History hijacked by perverse politics

[Virendra]

Post by Kanchan Gupta in Coffee Break at Daily Pioneer
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History hijacked by perverse politics

What drove Muslim invaders to loot and destroy Hindu temples? Was it greed? Was it hatred of idol worship? Or was it contempt towards a conquered people? Ajmer offers possible answers.

First, some trivia for history buffs. James Tod joined the Bengal Army as a cadet in 1799, presumably looking for a life of adventure in the heat and dust of India. He swiftly rose through the ranks and, as a Lieutenant-Colonel, the records of the times tell us, provided valuable service to the East India Company. His uncanny ability to gather information helped the early colonisers smash the Maratha Confederacy. Later, his assistance was sought during the Rajputana campaign.

Colonel Tod, as he was known, was a natural scholar with an eye for detail and a curious mind. He was fascinated by the history of Rajputana and its antiquities as much as by its palace intrigues and the shifting loyalties of its rulers and their factotums. That fascination led to his penning two books that are still considered mandatory reading for anybody interested in the history of the Rajputs, although latter-day scholars of the Marxist variety would disagree with both the contents and the style, neither leavened by ideological predilections. The first volume of Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan was published in 1829 and the second in 1832, nearly a decade after he returned to Britain.

And now to present times. Thousands of people, Indians and foreigners, Muslims and non-Muslims, visit Ajmer every day to offer a chaadar at Dargah Sharif of Hazrat Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti, a shrine where all are welcome and every prayer is answered, or so the pious choose to believe. Many stay on to visit the other antiquities of Ajmer, among them a magnificent mosque complex which bears little or no resemblance to its name: 'Adhai Din Ka Jhonpra'.

People gawk at the columns and the façade intricately carved with inscriptions from the Quran in Arabic. They pose for photographs or capture the mosque's 'beauty' on video cameras and carry back memories of Islam's munificence towards its followers. Don't forget to visit 'Adhai Din Ka Jhonpra', they will later tell friends and relatives visiting Ajmer.

As for Indian Muslims who travel to Ajmer and see 'Adhai Din Ka Jhonpra', they would be tempted to wonder why similar mosques are no longer built, a wonderment that is only partially explained by the fact that sultans and badshahs no longer rule India. The crescent had begun to wane long before a derelict Bahadur Shah Zafar was propped up as Badshah of Hindoostan by the mutineers of 1857.

Such speculation as may flit through troubled minds need not detain us, nor is there any need to feel sorry for those who wallow in self-pity or are enraged by the realisation of permanent loss of power. A century and a half is long enough time to reconcile to the changed realities of today's Hindustan.

So, let us return to 'Adhai Din Ka Jhonpra' in Ajmer. Few who have seen and admired this mosque complex would be aware of Colonel Tod's description of it in the first volume of Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan: "The entire façade of this noble entrance "¦ is covered with Arabic inscriptions"¦ but in a small frieze over the apex of the arch is contained an inscription in Sanskrit." And that oddity tells the real story of 'Adhai Din Ka Jhonpra'.

This is no place of worship built over weeks and months for the faithful to congregate five times a day, it is a monument to honour Shahabuddin Muhammad Ghauri who travelled through Ajmer after defeating, and killing, Prithviraj Chauhan in the second battle of Tarain in 1192 AD. Stunned by the beauty of the temples of Ajmer and shocked by such idolatory, he ordered Qutbuddin Aibak to sack the city and build a mosque, a mission to be accomplished in two-and-a-half days, so that he could offer namaz on his way back.

Aibak fulfilled the task given to him: He used the structures of three temples to fashion what now stands as 'Adhai Din Ka Jhonpra'. Mindful of sensitivities, his men used their swords to disfigure the faces of figures carved into the 70 pillars that still stand. It would seem India's invaders had a particular distaste for Indian noses portrayed in stone and plaster.

