Riaz Haq writes this data-driven blog to provide information, express his opinions and make comments on many topics. Subjects include personal activities, education, South Asia, South Asian community, regional and international affairs and US politics to financial markets. For investors interested in South Asia, Riaz has another blog called South Asia Investor at http://www.southasiainvestor.com and a YouTube video channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkrIDyFbC9N9evXYb9cA_gQ
Justice Markandey Katju, retired judge of Supreme Court of India, talked of "dark clouds over India" in a speech to about 200 people of all faiths at an interfaith event in Silicon Valley. He said "Muslims making up only 15% of the population are on the receiving end" but the rest of India is also paying the price. India's economy is in serious trouble. There is rampant poverty and high rates of malnutrition in the country. There are heavy job losses across the entire labor market. The event was organized by Ibadatkhana Foundation led by Tasawar Jalali. Other organizers included Javed Ellahie, Naren Singh, Santosh Addagulla and Prabakar Karuppiah .
"Indian Supreme Court has surrendered, Indian media have surrendered" to the "dark forces" of Modi's "Hindutva", he said. He said "there was no communalism in India before 1857", the year Delhi fell to the British colonizers. The colonial rulers from Britain then proceeded to "divide and conquer India" by using what Justice Katju described as "history in the service of colonialism", an apparent reference to Professor B.N. Pande's 1977 speech to Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India's parliament.
Ibadatkhana:
Justice Katju described "Ibadat Khana" as part of a brief history lesson on Mughal Rule in India. Ibadat Khana was built by Emperor Akbar in Fatehpur Sikri in 1575 as a place where scholars of various faiths could discuss theology. The establishment of this center of learning was motivated by the emperor's desire for "Sulh-e-Kul, meaning "universal peace" among various faiths.
This was about the same period as St. Bartholomew Massacre in Europe. Catholic mobs attacked and killed tens of thousands of Protestants in France. These religious wars raged in Europe for centuries. In fact, Ireland witnessed sectarian massacres as recently as the 1990s.
India's Diversity:
Justice Katju said India is a very diverse land of immigrants. He said 92% of the population descended from ancestors who arrived from other lands to settle in India. The original inhabitants of India make up about 8% of the population.
He said people migrate from harsh to more comfortable places. India with its rivers and valleys offered rich fertile soil for agriculture that dominated the world economy for thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution. There have been only two periods when people left India in large numbers to go elsewhere: Indentured service after the end of slavery in 1800s and more recently the migration of better educated Indian to America and Europe.
Modi's India:
Mr. Katju said "dark clouds" are gathering over India with courts and media surrendering to Modi's despotic rule. He said "Muslims making up only 15% of the population are on the receiving end" but the rest of India is also paying the price. India's economy is in serious trouble. There is rampant poverty and high rates of malnutrition in the country. There are heavy job losses across the entire labor market.
A diverse country like India can not afford Hindutva. This is a time to bring back Emperor "Sulh-e-Kul" to save India.
Panel Discussion:
There was a panel discussion with Justice Katju, Dr. Jasbir Kang, Mr. Javed Ellahie and Prof. Randolph Langenbach. The panel was moderated by Ritu Jha and Mariam Turab. During the panel discussion, Justice Katju brought up the idea of reunification of India and Pakistan. He argued "if East and West Germany can reunify, so can India and Pakistan". The idea was contested by Mr. Javed Ellahi and Dr. Jasbir Kang who talked about the idea of pushing for more trade and people-to-people exchanges which could eventually lead to replication of European Union in South Asia. But Hindutva stands in the way of peace in South Asia.
Summary:
In a speech to about 200 people of various faiths in Silicon Valley, Justice Markandey Katju, India's retired Supreme Court judge, talked about "dark clouds over India". The event was organized as an interfaith event by Ibadatkhana Foundation. A diverse country like India can not afford Hindutva. This is a time to bring back Emperor Akbar's "Sulh-e-Kul" to save India, he said.
