Jain Memory of the Tughluq Sultans: Alternative Sources for the Historiography of Sultanate India

Abstract

AbstractSome of the earliest narratives of meetings between leaders of an Indian community and their Muslim ruler appear in the Vividhatīrthakalpa (Chapters on Many Sacred Places) of the Jain monk Jinaprabhasūri (c. 1261–1333 ce). The text depicts the monk's relationship with Sultan Muḥammad bin Tughluq (r. 1325–51) in the years 1328–33, which resulted in the sovereign issuing a number of edicts (farmāns) to protect Jains and Jain temples and which led to the return of a Jina icon (Pkt. paḍima, Skt. pratimā) and the establishment of a Jain quarter in Delhi. Over the next two-and-a-half centuries, Jinaprabhasūri's story would be retold several times, with fifteenth-century narrators shifting his interlocutor to Fīrūz Shāh Tughluq (r. 1351–88). In the process of making Jinaprabha an object of memory, Jain authors of both the monk's own and rival monastic orders (gacchas) depicted the sultans as benefactors of the Jain community. While these narratives were attempts to delineate the proper relationship between Jain monastic leaders and Muslim rulers, they also constituted a Jain memory of the Tughluq sultans that is often at odds with modern historical representations of them. Reading these narratives alongside other evidence of Jains’ relations with the Tughluqs offers historians an alternative view of these figures and their relations with their Indian subjects, helping to de-centre modern historical narratives based on selective readings of Persian and Arabic sources and a privileging of Brahmanical or colonial viewpoints of the period. However, these narratives require historians to theorise this ‘memory’ to understand them productively as historical sources.