[The first part of Dr. Shadab Munawar Moosa’sresearch-based article appeared in Radiance Viewsweekly (2-8 February 2025)as Cover Story entitled “Mosques and Muslim Identity in India”. The second part was published in Radiance (9-15 February 2025), and the third part is being published here in this issue.]
One narrative being dished out by propaganda peddlers is that Muslim rulers subjugated Hindu subjects and their places of worship. It maintains that the Hindus were not allowed to construct temples and thousands of them were destroyed whereas Islamic structures were built and allowed to survive in great numbers. Little is known about temples in North India built after the Muslim conquest of Delhi; attention tends to be drawn to Islamic monuments, often on those parts constructed from remnants of Hindu temples, thus skewing our perceptions of Muslim relations with India’s majority population.
We have covered the temple destruction narrative in the previous section, here we discuss the other dimension. For this we will examine cities with predominant Muslim-ruled areas and mandir construction.
Example 1: Bihar
We have about a hundred inscriptions telling about once existing pre-Mughal Islamic monuments in Bihar, but only one survives. By contrast we have about six extant 14th-century temples. Such academic narratives have been present, but it seems that they have been dealt with by putting a cloak of invisibility on them.
Reference:
For the inscriptions, see Qeyamuddin Ahmad, Corpus of Arabic and Persian Inscriptions of Bihar (Patna: K.P. Jayaswal Research Institute, 1983), 1-118. Catherine B. Asher, Islamic Monuments of Eastern India and Bangladesh (Leiden: Inter Documentation Co. on behalf of the American Committee for South Asian Art, 1991), provides illustrations.
See D.R. Patil, Antiquarian Remains in Bihar (Patna: K.P. Jayaswal Research Institute, 1963), 134, 139, 141, 213–15, 580–81; and Frederick M. Asher, “Gaya: Monuments of the Pilgrimage Town,” in Janice Leoshko, ed., Bodhgaya: The Site of Enlightenment (Bombay: Marg, 1988), 77.
Example 2:
Small temple architecture was a Hindu religious norm of temple construction.
Two towns, Amber, Raja Man Singh’s watan jagir in Rajasthan, and Rajmahal, his capital as Akbar’s governor of Bengal. While today Rajmahal is in Bihar, in the Mughal period it was in suba Bengal.Each intended for Kachhwaha residence and administration, might be more useful for understanding issues of Hindu-Muslim identity in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Amber is famed for its palace built by this raja and further expanded in the 17th century by Mirza Jai Singh (1622–1667), but many other contemporary structures grace the site that largely go unnoticed by today’s visitors. For example, on the main Delhi road lies a mosque originally constructed in accordance with Akbar ’s order in 1569-70. It is now rebuilt, but the locale and space occupied remain constant, as is shown on an early 18th-century map of Amber. In Rajmahal the Jami mosque, built in this case by Raja Man Singh, is in a similar location, that is, on the main road. The small temple also reputedly provided by Raja Man Singh is behind the mosque, not visible from any distance. How are we to read this placement? Does this mean that Islamic identity always sublimates a Hindu one even in cities built by a Hindu prince? Or does it mean that location of temples to Hindus in premodern North India had a very different meaning than it might today?
Reference:
For the mosque’s foundation inscription, see S.A. Rahim, “Nine Inscriptions of Akbar from Rajasthan,” Epigraphia Indica, Arabic and Persian Supplement, 1969, 55-56. See Susan Gole, Indian Maps and Plans (New Delhi: Manohar, 1989), 170, for a portion of a map of Amber in the National Museum, New Delhi [56.92.4] showing the mosque.
Kuraishi, List of Ancient Monuments Protected under Act VII of 1904, 217-19, for the mosque; the temple is in Asher, “The Architecture of Raja Man Singh,” 192.
Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia, Edited by David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence, University Press of Florida.
