SUDHAKAR RAJE
APROPOS The hate you give by Subhadra Sen Gupta (The Indian Express, 25 June 2017), she has been described at the end of the piece as a writer on Indian history. So it should be interesting to check how far history and her story are on the same page.
First of all, of course, the Mughal emperor Akbar, whom she “adores”. So here are a few authentic (though not exactly adorable) quotes :
□ “He (Akbar) was long ranked with Shahabuddin, Alauddin and other instruments of destruction, and with every just claim, like these he constructed a mumba (pulpit) for the Koran from the altars of Ekling.” (Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajputana, Vol. 1, p. 338.) Eklingji is the main deity of the Rajputs.
□ Akbar launched his campaign against Chitor in September 1567. When he captured the fort he ordered a general massacre of those inside, in which 8000 Rajputs were put to the sword. (Encounter with Islam by Itihas Bhushan Dr. S. D. Kulkarni, with Foreword by Justice BN Deshmukh, in which the former Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court wrote : “I have no doubt the entire approach…. exhibited in this volume is extremely rational, objective and faithful to history.” This book is volume 6 of the 18-volume Study of Indian History and Culture by Dr. Kulkarni.)
□ Chitor had to pay a heavy price for its independence. It is said that Akbar estimated the total of the Rajput dead by collecting the ‘sacred threads’ worn by high-caste Rajputs (Hindus). They weighed 74½ maunds of 8 lbs. – that is, about 30,000 dead. (SR Sharma, Mughal Empire in India, 8th ed. p. 123.)
Additionally there is an interesting angle to this Muslim ruler’s life-story : Akbar had employed a learned Mullah by name Abdul Kader, popularly known as Badauni, for doing translations from Arabic and Sanskrit works into Persian, and he also had frequent interactions with Hindu Sanyasis and Brahmins. What was the effect of these interactions and Sanskrit translations on Akbar ?
Badauni writes : “As history was read from day to day, His Majesty’s faith in the companions of the Prophet began to be shaken and the breach grew broader. The daily prayers, the fasts and prophecies were all pronounced delusions as being opposed to sense. Reason, not revelation, was declared to be the basis of religion” (Elliot and Dowson, Tarikh-i-Badauni, p. 524.) “Doubts accumulated upon doubts…. The ramparts of the….true faith were broken down, and in the course of 5 or 6 years not one trace of Islam was left in him.”. (Elliot and Dowson, Tarikh-i-Badauni, p. 527.) All in all, says Badauni, to Akbar Islam was taqlid (fake). (Tabaqat-i-Nasiri, Tr. Raverty, p. 82.)
So the question of questions : Was Akbar the Great a great Muslim ruler, or did he become great when “not one trace of Islam was left in him” ?
To proceed, this sweeping certificate : “The Mughals were pretty tolerant people”. Just a couple of examples should suffice to indicate the quality of this tolerance – Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb.
Shah Jahan was said to be a lover of fine arts, which could (or should) mean he was a person with refined sensibilities. And yet “he had ordered destruction of temples, forbidden Hindus to dress like Muslims, and prohibited the Hindu dead to be cremated near Muslim graveyards.” (SD Kulkarni, Encounter with Islam, p. 224.)
As for Aurangzeb, he was known as a very pious Muslim – so pious that he constantly kept counting the beads on his rosary. About Aurangzeb SR Sharma writes : His “bigoted policy….was deliberate and relentlessly systematic, (which) will be borne out by the following collocation of facts :
□ Wholesale destruction of Hindu temples.
□ Re-imposition of the hated Jazia.
□ Extraction of heavier customs duties from Hindus.
□ Dismissal of Hindus from services.
□ Prohibition of Hindu fairs.
□ Prohibition against the free exercise of their religious rites – Holi and Diwali.
□ Prohibition of wearing arms, fine dresses and riding by Hindus.
□ Prohibition of Hindu learning.”
(Mughal Empire in India, p. 277.)
