{"id":95586,"date":"2017-07-17T12:00:53","date_gmt":"2017-07-17T11:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=95586"},"modified":"2017-07-16T15:57:45","modified_gmt":"2017-07-16T14:57:45","slug":"the-subversion-of-indias-pluralist-legacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/07\/the-subversion-of-indias-pluralist-legacy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Subversion of India\u2019s Pluralist Legacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.\u201d<\/em>
\n— George Orwell<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

17 Jul 2017 – <\/em>Too much of the thinking about Muslim rulers is now being shaped along predictable, clich\u00e9d lines. This is true of all shades of opinion, perception and scholarship. There is evidence from a number of established scholarly discourses that the public perception about Muslim rulers is being increasingly manipulated to fit into a profile constructed by right wing historians.\u00a0 Mahmud Ghazni’s destruction of the Somnath temple\u00a0has been projected in a manner that glosses over\u00a0 \u00a0the pluralistic the policies of Muslim rulers, and lends a negative bias to the narrative. The truth is that\u00a0\u00a0 under most of the Muslim rulers Indians were held together by a common Sanskrit-Urdu culture which guaranteed that India would always remain secular.<\/p>\n

The greatest damage to Muslim history has been done by the infamous book,\u00a0The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians<\/em>, authored by Elliot and Dawson. There was a time when this book was widely prescribed in schools and colleges. A casual glance at a few pages would reveal the determined effort of the authors to poison the minds of readers against Muslim rulers. The authors, keen to contrast what they understood as the justice and efficiency of British rule with the so-called cruelty and despotism of the Muslim rulers who had preceded that rule, were anything but sympathetic to the \u201cMuhammadan\u201d period of Indian history. The politics of the history textbooks in India today promote communal strife by creating a historical consciousness that gives pride of place to religion and proposes a narrative that traces back community identities and antagonisms, and hence legitimizes their existence.<\/p>\n

The famous parliamentarian and a vehement critic of the process of distortion of Indian history, Dr.Bishambar \u00a0Nath \u00a0\u00a0Pande, \u00a0had said in the \u00a0Indian Parliament \u00a0in 1977 : \u201cThus under a definite policy the Indian history textbooks were so falsified and distorted as to give an impression that the medieval period of Indian history was full of atrocities committed by Muslim rulers on their Hindu subjects and the Hindus had to suffer terrible indignities under Islamic rule.\u201d<\/p>\n

Several new studies, coming from western scholarship, also show that the Mughals were pluralists and catholic in their outlook and in their policies. According to Audrey Truschke, a Mellon post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University, much of the current religious conflict in India has been fueled by ideological assumptions about that period rather than an accurate rendering of the subcontinent\u2019s history.<\/p>\n

In her book,\u00a0Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court<\/em>, Truschke says that the heyday of Muslim rule in India from the 16th to 18th centuries was, in fact, one of \u201ctremendous cross-cultural respect and fertilization,\u201d not religious or cultural conflict. A leading scholar of South Asian cultural and intellectual history, Truschke argues that this more divisive interpretation actually developed during the colonial period from 1757 to 1947.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe British benefited from pitting Hindus and Muslims against one another and portrayed themselves as neutral saviors who could keep ancient religious conflicts at bay,\u201d she says. \u201cWhile colonialism ended in the 1940s, the modern Hindu right has found tremendous political value in continuing to proclaim and create endemic Hindu-Muslim conflict.\u201d<\/p>\n

Truschke finds that high-level contact between learned Muslims and Hindus was marked by collaborative encounters across linguistic and religious lines.<\/p>\n

Her research overturns the assumption that the Mughals were hostile to traditional Indian literature or knowledge systems. In fact, her findings reveal how Mughals supported and engaged with Indian thinkers and ideas. As Truschke discovered, the Mughal courts in fact sought to engage with Indian culture. They created Persian translations of Sanskrit works, especially those they perceived as histories, such as the two great Sanskrit epics.<\/p>\n

\u201cA deliberate misreading of this past undergirds the actions of the modern Indian nation-state,\u201d according to Truschke.<\/p>\n

At a time of conflict between the Indian state and its Muslim population, Truschke says:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is high time we discarded the pernicious myth of India\u2019s medieval Muslim villains. This poisonous notion imperils the tolerant foundations of modern India by erroneously positing religious-based conflict and Islamic extremism as constant features of life on the subcontinent. Moreover, it is simply bad history. India has a complicated and messy past, and we do it and ourselves no justice by flattening its nuances to reflect the religious tensions of the present..\u201d<\/p>\n

There are several documents of Mughal period that\u00a0 reveal the policy of Akbar, Jahangir and Shahjahan towards Hindu temples. These documents have been available in the Vrinda-an Research Institute and in some of the temples. These have been studied by Tarapada Mukerjee and Irfan Habib in the papers presented at the 48th and 49th sessions of the Indian History Congress.<\/p>\n

According to the study of Mukerjee and Habib, based on documents of Mughal days, Akbar enlarged and consolidated all grants to temples and temple-servants in the Mathura region by his\u00a0farmaans<\/em>\u00a0(dated August 27, 1598 and September 11, 1598) in Vrindavan, Mathura and their environs. Jahangir not only continued these grants, he substantially added to these. Jahangir added at least two temples to the list of thirtyfive already supported by Akbar\u2019s grant of 1598. In addition he provided 121 bighas of land for five families of temple\u00a0sevaks<\/em>. Jahangir also visited the Vrindavan temples in 1620.<\/p>\n