Colonial-era British historians deliberately distorted the history of Indian Muslim rule to vilify Muslim rulers as part of the British policy to divide and conquer India, says American history professor Audrey Truschke, in her recently published book "Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India's Most Controversial King". These misrepresentations of Muslim rule made during the British Raj appear to have been accepted as fact not just by Islamophobic Hindu Nationalists but also by at least some of the secular Hindus in India and Muslim intellectuals in present day Pakistan, says the author. Aurangzeb was neither a saint nor a villain; he was a man of his time who should be judged by the norms of his times and compared with his contemporaries, the author adds.
Demolishing Myths:
Madhav Golwalkar, considered the founder of the Hindu Nationalist movement in India, saw Islam and Muslims as enemies. He said: “Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindusthan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting to shake off the despoilers".
Professor Truschke systematically dismantles
myths about India's Muslim rulers as being hateful and bigoted tyrants who engaged in rape and pillage of Hindus and carried out widespread destruction of Hindu temples across India. Hindu Nationalists led by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who considers Golwalkar "worthy of worship, are using false history to play victims of "brutal" Islamic rule and to justify their hatred and violence against Indian Muslims today.
Hindu Nationalists' False Narrative:
Truschke explains how the Hindu Nationalists have used colonial-era distortions of history and built a false narrative to justify their hatred and violence against India's Muslim minority. Here's an excerpt from her book:
"Such views have roots in colonial-era scholarship, where positing timeless Hindu-Muslim animosity embodied the British strategy of divide and conquer. Today, multiple websites claim to list Aurangzeb's "atrocities" against Hindus (typically playing fast and loose with the facts) and fuel communal fires. There are numerous gaping holes in the proposition that Aurangzeb razed temples because he hated Hindus, however. Most glaringly, Aurangzeb counted thousands of Hindu temples within his domain and yet destroyed, at most, few dozen.....A historically legitimate view of Aurangzeb must explain why he protected Hindu temples more often than he demolished them."
Misguided Pakistani View:
The false narrative about Aurangzeb has been accepted as fact not just by Islamophobic Hindu Nationalists in India who use it for their own purposes, but also by at least some of the Muslim intellectuals in present day Pakistan. Truschke singles out Pakistani playwright Shahid Nadeem to make this point in her book:
"Across the border in Pakistan, too, many endorse the vision of an evil Aurangzeb. As Shahid Nadeem, a Pakistani playwright, recently put it: " Seeds of partition were sown when Aurangzeb triumphed over [his brother] Dara Shikoh". Such far-fetched suggestions would be farcical, if so many did not endorse them."
Some British educated secular Indian leaders have also been misled colonial-era historical narrative of Muslim rule pushed by the British. For example, India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, thought Aurangzeb was too Muslim to rule India. Nehru described Aurangzeb as "a bigot and an austere puritan" and called him a dangerous throwback who "put back the clock". Here's a quote from Nehru used by Truschke to make her point:
"When Aurangzeb began to oppose [the syncretism of the earlier Mughal rulers] and suppress it and to function more as a Moslem than an Indian ruler, the Mughal empire began to break up".
The Real Aurangzeb:
Here's an excerpt from Truschke's article in Wire.in that explains how she sees "historical Aurangzeb":
"Aurangzeb, for instance, acted in ways that are rarely adequately explained by religious bigotry. For example, he ordered the destruction of select Hindu temples (perhaps a few dozen, at most, over his 49-year reign) but not because he despised Hindus. Rather, Aurangzeb generally ordered temples demolished in the aftermath of political rebellions or to forestall future uprisings. Highlighting this causality does not serve to vindicate Aurangzeb or justify his actions but rather to explain why he targeted select temples while leaving most untouched. Moreover, Aurangzeb also issued numerous orders protecting Hindu temples and communities from harassment, and he incorporated more Hindus into his imperial administration than any Mughal ruler before him by a fair margin. These actions collectively make sense if we understand Aurangzeb’s actions within the context of state interests, rather than by ascribing suspiciously modern-sounding religious biases to him."
