Temple desecration in the sixteenth-century Deccan?

The case of the Adoni fort mosque

Abstract

This article reconstructs the complex history of a contested religious building inside the fort at Adoni, in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. When I surveyed it in June 2006, it had been partly demolished, the result of a day of communal rioting between Hindus and Muslims in October 1977. The building had been targeted by a group of Hindu youths based on their mistaken belief that the edifice had originally been a Hindu temple that had subsequently been converted into a mosque. The youths believed they were retaliating for the earlier desecration of their supposed temple, but its formal and structural features show that the building could never have functioned as such and must always have been a mosque. In fact it had been built as a mosque under the patronage of the Vijayanagara kings, Hindu rulers who had it constructed in the Vijayanagara style for the Muslim warriors in their service. When Vijayanagara lost control of Adoni, and it was taken over by the rulers of Bijapur, they transformed the mosque by plastering over Vijayanagara stylistic elements and reconstructing it in the Bijapuri metropolitan style. What the youths viewed in 1977 as the religious conversion of a temple into a mosque was in actuality the stylistic conversion of a Vijayanagara mosque into a Bijapuri one.