In the North the impact of Islam was very different India is full of riches wrote the Muslim this story now be really entirely beautiful and delightful and as its people are mainly infidels and idolaters it is right by order of God for us to conquer within a few decades of the prophets death Islam had swept Westwood's to Spain and eastwards to the Indus Valley Oh don't eventually Muslim attacks shattered the old Hindu kingdoms of the North Banaras itself fell in 1194 and in the heart of the city you can still see what results from asserting by force the unique truth of one faith over another mosques built out of the ruins Hindu temples smashed Hindu walls sticking out of the back of a Muslim prayer hall religion itself is outraged said Mahatma Gandhi when outrage is done in his name these tragedies initiated a long and tortuous relationship between Hindu and Muslim which both enriched India and even in our own time has threatened to tear it apart in Banaras the Muslims became the mainstay of the city's.
Economy the thousands of silk weavers like Subhan Allah and his sons with her tiny shops and handlooms are all Muslim it was here in the 15th century that the poor weaver Kabir preached the Brotherhood of Hindu and Muslim but in 1991 a rising tide of Hindu fundamentalism saw their looms smashed saris burned and dr lee hoods ruined as India's ideal of unity and diversity went through a new ordeal of fire a mixed Hindu and Muslim culture arose in the north and in the 16th century there was yet another brilliant flowering of Indian civilization the moguls mobile emblem created an art and architecture which still defines our popular image of India today in its flamboyant mixture of Hindu Persian and Muslim this is fatehpur sikri founded in 1569 near Agri but akbar the great Ackbar commissioned a great translation of the mahabharata into persian along with these exquisite paintings he came to understand that the only way to rule india indeed any civilization is with tolerance and florals and increasingly he was drawn to the deepest currents in India informed the most fascinating aspect of Akbar's career and surely the one that's most relevant to us today was his attempt to find a synthesis of all the religions in his empire it could only ever have happened one imagines in a heady religious climate of India and it's all the more remarkable because Ackbar's brought up a devout Muslim and he was illiterate his tutors unanimously condemned him as a bad pupil but impressed by the terrible evils which are unleashed by religious intolerance and perhaps motivated by political considerations at boss summoned holy men from the Hindus and the jains the Christians and the Jews the Zoroastrians even mandaeans from pressure along with Sunni and Shia Muslims and out of their discussions he attempted to formulate a simple belief in God a doctrine of right conduct which strangely echoes a shocker even though Akbar knew nothing of him and nor it seems of Buddhism Akbar was even prepared to acknowledge the rightness of the case.
For vegetarianism well there was a good meeting mogul that was one aspect that he couldn't fulfill in his personal life one of his friends at court said that Akbar had the one quality which makes a ruler truly great namely the capacity to meet people of whatever rank or whatever religion with the same I of favour his tolerance would be remarkable even today I think but in the 16th century Western Europe for example was torn apart by religious wars with unspeakable cruelties being done to people in the name of God at bars noble ideals were of course doomed to failure but his insight into the Indian predicament was not lost on Pandit Nehru in the 1940s nor on mahatma gandhi who insisted that all religions are true here in fatehpur sikri at the gate of victory this great son of a great Muslim dynasty left as this epitaph Jesus peace be on him said this the world is a bridge cross it but build no house upon it the world endures about an hour spend it in devotion the rest is unseen Akbar's city of dreams was deserted because of lack of water today fatehpur sikri lies high and dry on its original a group his empire had created a unified state giving the same rights to Muslim and Hindu and Empire of the sort have succumbed now it has become cleared but in our troubled world so full of contradictions it cannot be wisdom to assert the unique truth 15 over another the wise person makes justice his gun and learns from all perhaps in this way the door may be opened again his key has been lost in the far south middle a verdant and fecund land of temples the Tanners escaped the full Muslim impact and here the ancient Hindu vision of unity survived from ancient times the Tamil shore was frequented by Greek and Roman traders he is at their poets beautiful great ships of the Greeks bearing gold came splashing on the white foam to return lame the spices and in that turn the Tamil would later spread Hindu culture as far as Java Cambodia the tunnels left brilliant legacies in poetry painting and sculpture but their finest creations were in bronze among their masterpieces is this image of Shiva the wild god of prehistory is here transformed by the Tamil sensibility into a sinuous and sensuous cowherd with a turban of snakes this was cast in one piece in 10 11 400 years before Donatello in Florence there'd been nothing like it since the ancient Greeks but perhaps the most beautiful of all tunnel bronzes is this portrayal of the dual nature of divinity male and female in one body.