Truschke is not alone in the above assessment of Aurangzeb. Marathi writer Nagnath S. Inamdar, the author of "Shahenshah: The Life of Aurangzeb", recalls visiting a prominent Hindu temple whose priest told him that it had come down in his family that not only had Aurangzeb left the temple intact, but also authorized a recurring annual donation for its maintenance. Further diminishing the idea of a puritanical figure, Inamdar also found old manuscripts with love sonnets composed by Aurangzeb.
Real History in Persian:
Truschke says the original history of the Mughal rule was written in Persian. However, it is the English translation of the original work that are often used to distort it. Here's what she says about it in her book:
"The bulk of Mughal histories are written in Persian, the official administrative language of the Mughal empire but a foreign tongue in India today. Out of necessity and ease, many historians disregard the original Persian text and rely instead on English translations. This approach narrows the the library of materials drastically, and many translations of the Mughal texts are of questionable quality, brimming with mistranslations and abridgments. Some of these changes conveniently served the agendas of the translators, especially colonial-era translations that tend to show Indo--Muslim kings at their worst so that the British would seem virtuous by comparison (foremost here is Elliot and Dowson's History of India as Told by Its Own Historians). Such materials are great for learning about British colonialism, but they present an inaccurate picture of Mughal India."
Comparison with Contemporaries:
On temple destructions, Truschke says that the "Hindu rulers were the first to come up with the idea of sacking one another’s temples, before Muslims even entered the Indian subcontinent. But one hears little about these “historical wrongs”".
University of Texas Professor Donald Davis, a scholar of Hinduism, agrees that “there is no question that medieval Hindu kings frequently destroyed religious images as part of more general rampages”.
Invasions of various parts of India by Shivaji Bhonsle's Maratha forces were extremely bloody and destructive affairs. Maratha raiders led by Shivaji raped, pillaged and plundered the people, mainly Hindus, in the territories they captured. Some of these events are documented in Sir Jadunath Srakar's Shivaji and His Times. Shivaji Bhonsle was a contemporary and rival of Aurangzeb. He is now revered by Hindu Nationalists as a hero who allegedly protected Hindus from Aurangzeb in the second half of the 17th century.
Aurangzeb-Shivaji Conflict Not Religious:
Professor Truschke debunks the Hindu Nationalist portrayal of Shivaji-Aurangzeb conflict as being Hindu-Muslim war. She argues in her book that "the Mughal-Maratha conflict was shaped by craving for raw power that demanded strategic, shifting alliances. Shivaji allied with numerous Islamic states, including Bijapur, Golconda, and even the Mughals when it suited him (sometimes against Hindu powers in south India). Shivaji welcomed Muslims within his army; he had qazis (Muslim judges) on his payroll, and Muslims ranked among some of the top commanders".
She says that "Mughal alliances and the imperial army was similarly diverse, and Aurangzeb sent a Hindu, Jai Singh, to besiege Shivaji at Purandar."
Summary:
Aurangzeb was neither a saint nor a villain; he was a man of his time who should be judged by the norms of his times and compared with his contemporaries. Colonial-era British historians deliberately distorted the history of Indian Muslim rule to vilify Muslim rulers as part of their policy to divide and conquer India, according to American history professor Audrey Truschke. Professor Truschke has systematically dismantled all the myths about India's Muslim rulers as hateful and bigoted tyrants who engaged in rape and pillage of Hindus and carried out widespread destruction of Hindu temples across India. Hindu Nationalists led by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi are using false history to justify their hatred and violence against Indian Muslims today.
Related Links: Here's an interesting discussion of the legacy of the British Raj in India as seen by writer-diplomat Shashi Tharoor:
William Dalrymple was invited to Silicon Valley to spend an evening on April 4, 2008, with TIE charter members. TIE is an organization consisting mainly of technology entrepreneurs of Indian origin but it also includes other South Asian entrepreneurs from Pakistan and Bangladesh as well. I had a chance attend this event with Mr. Dalrymple along with other charter members of TIE Silicon Valley.