Example 3:
In Varanasi or Lucknow, for example, mosques dominate the landscape. Even in Lucknow today, temples are not particularly visible, although many do exist. In Varanasi, of course, deemed by many the Hindu city par excellence, small temples literally dot the ghats and city, although most of them date no earlier than the late 18th century. It is particularly interesting that Rani Ahilya Bai Holkar’s newly constructed Vishvanath temple, the focal tirtha in all Varanasi, is notably smaller than the adjacent mosque constructed during Aurangzeb’s reign from the spoils of an earlier Vishvanath temple. Yet the Rani was a woman of considerable resources, and the temple was built in 1777 when Hindu political power dominated in Varanasi. Had she wished to build a larger temple, rather than one almost lost in the interior gullies of DasashvamedhGhat, she could have done so.
Reference:
For the mosques of Lucknow, see B.N. Tandan, “The Architecture of the Nawabs of Avadh, 1722-1856,” in Robert Skelton et al., eds., Facets of Indian Art (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1986), 66-75.
For those in Varanasi, see Pierre-Daniel Coute and Jean-Michael Leger, Benares (Paris: Editions Creaphis, 1989), 71-81. Perhaps the most famous drawing of the so-called Alamgir mosque dominating the riverscape is in James Prinsep, Benares Illustrated (Calcutta: At the Baptist Mission Press, 1833).
Some temples are cited in Yogesh Praveen, Lucknow Monuments (Lucknow: Pnar, 1989), 1-23.
Diana Eck, Banaras, City of Light (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 90.
For a view showing this juxtaposition, see Rajesh Bedi and John Keay, Banaras, City of Shiva (New Delhi: Brijbasi Printers, 1987), 37.
Coute and Leger, Benares, 54; Eck, Banaras, City of Light, 120, 248, where the queen is credited with building a temple at the Manikarnika Cremation ghat in Benares. F. M. Asher, “Gaya,” 74, indicates she also built the Vishnupad temple in Gaya.
Example 4: Shahjahan and Chandni Chowk
In Shah Jahan’s time, highly desirable plots in the Chandni Chowk, Delhi was called Shajahanabad in those days, vicinity had been allocated to Hindu and Jain bankers and merchants. Wealthy Khatri Hindu merchants and Jains, including one branch of the Jagat Seth family, played a role in the city’s economic well-being. So, it is not surprising that between 1639 and 1850 Hindus and Jains built over a hundred temples that still survive.
The question is why?
Reference:
Naryani Gupta, Delhi between Two Empires, 1803-1931 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), 46.
Hamida Khatoon Naqvi, “Shahjahanabad: The Mughal Delhi, 1638-1803: An Introduction,” in Delhi through the Ages, ed. R.E. Frykenberg (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), 144.
Susan Gole, “Three Maps of Shahjahanabad,” South Asian Studies 4 (1988): 14-17, where she discusses a map in the IOL (AL 1762) of Chandni Chowk which gives the names of many Hindus’ havelis and quarters.
Naqvi, “Shahjahanabad,” 144.
Example 5:
To understand the dominance of mosques and the surprisingly low visibility of Shahjahanabad’s temples, it is instructive to look at temple and mosque construction in a city planned and ruled by Hindu monarchs, that is, Jaipur in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Even though Jaipur was built by a Hindu ruler and, many have argued, as a Hindu city, temples are no more visible within the confines of Jaipur’s walls than they are in 18th- and 19th-century Shahjahanabad. Only one inside Jaipur’s walls, the Kalkiji temple, built by Sawai Jai Singh in 1740, bears a shikhara. While the entire temple is easily visible from its platform on the second storey above shops, it is not readily visible from the busy main street in the major SirehDeori Bazaar. The other two temples with dominant shikharas visible from a distance probably were not built until the late 19th century. The rest are, like those in Delhi, within courtyards. Examples include the Ramachandraji temple (1854) located above shops in SirehDeorhi Bazaar and Shri BrijrajBehariji’s temple (1813) in Tripolia Bazaar.
These examples depict a completely different philosophy and religious spirituality of temple construction by Hindus in north India.
References:
Joan L. Erdman, Patrons and Performers in Rajasthan (Delhi: Chanakya, 1985), 28, is the only scholar to give a balanced reading indicating Jaipur’s debt to Mughal tradition.
Aman Nath, Jaipur: The Last Destination (Bombay: India House Pvt. Ltd., 1993), 4-5, 72, 73, 147, 198.
G.H.R. Tillotson, The Rajput Palaces: The Development of an Architectural Style, 1450-1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 168.