The story of 'Adhai Din Ka Jhonpra' is not unique. Hindustan's landscape is dotted with mosques built on sites where temples stood, often crafted with material from the destroyed places of worship. Quwwat-ul Islam, the first mosque built in Delhi, bears testimony to the ruthless invader's smash-and-grab policy, as do the mosques Aurangzeb built in Kashi and Mathura, or the mosque Mir Baqi built at Ayodhya on the site Hindus believe to be, and revere as, Ram Janmasthan.

The pillars and inner walls of Babri Masjid, as the disputed structure was known till it came crashing down on December 6, 1992, were those of a temple that once stood there, a fact proven beyond doubt. Somnath was fortunate: It was sacked repeatedly, but no mosque came to occupy the land where it stood — and still stands — in Gujarat, a coastal sentinel guarding faith, culture, civilisation. The Vishwanath temple at Kashi was less fortunate as was Krishna Janamsthan in Mathura.

Strange as it may seem, such destruction, barring the illegitimate occupation by Muslims of Temple Mount revered by Jews in Jerusalem, never happened in the land considered holiest of all by followers of the three Abrahamic faiths. The Church of Nativity in Bethlehem commemorates (and preserves) the manger where Jesus Christ was born. In the walled city of Jerusalem stands the centuries old Church of the Holy Sepulchre at the spot where Jesus was crucified and the sepulchre where he was buried and from where he rose. These and many other Christian sites have remained untouched. As have Jewish sites.

What then explains the extraordinary destructive trait displayed by Muslim invaders who raided India again and again? It couldn't just have been the wealth of temples (as Marxist historians who grudgingly concede temples were indeed attacked would forcefully argue in justification of the destruction), there has to be something more. Was it polytheism that upset the early age Islamists? Was it idol worship that enraged them? Or was it simply hate and contempt towards the conquered, that drove the destructive impulse of the conquering invader?

Ironically, to ask these questions would be considered as 'intolerance' today. Positing possible answers would be labelled as 'hate speech'. And those asking the questions and positing possible answers would be described as 'Islamophobes'.
History has truly been hijacked by the perverse politics of our times.

(The writer is a senior journalist based in Delhi)
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Regards,
Virendra

 

[Singh]

I would concede Kanchanda's argument that history is not properly represented, however, I had previously argued that it made sense to gloss over some seemingly more brutal and dark episodes in school history books in the interest of harmony and nation building. History in its entirety and objectivity can be part of +1 onwards education. One of the reasons for this is not only because of Hindu-Muslim discord that can arise but also a lot of caste, community discord can arise. Tamils may want more of their history, Muslims may argue something else etc. This change can only come when there is a fundamental change in the society's outlook and maturity level.

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PB Mehta today replugged an old article from last year in his tweet, in which he blamed both the left and right as well for being self serving.

One of the great modern poetic renditions of Ram's predicament is Nirala's "Ram Ki Shakti Puja". No summary can do justice to its linguistic inventiveness. This short poem begins with the setting sun. The armies of Ram and Ravana have left the horrifying battlefield. Ram is overcome with doubt and despair. How can he possibly defeat Ravana? Vibhishana reminds Ram that Ravana's power comes from Goddess Shakti. Ram is shocked and mystified: by what inscrutable logic is Shakti siding with Ravana? Ravana opposes dharma. Jambvan advises Ram to worship Shakti: to reveal his true nature to her. Hanuman is ordered to bring 108 lotuses. As Ram offers them one by one, Shakti steals the last one, and Ram realises he is one short. He despairs at the uncompleted offering. But then Ram recalls how his mother affectionately called him "lotus eyed". Thus, he decides to complete his offering by substituting his eye in place of the lotus flower. At this moment of self-offering, Shakti intervenes and blesses Ram.

There are several reasons to remember Nirala on this Diwali. The exclusion of A.K. Ramanujan's great essay from the syllabus of the Delhi University highlights the ways in which both the Left and the Right have reduced a great tradition to an impoverished political totem. In the process, both have elided larger questions. The deeper crisis is that our public culture no longer has even the minimal intellectual resources to engage in a serious debate over different "meanings" of Ramayana. The invocation by the Left of a diversity of traditions is technically correct. But in this invocation, diversity is merely a formal gesture. We like the fact that there are diverse Ramayanas. But we don't want to have the space to discuss any one of them. It is a bit like Amartya's Sen's invocation of the unilluminating phrase "argumentative". We wear the term argumentative as a badge of honour. But are embarrassed by everything the tradition argued about.

