Firdous Ahmad Lone
“Epithets are efficient things. They compress centuries of contested historiography into a single, portable accusation — and few in Kashmir’s past have proven more durable or more damaging than the one attached to Sikandar Shahmiri: Butshikan.”
Epithets are efficient things. They compress centuries of contested historiography into a single, portable accusation — and few in Kashmir’s past have proven more durable or more damaging than the one attached to Sikandar Shahmiri: Butshikan, the idol-breaker.
In a new essay published in Inverse Journal, Khawar Khan Achakzai does not seek to rehabilitate this seventh sultan of the Shah Miri dynasty so much as to complicate him — and in doing so, Achakzai mounts a serious challenge to what he identifies as a “reductionist communal” reading that has, for too long, passed as received wisdom.
The essay’s ambition is clearly signalled from the outset. Achakzai draws on archaeological finds, Persian chronicles, Sanskrit inscriptions, and a wide range of contemporary scholarship to argue that Sikandar’s alleged iconoclasm was neither exceptional nor uniquely religious in its motivation.
Instead, when his actions did involve targeting temples, they followed a broader pattern of medieval South Asian politics, in which temples functioned as political and economic rivals to sovereign authority, and their subordination was a tool of rule deployed by Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim kings alike. This is not, the essay insists, an exoneration. But it is a demand for context.
The Inscription That Should Have Changed the Conversation
The essay’s most striking contribution is its foregrounding of material evidence that has received, as Achakzai puts it, “very little to no attention” in mainstream Kashmiri historiography. The centrepiece is a four-armed Brahma figurine, documented by Kashmir scholar J.L. Bhan in his work Kashmir Sculptures, bearing a Sharda script inscription that attributes its installation in a Srinagar temple as an honour to Sultan Sikandar.
Sculpted in 1409 CE, during Sikandar’s own reign, the figurine carries the sultan’s name as a dedication. The inscription, which Achakzai renders as roughly meaning “The revered Sikindra, together with Reoya, the chief associated with Rahula..,” and its tone toward Sikandar is clearly one of reverence.
A second inscription, cited from B.K. Deambi’s Corpus of Śāradā Inscriptions and dated to December 3, 1428, commemorates the consecration of a Hindu hermitage at Khonamuh by a sculptor named Gaggaka. Its second verse praises both Sikandar and his son Zain-ul-Abidin in the same breath — calling the former “illustrious.”
That these inscriptions exist, and that they have been largely overlooked in the dominant narratives about Sikandar, is itself a historiographical problem that the essay rightly names.
“The fact that very little to no attention has been given to the connotation and context under which such inscriptions were produced builds on the argument that Sikandar might have been depicted notoriously as a result of political motives and a communal intent.”
— Khawar Khan Achakzai, Inverse Journal
The Argument from Realpolitik
The essay builds on the work of historians such as Chitralekha Zutshi and Richard M. Eaton, who have argued that temple desecration in medieval India often followed a political logic.
Zutshi’s view that such acts were aimed at accessing wealth and asserting state authority—while being framed in religious language, is particularly central to Achakzai’s argument.
Eaton’s influential framework of selective, politically targeted desecration further supports the claim that these actions were not unique to Muslim rulers nor driven solely by theology..
This line of argument is well-established in South Asian historiography and Achakzai applies it with care. His supporting evidence is telling: Sikandar’s senior-most minister, Rai Magre, was Hindu. His army chief, Achaladeva Achala, was also Hindu.
Persian sources describe a court that included scholars from multiple faiths, and historians such as R. K. Hangloo have noted the continued prominence of Brahmins in administrative and intellectual life. Such continuity complicates the idea of a ruler driven purely by religious hostility.
Achakzai quotes Hangloo’s observation pointedly: if coercive Islamisation were truly the overriding policy of the reign, why did Brahmins continue to occupy scholarly and administrative positions, wander freely, and visit holy places — as Sikandar’s primary chronicler Jonaraja himself records?
The essay also draws on architectural historian Sameer Hamdani’s analysis of early Muslim religious buildings in Kashmir, which Hamdani describes as reflecting “a paradigm of assimilation rather than conquest and dominion.” The use of local materials, local techniques, and the absorption of existing aesthetic vocabularies into new constructions are taken as evidence of an integrative, rather than extractive, imperial logic.
Where the Essay Could Go Further
The essay’s main limitation is its brief treatment of Rajatarangini by Jonaraja—a key source on Sikandar that was written soon after his reign and continues to be widely cited. Given its importance, the essay would have benefited from a deeper analysis, especially since Jonaraja wrote under the patronage of Zain-ul-Abidin, raising the possibility of political bias.
An important dimension that remains underexplored is feudalism—the same structure that had earlier driven Harsha to plunder temples. Sikandar’s actions may reflect an attempt to curtail the economic and political power of feudal institutions.
Similarly, while Achakzai is scrupulous in noting that his paper “makes no claims about contemporary communities, faiths, or identities,” the essay would benefit from a more explicit engagement with why the Butshikan narrative has proved so resilient and so politically useful across different periods. The historiographical question — who needed this particular image of Sikandar, when, and for what — is gestured at but not fully pursued. This is not a flaw so much as an invitation to the next study.
A Necessary Intervention
None of these observations diminish what the essay accomplishes. At a moment when medieval history is routinely conscripted into contemporary political arguments, the methodological discipline of Achakzai’s paper — its insistence that violence be acknowledged rather than erased, while also being situated rather than caricatured — represents a responsible model for how such topics can be approached.
The essay does not ask its readers to admire Sikandar. It asks them to think more carefully about the frameworks through which medieval rulers are judged, and about whose interpretive interests those frameworks serve.
The idol-breaker epithet, it turns out, may tell us as much about the historians who fixed it as about the sultan who earned it.
Beyond Butshikan: Reassessing Sikandar Shahmiri’s “Iconoclast” Legacy by Khawar Khan Achakzai was published in Inverse Journal on April 5, 2026.
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