A majority of Muslims too have understood that they were misled by vested interests and it was wrong to destroy and appropriate the places of worship of others. Abhinav Prakash Singh 15 Nov, Quwwat ul-Islam Mosque in Mehrauli, Delhi. The pillars bear Hindu and Jain motifs Photo: Alamy. This is how it is in south India where history lives on in the modern age through ancient temples and unbroken rituals and customs.
But in the north, it is impossible to find any temple that is older than years. In the plains of the Ganga and the Yamuna rivers, in some of the holiest Hindu cities like Varanasi, Ayodhya, Haridwar, not a single ancient Hindu temple is to be seen today despite numerous references to majestic stone temples in the texts.
Where did they go? What happened to the Hindu temples? These questions agitate Hindu youth even today. With the rise of the nationalist movement and a rediscovery of the past, Hindus tried to systematically write their history but came up against the painful memory of invasions, subjugation and destruction.
Temple after temple was wiped out in north India. The industrial-scale destruction was so widespread that there is hardly any Hindu temple in the north that is years old. Even the cities in the north-western part of the subcontinent like Multan and Peshawar were once adorned with architectural marvels that these temples were.
But now none of them exists. Most of the temples we see at the holiest of the Hindu sites were built only after the imperial power of the Islamic rule weakened in the early modern era with the rise of Maratha power. New Hindu kingdoms ruled by visionaries like Ahilyabai Holkar played a pivotal role in rebuilding most of the important temples across north India. It also shows that Hindus never lost their historical sense and patiently strove to reclaim what legitimately belonged to them.
It is a brilliant yet sad read that recounts the struggle of a people to preserve what was sacred to them in the hope that one day the deities would be restored in their rightful place.
The struggle for temples is also the story of the struggle of a civilisation, its determination to survive in the face of unprecedented odds.
Temples have become like history immortalised in stone that sing the tales of sorrow, perseverance and hope. What was once the expression of the spiritual, artistic and cultural imagination of a civilisation now stands as the embodiment of the collective historical memory of a wounded civilisation.
A wounded civilisation whose scars have just begun to heal. For, it denies them even basic human dignity.
It denies their existence, their pain and their hopes. Similar attempts were made in India to whitewash the past. But today, they have taken a turn for the worst. We are told that no temples were ever destroyed and the Hindu memory is simply the bigotry ingrained by colonial rule.
When denial of temple destruction became difficult, we were told that they were not demolished due to religious reasons but for the benefit of politics and to plunder their wealth.
When they were presented with their own records of the iconoclasts that demonstrated the religious bigotry at work, we were informed that Muslim rulers learnt it from Hindu rulers who regularly plundered the temples of other rulers. Never mind that they could hardly recount more than a few such examples in our millennia-old history, even after carefully obfuscating the destruction of temples with the plunder of treasury. Never mind that even in these cases, Hindu kings would always respectfully carry away deities and install them in temples in their own kingdoms and not trample them under their feet.
When this simple fact was pointed out, we were told that it was just architectural recycling! Perhaps the Qutub Minar was architectural recycling because Hindus and Jains thought their temples were junk?
All such mosques were built on vacant lands. In the case of the Ram Mandir, they went much further. The faith of tens of millions in Lord Ram was ridiculed. Simple devotees were asked to prove his existence. Birth and education certificates of Ram were asked for in Parliament. Ram and the Ramayana were demonised as patriarchal, casteist and a violent text to delegitimise the quest to rebuild the Ram Mandir.
Not satisfied, they went a step further and denied the existence of Hinduism itself by branding it as a sinister colonial construct designed to subjugate the people of India using superstition, myths and irrational belief in idol worship.
Not surprisingly, their language was no different from those of the vandals who wreaked havoc in the past. It also shows Hindus never lost their historical sense and patiently strove to reclaim what legitimately belonged to them.
Islamisation in India occurred mainly on the far eastern and western ends of the Indo-Gangetic plain, along the margins of both the stronghold of Indo-Muslim rule the Delhi Doab , and of the heartland of Brahmanical culture Aryavarta. Similarly, the argument that low-caste Hindus found in Islam an escape from Brahmanical and upper caste oppression is unconvincing, since the greatest movement to Islam occurred in areas where Brahmanical power was weakest.
I do not think it is possible to quantify conversions secured through these modes of explanation. It is true that scattered references in the original sources mention individuals who converted to Islam after receiving some sort of favour or patronage from the court of Sultan Firuz Tughluq. But these few instances cannot explain Islamisation among the millions who lived far from the centres of court patronage.
It is said the writings of colonial historians have contributed to the perception that Hindus were forcibly converted to Islam. On what kind of evidence were such claims made? Why has this theory of forcible conversion persisted even to this day? There is no evidence that significant numbers of Hindus were forcibly converted to Islam.
Emperor Jahangir issued many edicts admonishing his nobles not to convert anybody by force. Of course, the very fact that such orders were issued suggests that such conversions must have occurred. So there are these scattered references to forced conversion. But for the most part, the Mughals were scrupulously secular in outlook. They focused on stability, loyalty, and revenue, not on religious change among their subjects. On one occasion, the Mughal governor of Bengal actually demoted a high-ranking officer for having converted his personal servant to Islam.
In the face of such evidence to the contrary, one is led to wonder why the trope of forced conversion has found such a secure hold in popular perceptions of Indian history.
