Holy Wars? Temple Desecrations in Medieval India*

Holy Wars? Temple Desecrations in Medieval India* Sriya Iyer*† Anand Shrivastava†‡ Rohit Ticku‡§ This draft: August 2017 Abstract This study examines the relationship between authoritarian rule and religious authority during regime transitions in medieval India. Existing models of such relationships suggest that the victorious Muslim regime would have dismantled existing Hindu religious institu- tions to delegitimize the previous regime. We formally test this by constructing a unique geocoded dataset and show that a Muslim State’s battle victory against a Hindu State in- creased the likely desecration of a Hindu temple by over 30 percentage points. To address the potential endogeneity of the battle outcome variable we use a novel instrument of Mus- lim ruler assassination. We argue that the political uncertainty following a ruler’s assassination would have hampered a Muslim State’s battle performance against a rival Hindu State. These assassinations were motivated by an intra-dynasty succession tussle among the Muslim States, and were arguably unrelated to factors that determined a temple desecration. Keywords: Conflict, religion, iconoclasm, politics, assassination. JEL Classification: D74; N35; N45. *We thank Nicolas Berman, Lore Vandewalle, Jared Rubin, Larry Iannaccone, Carolyn Warner, Rahul Mukherjee and the participants at the Association for the Study of Economics Religion and Culture (ASREC) conference, Institute for the Study of Religion, Economics and Society (IRES) graduate workshop, and Graduate Institute Brown Bag Seminar for their useful suggestions. Any errors are attributable to the authors. †University of Cambridge Faculty of Economics, Sidgwick Ave, Cambridge, CB3 9DD. ‡School of Liberal Studies, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, 560100. §Corresponding Author. Department of International Economics, The Graduate Institute. Maison de la Paix, Chemin Eugène-Rigot 2, 1202 Geneva (CH). e-mail: [email protected]. 1 Introduction Economists have been interested in the relationship between religion and politics since the time of Adam Smith (Smith, 1778). Recent studies have shown the use of religion as a nation- building tool (Aldashev and Platteau, 2014), as a solution to collective action problems and as a driver of conflict (Iyer, 2016). The relationship is of particular interest in authoritarian regimes where the role of the religious elite in lending legitimacy to the ruler has been highlighted by various studies (Aldashev, Platteau, and Sekeris, 2013; Chaney, 2013; Auriol and Platteau, 2016). The ruler offers economic incentives to the religious elite to co-opt them and maintain his legitimacy. In the absence of such patronage, the clerics may lead mass uprisings against the ruler, as happened during Shah Pahlavi’s rule in Iran. The situation changes when the ruler is of a different religion to that of the prevailing religious elite. In that situation, the autocratic ruler may want to delegitimize the existing religious elite as co-opting them may not be viable due to the religious difference. Such delegitimization may take the form of desecration of religious places especially in those cases where the incum- bent religion had sacred places that were used as sources of political power (Heitzman, 1991; Hassner, 2003; Iannaccone, Haight, and Rubin, 2011). Examples of such places include “sacred capitals” in ancient Egypt, biblical Jerusalem, ancient Rome and Constantinople, early medieval India and 19th-century Salt Lake City. Desecrations of religious sites have been observed at various times in history including during the Reformation in various European nations (Becker, Pfaff, and Rubin, 2016). In most such cases it becomes difficult to separate the purely political motive outlined above, from the religious zeal of the ruler or indeed of the newly converted masses. In this paper, we look at one particular case in history and attempt to distinguish between these two possible motivations. We look at medieval India, focussing on the emergence of Islamic dynasties that fought against Hindu rulers (and each other). This period is known for desecration of Hindu 1 temples by Muslim rulers. Some historians have advanced hypotheses analogous to the political motivations described earlier to explain these desecrations (Eaton, 2000; Moin, 2015). Accord- ing to them royal temples were the symbols of political authority of their patron rulers, and were systematically destroyed by Muslim States during the course of battle to delegitimize their Hindu rivals. But the practice of ‘iconoclasm’ or image-breaking has a significant place in Islam as it is often connected to the removal of idols from Ka’ba in Mecca. Recent incidents ranging from the desecration of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in 