Music-before-Mosque Has Become the Most Convenient Tool to Incite Communal Violence
By
New Age Islam Staff Writer
12 August
2023
This Tradition
Was Started In Salem, Tamil Nadu In 1882.
Main
Points:
1. Since 1920s, riots were mainly
caused by music-before-mosque on Hindu festivals.
2. In 1926 and 1927, music before
mosque caused riots in Nagpur and other places.
3. Bal Gangadhar Tilak converted Ganesh
Chaturthi into a public event.
4. Hedgewar promoted music before
mosque practice.
5. During the 80s and 90s, religious
processions accompanying music through mosques caused riots in Bhagalpur and
Saharanpur.
-----
Rampaging
groups set ablaze numerous vehicles amidst riots in Nuh.
------
Nilanjan
Mukhopadhyay gives an account of the causes of communal riots in India. He
observes that most of the communal riots in India between Muslims and Hindus
were the result of religious processions passing by a mosque in accompaniment
of loud music. The earliest such riots occurred in Salem of Tamil Nadu. As a
result of the riots, dead bodies of children were seen in streets. The
nationalist Hindu leader Balgangadhar Tilak was instrumental in the popularisation
of the practice of playing loud music during Hindu festival Ganesh Chaturthi.
He converted Ganesh Chaturthi into a public event and it soon became an Utsav,
an extravagant public event. After the Hindu-Muslim riots in Bombay in 1893,
Tilak became more aggressively anti-Muslim and tried to do away with the
Hindu-Muslim bonhomie during festivals. Before the riots, Hindus would join
Muslims in Muharram with their own Taziyas. In 1984, Tilak called for
boycott of Muharram by Hindus and encouraged Hindus to celebrate Ganeshotsav
like Muharram.
The
practice of music-before-mosques was so widespread in pre-Independence and
post-Independence India that it inspired a research scholar of the United
States, Jullian Lynch to do his PhD on the topic.
He writes
that the founder of the RSS, Hedgewar also promoted the practice by breaching
an agreement on not playing music before mosques during Ganesh immersion. Thus,
music in religious processions was a demonstration of strength of Hindus. This
led to communal polarisation.
Therefore,
this tool of communal polarisation and show of strength has been resorted to by
the Hindutva brigade more passionately in the last few years. The latest trend
of Shobha yatras, which are not religious events have been promoted in order to
cause more communal confrontation by playing music before mosques before
mosques, particularly during namaz. Communal riots have occurred in Mumbai,
Khargone in Madhya Pradesh, Jahangirpuri in Delhi and Howrah in West Bengal in
the last year and this year. The violence in Nuh is the current example of
violence resulting from this practice.
Kanwar
Yatra, taken out in Sawan (rainy season) every year has been increasingly used
to foment trouble. Kanwar yatra has been taken up by a section of Hindus since
decades and it had been a low key affair in the past. But with rise in
religious passion, every religious practice has become an occasion to show
religious strength. This passion has gripped hitherto peaceful regions like Nuh
in Mewat. To cause discomfort and anxiety among Muslims, weapons and fire arms
are possessed by the participants. Then, the Muslims are accused of pelting
stones. Stone pelting triggers riots. The Muslims are blamed for riots. They
are arrested. Currently, Muslim accused's houses are also bulldozed while real
killers go scot-free.
Therefore,
this practice of playing music in religious processions while passing through
has been a cause of riots in India. Instead of showing restraint and doing away
with the practice of playing music before mosques during Hindu festivals, it is
being promoted. Nowadays, processions are taken though new routes on which a
sizeable Muslim population is located.
For
centuries, Hindus and Muslims of India have celebrated each other’s' festivals
together. They respected each other's religious sensibilities. They avoided
practices that hurt the religious sentiments of each other. But off late, this
respect for religious sentiments has been lost due to political aspirations of
religious groups and leaders like Tilak and Hedgewar, as Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay
finds out. An experimented pattern has been studied. A religious procession on
a Hindu festival is taken out through a Muslim locality. The members of the
religious procession possess weapons and fire arms. While passing through the
Muslim area, the members shout provocative slogans. The Muslims react by
pelting stones. Riots start and the Muslim locality bears the brunt of the
violence. They are killed and injured. Next, the police action begins. Muslims
are arrested. Their houses are bulldozed. Since, the people in the procession
are outsiders, they are not identified and roam free. Therefore, the rising
trend of music-before-mosques is increasingly becoming a cause for concern for
Muslims of the country.
