Some Excerpts
The next generation of political leaders, especially the
left-wing that was to gain control of Congress in the
thirties, and complete control in the fifties, would profess
negationism very explicitly. The radical humanist (i.e.
bourgeois Marxist) M.N. Roy wrote that Islam had fulfilled a
historic mission of equality and abolition of
discrimination, and that for this, Islam had been welcomed
into India by the lower castes. If at all any violence had
occurred, it was as a matter of justified class struggle by
the progressive forces against the reactionary forces,
meaning the fedual Hindu upper castes.
This is a modern myth springing from an incorrect and
much too grim picture of the caste system, a back-projection
of modern ideas of class struggle, and an uncritical
swallowing of contemporary Islamic apologetics, which has
incorporated some voguish socialist values. There is no
record anywhere of low-caste people welcoming the Muslims
as liberators. Just like in their homeland, the Muslim
generals had nothing but contempt for the common people, and
all the more so because these were idolaters. They made no
distinction between rich Pagans and poor Pagans: in the
Quran, Allah had promised the same fate to all idolaters.
By contrast, there is plenty of testimony that these
common people rose in revolt, not against their high-caste
co-religionists, but against the Muslim rulers. And not
only against heavy new taxes (50% of the land revenue for
Alauddin Khilji, whom the negationists hail as the
precursor of socialism) and land expropriations, but
especially against the rape and abduction of women and
children and the destruction of their idols, acts which
have been recorded with so much glee by the Muslim
chroniclers, without anywhere mentioning a separate
treatment of Hindu rich and Hindu poor, upper-caste Kafir or
low-caste Kafir. Even when some of the high-caste people
started collaborating, the common people gave the invaders
no rest, attacking them from hiding-places in the forests.
The conversion of low-caste people only began when Muslim
rulers were safely in power and in a position to reward and
encourage conversion by means of tax discrimination, legal
discrimination (win the dispute with your neighbour if you
convert), handing out posts to converts, and simple
coercion. Nevertheless, the myth which M.N. Roy spread, has
gained wide currency.
M. Habib
Firstly, it was not all that serious. One cannot fail
to notice that the Islamic chroniclers (including some
rulers who wrote their own chronicles, like Teimur and
Babar) have described the slaughter of Hindus, the abduction
of their women and children, and the destruction of their
places of worship most gleefully. But, according to Habib,
these were merely exaggerations by court poets out to please
their patrons. One wonders what it says about Islamic
rulers that they felt flattered by the bloody details which
the Muslims chroniclers of Hindu persecutions have left us.
At any rate, Habib has never managed to underpin this
convenient hypothesis with a single fact.
Secondly, that percentage of atrocities on Hindus which
Habib was prepared to admit as historical, is not to be
attributed to the impact of Islam, but to other factors.
Sometimes Islam was used as a justification post factum, but
this was deceptive. In reality economic motives were at
work. The Hindus amassed all their wealth in temples and
therefore Muslim armies plundered these temples.
Thirdly, according to Habib there was also a racial
factor: these Muslims were mostly Turks, savage riders from
the steppes who would need several centuries before getting
civilized by the wholesome influence of Islam. Their inborn
barbarity cannot be attributed to the doctrines of Islam.
Finally, the violence of the Islamic warriors was of
minor importance in the establishment of Islam in India.
What happened was not so much a conquest, but a shift in
public opinion: when the urban working-class heard of Islam
and realized it now had a choice between Hindu law (smrti)
and Muslim law (shariat), it chose the latter.
Mohammed Habib's excise in history-rewriting cannot
stand the test of historical criticism on any score. We can
demonstrate this with the example of Sultan Mahmud Ghaznavi
(997-1030), already mentioned, who carried out a number of
devastating raids in Sindh, Gujrat and Punjab. This
Ghaznavi was a Turk, certainly, but in many respects he was
not a barbarian: he patronized arts and literature
(including the great Persian poet Firdausi, who would end up
in trouble because his patron suspected him of apostasy, and
the Persian but Arabic-writing historian Albiruni) and was a
fine calligraphist himself. The undeniable barbarity of his
anti-Hindu campaigns cannot be attributed to his ethnic
stock. His massacres and acts of destruction were merely a
replay of what the Arab Mohammed bin Qasim had wrought in
Sindh in 712-15. He didn't care for material gain: he left
rich mosques untouched, but poor Hindu temples met the same
fate at his hands as the richer temples. He turned down a
Hindu offer to give back a famous idol in exchange for a
huge ransom: I prefer to appear on Judgement Day as an
idol-breaker rather than an idol-seller. The one explanation
that covers all the relevant facts, is that he was driven to
his barbarous acts by his ideological allegiance to Islam.
