Authors: Patrick French
Each group thus identified is in fact a majority in its respective system of categorization, and their common characteristics can be taken to be important, depending on the context. In order to attach immense significance to the fact that Hindus constitute a majority group in Indian society in one particular system of classification, the priority of that religion-based categorization over other systems of classification would have to be established first.
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This is the logic of the clever schoolboy, and forgets the reality of how people live and think. It forgets the sentiments of the individual. In any village in rural India, you would find men and women with a stronger attachment to their household and family rituals, or to Ram, Murugan or a
non-Hindu deity, or only to the ancient distinctions and prejudices of their community, than to the knowledge that they “do not work in the organized industrial sector.” A powerful attachment to religion remains at the heart of how most people go about their day, and it is by no means exclusive to Hindus. Rather, the practice of religion is integrated, almost casually, into nearly every aspect of life.
The Indus Valley civilization, which began more than 4,000 years ago and can be seen in archaeological remains in India and Pakistan, has an atavistic link to modern Hinduism. Quite how close the connection might be is debated, since its surviving tablets, seals, buildings and figurines are ambiguous, and the script of the Indus Valley has yet to be plausibly deciphered. If or when this happens, perhaps after the unearthing of more inscriptions, ideally in the form of a “Rosetta Stone” with parallel text in a known language, things will become clearer. Many rediscovered items from ancient times appear to echo familiar objects. The representation of a seated figure resembling Shiva, the stone carvings of “priest-kings,” the fine bronze image of a dancing girl with bangles up to the top of her arms and engraved symbols of a bull, these all give the impression of links to contemporary Hindu imagery. The large and beautifully constructed ritual bathing tank at the centre of the Indus Valley city of Mohenjo-daro looks like the ritual bathing tanks still found beside most temples today. Against this is an argument proposing that other ancient civilizations also worshipped animals, or a combination of gods, beasts and priests. For many Hindus, however, the links to the Indus Valley seem unmistakable.
Some scholars have used obvious uncertainty about what happened long ago to deduce there may have been no connection at all. So for Wendy Doniger, the tank at Mohenjo-daro perhaps had no ritual purpose, and its existence proves only that the people of the Indus Valley civilization “liked to bathe, just to get clean or to cool off on hot days or to splash about, same as we do.” Under such an interpretation, there may have been no “theocratic elite” in this highly structured and carefully laid out Indus Valley city—one of the most sophisticated early cities ever discovered. Why should “enforced dogma” have been mandated by their rulers? “Is it possible that this was the first secular state, anticipating the European Enlightenment by 4,000 years? Could they have been more like protoatheists than protoyogis?” The structure presumed to be a “college of priests” might have been nothing of the sort: “Well, it’s a big building, true, but why couldn’t it be a dorm, or a hotel, or a hospital, or even a brothel?”
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Questions like this owe more to the exigencies of American academia than to close observation
or probability. They are an example of a scholarly tendency to write about India, and particularly about Hinduism, in a way that would not be tried when writing about Christianity or Islam. Indeed the blanket title of Doniger’s book,
The Hindus
, is hard to imagine transposed to
The Christians
or
The Muslims
.
Whether viewed through the lens of Hindutva or the lens of Western academic tradition, the fluid nature of Hinduism means its particularities will inevitably be much debated. The teaching of India’s history is a matching dispute. The discussion about how best to understand the past is ever running, and the usual account of this debate quotes examples from textbooks used in schools run by combative Hindu organizations. These are often outlandish and are more about wishful thinking than about history.
Ithihas Gaa Rahaa Hai
—“History Is Singing”—was a Class 5 textbook used in private RSS schools in the north. It suggested among other things that the first inhabitants of China were Indian Rajputs, and that Adolf Hitler had “lent dignity and prestige to the German government” and “instilled the spirit of adventure in the common people.”
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The more respectable textbooks produced by NCERT (the National Council of Educational Research and Training, a body appointed by the central government) were, however, until recently, a long way from neutral, even if they had fewer flights of fantasy. Bipan Chandra’s standard
Modern India
offered a Marxist historiography, or as he put it: “emphasis on forces, movements and institutions rather than on military and diplomatic events and … political leaders.”
