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Much of the contemporary evidence on temple desecration cited by Hindu nationalists is found in Persian materials translated and published during the… - Richard Maxwell Eaton
" "Much of the contemporary evidence on temple desecration cited by Hindu nationalists is found in Persian materials translated and published during the British occupation of India. Especially influential has been the eight-volume History of India as Told by its Own Historians, first published in 1849 and edited by Sir Henry M. Elliot, who oversaw the bulk of the translations, with the help of John Dowson. But Elliot, keen to contrast what he understood as the justice and efficiency of British rule with the cruelty and despotism of the Muslim rulers who had preceded that rule, was anything but sympathetic to the “Muhammadan” period of Indian history.
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About Richard Maxwell Eaton
Richard Maxwell Eaton (born 1940) is an American historian, currently working as a professor of history at the University of Arizona. He is known for having written the notable books on Indian history before 1800. He is also credited for his work on the social roles of Sufis, slavery, and cultural history of pre-modern India. His research is focused on the Deccan, the Bengal frontier, Islam in India
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Richard M. Eaton
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Richard M Eaton
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Additional quotes by Richard Maxwell Eaton
But as I mentioned in my published essay, the tables and maps I presented “by no means give the complete picture of temple desecration after the establishment of Turkish power in upper India.” And I concluded that “we shall never know the precise number of temples desecrated in Indian history.” All we can talk about are instances for which there is contemporary evidence, whether it appears in the archaeological record, in the epigraphic record, or in contemporary chronicles. And even those data must be closely interrogated.
Ironically, one of the few things that Indian and Pakistani textbooks seem to agree on is in fact a falsehood: namely, that Islam grew in precolonial India through the agency of Sufi saints. There is little contemporary evidence for such a thing. Generally speaking, Sufis were not interested in converting Hindus.
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Think of trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle in which 30% to 50% of the pieces are missing, and you have no border pieces at all. The best you can do is to fit together the few pieces you have in order to construct a reasonable approximation of what the whole picture most likely looked like. An honest historian will admit that the evidence is almost always fragmentary, incomplete, or even contradictory. But what one cannot do is to try to fill in the blank spaces with pieces that don’t exist, or that you think “must have” existed.
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