There is no record of his being welcomed by urban
artisans as a liberator from the oppressive Hindu social
system. On the contrary, his companion Albiruni testifies
how all the Hindus had an inveterate aversion for all
Muslims.
The Marxists
In Communalism and the Writing of indian History, Romila
Thapar, Harbans Mukhia and Bipan Chandra, professors at
Jawaharlal Nehry University (JNU, the Mecca of secularism
and negationism) in Delhi, write that the interpretation of
medieval wars as religious conflicts is in fact a back-
projection of contemporary religious conflict artificially
created for political purposes. In Bipan Chandra's famous
formula, communalism is not a dinosaur, it is a strictly
modern phenomenon. They explicitly deny that before the
modern period there existed such a thing as Hindu identity
or Muslim identity. Conflicts could not have been between
Hindus and Muslims, only between rulers or classes who
incidentally also belonged to one religious community or the
other. They point to the conflicts within the communities It is of course a fact that some Hindus collaborated with
the Muslim rulers, but that also counted for the British
colonial rulers, who are for that no less considered as
foreign oppressors. For that matter, in the Jewish ghetto
in Warsaw the Nazis employed Jewish guards, in their search
for absconding Jews they employed Jewish informers, and in
their policy of deportation they even sought the co-operation
of the Zionist movement: none of this can disprove Nazi-
Jewish enmity. It is also a fact that the Muslim rulers
sometimes made war among each other, but that was equally
true for Portuguese, French and British colonizers, who
fought some wars on Indian territory: they were just as much
part of a single colonial movement with a common colonial
ideology, and all the brands of colonialism were equally the
enemies of the indian freedom movement. Even in the history
of the Crusades, that paradigm of religious war, we hear a
lot of battles between one Christian-Muslim coalition and
another: these do not falsify the over-all characterization
of the Crusades as a war between Christians and Muslims
(triggered by the destruction of Christian churches by
Muslims).
After postulating that conflicts between Hindus and
Muslims as such were non-existent before the modern period,
the negationists are faced with the need to explain how this
type of conflict was born after centuries of a misunderstood
non-existence. The Marxist explanation is a conspiracy
theory: the separate communal identity of Hindus and Muslims
is an invention of the sly British colonialists. They
carried on a divide and rule policy, and therefore they
incited the communal separateness. As the example par
excellence, prof. R.S. Sharma mentions the 19th -century
8-volume work by Elliott and Dowson, The History of India as
Told by its own Historians. This work does indeed paint a
very grim picture of Muslim hordes who attack the Pagans
with merciless cruelty. But this picture was not a
concoction by the British historians: as the title of their
work says, they had it all from indigenous historiographers,
most of them Muslims.
The original source material leaves us in no doubt that
conflicts often erupted on purely religious grounds, even
against the political and economical interests of the
contending parties. The negationists' tactic therefore
consists in keeping this original testimony out of view. A
good example is Prof. Gyanendra Pandey's recent book, "The
Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India". As the
title clearly says, Pandey asserts that communalism (the
Hindu-Muslim conflict) had been constructed by the British
for colonial purposes anmd out of colonial prejuidices, was
later interiorized by Indians looking for new, politically
profitable forms of organization in modern colonial society.
This is like saying that anti-Judaism is a construction of
modern capitalists to divide the working class (the standard
Marxist explanation for all kinds of racism), while
concealing the copious medieval testimony of anti-Judaism
on undeniably non-capitalist grounds. Prof. Pandey
effectively denies a millenniumful of testimonies to Islamic
persecution of the Indian (Hindu) Kafirs.
2.5 Foreign Support For Indian Negationism
Some foreign authors, influenced by Indian colleagues,
have also added a big dose of negationism to their work on
Indian history. For instance, Percival Spear, co-author
(with Romila Thapar) of the Penguin History of India,
writes: "Aurangzeb's supposed intolerance is little more
than a hostile legend based on isolated acts such as the
erection of a mosque on a temple site in Benares."
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........
destroyed temple. He ordered all temples destroyed, among
them the Kashi Vishvanath, one of the most sacred places of
Hinduism, and had mosques built on a number of cleared
temple sites. All other Hindu sacred places within his
reach equally suffered destruction, with mosques built on
them; among them, Krishna's birth temple in Mathura, the
rebuilt Somnath temple on the coast of Gujrat, the Vishnu
temple replaced with the Alamgir mosque now overlooking
Benares, the Treta-ka-Thakur temple in Ayodhya. The number
of temples destroyed by Aurangzeb is counted in 4, if not in
5 figures. According to the official court chronicle,
Aurangzeb "ordered all provincial governors to destroy all
schools and temples of the Pagans and to make a complete end
to all Pagan teachings and practices". The chronicle sums
up the destructions like this: "Hasan Ali Khan came and said
that 172 temples in the area had been destroyed... His
majesty went to Chittor, and 63 temples were destroyed... Abu
Tarab, appointed to destroy the idol-temples of Amber,
reported that 66 temples had been razed to the ground."
In quite a number of cases, inscriptions on mosques and
local tradition do confirm that Aurangzeb built them in
forcible replacement of temples (some of these inscriptions
have been quoted in Sitaram Goel: Hindu Temples, vol.2,
along with a number of independent written accounts).
Aurangzeb's reign ws marked by never-ending unrest and
rebellions, caused by his anti-Hindu policies, which
included the reimposition of the jizya and other zimma
rules, and indeed the demolition of temples.
Aurangzeb did not stop at razing temples: their users
too were levelled. There were not just the classical
massacres of thousands of resisters, Brahmins, Sikhs. What
gives a more pointed proof of Aurangzeb's fanaticism, is the
execution of specific individuals for specific reason of
intolerance. To name the best-known ones: Aurangzeb's
brother Dara Shikoh was executed because of apostasy (i.e.
taking an interest in Hindu philosophy), and the Sikh guru
Tegh Bahadur was beheaded because of his objecting to
Aurangzeb's policy of forcible conversions in general, and
in particular for refusing to become a Muslim himself.
Short, Percival Spear's statement that Aurangzeb's
fanaticism is but a hostile legend, is a most serious case
of negationism.
An example of a less blatant (i.e. more subtle) form of
negationism in Western histories of India, is the India
entry in the Encyclopaedia Brittannica. Its chapter on the
Sultanate period (which was much more bloody than even the
Moghul period) does not mention any persecutions and
massacres of Hindus by Muslims, except that Firuz Shah
Tughlaq "made largely unsuccessful attempts to convert his
Hindu subjects and sometimes persecuted them". The article
effectively obeys the negationist directive that
"characterization of the medieval period as a time of Hindu-
Muslim conflict is forbidden".
It also contains blissful nonsense about communal amity
It also contains blissful nonsense about communal amity
in places where the original sources only mention enmity.
Thus, it says that Bahmani sultan Tajuddin Firuz extracted
tribute payments and the hand of the king's daughter from
the Hindu bastion Vijayanagar after two military campaigns,
and that this resulted in "the establishment of an
apparently amicable relationship between the two rulers".
Jawaharlal Nehru considered the induction of Hindu women in
Muslim harems as the cradle of composite culture (his
euphemism for Hindu humiliation), but it is worse if even
the venerable Encyclopedia considers the terms of debate as
a sign of friendship. At any rate, the article goes on to
observe naively that peace lasted only for ten years,
when Vijaynagar forces inflicted a crushing defeat on Firuz.
In this case, the more circumspect form of negationism is at
work: keeping the inconvenient facts out of the readers'
view, and manipulating the terminology.
An American historian's book is introduced thus: "In
this book [Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in
North India], Sandra Freitag examines one of the central
problems of modern Indian history, the Hindu-Muslim
conflict, with new and provocative insight. She challenges
long-standing interpretations by defining this conflict as a
developing social process groups, not simply Hindu or Muslim, in highly specific local contexts bound together
in a changing institutional order."
This sophisticated verbiage cannot conceal that the
book's approach is merely the standard secularist version
propagated by Indian establishment historians since decades.
There is nothing new and provocative about a book that
claims to explain communalism without touching on its single
most important determinant, viz. the doctrine laid down in
Islamic scripture, and that blurs the clear-cut process of
India's communalization by Islam with the help of scapegoats
like colonialism.
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