THE REGIONAL KINGDOMS OF EARLY MEDIEVAL INDIAdonated it, e.g. the Udayeshvara-Linga or the Rajarajeshvara-Linga in the
temples established by Udayaditya and Rajaraja in their respective capitals.
Paintings in the temple and sculptures outside it showed the king depicted
like a god and the gods in turn were decorated with royal attributes. In
order to gain additional legitimation some kings even solemnly transferred
their realm to the royal god and ruled it as the god’s representative or son
(putra). In this way they could use the royal temple and its staff as
instruments of government and could threaten disobedient samantas with
the wrath of the royal god if they did not obey the king’s orders.
The settlement of Brahmins and the establishment of royal temples
served the purpose of creating a new network of ritual, political and
economic relations. This network was centred on the king and was thus an
antidote to the centrifugal tendencies of the samantachakra. But in the long
run this policy did not solve the problems of the constant power struggles
in medieval regional kingdoms. More and more resources were diverted to
the Brahmins and temples and thus were not available for other urgent
tasks of the state such as infrastructure, agrarian extension, administration
and defence. This was particularly true of kingdoms where one king after
another established a great temple of his own and more and more land and
wealth passed into the hands of the managers of temple trusts. The people
were pressed by the burden of taxation and the samantas were driven to
rebellion by the very measures which were designed to keep them in check.
Thus a dynasty would fall and would be replaced by another one whose
strength was mainly based on the as yet undivided resources of its own
nuclear region.
GODS, TEMPLES AND POETS: THE GROWTH
OF REGIONAL CULTURES
Four factors characterise the early medieval period in India and indicate its
importance for the evolution of Indian culture in general: the emergence of
regional kingdoms, the transformation of ‘Brahminism’ into a new kind of
popular Hinduism, the evolution of regional languages and, as a result of
all this, the growth of regional cultures. This heritage of the Early Middle
Ages was in many ways enriched by the influence of Islam and continued
to be of relevance in the Mughal empire, in the later realms of the Rajputs,
Marathas and Sikhs and even today. We now turn to the transformation of
Hinduism.
The new systems of Indian philosophyThe history of Hinduism in the second half of the first millennium was
influenced by two tendencies which seemed to contradict each other but
whose synthesis actually led to the emergence of the kind of Hinduism