01-29-2008, 10:13 PM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->'Sir Vidia Gets It Badly Wrong'
OUTLOOK India, March 15, 2004
William Dalrymple grants Naipaul his eminence, but challenges his jaundiced notions of Indian history <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Rather than the 60,000 looted temples of RSS myth, Eaton writes that he can find evidence for around 80 desecrations "whose historicity appears reasonable certain", and that these demolitions tended to take place in very particular circumstances: that is, in the context of outright military defeats of Hindu rulers by one of the Indian sultanates, or when "Hindu patrons of prominent temples committed acts of disloyalty to the Indo-Muslim states they served. Otherwise, temples lying within Indo-Muslim sovereign domains, viewed as protected state property, were left unmolested".
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Eaton sees the attacks on temples not so much as the introduction to India of a new spirit of iconoclasm, so much as the continuation of the existing pre-Islamic practice of destroying or abducting the protecting state deity whose power was politically linked to the sovereignty of the defeated ruler: "Early medieval Indian history (of the pre-Muslim period) abounds in instances of temple desecration that occurred amidst interdynastic conflicts," he writes. "In AD 642...the Pallava king, Narasimhavarman I, looted the image of Ganesha from the Chalukyan capital of Vatapi. Fifty years later, armies from those same Chalukyas invaded North India and brought back to the Deccan...images of Ganga and Yamuna, looted from defeated powers there. In the eighth century, Bengali troops sought revenge on King Lalitaditya's kingdom of Kashmir by destroying the image of Vishnu Vaikuntha, the state deity."
And so on. Paradoxically, by destroying royal temples intimately linked with the protection of Hindu kings, and by abducting the tutelary state deities, Muslim rulers were in fact acting in accordance with Indian tradition, just as they were when they claimed descent from the Pandava heroes of the Mahabharataâas did the Muslim ruler of Kashmirâor portrayed themselves as supporters of the Ramrajya, as was the claim of the Mughals.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
In the above article, WD openly challenges Naipaul as a closet Hindutvavadi, and a non-scholar. Doing so, he relies upon all the debunked theories like Vijayanagaram was not what it used to be thought as - a "Hindu kingdom in face of Islamic onslaught", and its destruction was not at all the work of an Islamic zeel, but pure politico-economics etc., and that iconoclasm displayed by Islamic Rulers in India was but a continuation of the same practice by the earlier Hindu kings themselves and so on.
The above bull***t from Eaton was so brilliantly demolished by K Elst, in one of the articles in his book "Problems with Secularism". That article had appeared in Outlook too, but I can not find online resource of that article.
OUTLOOK India, March 15, 2004
William Dalrymple grants Naipaul his eminence, but challenges his jaundiced notions of Indian history <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Rather than the 60,000 looted temples of RSS myth, Eaton writes that he can find evidence for around 80 desecrations "whose historicity appears reasonable certain", and that these demolitions tended to take place in very particular circumstances: that is, in the context of outright military defeats of Hindu rulers by one of the Indian sultanates, or when "Hindu patrons of prominent temples committed acts of disloyalty to the Indo-Muslim states they served. Otherwise, temples lying within Indo-Muslim sovereign domains, viewed as protected state property, were left unmolested".
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Eaton sees the attacks on temples not so much as the introduction to India of a new spirit of iconoclasm, so much as the continuation of the existing pre-Islamic practice of destroying or abducting the protecting state deity whose power was politically linked to the sovereignty of the defeated ruler: "Early medieval Indian history (of the pre-Muslim period) abounds in instances of temple desecration that occurred amidst interdynastic conflicts," he writes. "In AD 642...the Pallava king, Narasimhavarman I, looted the image of Ganesha from the Chalukyan capital of Vatapi. Fifty years later, armies from those same Chalukyas invaded North India and brought back to the Deccan...images of Ganga and Yamuna, looted from defeated powers there. In the eighth century, Bengali troops sought revenge on King Lalitaditya's kingdom of Kashmir by destroying the image of Vishnu Vaikuntha, the state deity."
And so on. Paradoxically, by destroying royal temples intimately linked with the protection of Hindu kings, and by abducting the tutelary state deities, Muslim rulers were in fact acting in accordance with Indian tradition, just as they were when they claimed descent from the Pandava heroes of the Mahabharataâas did the Muslim ruler of Kashmirâor portrayed themselves as supporters of the Ramrajya, as was the claim of the Mughals.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
In the above article, WD openly challenges Naipaul as a closet Hindutvavadi, and a non-scholar. Doing so, he relies upon all the debunked theories like Vijayanagaram was not what it used to be thought as - a "Hindu kingdom in face of Islamic onslaught", and its destruction was not at all the work of an Islamic zeel, but pure politico-economics etc., and that iconoclasm displayed by Islamic Rulers in India was but a continuation of the same practice by the earlier Hindu kings themselves and so on.
The above bull***t from Eaton was so brilliantly demolished by K Elst, in one of the articles in his book "Problems with Secularism". That article had appeared in Outlook too, but I can not find online resource of that article.