I suspect that the answer lies in how the British justified their occupation of India. They did this, in part, by contrasting their claims to ruling with justice, virtue, and integrity with the alleged tyranny and violence of the Indo-Muslim states they had replaced. The notion that Muslim rulers had forcibly converted Indians served the colonial need to portray Muslim rule as violent, tyrannical, and hence illegitimate and deserving of removal.
The trope of forced conversions has persisted into the present mainly because of the pervasive Islamophobia of our own times. This is by no means confined to India, of course. Ben Carson, a leading candidate for the American presidency, has recently declared that a Muslim should be unqualified to serve as president because, so he claims, Islam is not consistent with the US Constitution. Did the spread of Islam in India elicit any kind of counter-response from Brahmanical Hinduism?
Why did this happen in the late 19th century? In the first place, precolonial Muslim states generally practiced a hands-off policy with respect to proselytisation. As a result, there was no identifiable political agent towards which one might direct such a response. Second, precolonial populations did not think of society in terms of a collection of mutually exclusive and antagonistic religious communities, such as happened in the colonial era. While premodern Indians were certainly aware of religious difference, not a single communal riot is known to have occurred for almost all of medieval history.
And third, the growth of Muslim populations in India was so gradual, and so subtle, that indigenous sources were unable to perceive that any change had taken place. In fact, the very idea that there might have been — or even should have been — a precolonial Brahmanical counter-response to the growth of Muslim communities seems to be a back-projection of the sort of counter-responses that did take place in the 19th and 20th centuries.
I refer to the Protestant missionary movement to convert Indians to Christianity. There you had an organised, institutionalised plan of converting Indians, which also enjoyed the implicit support of the colonial state. You also had new and visible communities of Christian converts arising in the sort of competitive political atmosphere that the colonial state fostered.
None of those factors were present in precolonial times. As a historian, how do you see the politics of conversion that is playing out today? There are many reasons for rigid understandings of particular religious traditions, and for drawing sharp boundaries around religious communities. One of them surely has to do with an increased exposure to, and reliance upon, the authority of the written word, and in particular, the unalterable, unchallengeable authority of scripture.
But a more dramatic movement in this direction came in colonial times with the technology of the printing press. With each new advance in the technology of knowledge — first, paper, then printing — the written word gained authority and power. Still another was the sense of competition that was injected in Indian society as the colonial government expanded the voting franchise to include ever widening elements of the population.
This, too, was a product of colonial rule. Christian missionaries to India brought with them a Protestant understanding of conversion, which involved a sudden and total change of identity. On the other hand, religious change in precolonial India had for the most part been a gradual, almost glacial process — so gradual and unconscious as to go unnoticed either by local chroniclers or foreign travellers.
Your writings, as also of others, ascribe the spread of Islam to the popularity of Sufi saints. What explains their popularity? Ironically, one of the few things that Indian and Pakistani textbooks seem to agree on is in fact a falsehood: namely, that Islam grew in precolonial India through the agency of Sufi saints. There is little contemporary evidence for such a thing. Generally speaking, Sufis were not interested in converting Hindus.
Their primary goal was to help people who were already Muslim to attain the higher states of the spiritual quest. On the other hand, there is considerable evidence of colonial-era Muslim communities attributing to Sufi shaikh s — or in many cases, men who were retroactively given a Sufi identity -- the conversion of their ancestors. District gazetteers compiled in the 19th and 20th centuries are full of such narratives. However, such attributions are not supported by contemporary evidence.
Most Sufis certainly wished to set an example for others to follow. Both the letters maktubat of prominent shaikh s and their recorded sayings malfuzat show a desire to help Muslims act in ways more closely aligned with Islamic Law, and also to assist their inner circle of devoted mystics to attain higher stages of divine awareness. The correct relationship of Sufi shaikh s to royal courts was always a contested issue, on which different orders took different positions.
Some scorned such association, believing that it compromised their devotion to the ideals of poverty and austerity, which were believed necessary for undertaking the mystical path to divine awareness. For Sufis of this sort, then, acceptance of royal patronage does indeed suggest a kind of joint project between the king and the saint. In one of his radio broadcasts, a monthly feature now, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was ecstatic about his meeting with Sufi saints and scholars. It will benefit Islam as well as humankind.
I am encouraged by the positive experience he seems to have had. Hindutva ideologues claim that 60, temples were demolished under Muslim rule in India. How do you respond to this charge? I feel that we can get too swept up in a numbers game here. Yes, there is a huge discrepancy between 60, and And even those data must be closely interrogated. The best you can do is to fit together the few pieces you have in order to construct a reasonable approximation of what the whole picture most likely looked like.
An honest historian will admit that the evidence is almost always fragmentary, incomplete, or even contradictory. I have no doubt that more than 80 temples were desecrated by Muslims, just as there were probably more temples desecrated by Hindus than are in the record.
Conversely, later Indo-Muslim chroniclers, seeking to glorify the religious zeal of earlier Muslim rulers, sometimes attributed acts of temple desecration to such rulers even when no contemporary evidence supports the claims.
Do we have vivid Hindu accounts of the destruction of temples, conveying trauma, as some tend to believe it must have been? If not, why? Why are descriptions of temple destruction largely in Persian sources? We have very little by way of vivid Hindu accounts of such activity, or of reports of trauma across the general population.
For it was there that kingship was established, celebrated, renewed, and contested. For that reason, they were also attacked by outside enemies. This much is clear both from normative Sanskrit texts and from the inscriptional record. Later on, Muslim kings intending to establish their own rule in India simply followed this tradition.
The desecration of royal temples was surely traumatic for defeated kings, the Brahmins they had patronised, and court functionaries.
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