Sultans of the South

In today’s Japan, during the Kyoto Gion Festival, which celebrates the Yasaka Shrine of the god Gion Tenjin, the float of the Taishi-yama ward is decorated with a hanging of silk embroidery from eighteenth-century Deccan. It was probably Dutch traders who brought this beautiful cloth from India to Japan. Objects like this embroidery, a focus of Yumiko Kamada’s essay in the book under review, place South India within an early modern world connected by cosmopolitan tastes, quickening commerce, and innovative technologies of religion, politics and war. This volume of essays, edited by Navina Najat Haidar and Marika Sardar, is the result of a symposium held in 2008 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and offers a fresh look at the Sultanate era of South Indian history through the lens of material and artistic culture. In the fourteenth century, the Deccan (a word that means south) saw the arrival of Turko-Persian political and court cultures from India’s north. As Richard Eaton describes, in a useful historical overview, these Muslim kingdoms established oceanic connections with polities in the Middle East and, in the sixteenth century, with European traders and powers. Moreover, existing Hindu ruling houses and warrior groups merged with the Muslim newcomers to produce an eclectic mix of religious customs and literary practices. Such encounters were not altogether amicable, but the modes in which tensions were resolved are not intuitive to modern sensibilities. For instance, in an essay on Deccan’s temples, Eaton shows that, while royal temples were destroyed in the initial wave of conquest in the fourteenth century, temples not associated with local rulers were generally left alone. He cites further evidence that Muslim kings who had destroyed temples during war often supported reconstruction afterwards. A similarly complex pattern exists for mosques in pre-modern Deccan. According to Eaton, mosques directly associated with the state were adorned in imperial ‘Delhi’ styles, but provincial mosques, built with sub-royal patronage, contained within them local, pre-conquest architectural motifs. Thus in a Tughluq-era provincial mosque built with temple spolia, the spiritual centre of the mosque, the mihrab (prayer niche) where the prayer leader stood, was marked with pillars that had framed the inner sanctum of a Hindu temple. In other words, what had been considered holy before the conquest was used to mark sacredness in the new order

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