Being a Hindu: The history and politics of how Sanatana Dharma survived centuries of repression, invasion and persecution Part-2
- In History & Culture
- 10:14 PM, Nov 23, 2021
- Dr. Mrittunjoy Guha Majumdar
A Crimson Crescent?
India has seen a number of waves of invasions over the millennia. Be it the Greeks, the Scythians or the Yuezhi, invaders struck the Indian subcontinent and often got assimilated into the civilizations preceding their advent. That is till the rule of Harshavardhan and the Rajput feudal lords thereafter. The Muslim conquest of the Indian subcontinent began with the conquest of Sindh by Muhammad bin Qasim and his Arabic army in 712 AD. Qasim regarded polytheists such as Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains as dhimmis (literally ‘protected person’) but also made them pay jizya (per capita yearly tax imposed on non-Muslims) for religious freedom. This would be the first of many such instances in the subsequent centuries of such an imposition. The imposition, however, was only the step after the subjugation of native people of an area; what preceded it was absolute carnage.
Historian K. S. Lal in his book Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India claims that the population of the India subcontinent went from about 200 million in 1000 AD to about 170 million in 1500 AD[26]. This was primarily due to killings, deportations, dissemination, wars, and famines. American historian, writer and philosopher Will Durant calls the Muslim conquest of India[27] PROBABLY THE BLOODIEST STORY IN HISTORY.
Interestingly, even those Hindus who converted to Islam were not immune from persecution, with them being part of a certain racial hierarchy in India as mentioned by political thinkers such as Ziauddin al-Barani in the Fatawa-i Jahandari[28], with this being something against the fundamental tenets of Islam, which knows no hierarchy in front of Allah. The destruction of temples and educational institutions led to a widespread decline in Hindu education, although Brahmanical education still received the occasional patron in the likes of Akbar (with his patronage of a Vrindavan temple). The period from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries were dark times for Santana Dharma. Some people still persisted, still fought on.
Bukka Raya I, a founder of the Vijayanagara Empire, took steps to rehabilitate Hindu religious and cultural institutions which had suffered a setback under Muslim rule. Most of the great temples in North India were destroyed and no great temples were built under Muslim rulers. Even those that were lacked in imagery since that was not allowed in Islam. The Somnath temple was sacked and resurrected around 17 times (going on to show the grit and resilience of the Hindus who faced such violence and aggression)! This grit and resilience is further seen when one observes that though Sanskrit and research on Hindu philosophy faced a phase of struggle, with Muslim rulers often destroying well-established and well-known educational institutions, the traditional educational institutions in villages continued as before in vernacular regional languages based on Sanskrit, and a lot of Vedantic literature are said to have been translated into these languages between 12th to 15th centuries [29-31]!
The Islamic invaders in mainland India began to arrive with the arrival of Mahmud of Ghazni in the eleventh century. His campaigns across the Gangetic plains are often remembered for the amount of plundering and destruction of temples that he carried out. Al-Utbi, Mahmud’s court historian, viewed Mahmud’s expeditions as jihad to propagate Islam [32-34]. Speaking of his campaign on Mathura, from which he obtained a loot of around 3 million rupees and over 5000 slaves[35], it is written:
Orders were given that all the temples should be burnt with naphthala and fire and levelled with the ground. The city was given up to plunder for twenty days. Among the spoil are said to have been five great idols of pure gold with eyes of rubies and adornments of other precious stones, together with a vast number of smaller silver images, which, when broken up, formed a load for more than a hundred camels.
Mahmud of Ghazni sacked the second Somnath Temple in 1026 AD and destroyed the famous Shiva-lingam of the temple[36]. He organised regular raids and expeditions against members of the Rajput confederacy he defeated between the coalition he fought on his Mathura campaign of 1018 AD to the Kachh campaign against Bhima I in 1025 AD. Alberuni, a historian who accompanied Mahmud of Ghazni, described the conquests in North-Western India[37]:
Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed there wonderful exploits, by which the Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions, and like a tale of old in the mouth of the people.
He goes on to state that the civilisation of the scattered Hindus declined and retreated from the North West [37, 38]
This is the reason, too, why Hindu sciences have retired far away from those parts of the country conquered by us, and have fled to places which our hand cannot yet reach, to Kashmir, Benares, and other places.
