A Vision of United India

Chapter 3

The Islamic Invasion of India

As stated earlier, Islam, soon after its birth in Mecca and Medina, began to conquer the nations in Africa and the Western part of Asia; and quite inevitably, it was then the turn of India and the invasions began in the eighth century. In the eighth century A.D., there began a series of invasions, which had a profound and lasting effect on India. These were the invasions of the Muslims, first through the Arabian Sea into Sind and later, by the Turks through the passes on the northwest of India. These invasions came through the northwestern passes, the Khyber Pass and the Bolan Pass. This was the beginning of the Mohammedan conquest of India. It must be said right away that the massacres perpetuated by Muslims in India are unparalleled in history, bigger than the Holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis; or the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks; more extensive even than the slaughter of the South American native populations by the invading Spanish and Portuguese. We shall quote from the French historian Alain Danielou, as well as the Dutch scholar Koenraad Elst who has written a very interesting book called "Negationism in India" and finally from Sri Aurobindo, who was one of the very few amongst the Indian revolutionaries, who had the courage to speak the truth about what was then called "the Mahomedan factor ". From the time the Muslims started arriving, around 632 A.D., remarks Alain Danielou, the history of India becomes a long

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monotonous series of murders, massacres, spoliations and destructions. It is, as usual, in the name of "a holy war" of their faith, of their sole God, that the barbarians have destroyed civilizations, wiped out entire races. Mahmoud Ghazni, continues Danielou, was an early example of Muslim ruthlessness, burning down in 1018 the temples of Mathura, razing Kanauj to the ground, and destroying the famous temple of Somnath, sacred to all Hindus. His successors were as ruthless. In 1030, the holy city of Benares was razed to the ground, its marvellous temples destroyed, its magnificent palaces wrecked. Indeed, the Muslim policy towards India, concludes Danielou, "seems to have been a conscious systematic destruction of everything that was beautiful, holy, refined". (Histoire de l'Inde, p.222) In the words of another historian, American Will Durant: "the Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilisation is a precious good, whose delicate complex order and freedom can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplying within". India, before the advent of Islamic imperialism, was not exactly a zone of peace. There were plenty of wars fought by Hindu princes. But in all their wars, the Hindus had observed some time-honoured conventions sanctioned by the Shastras. The Brahmins and the Bhikshus were never molested. Cows were never killed. Temples were never touched. The chastity of women was never violated. Non-combatants were never killed or captured. A human habitation was never attacked unless it was a fort. The civil population was never plundered. War booty was an unknown item in the calculations of conquerors. The martial classes, who clashed mostly in open spaces, had a code of honour. Sacrifice of honour for victory or material gain was deemed as worse than death. This was the honour of the Kshatriya.

Islamic imperialism came with a different code - the Sunnah of the Prophet. It required its warriors to fall upon the helpless civil population after a decisive victory had been won on the battlefield. It required them to sack and burn down villages and towns after the defenders had died fighting or had fled. The cows, the Brahmins, and the Bhikshus invited their special attention in mass murders of non-combatants. The temples and monasteries were their special targets in an orgy of pillage and arson. Those whom they did not kill, they captured and sold as slaves. The magnitude of the booty looted even from the bodies of the dead, was a measure of the success of a military mission. And they did all this as mujahids (holy warriors) and ghazls (kafir-killers) in the service of Allah and his Last Prophet. Hindus found it very hard to understand the psychology of this new invader. For the first time in their history, Hindus were witnessing a scene, described in the following words: "The conquering army burnt villages, devastated the land, plundered people's wealth, took Brahmins and children and women of all classes captive, flogged with thongs of raw hide, carried a moving prison with it, and converted the prisoners into obsequious Turks." This was not an isolated incident, but repeated innumerable times in the next few centuries. In addition, they desecrated the idols, which the Hindus worshipped. According to 'Sirat-i-Firoz Shahi': "Allah who is the only true God and has no other emanation, endowed the king of Islam with the strength to destroy this ancient shrine on the eastern sea coast and to plunge it into the sea, and after its destruction he ordered the image of Jagannath to be perforated, and disgraced it by casting it down on the ground. They dug out other idols which were worshipped by the polytheists in the kingdom of Jajnagar and overthrew them as they did the image of Jagannath, for being laid in front of the mosques along the path of the Sunnis and the way of the 'musallis'

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(Muslim congregation for namaz) and stretched them in front of the portals of every mosque, so that the body and sides of the images might be trampled at the time of ascent and descent, entrance and exit, by the shoes on the feet of the Muslims."Within a few centuries, almost the whole of India had come under the Muslim sway. The Delhi Sultanate had taken control of India.