The Nawabs of Oudh gave several grants to the temples of Ayodhya and provided them protection in other ways. The Diwan of Nawab Safdarjung built several temples in Ayodhya and arranged for the repair of other temples. Nawab Safdarjung gave land for the construction of a temple at Hanumangarhi. Asafa-dullah\u2019s Diwan gave further help for the construction of a temple.<\/p>\n

Another great ruler vilified by historians was Tipu Sultan, who was the fiercest foe the British ever encountered. As one of the first Indian rulers to be martyred while defending his homeland against the Empire, Tipu figures prominently in the British Army\u2019s National Army Museum as one of the ten greatest enemy commanders the British Army ever faced. In his capability as a military strategist, Tipu was an equal of Napoleon Bonaparte.<\/p>\n

Besides being a great military strategist, Tipu was also a visionary and innovative ruler. Aside from military innovation, Tipu is said to have introduced new coinage, a calendar and a system of weights and measures mainly based on the methods devised by French technicians. Thus, he was a modernist who even planted the \u201ctree of liberty\u201d at the Srirangapatna fort, in honour of the French revolutionaries.<\/p>\n

Tipu Sultan is, however, demonised, largely due to the particularly biased trajectory of British historiography, which branded him \u201ca furious fanatic and an intolerant bigot.\u201d Some even retained a fondness for comparing Tipu with Mahmud Ghaznavi and Nadir Shah. Wilks and Kirkpatrick accused Tipu of exiling 60,000 Kanarese Christians. But one must not forget that the Kanarese Christians apparently helped the English to conquer Mangalore during the Second Anglo-Mysore war. He treated the Syrian Christians of his kingdom extremely well and also encouraged Armenian merchants to settle in Mysore.<\/p>\n

Similarly, he was falsely accused of resorting to forced conversions. An archival record unearthed in 1913 revealed 21 letters he wrote to Sringeri monastery proving him to be a patron of many Hindu maunders (temples). The reason for the acute venom spouted against Tipu by the British lay in the challenge he posed to colonial power. When the princes of Rajputana had surrendered and Ranjit Singh, \u201cThe Lion of Punjab,\u201d compromised, and the Marathas quietly buckled under the threat of British arms, Tipu dared to confront the colonialists.<\/p>\n

The defenders of Tipu Sultan say that when he was not fighting the British, he focused on welfare works such as improving irrigation and agriculture and making just laws. The 1988 Annual Journal of the Tipu Sultan Research Institute and Museum reprinted parts of a 1786 proclamation that abolished flogging and whipping. The edict also said:<\/p>\n

\u201cLooting a conquered army enriches a few, impoverishes the nation and dishonors the entire army. War must be linked to the battlefields. Do not carry it to innocent civilians. Honour their children and the infirm.\u201d<\/p>\n

Research by Dr. B N Pande\u00a0 showed not only that Tipu paid annual grants to 156 temples, but that he enjoyed cordial relations with the Shankaracharya of Sringeri Math to whom he had addressed at least 30 letters.<\/p>\n

The well-known writer Amitav Ghosh has written profusely of the Mughal contribution to the efflorescence of Hinduism. Learning of a miracle performed by a famous Guru, Babur visited him in prison. Such was the presence of the Guru that Babur is said to have fallen at his feet, with the cry: \u201cOn the face of this faqir one sees God himself.\u201d He emphasizes that it is beyond dispute that Babur\u2019s descendants presided over a virtually unprecedented efflorescence in Hindu religious activity. Hinduism as we know it today \u2014 especially the Hinduism of north India \u2014 was essentially shaped under Mughal rule, often with the active participation and support of the rulers and their officials and feudatories.<\/p>\n

It is a simple fact that contemporary Hinduism as a living practice would not be what it is if it were not for the devotional practices initiated under Mughal rule. The sad irony of the assault on the Babri mosque, Ghosh rues, is that the Hindu fanatics who attacked it destroyed a symbol of the very accommodations that made their own beliefs possible.<\/p>\n

The developments that occasioned the Indian Partition catalysed a process of sectarian politics that found its logical end in the creation of separate nations altogether. Seven decades after the partition of India, a debate on what caused it is merely academic. But the question of how to contain and tame its lingering sparks and bushfires is of immense practical importance. Hindu nationalist ideologues still periodically subject Indian Muslims to loyalty tests. As the great British statesman James Baldwin writes in\u00a0Notes of a Native Son<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.\u201d<\/p>\n

A reappraisal of history can alone put the record straight and clear the misconceptions created by partisan historians, in whose works fantasy, conjecture and stereotypes have replaced fact and reality. Or else we will be confirming the fears of the great thinker, Walter Benjamin:<\/p>\n

\u201cHistory is written by the victors.\u201d<\/p>\n

The paradox underlying this conundrum is best captured in the dedication template of Bhagwan S. Gidwani, author of\u00a0The Sword of Tipu Sultan<\/em>, who devoted 13 years to part-time research on his book in the archives of half a dozen countries for writing his novel. It reads:<\/p>\n

\u201cTo the country which lacks a historian; to men whom history owes rehabilitation.\u201d<\/p>\n

_____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Moin Qazi<\/em>, PhD Economics,\u00a0PhD English,<\/em> is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment<\/a> and author of the bestselling book, <\/em>Village Diary of a Heretic Banker. He has worked in the development finance sector for almost four decades in India and can be reached at <\/em>moinqazi123@gmail.com<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

17 Jul 2017 – Too much of the thinking about Muslim rulers is now being shaped along predictable, clich\u00e9d lines. This is true of all shades of opinion, perception and scholarship. There is evidence from a number of established scholarly discourses that the public perception about Muslim rulers is being increasingly manipulated to fit into a profile constructed by right wing historians.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95586"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95586\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}