The subsequent raids by Muhammad Ghori were no less brutal. He is said to have destroyed 27 temples within Qila Rai Pithora, the fort of Prithviraj Chauhan, after the latter’s defeat in the Second Battle of Tarain in 1193. Ghori, along with Quṭb al-Dīn Aibak, later built the Quwwat al-Islam mosque using the remains of these temples. You can still see the remnants of these temples in the pillars of the mosque, with defaced figures and figurines of gods and goddesses and other celestial beings.
This persecution continued under the Delhi Sultanate after Aibak too. The Mamluk king Balban was said to have been as violent. In suppressing interminable revolts around Delhi he massacred so many people that some writer note that this caused rivers of blood to flow all around. Mangled dead bodies piled up in every town and the whole region emitted an unbearable stench. The Khiljis were no less. There was religious violence in India during the reign of Alauddin Khalji [39, 40]. Alauddin’s army commanders such as Malik Kafur, Nusrat Khan, Ulugh Khan and Khusro Khan attacked, killed, looted and enslaved non-Muslim people from all over India [41, 42]. The Khalji dynasty’s court historian Amir Khusrow writes in the Táríkh-i ‘Aláí [43],
The [Muslim] army left Delhi … [in] Nov. 1310 … After crossing those rivers, hills and many depths, … elephants [were sent], … in order that the inhabitants of Ma’bar might be aware that the day of resurrection had arrived amongst them; and that all the burnt Hindus would be despatched by the sword to their brothers in hell, so that fire, the improper object of their worship, might mete out proper punishment to them. The sea-resembling army moved swiftly, like a hurricane, to Ghurganw. Everywhere, … the people who were destroyed were like trunks carried along in the torrent of the Jihun, or like straw tossed up and down in a whirlwind.
When this still did not subdue the spirit of the Hindus, and riots and mutinies by the Hindus erupted in various parts of the Sultanate, from Punjab to Gujarat to Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, these riots were crushed with mass executions, where all males above the age of 8 were seized and killed[44]. Alauddin’s general Nusrat Khan retaliated further against mutineers by seizing all children and women of the affected area and placing them in prison. In another act, he had the wives of suspects arrested, dishonoured and publicly exposed to humiliation[44].
It was not only the Muslim armies who acted as the aggressors. Even the court officials, muftis and kazis recommended violence and humiliation of the Hindu masses on religious grounds. Kazi Mughisuddin of Bayánah advised Alauddin in the following manner[45]:
keep Hindus in subjection, in abasement, as a religious duty, because they are the most inveterate enemies of the Prophet, and because the Prophet has commanded us to slay them, plunder them, and make them captive; saying—convert them to Islam or kill them, enslave them and spoil their wealth and property.
The Muslim army led by Alauddin’s famous general Malik Kafur pursued two violent campaigns in south India, between 1309 and 1311, against three Hindu kingdoms: Deogiri (in present-day Maharashtra), Warangal (in present-day Telangana) and Madurai (in present-day Tamil Nadu). Thousands of people were slaughtered. The Halebid temple was destroyed. Cities and villages were plundered. The loot from south India was so large that the historians of that era state that a thousand camels had to be deployed to carry it to Delhi[46]!
In the booty from Warangal was the Koh-i-Noor diamond that today sits atop the crown of Queen Elizabeth II[47]. In 1311, Malik Kafur entered the well-known Srirangam temple and massacred the Brahmin priests of the temple, who resisted the invasion for three days. Kafur then plundered the temple treasury, along with the storehouse, and desecrated and destroyed a number of religious icons and statues. Ulugh Khan would later invade Srirangam in 1323, and in a notorious act of brutality, have 12000 unarmed ascetics killed [48-53].
Next came the Tughlaqs. We find the systematic persecution of Hindus under the rule of the Tughlaq dynasty documented in the Tarikh-i-Firuz Shah, written during the reign of the third Tughlaq king Firoz Shah Tughlaq. It was common to capture and enslave Hindus. In fact, when Firoz Shah died, slaves in his service were killed en masse and piled up in a heap[54]! Hindus, including and particularly Hindu Brahmin priests, who refused to convert to Islam faced a terrible fate, as noted by Ziauddin Barani in his Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi[55]:
An order was accordingly given that the Brahman, with his tablet, should be brought into the presence of the Sultan … The true faith was declared to the Brahman and the right course pointed out. But he refused to accept it … The Brahman was tied hand and foot and cast into it [a pile of brushwood]; the tablet was thrown on the top and the pile was lighted … The tablet of the Brahman was lighted in two places, at his head and at his feet … The fire first reached his feet, and drew from him a cry, but the flames quickly enveloped his head and consumed him. Behold the Sultan’s strict adherence to law and rectitude.
