How Historians Poisoned India’s Pluralism
By
Moin Qazi, New Age Islam
22
September 2022
Mughal Courts 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
----
“The
most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own
understanding of their history.”
–George
Orwell
Too much of
the thinking about Muslim rulers is now being shaped along predictable, clichéd
lines. This is true of all shades of opinion, perception and scholarship. There
is evidence from several established scholarly discourses that the public
perception of Muslim rulers is being increasingly manipulated to fit into a
profile built by right-wing historians.
The
negative images of Islam stem partly from a lack of understanding of Islam
among non-Muslims and partly from the failure of Muslims to explain themselves.
The results are predictable: hatred feeds on hatred. Ignorance of Islam exists
among both Muslims and non-Muslims. Non-Muslims, ignorant and misunderstanding
Islam, fear it. They believe it threatens their most basic values. Similarly,
Muslims have their own misconceptions. They, reacting to the hate and fear of
non-Muslims, create a kind of defensive posture within their societies and a
combative environment built on militant rhetoric. In this heat and
misunderstanding, the voices of sanity are drowned.
The
greatest damage to Muslim history has been done by the infamous book, The
History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians, 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 “Muhammadan” 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 legitimises their existence.
Several new
studies, coming from western scholarship, also show that the Mughals were
pluralists and catholic in their outlook and 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’s history.
In her
book, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court, Truschke says that
the heyday of Muslim rule in India from the 16th to 18th centuries was, in
fact, one of “tremendous cross-cultural respect and fertilization,” not
religious or cultural conflict. A leading scholar of South Asian cultural and
intellectual history, Truschke argues that this more divisive interpretation
developed during the colonial period from 1757 to 1947.
“The
British benefited from pitting Hindus and Muslims against one another and
portrayed themselves as neutral saviors who could keep ancient religious
conflicts at bay,” she says. “While colonialism ended in the 1940s, the modern
Hindu right has found tremendous political value in continuing to proclaim and
create endemic Hindu-Muslim conflict.”
Truschke
finds that high-level contact between learned Muslims and Hindus was marked by
collaborative encounters across linguistic and religious lines.
Her research
overturns the assumption that the Mughals were hostile to traditional Indian
literature or knowledge systems. Her findings reveal how Mughals supported and
engaged with Indian thinkers and ideas. As Truschke discovered, the Mughal
courts 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.
“A
deliberate misreading of this past undergirds the actions of the modern Indian
nation-state,” according to Truschke.
At a time
of conflict between the Indian state and its Muslim population, Truschke says:
“It’s
invaluable to have a more informed understanding of that history and the deep
mutual interest of early modern Hindus and Muslims in one another’s
traditions.”
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’s 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 equal to Napoleon Bonaparte.
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 “tree of liberty” at the Srirangapatna fort, in honour of the
French revolutionaries.
Tipu Sultan
is, however, demonised, largely due to the particularly biased trajectory of
British historiography, which branded him “a furious fanatic and an intolerant
bigot.” 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 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.
Similarly,
he was falsely accused of resorting to forced conversions. An archival record
unearthed in 1913 revealed 21 letters he wrote to the 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, “The Lion of Punjab,” compromised, and the Marathas quietly buckled
under the threat of British arms, Tipu dared to confront the colonialists.
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: “On the face of this faqir one sees God himself.” He emphasizes that
it is beyond dispute that Babur’s descendants presided over a virtually
unprecedented efflorescence in Hindu religious activity. Hinduism as we know it
today — especially the Hinduism of north India — was essentially shaped under
the Mughal rule, often with the active participation and support of the rulers
and their officials and feudatories.
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 the 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.
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 Notes of a Native
Son:
“People are
trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.”
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:
“History is
written by the victors.”
The paradox
underlying this conundrum is best captured in the dedication template of
Bhagwan S. Gidwani, author of The Sword of Tipu Sultan, 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:
“To the
country which lacks a historian; to men whom history owes rehabilitation.”
------
Moin
Qazi is the author of the bestselling book, Village Diary of a Heretic Banker.
He has worked in the development finance sector for almost four decades.
URL: https://newageislam.com/interfaith-dialogue/historians-poisoned-india-pluralism/d/128000
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