to Vijayanagara principles, organizing the army along principles borrowed
from the Portuguese. He was noted for the sacking of Surat (by then a small
enclave of the British East India Company) and for fighting and plundering
the lands of Deccan kings (many of them Hindu) and of the Mughals. It is
interesting that by the late nineteenth century, thanks to the rhetoric of
another native of Maharashtra, B. G. Tilak, S ́iva ̄jı ̄ is extolled as a brave Hindu
hero and vanquisher of Muslims. The historical record is not so clear; he was
known to have a number of Muslims in top positions in his administration
and in his army. His battles were against Hindu as well as Muslim political
figures and seemed to have been more political than religious in nature. In
any case, Mara ̄tha ̄ “country” came to be seen as a place where Hindu dharma
was preserved.
The same was true under the Ra ̄jputs for a number of centuries. As
described earlier, the Ra ̄jputs employed brahman ministers and patronized
a particular form of orthodox “Hindu” culture. It is believed that satı ̄
(the immolation of widows), for example, was performed under Ra ̄jput
aegis for the first time in 1382, and that it was especially continued under
such ruling families as the Sisodiyas wherein, on at least one occasion, an
entire harem of up to twenty women was immolated on the funeral pyre
of their dead husband.^6 Yet by the time of the Mughals, the Ra ̄jputs were
closely allied to them, thanks to intermarriage even in Akbar’s time, and
it became increasingly difficult to distinguish Ra ̄jput “culture” from that of
the Mughals.
Hindu orthopraxy, in short, was the practice of “retaining” what was
perceived to be proper “Hindu” practice. Whether these polities were
created in explicit contradistinction to Islamic forms of orthopraxy has been
debated. What is evident, nonetheless, is that in some Islamic courts, forms
of Islamic orthodoxy prevailed. In these courts, the emperor was huzu ̄r
(omnipotent representative of Alla ̄h),^7 and the ‘ulama ̄‘or Su ̄fı ̄s were usually
the court advisers. The building of mosques and other monuments served
both religious and political purposes. Madrasas– schools of Islamic (and
especiallysunnı ̄) learning – were the counterpart of the mat.has. In these
madrasasArabic was taught, and the Qu‘ra ̄n was memorized and recited; in
addition, pilgrimages to the tombs of pı ̄rsincreased, and women were
encouraged to live in purdah(seclusion), increasingly used as a symbol of
purity and Islamic identity.
Does orthopraxy sometimes give way to fundamentalism, even xenophobia
and militancy? There is little doubt that it did, but it is difficult to sort out
the historical reality from post-factorhetoric and chauvinism. For example,
by at least the thirteenth century, there was clearly a rhetoric of xenophobia
in some Sanskrit sources addressed against Afghans. In these sources,
140 Developments in the Late Medieval Period