Under Firoz Shah’s rule, Hindus were forced to pay the Jizya tax, were recorded as infidels and their communities monitored. Hindus who tried to erect a deity, build a temple or practise their religion in public such as near a kund (water tank) were arrested, brought to the palace and executed [56, 57]. Tughlaq wrote in his autobiography Futuhat-i Firoz Shahi[58]:
Some Hindus had erected a new idol-temple in the village of Kohana, and the idolaters used to assemble there and perform their idolatrous rites. These people were seized and brought before me. I ordered that the perverse conduct of the leaders of this wickedness be publicly proclaimed and they should be put to death before the gate of the palace. I also ordered that the infidel books, the idols, and the vessels used in their worship should all be publicly burnt. The others were restrained by threats and punishments, as a warning to all men, that no zimmi could follow such wicked practices in a Musulman country.
Timur, or Tamerlane as he is famously called in many parts of the world, invaded Delhi soon after. His invasion was marked by systematic slaughter and various other atrocities on a large scale, inflicted mainly on Hindus, who were enslaved or massacred[59-63]. Apparently, he massacred Indian Muslims too, just to punish the Delhi Sultanate for being too soft on the Hindus! Sharafuddin Yazdi describes the invasion in Zafarnama[64], as follows
[Timur’s] soldiers grew more eager for plunder and destruction … On that Friday night there were about 15,000 men in the city who were engaged from early eve till morning in plundering and burning the houses. In many places the impure infidel gabrs [of Delhi] made resistance … On that Sunday, the 17th of the month, the whole place was pillaged, and several places in Jahan-panah and Siri were destroyed. On the 18th the like plundering went on. Every soldier obtained more than twenty persons as slaves, and some brought as many as fifty or a hundred men, women and children as slaves out of the city. The other plunder and spoils were immense, gems and jewels of all sorts, rubies, diamonds, stuffs and fabrics of all kinds, vases and vessels of gold and silver … On the 19th of the month Old Delhi was thought of, for many infidel Hindus had fled thither … Amir Shah Malik and Ali Sultan Tawachi, with 500 trusty men, proceeded against them, and falling upon them with the sword despatched them to hell.
After Timur left, Delhi faced a period of a political vacuum and uncertainty. Up north, in Kashmir, encouraged by Islamic theologian Muhammad Hamadani, Sikandar Butshikan of the Shah Miri dynasty quickly acquired the title of but-shikan or idol-breaker, as destroyed ancient Hindu and Buddhist temples, desecrated their premises, demolished statues, damaged Hindu and Buddhist books and banned followers of Dharmic religions from prayers, performing arts and observation of their religious festivals [65-69].
In Delhi, the Sayyids and the Lodis who came to power continued the history of oppression of Hindus. From 1414–1423, the Muslim historian Yahya bin Ahmad records that the Islamic commanders “chastised and plundered the infidels” of Gwalior, Chandawar, Ahar, Bail, Khur, Kampila, Katehr, Seori, Etawa, Sirhind and Rahtors[70]. However, what is interesting to see is that in this period the violence was not one-sided, and the Hindus retaliated by forming their own armed groups. They attacked forts that had been captured by Muslims. For instance, in 1431, Jalandhar was retaken by Hindus and all Muslims inside the fort were put in prison, with bin Ahmad remarking on the arrest of Muslims by Hindus,
the unclean ruthless infidels had no respect for the Musulman religion
Religious violence and persecution continued during the reign of Bahlul Khan Lodi and Sikandar Lodi. The Sultanate witnessed the burning and killing of Hindus for their religion, in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal[71]. In Uttar Pradesh, a historian of Lodi dynasty times, described the state sponsored religious violence as follows,
He (Lodi) was so zealous of a Musulman that he utterly destroyed diverse places of worship of the infidels. He entirely ruined the shrines of Mathura, the minefield of heathenism. Their stone images were given to the butchers to use them as meat weights, and all the Hindus in Mathura were strictly prohibited from shaving their heads and beards, and performing ablutions. He stopped the idolatrous rites of the infidels there. Every city thus conformed as he desired to the customs of Islam.
Image source: Quora
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