The Right, on the other hand, has substituted intimidation for sober argument. But it does not have the resources to have the foggiest idea of what texts it is trying to defend and why. If so, it would be more seriously worried about startling facts that scholars of Hindi have been pointing out. Apporvanand pointed out recently that Delhi University (which now has more Hindi-medium students than ever) was finding it difficult to get anyone to teach Chayavad, that great movement in modern Hindi poetry. Engaging with the meaning of Nirala is out of question. But the situation is even more dire for the teaching of Tulsidas. This assertion of tradition is coming at a moment where its loss is imminent.

Why should this matter for the culture at large? Part of the narrow-mindedness currently on display is a direct consequence of this larger ignorance. Nirala's poem takes on board the motifs of every retelling of Ramayana. First, the ethical message is rather more complicated than meets the eye. In a way, Nirala is saying what Gandhi said: sustaining dharma requires making your life itself the offering. Ram has to compose himself as the offering before he is recognised as righteous; the lotuses alone won't do it. But there is this constant ambiguity: on whose side are the Gods? One of the ignorant clichés of Indian culture is to contrast the simplicity and rectitude of the Ramayana, with the shades of grey of the Mahabharata. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Even as pious a text as Ramcharitmanas describes good and evil as inextricably and complicatedly linked in creation. So the act of moral discernment is always more complicated than the simplistic pieties that are blinding us. Third, there is the constant pan-Indian inter-textuality. Nirala's spin on Ram's Shakti puja is possible only with reference to Krittibas's Bengali Ramayana: a condition of creativity is that it is the next move in an ongoing tradition.

Fourth, the more you delve into the tradition the harder it becomes to swallow the narrow-minded divisions that modern politics and pseudo-scholarship have created. Is the Shakta tradition opposed to the Vaishnava tradition? Is Ram for Tulsidas, Sagun or Nirguna? Is Ram divinity, history or mythology? Such questions are almost unintelligible if you care to know any of these texts. The Right commits the mistake of assimilating all tradition to one single glob, undifferentiated, where nuances don't matter. But equally, the so-called Left has created intellectual divisions and categories of understanding that bear no relation to the texts at hand.

Fifth, there is an aspect of the assimilative generosity of the tradition itself. Rather than looking upon difference in oppositional terms, it at least seeks to understand. No wonder, the supposedly straight laced Tulsidas, without a trace of irony pays homage even to those "wretches, who without cause delight to vex the righteous. I reverence these scoundrels who with a thousand tongues maliciously describe the faults of others."

But finally, the most important challenge is this. The Left and Right in India share one deep premise. The tradition, in its final analysis, has to be reduced to the social question. Whose group interests does a particular narrative serve? Some of this has produced remarkable criticism. It is fun reading E.V. Ramasami do a hatchet job on all the heroes in the Ramayana. But in retrospect what strikes you about Ramasami's Ram-baiting invectives is this. One, that he still lived in a culture where those intricate references to different Ramayana cultures made sense. And two, that he paid unwitting homage to a text by taking it seriously. The most virulent form of deconstruction can itself betray a love and attachment for the object being deconstructed.

But once texts are reduced to the social question, the contest over them will be a contest between raw group power. There will be no space for larger questions of meaning, ethics and ontology. So this Diwali, we wonder what is left of Ram, beyond personal piety on the one hand, and sectarian enlistment on the other. But engagement with many Ramayanas requires two things that have disappeared. The first is shraddha (badly translated as reverence). Where do we get an idea of a basic trust in the world that allows us a mode of being less anxiety driven? The second is what Tulsidas describes as his motive for writing. It is not about spreading a message or conveying the truth. He says he is writing entirely for "self-satisfaction". Perhaps we are squabbling so much because what gives true self-satisfaction is the question we want to avoid most.

Questions lit up - Indian Express