Who Are We?

ELEPHANT-RIDING KINGS—Jain, Buddhist and Shaivite—going to battle to the declamation of Sanskrit poetry. Regiments of Adivasi troops with flaming arrows, heeding commands in aristocratic Tamil. Rice-fields watered with canals, sweltering under the sun, their silence interrupted by the singing of farmers. Colourful ships weighed down with cargoes, borne by warm gales of rain. Glittering courts full of terror, gender and caste violence. Such was medieval India, c. 600–1200 CE. A world populated by people with their own internal worlds. In the words of Tibetan writer Tenzin Dickie, they were loving, plotting, desiring, failing, living, simply living.
As they lived, few of them thought “Someday I will be part of history.” More humdrum concerns, more personal crises and ambitions occupied their minds, as they occupy all of ours.

But as 2022 comes to an end, it seems that we no longer think of people in the past as having similar internal worlds. On television, in film, on social media and in books, we are told again and again that they were motivated either by abstract modern concepts, or by complete religious fanaticism. It seems that what our media and politicians would like us to believe is that the past was a simpler, more idealistic place, one worth emulating at all costs. But nothing could be farther from the truth. India through history was a dazzlingly different world from today’s India. Projecting our ideas onto it is an act of profound violence: not only against who our ancestors were, but also against ourselves.

Today, the most direct way in which we engage with medieval history is when visiting temples from the period—such as those at Khajuraho, Pattadakal or Thanjavur. We are impressed by their architecture, by tour guides waxing eloquent on iconography. Surely, it is easy to think, these temples must have been built for reasons we can relate to: say, for religious pride. Since—partially due to colonialism, and partially due to political opportunism—we have been convinced that religions aren’t respected enough today, we would love to believe that the present is an aberration from a much more comforting past.

The idea that temples were really built for the glory of an individual, for their personal merit, and through extracting wealth through war and exploitation seems so alien as to be almost blasphemous. But very often, this really was the case in medieval India, and I say this as non-pejoratively as possible. “Religion” to the medieval Indian mind was not a body of beliefs separate from the lived world, the way it is in ours. Religion was the fabric through which reality itself was perceived. And that reality included now-vanished systems that we would find profoundly unjust and exploitative.

It was simply a given for landowners to collect tax from toiling peasants, and for these taxes to be donated, forwarded, or spent for social capital and luxury consumption. In a world far less urbanised than ours, most of the population—and thus the majority of our ancestors—belonged to cultivating castes, and lived hand-to-mouth existences.And there were many less privileged than they: various forms of forced servitude, including slavery and untouchability, were a reality. Medieval commercial texts such as the Lekhapaddhati mention the capture and sale of female slaves, and the use of brutal corporal punishment. Elite courtly texts, such as the Kalingattuparani, make it clear that this was universal, mentioning women captured as tribute and housed in the royal harem.

Far away from these difficult lives were medieval Indian courts: today glamourised and misrepresented like no other institution. For recent blockbusters, such as Mani Ratnam’s Ponniyin Selvan, tremendous media attention has been focused on jewellery, costume and rather ahistorical notions of feminism or women empowerment. While powerful women certainly did exist in medieval India, they were the exception, not the rule. Hundreds of inscriptions describe how women were considered “treasures” to be captured from other kings, or bestowed as gifts through marriage and tribute. Some women did have the social and political capital to rule, but usually presented themselves through masculine modes of power: calling themselves maharaja, leading armies, and so on. This is a far cry from our modern notions of gender equality, let alone intersectional feminism.

Warfare, masculinity, and sexuality were all tied together in the medieval Indian worldview. War was the means through which political networks were created and sustained, with tiers of minor kings linked to a central ruler. But military success was also a sign of virility; the king, partially by virtue of these factors, had a right to govern and “enjoy” the earth, often paralleled in inscriptions with his “enjoying” the women of his harem. But another major component of royal legitimacy was the turbulent system of caste. Medieval dynasties—irrespective of origin—took great care to claim upper-caste lineages and declare that they were upholders of the caste system. While this was certainly a world as yet untouched by the rigid definitions and census of a colonial state, it was also one where caste had meanings similar to today.

The wealth accumulated through rulership was not intended for redistribution to the public, but rather among the ruling classes: through elite projects such as temple-building and endowments. These were considered monuments to a successful ruler and a dynasty’s flourishing relationship with a god. Temples were believed to quite literally “generate” ritual benefits, acting like an engine of sorts to convert physical wealth into spiritual benefit for the king, his court, and the kingdom at large. Violence against women and against the “lower” castes was, it was believed, inevitable in order to perpetuate this system.

