A section from the journey

A Political Idiom of Kingship

Here is a hard fact that changes the shape of the story. Long before this age, and during it, Hindu kings also raided the temples of rival Hindu kings and carried off their sacred images as trophies of victory. The great Chola emperor Rajendra did exactly this. It does not excuse any loss. But it shows that attacking a rival's state-temple was a shared language of kingship in that world, not the mark of one faith alone.

In the last section we learned an idea that unlocks much. A royal temple stood for a king's power. So to strike at it was a move in the hard game of kings. Now we must follow that idea to a place that is uncomfortable, but honest. If that is true, then the move belonged to no single religion.

Here is the fact, said plainly. Long before rulers of other faiths arrived, and right through this age as well, Hindu kings also raided the temples of rival Hindu kings. They broke into them, took their treasure, and carried off their sacred images as the spoils of war. This is not a guess. Careful scholars have gathered the cases.

Think of the great Chola emperor Rajendra, who ruled a mighty realm in the south a thousand years ago. When he defeated his neighbours, he brought their gods home as trophies. He filled his new capital with images seized from the kings he had beaten, a Durga and a Ganesha taken from one royal house, fierce images of the Goddess from another, a great stone , the bull of Shiva, from a third.

He was not alone. A Pandya king of the south once carried off a golden image of the Buddha from the island of Lanka. And far in the north, a king of Kashmir is remembered, in his own land's chronicle, for plundering temples to fill his treasury when his coffers ran low. These were Hindu kings, striking at the temples and gods of others.

Now hear clearly what this does, and what it does not do. It does not excuse a single broken temple. A wound is a wound, and a god carried from his home is a grief, no matter whose army did it. We are not weighing one pain against another. That is never the work here.

What it does is change the shape of the whole story. To take a rival king's deity was a known and shared language of conquest across this whole land, spoken for centuries before this age and during it. It was the way a victor said, the throne is mine now. Kings of every faith spoke it. It was the cruelty of kingship, not the special mark of one religion turning upon another.

This is why a careful teacher will not let you read this age as a simple tale of one faith attacking another. The truth is harder and more human. Power has always been rough with what other powers hold sacred. Seeing that does not lessen the loss. It only places it in the real and tangled world where it happened.

Still, the people who lost a temple did not feel statecraft. They felt the silence where a god had been. So once more we set the two views side by side, the scholar's wider frame and the tradition's lived sorrow, and we honour both.

The rishi steps to the Threshold — where accounts differWas attacking a rival's temple the mark of one religion, or a shared political idiom of kingship used by Hindu rulers too?

What scholars find

Scholars such as Richard Davis (Lives of Indian Images) and Richard Eaton document that from at least the seventh century, Indian kings who were themselves Hindu routinely looted, seized, or desecrated the temples and especially the royal images of rival Hindu kings — the same political idiom later used by Turko-Persian rulers. The Chola emperor Rajendra I furnished his capital with deities seized from defeated neighbours (Durga and Ganesha from the Chalukyas; fierce Goddess images from the Kalingas; a Nandi from the Eastern Chalukyas); a Pandya king carried off a golden Buddha from Sri Lanka; and Kalhana's Rajatarangini records a Kashmiri king plundering temples for treasure. This does not excuse any act; it reframes desecration from 'religion attacking religion' to a widespread political idiom of pre-modern Indian kingship, in which the defeated king's state-deity was the target, used across religious lines.

As the tradition holds

The tradition does not deny that kings of every kind warred over sacred images; its own chronicles, such as Kashmir's Rajatarangini, record Hindu kings who plundered temples, and it has never claimed that power was gentle in any hand. What the tradition holds is that the loss to the worshipper is real whoever causes it, and that the sacredness of the deity is not diminished by the politics that surrounded it. It asks that this honest comparison not be used to dismiss the grief of any community, but received as it is meant — as a fuller, truer picture of a hard age. And it remembers that gods carried away were often later restored or re-installed, and that worship found its way home again.

It is easier to carry a story where harm runs in one direction only. The truer story, where almost every power has at some time been rough with the sacred, is harder to hold. What changes in you when you learn that a wrong was not the mark of one people, but a fault woven through the way power itself once worked?