Deccan

The Deccan is the plateau of peninsular India, and its religious interest lies in being a meeting ground rather than a heartland. Sanskritic tradition from the north, Tamil devotional religion from the south, and Persianate Islam arriving with the Delhi Sultanate's expansion all established themselves on the same plateau and had to deal with one another.

Its rock-cut sites show the first of these encounters. At Ellora, Buddhist, Hindu and Jain excavations stand along one escarpment, in that rough chronological order, so a visitor can walk from a Buddhist prayer hall to a Shaiva monolith to a Jain shrine in an afternoon. That sequence is evidence for how patronage moved between traditions in the same territory over several centuries.

The second encounter produced the Deccan sultanates, five successor states to the Bahmani kingdom, whose courts at Bijapur, Golconda and elsewhere developed a distinct Indo-Persian culture with strong Shia connections to Iran, substantial Hindu participation in administration, and a vernacular literature in Dakhni. Sufi orders spread widely across the plateau, and the shrines of their figures, at Gulbarga and Khuldabad among many, remain active and draw visitors of more than one religion.

Vijayanagara, on the plateau's southern edge, held out as a large Hindu state through the same period and defined itself partly against its northern neighbours.

The Deccan has more shrines visited by people of more than one religion than almost any comparable area, and interpreting them is harder than it looks.

The pattern is well attested. Sufi tombs across the plateau receive Hindu visitors who make the same offerings and ask for the same things as Muslim ones; some Hindu shrines receive Muslim visitors; a number of sites have parallel or joint arrangements for both. Practices such as tying threads, offering cloth, and seeking cures for illness or infertility cross the line freely, and in many places the families who serve at a shrine have done so for generations without regard to the wider category.

Two readings compete. One treats this as evidence of a genuinely shared religious culture in which the boundary between Hinduism and Islam was porous at the level of practice, whatever the theologians said. The other, argued by Peter van der Veer and others, warns that the sharing is often shallower than it looks, that it coexisted with clear communal boundaries in other domains, and that the modern political uses of the evidence, in both directions, distort what is being described.

What is not in doubt is that reformist currents in both traditions have attacked the practice for two centuries, and that shrines have been flashpoints during communal violence. Shared use is fragile and has been broken repeatedly, which is part of the record rather than an exception to it.