------
How
a 150-Year-Old Ploy to Incite Religious Violence Is Still Used in India
By
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay
06/AUG/2023
Just one
question came to my mind while scrolling down social media posts on the
violence in Haryana’s Nuh district triggered by the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad-Bajrang Dal procession on Monday: For how many more decades will these
people use the same tactics ad nauseam – playing music before mosques and in
predominantly Muslim localities?
The
question cropped up because of the long history of the issue. It is close to
150 years since music in front of mosques became a source of conflict between
Hindus and Muslims.
Researchers
have established that music emerged as a recurring source of communal violence
during the colonial period, especially in the 1860s. Although their numbers
were minuscule when compared to today’s figures, newspaper readers from the
last decades of the 19h century were conversant about the phenomenon of
‘music-before-mosque riots’.
Julian
Lynch – musician, composer, ethnomusicologist, researchers, and music teacher
all rolled into one – wrote that this category of riots, was the result of
“deliberate display of a musical procession, usually accompanying a Hindu
festival, in front of a Muslim place of worship, causing offence and, very
often, violence.”
He would
know this issue very well having completed a PhD thesis from the Department of
Anthropology with focus on Ethnomusicology at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison in 2020. He spent well over a decade researching the subject.
Social
media posts on the violence in Nuh underscored that the acts of provocation
were justified by asserting that Hinduism calls for music being performed on
virtually every occasion.
While
dwelling on this cause of conflict between Hindus and Muslims, Mahatma Gandhi
observed: “Not a single Hindu religious ceremony can be performed without the
accompaniment of music.”
In the
immediate context, neither the VHP-Bajrang Dal’s insistence to take out a
Shobha Yatra on the occasion of Sawan Somvar (Monday in the Hindu month of
Sawan) nor the Ram Navami processions earlier in April – which triggered
communal violence in seven states during the Ramzan – were religious ceremonies
per se.
Instead,
music on such occasions is used to display Hindu might. It is a vehicle to
establish what Lynch calls, the community’s “domination and territoriality”.
The message
to Muslims when passing through Muslim ilaaqe or localities, what academic
Nazima Parveen detailed in her in-depth book, Contested Homelands: Politics of
Space and Identity, is that of majoritarian hegemony.
Music
played by Hindus in processions, like in Nuh, is not a mark of devotion.
Instead, the objective is to convey Hindu power to march-in, at will, into
Muslim-dominated localities and play music outside mosques only to slight them.
This is done with full knowledge that Islam considers music as morally improper
and thereby proscribes its performance.
The
intention was to provoke and cock a snook at Muslims in the late nineteenth
century. It remains the same even now.
In his
thesis and a short paper that preceded it, Lynch drew attention to an 1882
report from Salem in Tamil Nadu by an anonymous correspondent of The Pioneer.
The reporter visited the city after a violent series of riots triggered by
music played by those in the procession as they passed by the mosque.
The
newspaper article mentioned bodies of infants, men and women – all Muslim,
strewn in the locality. Their houses and the mosque were burning or “razed to
the ground… There were corpses on all sides”. The unnamed reporter also saw
“dead pigs thrown in with the corpses of Muhammadan children.”
These stray
incidents became part of the emerging Hindu nationalistic toolkit in the 1890s
with Bal Gangadhar Tilak consciously converting Ganesh Chaturthi from being “a
devotional festival celebrated in honour of the god Ganesh… to a public
spectacle with strong political motivations.” This happened in 1894, a year
after the 1893 Bombay riots.
These riots
between Hindus and Muslims were triggered in August that year when “Hindu
ritual music” was played while Muslims offered the Friday afternoon namaz.
