Reading the Future of Hindu India From the Accounts of its Muslim Chroniclers
To read tea leaves, boil water first.
Let this be said, then, once and for all. India is a Hindu State.
Every Hindu in this country of 1.36 billion people knows this in their heart. Every Muslim in this country of 1.36 billion people knows this in their heart as well.
Do we have to fight over it?
India became a Hindu nation the day India’s first deputy prime minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, committed the nation to erecting the seventh temple of Somnath on November 13, 1947 – a good 1,200 years after it was first demolished by the Arab emir of Sindh in 725 CE, well within a century of the passing away of the prophet of Islam.
This confirmation of the symbol of a resurrected Hindu state was endorsed by the stalwarts of Independent India.
Among them was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, father of the nation, who was keen to usher in the age of Ram Rajya, in adoration of a king to whom yet another temple is rising to the sky.
Gandhi endorsed Patel’s idea of re-erecting Somnath, its foundation stone was laid by the Republic’s first President, Rajendra Prasad, and work on its construction was initiated by yet another member of Jawaharlal Nehru’s first cabinet, K M Munshi.1
When you wake up to Somnath’s importance in Indian history, you realise that whatever has happened ever since, under the veil of secularism, has merely been a game of light and shade, in which an otherwise complacent nation, smarting under the wound of Partition, rested and agitated, loved and hated, in alternate bouts of peace and turmoil.
Seventy years since Somnath’s resurrection, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is only river boarding the saffron torrent that has, so far, proceeded at glacial pace.
Cut to 2014.
If the 16th Lok Sabha poll was only a theatrical unfurling of the saffron sail, the 17th general election of 2019 was a confirmation that the ship was firmly in high water.
Still two years later, there is no going back now. No matter how big the storm surges appear in the distance.
The Cow, Doklam, Pulwama, Balakot, Ram Mandir, Article 370, CAA, Shaheen Bagh, Depsang, Love Jihad Law, Tandav and the tractor carnival planned for this morning in the 70th year of the Republic, are all unequivocal confirmations of this altered reality. And such confirmations are absolutely legit in a boisterous, vibrant and flourishing democracy. Thank you!
You don’t have to be a saffron flag-bearer, a presiding Hindu bigot, a blind devotee or a cyber pawn in a multi-pronged social media onslaught on the hearts and minds of citizens to put this moment in history on pen and paper. All you need is to wake up and smell the wind in Delhi’s dense, cold winter morn.
For, if you read history, the way history’s greatest storytellers have recounted their tales, you will learn that through its 5,000-year long and eventful narrative, India has always remained a Hindu state, except for a brief interregnum of 800 years, when much of the land between the Oxus and the Lohit rivers, and vast swathes beyond the Vindhyas became avowedly Islamic, confirmed by successive caliphs in Baghdad and Constantinople and the grand muftis of Mecca.
Why, even after the last big Islamic War of 1857, when this land passed under the Crown in England, the muftis of Mecca continued to certify India an Islamic State (Dar-ul-Islam).2 Strangely, the Hindus never drafted this version of history.
Because…
They did not believe in history.
And they did not call themselves Hindus.
And they never quite called this land of theirs, Hindustan.
Home, to them, was where the hearth was.
Des, to them, was their village.
The rest were outlanders or pardesi, never mind their colour, caste, community or creed.
That was till the Muslims started calling the Hindus Hindus.
And so, the first draft of the history of Hindus came to be written. Starting with one of Islam’s greatest chroniclers and the official historian of Mahmud of Ghazni, abu raihan al-Biruni (973-1050 CE), that story found its culmination in one of Islam’s greatest nation builders, Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876-1948).
And between the two of them, the ‘History of Othering’ moulded into shape over 900 years.
Wrote Biruni in his voluminous tome, Tahqiq ma li-l-Hind-min maqulah maqbulah, i.e., The book confirming what pertains to India, whether rational or despicable: ‘(They are) suspicious of foreigners, not just Muslims… after suffering waves of destructive attacks on many of its cities, and enslavement of numerous Hindus.’3
The second confirmation came 250-years later from one of Islam’s greatest poets and philosophers, Amir Khusrau (1253-1325). In his Khaza in al-futuh, Khusrau refers to Hindus as ‘fara inat al-fur (Pharaohs of infidelity) and hunud but-parast (idol worshippers),’ before going on to inform us ar ‘tufan-I khun-I an napakan khali-i-an-zamin-ra pak bi-shust (the Sultan washed the earth clean with a flood of these impure people’s blood and sent countless infidels to hell.)’4
So, how did the Hindu, ‘the other,’ respond to the ‘significant other, the Muslim?
History has very few markers to that question. For all the othering heaped upon him, the Hindu never quite called the Muslim a Muslim, choosing instead to taunt him by his race or tongue: Turushka, Turk, Mlechha, Yavana, Hun, Saka and even Arab all of whom, alongside the Hindu, belonged to one big family.
Inspired by a Vedic dictum Vasudaiva Kutumbakam (The world is a family), the Hindu went on to recite a verse from the Maha Upanishad:
‘One is a relative, the other stranger,
Say the small minded.
The entire world is a family,
Live the magnanimous
Be detached,
Be large-hearted
Lift up your mind, enjoy
The fruit of Brahmanic wisdom.’5
And he even went on to honour the Sultan as the embodiment of divinity.6
Which is possibly why, even at the height of Hindavi Swaraj through most of 18th century when the Maratha flag was planted from Multan to Madurai, the Hindu took care to respect the integrity of the grand old Mughal in Delhi, preserving the dignity of the State that presided as suzerain over the Peshwa in Poona.