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A later edition of the book published when the BJP was in power developed this approach in a new way, and offered a partial version of history. The “official policy” of “the Britishers” from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards had been “to break Hindu–Muslim unity.” Unconnected activities were linked in a chapter on armed uprisings which asserted that the Wahabi revival of the late nineteenth century was “socialist” and that all violent movements in India had “by their unselfish struggle wanted to awaken their countrymen against the atrocities of the British.” Subhas Chandra Bose, who attempted to raise an army with Nazi Germany and Japan’s help during the Second World War, was placed “among the front-ranking leaders of the world” and declared “immortal.”
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Historical films, in various regional languages, were for many people their prime source of knowledge about the past. Just as Abhishek Bachchan extolled the joys of capitalism in
Guru
in 2007, films during the years of socialist stagnation looked back with anger at the previous few hundred years. From the 1960s, the depiction of the British empire in India became
harsher. The Britisher was a stock villain, often played by one of a handful of European actors. In the 1985 movie
Mard
—“The Man”—featuring Amitabh Bachchan as the hero, the opening sequence shows soldiers carrying treasures from a seaside fort. “The atrocities of the British hadn’t reduced,” comes the voice-over. “They also took up looting.” The viceroy, Lord Curzon, the author of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, General Dyer, and “Simon”—presumably Sir John of the Simon Commission—discuss what to do with a group of corralled natives. (The fact the three men were in India at different times and had almost no connection with each other was not important.) Curzon, chomping on a cigar, gives the order: “Simon, include their names in the martyrs.” Two mounted machine guns open fire on the crowd. As the imperialists try to flee in a light aeroplane with their riches, the valiant local king, Raja Azad Singh, pursues the taxiing plane on horseback, manages to lasso the tail, drags it back and retrieves the treasure. Now the film can begin.
The debate about school textbooks was a microcosm of a larger intellectual rift. Nostalgic about the early days of nation building, and hoping to see a reflection of the Nehruvian vision, some preferred to stick to the safety of the secular version of the past propagated by the Congress party. This interpretation of history was at some distance from the popular understanding of early communal relations.
Take Mahmud of Ghazni: in the eleventh century, this Sunni warrior raided Kangra, Mathura and Kannauj in north India, captured 53,000 slaves and boundless booty and took them home to Afghanistan. He set off again for the great Hindu centre at Somanatha, where he smashed the Shiva lingam with his sword and looted gold, silver and jewels; the remains of the icon were carried back to Ghazni and incorporated into the steps of the new Jama Masjid, the Friday Mosque. So in popular legend he was the first in a procession of villainous Muslim raiders. Certainly India’s great surviving Hindu and Jain temple complexes are confined to areas the invaders did not reach, in the south and in outlying places such as Puri and Khajuraho, which suggests the destruction of idolaters’ temples was seen by a number of Muslim rulers as a necessary and even virtuous act. Reading contemporary accounts of the period suggests the repeated sacking of the north was done for more than purely strategic purposes, and that the conquest of territory and subsequent submission of the people were important. For example, Timur, the late-fourteenth-century conqueror who was said to have executed innumerable Hindus, wrote that when the wounded Raja of Jammu converted to Islam and ate the flesh of a cow “in the company of
Musulmans … I ordered my surgeons to attend to his wounds, and I honoured him with a robe and royal favours.”
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Other chiefs were executed by Timur for refusing to convert to Islam. These military campaigns did have an inescapably religious aspect.
