Phyllis Granoff

"It was a commonplace in medieval accounts of kings that in fact the Muslims are incarnations of the demons, while the Hindu king who wages war against them is an incarnation of one of the Hindu Gods, whose function it is to descend to earth in human form and extirpate the demons, thus winning one more round in the on-going battle between the Gods and the demons (§). The comparison, then, that the Muslims do no more against the divine images than the demons have always done against the Gods themselves, suggests this deeper identification."

"The Ekalingamahdatmya is clearly sufficiently preoccupied with the Muslim invasions of North India to raise directly the issue of how and why the Muslims could have overrun the land. Indeed as we have just seen it asks forthright how the images of the Hindu Gods, which it regards as the Gods themselves, could have been broken and battered by the unbelievers. The central stories of the text, the stories designed to explain the origins of the holy site and its images, I believe should be understood in this broader context of the text. Doing so reveals the consummate artistry that is at work in the reshaping of the underlying puranic stories to fit its special circumstances: the curse of Parvati, making the hard-hearted Gods into stones, is aptly suited to a period in history when building of more precious materials was a clear invitation to disaster. The Ekalingamabatmya may use the understatement of story telling, but it is nonetheless a valuable testimony to fears and attitudes in this perilous period of Indian religious history."