The ‘gyaanvaapi’ mosque and the Taj Mahal issues are challenging our secularism today. Germany traded peace with its past when the Nazi history became a part of its textbooks. After independence, our planners ignored thinkers like Sri Aurobindo who had a far more nuanced understanding of traditional Indian culture and also modern ideas like secularism or nationhood. The colonised west-looking politicians and the left-leaning academia could never fathom the nature of Indian past and simply imbibed western frameworks. This has only left a trail of disaster in our country where people stay divided in the name of anything and everything-mainly religion and caste.
A distorted writing of our history after independence failed to look at more profound solutions to deal with the clearly documented destroyed or altered temples. The philosophy of ‘secularism’ allowed the invaders to become benign and benevolent when all the invasions were brutal, inflicting great physical, cultural, and intellectual damage to India. Sadly, the solutions for preventing ‘communal strife’, for not offending the ‘minorities’, and encouraging ‘national integration’ was to dilute Hindu history and glorify or whitewash Islamic history.
To please or protect, our thinkers in all relevant fields inappropriately associated the present-day Muslims to the past Islamic invaders when it was quite unnecessary. The textbooks went against a huge body of contemporary descriptions of the invasions by chroniclers and historians. Our thinkers could have set a narrative by detaching the present Muslims from the crimes of the past Islamic invaders. In this far better method, there would have been no need to falsify our history and at the same time carry the country forward with better harmony. The dishonest approach caused immense damage to both Indian Hindus and Muslims. The Hindu now seethes in anger when he comes to know the historical narratives beyond the textbook teachings and the Muslim goes into a protective mode trying to defend the indefensible. Muslim intellectuals, especially the Aligarh school of historians, played a key role in this exercise.
Starting from early 8th century, the Islamic rulers successively attacked India till finally in 1210 CE, they settled in Delhi and became ‘natives’ as per our secular historical narratives. However, Muslim rule was a prototype of the succeeding British rule. No Muslim ruler ever learnt or spoke an Indian language except in the last days when Muslim power had almost collapsed. Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and later English had the pride of place. The positions of power and privilege were always for Muslims of Arabic, Turkish, Persian, or even Abyssinian descent, as they were for the white men. Their whole lifestyle had as little of the Indian in it as the lifestyle of the latter-day British. Muslim rulers of India perhaps have no connection with our Muslim brethren of today. Muslims, considering themselves as the descendants of those Muslim rulers, are only distorting history.
Muslim historians of medieval India left detailed accounts of destruction, killing, slavery, and iconoclasm which are available in original in libraries all over the world. Will Durant says that the Islamic conquest of India was the bloodiest in history. For example, Tuzuk-i-Baburi, Akbar-Nama, and Badshahnama respectively provides lurid details of Babur’s, Akbar’s, and Shah Jahan’s iconoclastic adventures and the killing of innocent citizens. Aurangzeb was the most brutal of them all. He was responsible for the destruction of temples in thousands perhaps as the listing in his official documents appear unending. ‘Hindu Temples: What happened to Them’ has a detailed and uncomfortable list of hundreds of mosques built on Hindu temples, based primarily on the books of Muslim historians of the period or inscriptions found on mosques.
India is a land of traditions and not religions. The characteristic feature of traditions is an ‘indifference to differences.’ Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and various others are simply traditions which the colonial understandings converted into proper religions. The post-independent thinkers did not question this misrepresentation and they perpetuated the story of many religions sometimes even conflicting with each other like in the western world. At a basic level, religions divide and traditions unite. The different traditions always evolve by mutual give and take. The solution to multi-culturalism in India was to ‘traditionalise’ the religions and not secularism; the latter applicable to the Christian European world at a specific time of its history. Presently, we are not only stopping this process but doing something more disastrous- to convert our traditions into religions and generating intolerance in the process.
We should be looking at solutions for the present scenario of claiming mosques and temples from this traditional philosophy. Mutual give and take and an honest acceptance of the past would be great starting points. But would our leaders (political and spiritual) and the intellectuals (academia, media, or judiciary) even try to break away from the colonial understandings of India in the first place? Muslims can well identify themselves with Indian traditions rather than trying to deny or justify the crimes done in the name of Islam by unrelated people. Muslim intellectuals choose mostly to defend the problematic documented history of the past. And as ‘Hinduism’ becomes more of a religion, the hard stances arise which makes the solutions difficult. There are many mosques which have a problematic history on the basis of documented records and archaeological findings but at some point, the Hindu and the Muslim groups have to sit together to decide which claims need acceptance and which to let go. The country deserves peace and the onus is on both Hindu and Muslim intellectuals; arguably a wee bit more on the latter who have largely remained mute to radical Islamic claims for decades.
RANDOM MUSINGS 