The Mughal connection to Indian temples--Bishnupur, Jagannath and Tirupati

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]It's 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.

[00:00:34]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 Baniya 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 can also be drawn from Mughal court documents such as firmans from Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb ordering the destruction or halting the construction of temples across the empire. So, how does 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, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb extended Mughal administration across the region.

[00:02:03]The Malla kings of Bishnupur, who accepted Mughal overlordship and became mansabdars or members of the imperial aristocracy, were the most prolific temple builders of this period. Loyalty, devotion, and ambition are all apparent in their temples and their inscriptions.

[00:02:18]For example, Wright presents a 1615 inscription from a Malla patron claiming to erect a temple in a quote, "in the auspicious rajya of Shri Shah Salim or Jahangir" and quote, while also naming the Mughal governor, Raja Kalyan Mal.

[00:02:32]The Malla dynasty's spectacular terracotta shrines helped spread Gaudiya Vaishnavism and introduced several innovations to Bengali temple architecture. They even influenced Mughal design sensibilities. The curved Bangla roof form, which was inspired by rainproof thatched huts, was later adopted by Shah Jahan for the imperial jharoka in Delhi. This wasn't a one-sided exchange, either.

[00:02:56]Mughal design components such as multi-cusped arches, onion and lotus domes, and others would also be integrated into Hindu temples. As editors Naman Ahuja and Sam Dalrymple note in Beyond the Mughal Arch, art and culture across this period demonstrated deliberate attempt to find common ground between Hindus and Muslims. Under the Mughals, temple construction-destruction were very much part of the same political calculus. In Odisha, for example, a Mughal mansabdar rode in the Jagannath Rath Yatra, demonstrating that the emperor was the temple's ultimate protector, at least in principle. When Aurangzeb ordered the temple's closure, local administrators actually faked the demolition because they couldn't afford to forgo the revenue it generated. Not coincidentally, the Mallas, with their terracotta temples and proclamation of loyalty, also ruled within an exceptionally wealthy province. A power and patronage within the Mughal imperial apparatus didn't operate according to modern notions of tolerance or Islamic bigotry. Instead, they obeyed the much more realistic and enduring calculations of political pragmatism. We can see a similar dynamics at work in a Mughal successor state far to the south and another state that delivered an electoral upset this week, though thankfully without communal rhetoric.

[00:04:08]During Shah Jahan's reign in the late 17th century, a South Indian dynast attempted to use a temple to strengthen his bargaining position. The man in question was Sriranga III, the last emperor of Vijayanagara. This was entirely a titular position by this point. The once great metropolis known today as Hampi had been a ruin for nearly a century, and Sriranga ruled a tiny dominion centered on Vellore in present-day Tamil Nadu. And the temple in question was the great complex of Tirupati. Historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam discusses Sriranga in Penumbral Visions, Making Polities in Early Modern South India. According to a 1657 letter, Shah Jahan's ambassador, along with the local ruler Krishna Nayaka, promised to make a good agreement with Sriranga. Quote, "If his majesty would give over all the stolen jewels from Tirupati into their hands." End quote. Subrahmanyam interprets this letter as an indication that Sriranga was using the temple treasury as a negotiating tool, aiming for the status of an autonomous chief with a jagir. But the then viceroy of the Deccan, Aurangzeb, was preoccupied with a war against his brothers, and nothing came of it. Several decades later, after Aurangzeb had ruled and died as emperor, ex-Mughal officials established a new state at Arcot near Vellore. Much like the Mughal emperors had done in Braj about a century earlier, the nawabs encouraged loyal Hindu courtiers to make gifts to important temples. In the early 1600s, Rajput and Bundela vassals of Akbar and Jahangir had offered the same at Vrindavan and Varanasi. In the early 1700s, a certain Lala Todar Mal, a Khatri courtier serving Sa'adatullah Khan of Arcot, offered gifts at the Varadaraja Perumal Temple at Kanchipuram and at Tirupati. He also commissioned statues of himself with beard, dress, and turban in the Muslim fashion along with images of his wife and mother.

[00:05:54]Subramanyam notes that the 16th century Vijayanagara emperor Krishna Raya had left similar self-portraits at Tirupati, though it's not really clear whether Todar Mal was seeking to imitate him.

[00:06:04]Now, again in Mughal fashion, the Nawab seemed to have seen the Tirupati temple as essentially state property in times of expediency. In 1740, for example, after seized defeat at the hands of marauding Marathas, Nawab Dost Ali Khan ordered the temple treasury to hand over 50,000 rupees to the general Bajirao, whose mother and wife then visited the temple. 20,000 of that was then distributed by the Marathas as charity. But, some decades later when the Nawabs bounced back, the state again became a benevolent patron in the interest of maintaining good relations with its subjects. Historian Richard Davis discusses this in his paper, A Muslim Princess in a Temple of Vishnu. Nawab Muhammad Ali Walajah lavishly endowed the Nathar Wali Dargah at Tiruchirappalli and Shah Hamid Shah's Dargah at Nagore. He also helped restore Srirangam after French forces had damaged it during the Carnatic Wars and adjudicated disputes over temple honors.

[00:06:58]As per historian K. D. Swaminathan in Two Nawabs of the Carnatic and the Srirangam Temple, the Nawabs even intervened at the great Shaiva complex in Chidambaram to restore worship at the Vaishnava shrine of Govindaraja Perumal.

[00:07:10]The Nawab Muhammad Ali coordinated the festival calendars of the Nathar Wali shrine and Srirangam to prevent clashes between processions and shared his royal accoutrements, the markers of sovereignty itself, with both of these shrines. All this seems to be a studied reconstruction in the distant Coromandel Coast of Akbar's policy of sulh-i-kul, universal peace, with the ruler, in theory at least, a benevolent patron of all subjects. It was also by then simply what it meant to hold ultimate political power in a diverse subcontinent. In the 21st century, in the aftermath of an election, it remains to be seen if such a view will endure against the odds. If you have questions or comments, we'd love to hear them. Follow us everywhere on social media. You can find me on Instagram at Anurag Bodda and on Twitter at A K Anisetti. We'll see you next week.

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