By Umashankar Joshi
Those who have to professionally study History have to eschew poetry where it distorts historical facts in order to build up some characters and run down others. The misuse of history to serve the interests of those in power is a well-known fact.
An example can be taken from the war cries: “Allah-o-Akbar” and “Har Har Mahadev”. In 1857, they were used by freedom fighters (both Muslim and Hindu) against the British rulers. By rewriting Indian History and giving it an unprecedented communal twist, the British succeeded in dividing the people of India to the extent that in 1947 — a mere 90 years later — the war cries were used by Muslims against Hindus and Hindus against Muslims.
How deep the communal divide has become can be judged by what we commemorate. In May 2012, the Congress and therefore supposedly “secular” government of Haryana put out large advertisements on Maharana Pratap, Chatrapati Shivaji Bhonsle and the 5th Sikh Guru, Arjun Dev, highlighting communal conflict as the cause of strife between them and the Mughal state.
As is well known, the most famous battlefield of Haldighati in Mewar is littered with Muslim graves. The vanguard of Maharana Pratap’s army consisted of Pathans seeking vengeance against the Mughals who had wrested power from them. Similarly, Shivaji and his successors, the Peshwas, always had professional Muslim soldiers in their ranks. The Mughal armies that fought Pratap were commanded by Hindu Rajputs like Mirza Raja Man Singh while Mirza Raja Jai Singh fought Shivaji on behalf of Aurangazeb. There is not a single battle in the annals of Indian history in which there were only Hindus on one side and Muslims on the other.
Those interested in learning the details of how Indian history was deliberately distorted can read Romila Thapar’s lecture Reporting History: Early India at Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, on 3 May 2012.
The distortion starts with The History of British India published by James Mill in 1819. Mill divided Indian History into ‘Hindu civilisation, Muslim civilisation and the British period’.
This “periodisation” formed the basis of the colonial argument that the primary identity of Indian society was that of religious communities, generally antagonistic to each other.
Unfortunately for “modern” India, periodisation has become axiomatic to the study of Indian history and nationalist Indian historians and the general public accepts it without thinking. The worst part is that Indians in general and Hindus in particular have bought the British claim that by conquering India, the British rid the country of “Islamic tyranny” for which the Hindus should be grateful for them.
The belief that 1947 saw “freedom” arrive after a 1,000-years of servitude stems from this lie equating Mughal and Sultanate rule with that of the Brits. This falsehood served the British thesis that India has always been conquered and ruled by aliens and those they were the same as the Mughals and the Sultans before them.
The 1882 Census was based on the idea that Indian society was a collection of religious communities. The vast population of India was categorised in terms of religious communities and the numbers in each community made Hindus (including Jains, Sikhs and Buddhists) the ‘majority’ and all others — Muslims, Christians and Parsis — minorities. Even economic laws like taxation were affected and we have the “Hindu” undivided family enjoying benefits denied to the minority communities.
Unless a concerted effort is made to correct this distortion, Hindu communalism will continue to flourish and Muslims will still be ill-treated and looked upon with suspicion.
The people of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh must not forget that the Bengal Army of the East India Company was largely a Hindu body with 31 per cent Brahmins and 34 per cent Rajputs. When they rose against their white masters and shot them as a warning that no quarter was to be asked for or given, they sought out the 82-years plus Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar as their titular head.
When he protested that he had neither treasure nor army to be of help to them they only asked that he put his hand on their head in a token of blessing. If there was abiding Hindu hatred for Muslims this would not have been possible. The Partition of 1947 occurring only 90-years or four generations later took at least 250 thousand (a quarter million) lives. This total turn around was caused by distorting history. This must be righted for sanity to return. INAV