William Dalrymple is a British writer, historian and journalist. He writes about South Asia, the Middle East, Mughal rule, the Muslim world and early Eastern Christianity. All of his six books have won major literary prizes. His first three were travel books based on his journeys in the Middle East, India and Central Asia.
More recently, Dalrymple has published a book of essays about South Asia, and two award-winning histories of the interaction between the British and the Mughals between the eighteenth and mid nineteenth century. Dalrymple is the son of Sir Hew Hamilton-Dalrymple and a cousin of Virginia Woolf. He was educated at Ampleforth College and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was first a history exhibitioner then senior history scholar.
At the Silicon Valley event, Dalrymple talked about and read from three of his best known books: Xanadu, The White Mughals and The Last Mughal.
Talking about Xanadu, he said he set out to write a book about how he assumed the Muslims had destroyed Christian churches and Hindu temples throughout the Middle East and South Asia. As he traveled from Jerusalem to Mongolia to write "Xanadu", he was surprised to see that Muslims had, in fact, been very tolerant of other religions and allowed their practice in their holy places to continue under Muslim rule. He then read a passage from Xanadu about a Greek monk he met in Palestine.
Then Dalrymple went on talk about his research into the pre-Victorian India of the late 18th and early 19th century when the British officers of East India company inter-married with local Indian women of both Muslim and Hindu faith. In fact, each had multiple wives and dozens of children. The book focuses on an officer named James Achilles Kirkpatrick who married Khairun Nisa, the niece of the prime minister of Hyderabad.
It was only after the British government directly took control of India when a system of apartheid began and eventually led to the great rebellion of 1857 against the British rule. An interesting fact he mentioned is that, in the 18th century Mughal era, India was the richest country in the world producing 22% of the world GDP (about the same as the US share now) and Britain contributed about 5%. By early 20th century, these figures completely reversed.
Dalrymple read a sad poem by Bahadur Shah Zafar in the period after the rebellion when Zafar was sent into exile.
In answer to a question about the authenticity of the Bollywood movie "Jodaa Akbar", which has drawn protests from Hindu nationalists and banned in Rajastan, Dalrymple said the protests by the VHP and the RSS were motivated by bigotry and found them "abhorrent".
In 2007-8, Dalrymple traveled extensively in Pakistan to cover the pro-democracy protests, the lawyers movement and the elections. He has written two very significant pieces focusing on difference between perception and reality of India and Pakistan sixty years after independence and Pakistan's ongoing transition to democracy.
In August 2007, Dalrymple traveled to both India and Pakistan to see for himself how the two countries are doing 60 years after independence. Here's an excerpt from what he wrote:
"In the world's media, never has the contrast between the two countries appeared so stark: one is widely perceived as the next great superpower; the other written off as a failed state, a world center of Islamic radicalism, the hiding place of Osama bin Laden and the only US ally that Washington appears ready to bomb."
"On the ground, of course, the reality is different and first-time visitors to Pakistan are almost always surprised by the country's visible prosperity. There is far less poverty on show in Pakistan than in India, fewer beggars, and much less desperation. In many ways the infrastructure of Pakistan is much more advanced: there are better roads and airports, and more reliable electricity. Middle-class Pakistani houses are often bigger and better appointed than their equivalents in India."
More recently, in March 2008, Dalrymple wrote a very optimistic piece about Pakistan pointing out positive changes in the form of a resurgent middle class:
"It was this newly enriched and empowered urban middle class that showed its political muscle for the first time with the organization of a lawyers' movement, whose protests against the dismissal of the chief justice soon swelled into a full-scale pro-democracy campaign, despite Musharraf's harassment and arrest of many lawyers. The movement represented a huge shift in Pakistani civil society's participation in politics. The middle class were at last moving from their living rooms onto the streets, from dinner parties into political parties."