Conversion of Hindus

This conquest was followed by the mass conversion of the people of India; this reached its peak during the time of the Moguls when vast sections of the Indian population became converted to Islam. These conversions took place partly because of fear and partly because of the intolerance then prevalent in the caste system in Hinduism. In its origin, the caste system was a fine arrangement of society based on the temperament of each individual; but with the loss of life power, it degenerated into a rigid bondage and a means of showing one's arrogance. Bloated with the pride of one's origin, it became one of the most degrading features of Indian society. It had become a system, which was based on discrimination by birth and was so entrenched in the Hindu society that neither the Sultans nor the Moguls could make a dent into it. Nor, did they make a deliberate attempt at that. Being the rulers and monarchs, their courtiers, aristocrats and even the common Muslim masses tolerated the pretensions of the Brahmins' superiority by birth. In the caste hierarchy, the Muslims were placed in the bottom category of the untouchables. Since they belonged to the ruling community, the higher caste Hindus did not treat them with the disrespect and disdain which they did to the untouchables of their own community. It was this intolerance of the caste system that led to virtual revolts against it. By the middle of the 13th century, almost the whole of India had come under the Muslim sway. That was the time when Indian civilization was in a period of decline. The life force had waned and as a consequence, the intellectual power was fading and it seemed just a matter of time before India would go down before the Muslim aggression. But just when it seemed that India might succumb to the pressure of Islam like all other civilizations before it, there was a spiritual and religious revival of Hinduism. The result was that it not only survived the pressure but also put its impact on Islam in many directions. This was due to its great power of assimilation and inner strength; and because of that, it remains alive even to this day, thus giving ample proof of a strength and soundness rare in the history of human cultures. A very important point that must be noted is that the vast mass of Muslims in India was, and is, Indian by race. Only a very small admixture of Pathan, Turkish and Mogul blood took place; and even the foreign kings and nobles became almost immediately wholly Indian in mind, life and interest. It was in the early part of the 14th century when Sadr-Al-Din became the first king to be converted to Islam - that Kashmir became Islamic. Under Akbar, the whole of Kashmir came under the sway of the Moguls and during the reign of Aurangzeb, the Rajput Raja of Kishtwar was converted along with his subjects. Even today, it is possible to find aristocrats or Rajas who are descendants of Mohammedanised Rajputs.

Political Factors

As a result of these invasions and conquests, not only the whole of north India but also a major portion of South India, had come under Muslim rule by the middle of the thirteenth century. The green flag of Islam flew all over the country. It seemed that the Islamisation of India was a definite and foregone conclusion, just as it had happened in Egypt and Iran. But within a century (by the middle of the 15th century), Hindu religion and culture

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had not only effected an astonishing recovery but were fighting back. In the political field, however, there was constant strife; although the Muslim rulers employed a large number of Hindus in the administration, this strife remained simmering just below the surface. With the advent of the Muslim rulers, a major change took place in the political set-up. The earlier Indian political system had in it a strong democratic element. No doubt there were monarchs but Indian monarchy previous to the Mohammedan invasion, was not in any way, a personal despotism or an absolutist autocracy. It had no resemblance to the ancient Persian monarchy or the monarchies of western and central Asia or the Roman imperial government or later European autocracies: it was of an altogether different type. In spite of a certain sanctity and the great authority conceded to the regal position and the personality of the king as the representative of the divine Power and the guardian of the Dharma, he did not have absolute power. But now we had a totally different system. The Muslim State in India was a theocracy and the Sultan was considered to be Caesar and Pope combined in one. His authority in religion was based on the Holy law of the Koran but in practice, he was an autocrat, unchecked by any restrictions and his word was law. The real source of his authority was military strength and all understood this, the common people, the soldiers, the poets, and even the ulemas. But as the Delhi Sultanate was moving towards disintegration, the rise of indigenous independent states began to take place. These states were both Hindu - like in Vijaynagar, Orissa and Mewar - and Muslim - like in Gujarat and Ahmednagar. All these represented local movements of self-determination. But before these movements of self-determination could take shape, they were destroyed by the Mogul invasion, which created the Mogul empire. This was followed by the rise of Shivaji's empire and just when it seemed that a new life was about to rise in the regional peoples, there came the intrusion of the European nations, in particular the British. The failure of the Peshwas and the confusion and anarchy that followed, gave the British the opportunity to take over the whole of India.

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