As alien as all this might seem to us, a king probably could not or would not have noticed this profound structural violence. (Considering how vulnerable kings were to coups, conquests, and assassination, they did not exactly have the most pleasant lives either). But, to the medieval mind, upper-caste men had to run things, because that was how the world must be run—otherwise everything would fall apart. This was moral, as strange as it might seem.

But morality is a notoriously vague and culturally specific concept: we can see it evolving before our eyes even today, as concepts of selfhood and sexuality change. If medieval rulers were not seen as immoral in the past—in fact, if they were actually considered moral and ideal—can we judge them by our own standards? And therein lies a major problem with how we think about medieval India: we do not allow the people of the past to live in the past.

It seems that our media and politicians would like us to believe that the past was a simpler, more idealistic place, one worth emulating. But nothing could be farther from the truth. India through history was a dazzlingly different world from today’s India

Share this on

Our world is certainly not ideal. In many cases, worldviews and moralities that originated in the medieval period continue to persist today. Caste and gender-based violence very much persist, even in India’s most urban and globalised settings. And yet, things have changed, very noticeably, for the better. A medieval king would have regarded with absolute horror the fact that so many Indians can read and write and have access to what were once exclusively upper-caste scriptures. Or that the state is—in theory—more focussed on public health, education, and infrastructure than endowing temples. And (also in theory) unopposed to inter-caste, interreligious marriages and gradually acknowledging and respecting queer identities.Yet the world has not ended, and people continue to flourish. In fact, we flourish at a scale that medieval people would have found incomprehensible. Twenty thousand people, who might casually assemble for a fair at Pragati Maidan, would be many times the population of most medieval towns. Mumbai or Chennai alone contain more people than an entire medieval kingdom. This should indicate the futility of our trying to emulate the past. We might as well try to emulate a small alien society living on Mars. We are separated irrevocably from our past by colonisation, globalisation, and radically new ideas of human dignity, political geography, polity, and society.

This fact makes our views of medieval kings all the sillier. We do not see them as products of their world, but somehow as products of ours. For example, in Karnataka, rulers such as Chalukya Pulakeshin II or Rashtrakuta Amoghavarsha I are considered medieval Kannada nationalists, conquering and patronising the language because it was their “mother tongue”. In reality, both these rulers had rigorous Sanskrit educations, and used Kannada to speak to local powers of their own time. Similarly, the Chola king Rajaraja is praised for his construction of the great Brihadishvara temple, supposedly financed through peaceful expansion. This despite the temple’s iconographic programme drawing parallels between the king and Shiva Tripurantaka, the Destroyer of the Three Cities—not to mention dozens of inscriptions on the temple enumerating his conquests.

In pointing out the reality of their morally complex world, I have frequently been accused of irreverence or contempt towards our past. I can sympathise with such statements, though I completely disagree. From Churchill to Akbar, some historical figures have become the focal point of sustained admiration and myth building. Indeed, one of the most lasting legacies of 19th-century European nationalism—emulated by a world they colonised and dominated—is that every country likes to believe that its history was always glorious until “outsiders” ruined it. And so, any counter-narrative that says: “no, our past was not glorious for everyone, and historical figures were always not who we think they were” is interpreted as an attack on the nation itself.

But nothing could be farther from the truth: we can only arrive at a truly equitable and just society when we first acknowledge the disturbing aspects of our past. The greatest act of historical irreverence and contempt is to shoehorn historical figures into our own politics, to claim that they were “ideal”, and to pretend that the majority of our ancestors (and even the majority of our fellow citizens) lived and live in anything other than conditions of deprivation or discrimination. Not only does this prevent us from understanding how far we have come and need to go as a country, but it does not allow the past to exist in its own dark splendour: only as a bland caricature of today’s politics.

2022 is a time of profound curiosity about who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going as a nation. This is perhaps inevitable in an overwhelmingly young nation, especially one where historical narratives have traditionally focussed on one geographic region. It is a tremendous tragedy that this curiosity has been satiated with regional histories that repeat the same binary convenient to political leaders: kings were great, everything was hunky-dory for everyone, some “evil invaders” showed up and are still around, we’ll restore this “ideal” past, so vote for us. Troll and question the patriotism of anyone who disagrees, because history must be “rewritten” into a single narrative.

How can there be a single narrative of the past when there can’t even be a single narrative of the present, when each of us sees our world in different ways and from different vantage points? If only one kind of historical narrative is made, it beggars us all. It prevents us from seeing the wonders and creativity of what our past was truly like, and from acknowledging the human suffering it has bequeathed us. Will we allow our yearning for imaginary historical glories to override our very real responsibility to our present?

About The Author

Anirudh Kanisetti

Anirudh Kanisetti is the author of Lords of the Deccan: Southern India from Chalukyas to Cholas

•