Lynch wrote that this incident “prompted particularly fervent editorializing
from the Marathi-language newspaper, Kesari, especially from the publication’s
founder, Brahmin leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak.”
In less
than two months, Tilak and other Brahmin leaders of the Bombay Presidency began
planning the “grand reinvention” of Ganesh Chaturthi.
In 1894,
when the festival was first celebrated as planned, it effectively converted a
modest private observance and localised collective immersions into a very
public and more extravagant ‘event’. The celebrations have become more
ostentatious with time as new features got added.
Until 1893,
Hindus and Muslims used to celebrate festivals with one another. Hindus joined
the Muharram festivities and contributed money to local groups besides offering
their services as musicians for which they were paid. Tilak called for the
boycott of Muharram by Hindus.
Lynch
wrote: “The anti-Muslim undercurrents of the public Ganesh Chaturthi found more
overt expression in Tilak’s calls in 1894 for Hindus to boycott celebrations of
Muharram.”
He also
cited an 1895 government report that stated that there had been “more Hindu
than Muhammadan Tabuts, and on the last day (the day of immersion) by far the
greater part of the procession was entirely Hindu”.
Tilak’s
anger was because Muslims had forgotten their “long-standing friendship” and
“began a regular campaign of harassing Hindu religious mendicants.”
The
colonial regime got the opportunity they sought to divide the people and
tighten their grip. The Public and Judicial Department felt that the 1894
Ganpati festival would serve “as a counter blast to the Muharram.”
Lynch was
of the opinion that a “crucial aspect of Tilak’s marketing of Ganeshotsav as a
replacement for Muharram involved the design of key elements in the festival to
directly mimic those of Muharram.” This included music and dancing.
The methods
succeeded and like the Ganesh Chaturthi, the Durga Puja in Bengal also was
converted from being a mainly a domestic affair to public pujas in community places.
Riots
between Hindus and Muslims became a recurring phenomenon and this faultline
became visible in Nagpur too, the eventual seat of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh (RSS).
In 1923,
its eventual founder, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar declared his intention to breach
a 1914 agreement of not playing music in front of mosques during the Ganesh
immersion procession at the end of the festival.
For him,
the right to play music was not a trivial matter but a manifestation of ‘Hindu
strength’. When the local administration clamped an embargo on playing music,
Hedgewar convinced local Hindu leaders to postpone the immersion of Ganesh
idols that year.
The
decision and an effort to play music in front of mosques was prevented by the
administration which led to a protest. In the annals of the RSS, this agitation
is called the Dindi Satyagraha, referring to a group, or dindi, singing songs –
ostensibly devotional but acting to create confrontation.
Reports
mention that B.S. Moonje was the satyagraha’s chief planner and Hedgewar was
the “stormtrooper.” More than half a decade later, Moonje would visit Italy,
meet Benito Mussolini and visit numerous fascist training centres. On his
return he spoke about replicating several facilities he saw in Italy.
These
communal clashes continued in Nagpur and in September 1925, Hedgewar
established the RSS. In many ways, ‘music-before-mosque’ was one of the primary
reasons that eventually led to the formation of the RSS.
In time,
the music-before-mosque changed, like in 1989 in Bhagalpur, slogans were
shouted in front of a mosque during that year’s Shila Yatra when specially
consecrated bricks were transported to Ayodhya.
This led to
one of the worst communal riots engulfing almost the entire district. Several
dossiers can be compiled of instances when the Sangh parivar organisations
forced communal violence with the same tactics.
And now, as
the events in Nuh show, the nearly 150-year-old ploy is still being used.
----
Nilanjan
Mukhopadhyay’s latest book is The Demolition and the Verdict: Ayodhya and the
Project to Reconfigure India. His other books include The RSS: Icons of the
Indian Right and Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times.
Source: How
a 150-Year-Old Ploy to Incite Religious Violence Is Still Used in India
URL: https://newageislam.com/interfaith-dialogue/music-mosque-tool-incite-communal-violence/d/130435
New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism