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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

How pragmatic calculations shaped Mughal rule in medieval West Bengal and Tamil Nadu

In the late 18th century, Nawab Muhammad Ali Walajah shared his royal accoutrements—the markers of sovereignty—with both the Nathar Wali shrine and Srirangam in modern-day Tamil Nadu.

It has been a little over half a millennium since a battle at Panipat changed the subcontinent’s destiny forever, in ways that seem strangely relevant in the aftermath of recent Assembly elections across India. Over the past decade, the Mughal Empire’s legacy has shaped public discourse both online and in voting booths, with Indian Muslims often held accountable for the perceived sins of long-dead emperors and the destructions and conversions they are believed to have ordered. But the silent testimony of architecture often complicates the shrill proclamations of propaganda.

Construction, destruction, and politics

In West Bengal, the last few years have seen an unprecedented (and arguably successful) attempt to portray Bengali Muslims as “infiltrators” from Bangladesh siphoning Hindu resources from a Hindu land. How accurate is this view? In an earlier edition of Thinking Medieval, we examined the origins of Bengal’s Muslim populace. Mughal court documents suggest that agrarian growth in Bengal saw the involvement of Hindu Bania finance and the voluntary conversion of forest-dwelling communities to Islam and agrarian lifestyles — among other factors. 

The Hindutva view of this period, in contrast, casts Mughal expansion into Bengal as a violent process marked by forcible conversions and the widespread destruction of temples, as Muslim invaders had ostensibly done since the 1200s. This view, too, can be drawn from Mughal court documents, such as firmans from Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb ordering the destruction (or halting construction) of temples across the empire. 

How might architecture enlighten this picture?

A new volume, Beyond the Mughal Arch: Temples in Early Modern Hindustan, offers a rich and thought-provoking contribution to public discourse on the Mughals and, more broadly, on post-16th century temple architecture in North India. In his essay in the volume, historian Samuel Wright counts 118 temples built in Bengal during the 16th and 17th centuries—102 of them in the 17th century alone, as Akbar,........

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