The hateful Jazia made compulsory by Aurangzeb was a poll tax levied on Hindus because they were Zimmies or Dhimmies, that is, lowly non-citizens outside the pale of the ruling Muslim society. So they not only had to pay but had to suffer disgusting humiliation while paying. To quote from Dr. P. Saran’s Studies in Medieval Indian History : “….when the Zimmie comes to pay the Jazia he should keep standing while the collector is seated, and he must wear the distinctive dress prescribed for the Zimmies. During the process of payment, the Zimmie is seized by the collar and vigorously shaken and pulled about.” “….the Hindu, Khairajguzar, or payer of Jazia, is he who, should the collector choose to spit into his mouth, opens the same without hesitation so that the official may spit into it.” (p. 123, 141.)
Cut to modern times from medieval ages, and the writer is seen approvingly mentioning assorted Congress politicians writing books on history. The less said about them the better, for it would be difficult to imagine anyone more ignorant of Indian history than their vice-president. However, her statement “Maulana Azad wrote about the freedom movement” merits a close look. This “nationalist Muslim” face of the oh-so-secular Congress was at one with Gandhi in opposing the Partition of India. Gandhi was vehemently opposed to it – “over my dead body”, he had said –, but he was so focussed on driving the British out of India that he equated freedom with Muslim rule, which for him was Indian rule. The Maulana took this thinking to a significant tangent. In his view, Muslims ruled over the whole of India for 800 years, so after the British departed there was nothing wrong with Muslims again ruling over the whole of India.
What is not widely known is that this thinking on Maulana Azad’s part was rooted in his pre-Congress past. Writing in 1913 in Al Hilal, a journal of which he was the founder-editor, Azad had said Mussalmans need not join any party. They are the ones who, for centuries, made the world join their party and follow their path. They constitute the Party of God, Hizbullah. “Al Hilal calls upon Muslims never….to take lessons from the Hindus.” (BR Nanda, Gandhi, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1989 / 2002.)
Some notes of the Maulana’s lectures to the students of his school called Darul Irshad, quoted by Nanda in his book, also make significant reading : “The Koran forbade Muhammadans to remain in subjection. A country like India, which had once been under Muhammadan rule, must never give up, and it was incumbent on them to strive to regain their lost control…. Ten crores of Mussalmans were living in slavery; it was a disgreace.”
Not for nothing has Dr. SM Ikram in his book Modern Muslim India and the Birth of Pakistan (Renaissance Publishing House, Delhi, 1991) called the Maulana an apostle of pan-Islamism in modern Muslim India.
From “Muslim India” to Hindu India – to Sen Gupta’s book, in which, she says, “I have packed 5000 years of India’s history”. Here the question of questions : Did India have no history before 5000 years ? Is it her position that there was no Bharat War and both Krishna and Rama are figments of the (Hindu) imagination ? In that case the conclusion is unavoidable that not only eminent Sanskritists like Dr. NR Waradpande and prestigious cultural institutions like Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan but even encyclopaedias like Swami Harshanand’s A Concise Encyclopaedia of Hinduism, Vettam Mani’s Puranic Encyclopaedia and the cultural encyclopaedia in Marathi produced by the Government of Maharashtra (decades ago) are peddling falsehoods. For they all (plus quite a few others abroad) say the Bharat War took place in 3101 BC (i.e. 5100 BP, Before Present), when Krishna was alive, and Rama predated Krishna by about 600 to 800 years. And beyond that, was there no Vedic Civilization ? Of course it is the “in” thing with “Indian Intelligents” to dismiss the Veda as just a scripture, with no historical value. But even a Western Christian researcher like Gordon Brown begs to differ, for he writes in The Aryans. “This precious document (Rigveda) also provides precious historical data.”
The river Saraswati, praised in Rigveda as naditamé, mighty river, is dismissed as mythical, as it dried up and disappeared later due to, in scholarly opinion, tectonic upheavals. However, there is literary, archaeological, geological and hydrological evidence of its existence. Archaeologists CF Oldham and RD Oldham in 1872, Auriel Stein in 1940-41, Herbert Wilhelmy in 1969 as well as other explorers have identified as many as 2000 sites marking the course of Saraswati. Geologists VM Puri and BC Verma have stated that the present-day Tons river is the Saraswati in the upper reaches. Hydrologists Baldev Sahai, RK Sood and DP Agarwal and later the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre tested the aquifers in the underground course of the river and determined that the water was about 8000 to 14000 years old. The bottom-line : Antiquity, just because it is antiquity, need not be a myth.