2001, to the ravaging of several religious and cultural sites by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, have highlighted this connection. Thus, distinguishing between political and religious motivations behind the desecration of Hindu temples in medieval India can give us some insight into the complex questions surrounding violence carried out in the name of Islam today. To enable our empirical exercise investigating the determinants of temple desecrations in medieval India we constructed a composite geo-coded panel dataset with temple locations, temple desecrations, battles, and territorial boundaries over five and a half centuries. We began with the temple desecrations dataset assembled by Eaton(2000) from year 1192 to 1720 AD. The next step was to identify existing temple locations over that period. We located the sites of medieval temples using maps of key religious and cultural sites by Schwartzberg, Bajpai, and Mathur(1992). We also demarcated the territorial bounds of ruling States utilizing the maps on medieval states by Schwartzberg, Bajpai, and Mathur(1992). This was supplemented with other regime characteristics, specifically the cause of a Muslim ruler’s death. Finally we compiled data on medieval battles in India using two different chronological sources. Our results show that Hindu and Muslim battle outcome is the main determinant of temple desecration. Specifically, the likelihood of temple desecration increases by over 30 percentage points when a Muslim State won against a Hindu State. Whether a temple was already present within a Muslim State’s territory does not affect the likelihood of its desecration. These results 2 substantiate the political mechanism behind temple desecrations and provide no evidence for indiscriminate desecration of Hindu temples that would allude to a policy of religious iconoclasm. Straightforward estimates are likely to be biased because of the potential endogeneity of the battle outcome variable. One reason for this could be reverse causality. Desecration of a temple belonging to their common royal deity could lead Hindu States into aligning to attack the Muslim State. The resulting coalition could have impacted the battle outcome. Or, the wealth from ravaging Hindu temples could have enabled Muslim states to improve military capacity and the likelihood of battle victory against the Hindu States. We may also be dealing with some confounding omitted variables. In absence of an organized tax-collection system younger Muslim States were likelier to ravage Hindu temples for wealth, and were plausibly weaker in military capacity than mature Muslim States (Olson, 1993). We propose a novel instrument of Muslim ruler’s assassination to address the plausible endogeneity of battle outcome. Our intuition is based on the absence of fixed rules of succession among the medieval Muslim States worldwide (Hurewitz, 1968). Consequently, Muslim States were rife with violent succession tussles, manifesting at their most extreme in the form of ruler assassinations. The Indo-Muslim States that experienced a ruler assassination would have been less likely to successfully defend against opportunist attacks by their rival Hindu States, or to carry out successful attacks. Since these assassinations were driven by succession conflict, we argue they were exogenous to local time varying unobservables that could have jointly determined a temple desecration. We also test for alternative explanation of our results. Religious ideology could still be a determining factor if Muslim States desecrated Hindu temples as soon as they took control of a new territory through battle victory against the Hindu States. We show that peaceful transition of power, unlike violent transition through battles, does not impact the likelihood of desecration. This rules out the “first opportunity” explanation of our results. Temple desecrations could also 3 have been an unintended consequence of Hindu and Muslim battles. If this was the case then battle incidence, and not outcome, would drive temple desecrations. We test for this conjecture and rule out that collateral damage could be explaining the results. One may question whether an analogous relationship, i.e. the desecration of mosque, is also observed when a Hindu State was victorious against a Muslim State? Historical evidence suggests to the contrary, because the mosque did not perform the symbolic act of associating the Muslim ruler with the divine (Eaton, 2000). For the Indo-Muslim ruler, especially in the early medieval period, the function of divine legitimacy was performed through his association with the Caliph (Moin, 2015). The study contributes to different strands of literature. Our main contribution is to the literature on the relationship between authoritarian

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