So who, then, is this Hindu, really?
Al-Biruni gives us a clue:
He was a man of ‘philosophy, science and mathematics.’ The Muslim liberally borrowed his teachings and carried them all the way to the library of Baghdad, in the wake of Biruni’s sojourn, without a hint of protest from the pundit.
The Hindu was also what the Khaliji-era poet laureate, Khusrau, came to describe thus:
‘Poets, composers and singers rise from this land
As abundantly and as naturally as the grass
How great is this land which produces men
Who deserve to be called men!
Intelligence is the natural gift of this land,
Even the unread are as good as scholars
There cannot be a better teacher than the way of life of the people
It is this which enlightens the masses. It is a gift of the Almighty!
This is very rare in other countries
It is the effect of the cultural environment of this land …
If perchance any Iranian, Greek, or Arab comes by
He will not have to ask for anything
Because they will treat him as their own.
They will play an excellent host and win his heart!
Even if they indulge in humour with him
They also know how to smile like a flower.’7
It is against this eclectic backdrop of history that days before Independence in August 1947, the Indus Valley Civilisation was carved out into Muslim Pakistan and the nationhood of the Hindus, by the pen stroke of one Cyril Radcliffe, who had never before set sail east of Paris.
Much of that story, its several versions, its aftermath, and several versions of its aftermath, in various shades of light and shadow, have been recounted to this day of the 70th anniversary of our Republic.
And so has the Hindu, once and forever defined as the Hindu by the Muslim, now defined a Muslim, the other.
Take away the Muslim from the Hindu and we are left with no this without that!
Why then, must we fight?
Why then, must this family of one and all (vasudaiva kutumbakam) rupture once more from within to erect more walls within walls?
How then, must we explain the lynching by cow vigilantes, the national registry of citizens, and the citizenship amendment act, the constant pushing of a community within its ghetto, and midnight arrests on grounds of who they wish to marry?
How then, must we explain the Ram Mandir that must surpass the dazzle of Somnath?
How then, must we put in context the alienation of Muslims in India who chose not to stray over the border at Partition, either because of the force of circumstance or because of their faith in who we were — or because of both?
How can we as a nation let our people, our significant other, feel ‘let down?’
Hinduism has no answer to this paradox because, to begin with, there is really no Hindu, and certainly no Hindu without the Muslim.
Our most sacred texts make no distinction between ‘this and that.’ Through history, and mythology preceding that history, the sacred geography of India has been a playground of the divine and the devious, where everyone gets to retire to the stands happily ever after, rested in the belief: I am That!
The way out of our present identity crisis created by theopolitical extremism is to be found in the history of early Islam. In 627 CE, in an act of The Prophet’s final sovereignty over Medina, where he lived in exile, up to 400 men of the Jewish tribe of Qureyz were slaughtered and buried in a trench; their women and children made slaves, some of them sold in return for horses and arms in Najd; everything the Qureyz owned — houses, date orchards, personal property —was divided among the faithful. There was no one left to agitate ‘Why?’
Historians have wished away that act of ruthlessness as ‘collateral damage’ provoked by Muslim anti-Semitism and Jewish Islamophobia.
Every leader who seeks to bring about a ‘civilisational transformation’ of his society resorts to such solipsistic argument, the chroniclers of civilisation have argued. They justify the need for the ‘hard line’ to establish authority and cede long-term ‘concessions’. 9
Narendra Modi is no different.
When you read the tea leaves first, what’s happening in India today seems to fall perfectly in place with history. But the larger point is that since Asoka’s slaughter in Kalinga and subsequent change of heart, the History of the Hindus provides no such space for statecraft.
Since time immemorial, the dharma of this land has been established on the firm ground of compassion, the Sanskrit word for which is Go.
And through centuries, that go has metaphorically transcended into the Sun, the Cow, and the Gomukh out of which flows the sacred Ganga, in which everybody gets to wash his misdeeds clean, irrespective of class, caste, creed or colour.
You get a confirmation of that compassion in the story of Muhammad as well.
Riding into his birthplace, Mecca, for the last time on 11 January, 630 CE, at the head of 10,000 strong militia, to secure the allegiance of his long-time rival, abu-Sufyan and the clan of Quraish, the Prophet publicly forgave his bete noire and Sufyan’s wife, Hind, for her perceived atrocities on the believers.
As Muhammad’s biographer Lesley Hazelton puts it: ‘He did not see this as a conquest where the winner takes all, but rather as reuniting of what should never have been divided.’
Taking a leaf out of history’s notebooks, we the people of Hind, that is Bharat, are entitled to a coalition of the willing, not condemned to a life of enforced subjugation.
And it is this power of wisdom that must be the guiding wisdom of power.
The author does not subscribe to any religion or dogma. He does not believe in the nation state.
References:
1 Somnatha: The Many Voices of a History by Romila Thapar.
2 Indian Musalmans by WW Hunter, 23, 1871.
3 Alberuni’s India translated by Edward C Sachau, 1888.
4 India’s Islamic Traditions (711-1750) edited by Richard M Eaton.
5 Baburnama, quoted in India’s Islamic Traditions (711-1750).
6 Hinduism: Path of Ancient Wisdom by Hiro G Badlani.
7 Pushp Prasad, Sanskrit Inscription of Delhi Sultanate, 1191-1526, quoted in Richard M Eaton’s India in the Persianate Age.
8 Translated by Syed Nadim Ali Rezavi.
9 The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad by Lesely Hazleton.