By Arshia Sattar
22.01.2021
'The Language Of History—Sanskrit Narratives Of Muslim Pasts': By Audrey Truschke, Penguin Random House India, 412 pages, ₹799.
Especially in India, Audrey Truschke is better known
for her tweets than for her scholarship. Often the centre of controversy or of
a Hindutva-led hate storm which includes threats of physical violence,
Truschke’s solid work as a historian of pre-modern India is mostly overshadowed
by the more pressing concerns of the immediate present. Her heresy against the
credo of Hindutva lies in the inauspicious constellation of ethnicity
(non-Indian), gender (female), and academic training in the West (the tools,
including languages, to analyse text and context). Her books (particularly her
last one on Aurangzeb) are noticed and reviewed, but typically by detractors
who have opinion and ideology as their critical weapons rather than equivalence
in research or appropriate tools of historical analysis.
Audrey Truschke insists
that we cannot read either the attitudes or the identity politics of the
present into the past. (Mint)
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Truschke’s new book, The Language of History:
Sanskrit Narratives of Muslim Pasts, seems to steer clear of any
contentious claims and should have smooth passage in this country. But then,
the imagination of offence has no limits and it is entirely possible that
someone will find her presentation of the texts created by Hindus that do not
despise and vilify Muslim rulers as either deliberately provocative or entirely
fabricated. Until that cacophony rises in its unholy chorus, let us enjoy the
pleasures of the book as we find them.
In the main, Truschke’s thesis, here and elsewhere, is
relatively simple: She argues against the Hindutva-driven polemic that Hindus
and Muslims in South Asia have always hated each other and that Hindus have
always felt oppressed by their Muslim rulers. She has made this point at length
in her first book, eloquently titled Culture Of Encounters, where she examines
Sanskrit texts at the Mughal court. In The Language Of History, she extends her
previous argument by looking at Sanskrit texts and their descriptions of Muslim
rule from within and without, written primarily between the 12th and 18th
centuries and created by a Hindu caste (and, arguably, a class) elite.
Truschke parses these texts in a manner such that they
need not be read as unidimensional, as documents from the contemporaneous
moment that spew hatred for Muslim “enemies”. She argues on several levels that
Sanskrit texts written over that period of 600 years do not indicate that the
Turkic and Persianate peoples who settled in India were despised for their
religion. For example, she says that Muslim aggressors were described in
Sanskrit texts in keeping with literary conventions, as any opposing military
force would be. Further, that the nomenclatures for these raiders and invaders
were generic Sanskrit words for outsider (such as yavana and mleccha) or were
regional markers borrowed from other languages (for example, turushka from
Persian and tajika from Arabic) or hammira, a Sanskrit neologism for the Arabic
amir. This was especially true before Islam became a continuous political
presence in the subcontinent and after it became so, there are instances of
Hindu kings in the regions of Rajputana and central India who took on hammira
as an honorific for themselves, adding it to their list of other more
commonplace Sanskrit titles such as maharaja.
While it is often a historian’s job to show us how the past inflects the present, the opposite proposition is not always and equally the case—the colours and hues of the present need not be the same as those of the past. Truschke rightly reminds us (as do other historians like Romila Thapar) that the ur-event for contemporary Hindutva (Mahmud Ghaznavi’s avaricious raid on the Somnath temple in the 11th century), is noticeably unremarked upon in its own time. Truschke insists that we cannot read either the attitudes or the identity politics of the present into the past, that many hundreds of years ago, people acted and reacted differently, that their feelings towards each other were not polarised in the way that they are now. She substantiates these hypotheses, in this case, by reading Sanskrit texts that refer (sometimes extensively) to the Muslim presence in their midst in the context of their own literary histories and genre traditions. Truschke quotes texts from different time periods and different parts of the country, such as Jayanayaka’s Prithvirajavijaya (12th century), Gangadevi’s Madhuravijaya, (14th century) and the 15th century Jaina chronicles of Jonaraja/Shrivara called the Rajatarangini. This larger literary space, which is also a historiographical one, simultaneously provides a more specific location for the texts and allows for a more nuanced and complex reading of the material that Truschke handles.
Here is the crux of The Language of History’s
argument. “As Indo-Muslim kings entrenched themselves in the subcontinent and
expanded their control through warfare, Sanskrit authors produced large-scale
poems that featured violent encounters with these polities and thereby
integrated their rulers into the intertwined realms, as articulated in Sanskrit
literature, of kingship and poetry. An earlier generation of scholars misread,
rather gravely, the significance of this literary development. Sanskrit poetic
portrayals of violence involving Muslims did not mark Muslims as abnormally
bloodthirsty, nor did they constitute some kind of mass literary resistance.
Rather in a world where warring was an integral part of kingship and
literature, Sanskrit authors signalled a willingness to investigate the
literary possibilities of Muslim-led rule by pitching Muslims as worthy foes
and in some cases, heroes on the battlefield. In other words, writing about the
violence enacted by Indo-Muslim political leaders likened them to, rather than
distinguished them from, other Indian rulers.”
It’s easy to see how a contention like this one might
become cannon fodder in a pitched battle about how to read Hindu texts about
Muslims in the subcontinent—Truschke staunchly insisting that the texts prove
that the so-called outsiders were being integrated into the literary
imagination and therefore were no longer “foreign”, with the other side remaining
adamant that text is greater than context, that literature must be read only as
historical truth, that time (and some rivers) can flow backwards.
Truschke puts herself in the trenches, as it were, not
afraid of the battles that she has chosen to fight. She writes confidently, not
afraid to use “I” in the construction of her arguments. But more than that, she
openly, and with some measure of aggression, confronts the schools of thought
she is arguing against, be they in her own field of history and historiography,
or in the politicised morass that Hindutva activists and ideologues have
generated around any discussion of India’s past. She wants her opponents to see
her, to recognise the person that she is and to acknowledge that, with the
skills of her trade, she is able to reasonably challenge everything they hold
to be true. As the clear stream of reason has been brutishly diverted into the
sands of virulent hatred, it may seem that the war that Truschke and so many
others have chosen to fight is unwinnable. But the battle in this war must
still be fought, for, all over the world, the stakes for what we stand to lose
get higher every day.
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Arshia Sattar is a writer, scholar and translator
based in Bengaluru. Her latest books include Mahabharata for Children and
Maryada: Searching for Dharma in the Ramayana.
Original Headline: What ancient Hindu texts tell us
about Muslims
Source: The Live Mint
URL: https://www.newageislam.com/books-documents/audrey-truschkes-new-book-language/d/124443
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