So if successive Muslim raiders behaved in this way, were the corresponding Hindu, Jain and Buddhist kingdoms at the time peaceful? It seems not: the riches of Somanatha had already been targeted by local Hindu rulers, though they were concerned with wealth and control rather than with religious conversion (you cannot plausibly convert to Hinduism). Records abound of old regional wars, intrigue and conquest, sometimes using Muslim mercenaries, sometimes in alliance with another power against an opponent or even a friend. Long before the arrival of European adventurers, India was a mixed-up place. In the Deccan, soldiers included archers from Iraq and Turkestan, ex-slaves from the north and Sunni mercenaries from the east coast of Africa. In Cambay, in what is now Gujarat, fifteenth-century Arab ship owners ran the long-distance maritime trade peaceably in conjunction with high-caste Hindus. In Bengal a century later, the Muslim king entertained communities including Arabs, Persians and Abyssinians, who organized much of his administration. Duarte Barbosa, a Portuguese merchant who had travelled as far as the Philippines with Magellan, noted that Moors in Bengal wore white cotton turbans and rings set with rich jewels. “Every one has three or four wives or as many as he can maintain. They keep them carefully shut up, and treat them very well.”
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To a large extent, the many groups living in India remained discrete and did not intermarry even when their commercial or personal relations were good. Social functioning depended on an ability to navigate multifarious communities. Islam itself transmuted into new forms amid the indigenous Indian polytheists, who themselves worshipped god in innumerable shapes; north, east, south, west; Vishnu, Kali, Murugan, Shiva. Muslim shrines, famously that of Moinuddin Chishti in Ajmer, would be visited by Hindus in search of blessings; Muslim Rajputs from Mewat would recite the Hindu epic the Mahabharat. The Indian system expected—and expects—to find difference in close proximity to the majority. In a small area of any city, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Muslims, Christians and different varieties of Hindu might live close by, separate but together. There are few parts of India where the people can be described as homogeneous.
There was hardly an aspect of Indian history which did not open itself to irreconcilable argument; for the public, the debate was always running. For example, did the cruelty exacted by early Muslim invaders make Hindus
harbour deep and lasting wounds, and an antipathy towards their Muslim neighbours? There was no unified answer to this question. Given the variety of experience in so many different places, and the lack of any early unified Hindu identity, it seems doubtful. India was so big, and so disparate, that the communal—or political—response would have been different in each region. Hinduism was of its nature amorphous, lacking a founding text or ideology. Only in the eighteenth or nineteenth century did it become feasible to look at its history in a structured, common way. The British were always keen on classification, and as they attempted to fit the subcontinent within the bounds of their own logic with the help of censuses and gazetteers, it became possible for different communities in India to see fresh patterns in the distant past and to use them politically. Followers of diverse but connected religious traditions had been classified under the rubric of Hinduism (although one community in Bombay insisted on being registered as “Hindoo Musalmans”).
In school textbooks, controversial realities had for many years been replaced by harmonious stories of a united and syncretic subcontinental past. Romila Thapar’s
Medieval India
—which was aimed at twelve-year-old children—played down the acts of desecration by early Muslim invaders, and emphasized their finer qualities. Although Mahmud of Ghazni had admittedly made seventeen raids on India in twenty-five years in the early eleventh century, “in his own country he was responsible for building a beautiful mosque and a large library.”
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Even in works aimed at adults, this tendency continued. It was possible to read a book like Thapar’s
Somanatha
and be no wiser by the end about what had happened all those years ago. In her view, the stories of Mahmud of Ghazni raiding Somanatha in the eleventh century were exaggerations done by the chroniclers in order to impress their patrons. So the “accounts in the Turko-Persian sources are diverse and ambiguous” and do not allow “a monocausal explanation of the event.”
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Certainly there would have been exaggerations; it was part of the job if you were a court historian. The risk, though, if every event from the past was hedged by deconstructionist readings was that it became impossible to establish any kind of narrative in Indian history—and narrative, like nature, abhors a vacuum. In its place came eccentric readings, like the suggestion that the early Rajputs strode off to people China.
Since 2005, India’s school textbooks for history and other subjects have been through a revolution. The propaganda has been replaced by a nearly faultless attempt to make history interesting to children. Instead of leaning towards one ideology or another, the new books tried to put forward information
and make the reader think about it—a substantial move away from the rote learning that Indian schoolchildren refer to as “byhearting.”
India and the Contemporary World
, a Class 9 textbook, had activities like: