconclasm had a motivation other than an alleigance, or
even the shadow of an alleigance to the precepts of Islam, which in any
case were present at that time (if they were at all present) in a very
nascent form in Kashmir.

Even while discussing Harsha, Kalhana uses the word Turushka,
conspicuously in another Sloka, Sloka 1149, Seventh Taranga) which
simultaneously refers to him as being habituated to eating pigs.

Sa turuskahsatadhisan aniiam posayan dhanaih
Nidhantivadhi durbuddhir bubhuje gramysukaran

'While he ever fostered with money the Turks, who were his centurions,
that perverse minded man (Harsha) until his death ate domesticated pigs
(gramyasukaran)'

(Sloka 1149, Seventh Taranga, page 357 of the R.S.Pandit translation)

What this verse surely implies is that that Harsa, while favouring
favouring foreign-born
mercenaries in his armed corps (like many other Kings at many other
times), remained personally uninfluenced by Islam.  There is also
nothing to indicate that these 'Turks' are in fact Muslims. Finally, a
king who regularly eats pork is hard to pass off even as a crypto-Muslim.

A.L.Basham, a well known historian of ancient India teases this obscure
reference into a hypotheses on the possible doctrinal influences on
Harsha's iconoclasm in a delightfully intricate essay titled 'Harsa of
Kashmir and the Iconoclast Ascetics'

[ See -  'Harsa of Kashmir and the Iconoclast Ascetics' by A.L. Basham,
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of
London, Vol 12, Issue 3/4, Oriental and African Studies Presented to
Lionel David Barnett by His Colleagues, Past and Present, Pages 688-69,
1948 ]

A.L.Basham concludes, (on the basis of detailed textual, numismatic and
material evidence) that the source of Harsha's iconoclasm lies elsewhere
than in Islam. He points out Harsha's close links to the south and his
willingness to be influenced by Southern adherents of the iconoclastic
'Ajivika' sect, and argues that it is here that we should look to the
sources of his own iconoclasm. Basham's argument, albeit speculative, is
less reliant on conjecture than the automatic identification of
'Turushka' with 'Muslim' that bedevils the other efforts to wrestle with
the complexity of his reign that I have referred to above.

7. Sankaravarman, son of Avantivarman (Fifth Taranga, Slokas 128-227)
(9th Century A.D.)

Finally, we come to the figure of Sankaravarman, whose mention in my
earlier posing on this issue, so exercised Rashneek Kher.

Sankaravarman's reign is described in considerable detail in the fifth
Taranga of Kalhana's Rajtarangini (Pgs. 197 - 206, R. S. Pandit's
Translation of Kalhana's Rajtarangini)

Let us take the verse that according to Rashneek Kher is 'simply
nowhere' because the is the one one in which Kalhana mentions
Sankaravarman sacking Parihaspura.

"Thus the petty minded king (Sankaravarman) in order to make his own
city   celebrated, carried away everything of value belonging to
Parihaspura"
  (Fifth Taranga, Sloka 161)

Here, is the verse in its original Sanskrit.

Svalpasatvo narapatih sva-purakhyapnaya sah,
Sarapaharam-karot-parihaspurasya yata

Aurel Stein translates this as -

Thus this ruler, who posessed but little character, had whatever was of
value at Parishaspura, carried off in order to raise the fame of his own
city." (Fifth Book, Sloka 161. Vol. 1, Aurel Stein's translation of
Kalhana's Rajtarangini, Pg. 207)

There are several other slokas that go on to describe Sankaravarman's
actions with regard to places of worship, they follow close on the heels
of the 161st sloka.

"In time, the Kings mind was in large measure, obsessed with the
practice of covetousness and he bcame an adept in the persecution of the
subjects"
  (Fifth Taranga, Sloka 165)

"Owing to fresh vices he, as a rule, ran short of money time ang again;
he robbed everything belonging to the gods and others through the device
of imposts. Two state departments known as the Attapatibhaga and the
Grhartyka were established by him, which was the robber of towns, the
households, the villages and the rest."
  (Fifth Taranga, Sloka 167)

"The money which was the sale proceeds of incense, sandal, oil and the
like, he took from the shrines of the gods under the pretext of a share
in the sale-price."
  (Fifth Taranga, Sloka 168)

"For the rest under the pretext of supervision through officials
specially empowered, he soon plundered sixty four temples of the gods."
  (Fifth Taranga, Sloka 169)

(All taken from Page 200 of the R.S.Pandit translation)

Sankaravarman in the eyes of Jayanta Bhatta
Luckily, with regard to Sankaravarman and his reign, Kalhana's
Rajtarangini is not the only source of information available to us. We
also have a Sanskrit dramatic satire, by Jayanta Bhatta called
'Agamadambara' which gives us a wealth of detail, not only about the
political conditions of Kashmir at the time of Sankaravarman, but also,
a great deal of information about doctrinal and religious disputes. In
fact, religious conflict is one of the major themes of this text. This
means that we have available to us the means of an independent
confirmation of Kalhana's assesment of Sankaravarman's reign by way of a
reading of Jayanta Bhatta's text, which is located squarely in
Sankaravarman's reign.

There is an excellent translation and commentary of Jayanta Bhatta's
satire by the the Hungarian Sanskritist Csaba Dezso. ('Agamadambara:
Much Ado About Religion' by Jayanta Bhatta, edited and translated by
Csaba Dezso, Clay Sanskrit Library, NYU Press; Bilingual edition, 2005).
My reading of this text is indebted to the scholarship of Dezso, and
much in  the following passages are simply my paraphrasing of his
introduction to the translation.

Jayanta Bhatta (a Shaivite Brahmin poet and playwright who served
Sankaravarman as a court poet and functionary) gives a more favourable
account of king Sankaravarman in his Agamadambara compared to Kalhana.
He described Sankaravarman as being  ‘supremely devoted to  ́Siva’,
and
says : ‘The merits of this king are celebrated all over the world, and
his attention is solely devoted to social and religious order’; As long
as His Majesty Sankaravarman righteously rules the country which has
fallen to him, the kingdom belongs to the virtuous alone, but he
supports it.'

We know that Kalhana describes Sankaravarman as a destroyer of sixty
four temples. But the motives for this destruction, which Kalhana
attributes to greed alone, can be read differently, if we take into
account Bhatta Jayanta's account of his patron's reign.

Let us look at only two examples from Jayanta's 'Agamadambara';

1. In the second act of the play, two dissident sadhus lament (in
Prakrit, the language used for Buddhist and non Vedic characters in the
play, and for women and lower caste characters) the fate of those who do
not abide by the Vedas  "because the king, shoulder to shoulder with his
‘rough’ (visama ) adviser, Jayanta, has ‘nabbed the mendicant
Nılambaras, beat them to jelly, and expelled them from the kingdom, on
the grounds that they were outside Vedic religion. And if any other
mendicant is caught, who is outside Vedic religion, he’ll be beaten up,
killed, thrown in jail, [or] slain. "

2. The beginning of the third act of the play has a royal herald
decaliming -

ye ’tranadijagatpravahapatita nanagamah sadhavas
te tishthantu yathasthitah svasamayadisthas carantah kriyah

ye tu prastutadharmaviplavakrtah papas tapopayinas
te cedasu na yanti ghatayati  ̄tan dasyun iva ksamapatih

"Those virtuous people who have fallen into the beginningless stream of
the world and belong to various religions—they should remain as they
are, performing practices prescribed by their own religious discipline.
Those criminal false ascetics, however, who devastate the established
social and religious order—if they don’t leave immediately, the king
will strike them like thieves. "

Remember, this is not a writer who seeks to belittle Sankaravarman, he
is the King's contemporary, he actually approves of his patron's
actions, he is describing events and processes he is involved in, and
that occur in his lifetime. And the words that he puts in the mouths of
his characters can be seen to be reasonably accurate reflections of his
own opinions. We do not get closer than this when it comes to the
historical record.

If anything, this (taken together with the reading of Kalhana's
Rajtarangini) conclusively demonstrates that Sankaravarman's reign was a
time of violence and religious persecution aimed specifically at
heterodox sects.

Anangapala
Acts of iconoclasm are also mentioned with regard to the scions of the
Hindu Shahi dynasty of Kabul who were given refuge by the Kings of
Kashmir (with whom they had ties of blood). Anangapala, a Shahi prince
in the court of King Ananta of Kashmir is described as 'the fiend
Anangapala, the royal favourite, had his mind ever occupied in breaking
up the gold images of the gods" (sloka 147, Seventh Taranga)

Summary of Rajtarangini Survey
in this way, I demonstrate that Kalhana's Rajtarangini actually lists
the reign of seven kings of pre Islamic Kashmir (Jalauka, Abhimanyu I,
Nara, Mihirakula, Ksemagupta Sankaravarman and Harsha) and the actions
of one member of the royal household - the Hindu Shahi prince
Anangapala, which feature acts of persecution based on religion
occurred. The details are spelled out - idols were destroyed, temples
abandoned and razed to the ground, adherents of faiths different to
those of the king were put to the sword. We also have discussion by
Kalhana of Jayapida's persecution of Brahmins, leading to an act of
collective suicide by drowning in the Tulamulya river by ninety nine
Brahmins.

There is nothing surprising in any of this. Kings and rulers,
everywhere, belonging to every religion have perseucted people on the
basis of their religious or secterian identities, just as kings and
rulers, belonging to different religions, have protected and patronized
religions different from their own. No particular faith has a monopoly
insofar as persecution or intolerance is concerned. No particular faith
is more tolerant than others, just as none is necessarily more
intolerant than others.

(continued in next posting)