In fact, concrete examples of Hindu antiquity even abroad can be cited. The ancient ruins in the English countryside known as Stonehenge are accepted by British historians as a 4000-year-old shrine of the Sun God, a Vedic deity – where the Sun Worship ritual is performed to this day. And in Anatolia (north Turkey) remains of a Hindu temple have been found at a site called Nevali Cori that have been dated to (at least) 7000 BC. Sanskritist Dr. Siddhartha visited this site.
Finally, some sweeping, derisive questions Sen Gupta asks :
□ Isn’t the Taj Mahal a Hindu temple ?
Response : Authors whose history of the times of Shah Jahan has been included in Elliot and Dowson’s Volume III do not refer to the construction of the Taj mahal. They note the building of the Red Fort. Also there is a curious reference to a large temple in Kanzul Mahfuz (Elliot and Dowson vol. VIII p. 38) : “In the city of Agra there was a large temple in which there were numerous idols…. It was the custom for the infidels to resort to this temple from far and near several times in each year to worship the idols.” History books today do not mention any such temple.
□ Didn’t Indian Rishis build an aeroplane ?
Response : In 1895 AD an Indian by name Shivkar Bapuji Talpade gave a flight demonstration on Chowpatty beach in Mumbai of an aeroplane he had constructed according to description in the Vedas. The demonstration was witnessed by the then Maharaja of Baroda State and was also reported in the press.
□ Aren’t the Aryans from India, and didn’t they conquer the Middle East ?
Response : In the first place there were no people called Aryans. The word Aryan is an Anglicisation of the Sanskrit word Arya, which means cultured. It never meant a particular race or caste. Currently the term Aryans is loosely and inaccurately used for ancient Indians.
On the historical level there were westward mass migrations of ancient Indians in the aftermath of three ancient wars – a war during the reign of king Māndhātā, an ancient ancestor of Rama, that took place around 7000 years BP, then Dāsharājnya, the “Battle of Ten Kings” described in Rig Veda, which was fought by Tŗtsu king Sudāsa around 6500 BP, and the Bharat (Kaurava-Pandava) War of 5100 BP. These migrants, who reached the Middle East in waves and established their kingdoms in the region, were known as Hittite, Mitanni, Cassite and Hurrite.
According to the Marathi encyclopaedia Maharashtriya Jnāna Kosh, in the Upanishad Īshāvāsyopanishad the word Asurya in the line asuryā nāma té lokā…. resembles Assyria, and can be considered the land of Asura-s. Will Durant and HR Hall share this view. Pococke says, “A system of Hinduism prevailed in the whole of Babylonian and Assyrian empires.”
The name / term Hittite is an Anglicised form of the name Khatti, which in turn is derived from the Sanskrit Kshatriya. The Hittite King Supliluliuma once made a treaty with Mitanni king Sati Vaja, in which Vedic deities Maruta, Agni and Surya were invoked. The Kassites also worshipped Vedic gods Indas (Indra), Surias (Surya) and Maruttas (Maruta). They even had a deity called Himalaya. The Kassites introduced the horse for chariots in the Middle East, which Childe calls “the Aryan animal par excellence.” The Mittani also worshipped Vedic gods Indra, Varuna, Mitra and Nāsatya. Commenting on their Sanskrit-derived gods’ and peoples’ names and numerals, Childe says, “….they are very nearly pure Indic.” The Hurrite had a god called Shakuntaya, which is almost the same as Sanskrit Shakunta, meaning a large bird or a bird of augury.
These are the “unproven facts” which Sen Gupta has questioned. All in all, her article is a dressing-down of “historians of the right”. Well, “Right” has two antonyms – Right versus Left, and Right versus Wrong. Maybe in the area of history-writing both antonyms of Right are synonyms of each other.