Medieval Endowment Cultures in Western India: Buddhist and Muslim Encounters – Some Preliminary Observations
Abstract
Endowment cultures based on Buddhist, Hindu-Brahmanical, and Jain traditions flourished in pre-Islamic India. The donative practices influenced each other, and the extant records testify to a consensus among the followers of different religions with regard to the merit drawn from pious grants.
Several rulers of the Maitraka dynasty were patrons of a Buddhist endowment culture in sixth to seventh-century Kathiawar. After the eighth century, patronage in favor of Buddhist monasteries apparently declined in Gujarat and Maharashtra. However, this decrease does not seem to have been caused by the first, short-term Muslim inroads into the region in the early eighth century, as the Hindu-Brahmanical endowment culture continued to prosper. On the contrary, there is epigraphic evidence that Muslim nobles, in their capacity as vassals of the indigenous Rāṣṭrakūṭa rulers, made religious grants on the west coast in the tenth century, following the pattern set by the native kings. According to Arab sources, the first mosques were also built on the Konkan coast in the tenth century. With the dissemination of Islamic rule in northern India in the thirteenth century, Muslim rulers seem to have confiscated land and other resources that had been bestowed on monasteries and temples, probably with the aim of increasing state revenues and of patronizing the institution of Islamic endowments (waqf).
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