Mother's Chronicles - Book Four

8

The Jungle

When trees are cut and removed from a forest, it becomes a jungle. The first thing that happens is a tangled spreading of the underbrush. In the same way, the Indian society was almost choked with undergrowth. So much so that the sustaining nourishment of India —the Vedas and the Upanishads —were all but buried under a vegetation of ignorance and customs.

We have a shining example of the Vedic times in Rishi Agastya and his consort Lopamudra —man and wife together and as equals, "digging" to reach the Sun hidden in the depths of Matter.

Gargi, of the Upanishad times, is an example of educated woman of India. In the court of King Janaka of Mithila, when Rishi Yajnavalkya challenged the assembled learned men to beat him in debate, all those who tried had to concede defeat; then it was that Gargi took up the challenge, dared to stand up to the winner and matched argument to argument and logic to logic, till finally he stopped her with a threat: "If you persist in further questionings, your head will fall off your shoulders."

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Such then was the education of women in ancient India.

But, as Sri Aurobindo wrote in the Bande Mataram on 22 September 1907: "It is the nature of human institutions to degenerate, to lose their vitality, and decay, and the first signs of decay is the loss of flexibility and oblivion of the essential spirit in which they were conceived. The spirit is permanent, the body changes; and a body which refuses to change must die." The body of Hindu society could not adapt to its changing environment, and this led to its degeneration. Many perversions crept in. The classification in four human types based on quality — varnāshrama — became a rigid caste system based on birth, which was sharply criticized by Sri Aurobindo. He denounced even more sharply the caste-based politics which the British government introduced. Customs petrified into laws. This petrification weakened the nation.

The weakened old culture became dislocated and broke into regional fragments under the shock of the Mahomedan conquest. For the invasion of the land by the savage hordes, their orgy of wanton destruction, forced conversions, and desecration of temples on the one hand, and their propensity to molestation of women on the other, changed the open and free Indian society to a closed one. Most to suffer were the women: it was polygamy for men, it was sati for women; unimaginable harsh rigours of life were forced upon the Hindu widows; education was denied to women — educated women soon became widows, was the superstition! Luckily for us there were always some exceptions.

Islam's move towards becoming a world force began immediately after Mohammed's death in A.D. 632, and soon

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large parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia were conquered. It was only defeats suffered by Mahomedans in Constantinople (717) and in central France (732) that saved Christian Europe from succumbing to the sweeping Islamic wave. In India, it took the Mahomedans four to five centuries and repeated invasions before they could establish their rule over a significant part of the subcontinent. The Hindus had held them at bay from A.D. 638, when the Mahomedans made the first of a series of attempts to conquer Sindh. Even when they finally wrested it in 712 from its Brahmin king Dahir, the Pratihara empire, the last great Hindu empire in Northern India, checked their progress beyond Sindh for nearly 300 years. In spite of the establishment of the Sultanate at Lahore in 1206, the major part of India remained under Hindu rule throughout the thirteenth century.

The Rajputs, the Marathas, the Sikhs¹ and other Hindu kings continued to offer stiff resistance to the "Muslim invaders — the greedy barbarians who were attracted by the proverbial

1. In fact, Sikhism, founded by Guru Nanak in the fifteenth century, was at first a peaceful sect derived from among the Hindus. But the cruel policies of the Muslim rulers after Akbar alienated them. The fifth Guru, Arjan, was executed on Emperor Jehangir's order because, out of pity, he had given shelter to Jehangir's fugitive son, Prince Khusro. Arjan's son, the sixth Guru, Hargovind (1606-45), gave a military turn to Sikhism. Again, the ninth Guru, Tegh Bahadur, who preferred death to conversion, was beheaded by Aurangzeb. So it was left to Tegh Bahadur's son, the tenth and last Guru, Govind Singh (1675 1708), to make the Sikh sect into a militant body, the Khalsa (or Pure), determined to resist Muslim atrocities and forced conversions. Guru Govind was himself treacherously assassinated by an Afghan Muslim.

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wealth of the land."¹ Indeed, Babar, the founder and first emperor (1526-30) of the Moghul dynasty, which replaced the Delhi Sultanate, records in his Babarnama: "Hindustan is a country of few charms, its people have no good looks; of genius and capacity none; of manners none. ..." Why then was he attracted to the country? "The chief excellence of Hindustan is that it has masses of gold and silver."

But, to borrow a sentence from K. M. Munshi,² "We were far in advance of the world, physically, morally, mentally, but we lacked the art of organised destruction. We were vanquished." The Hindus had indeed neglected to materialize "all the destructive forces in Nature to aid them in massacre and domination." It's not that the Hindus were in any way militarily inferior to the Mohammedan invader. Quite the contrary. They defeated the Central Asian barbarians so many times. But the Hindus were much too civilized, and that proved to be their undoing. The Kshatriya, the warrior class, was trained in and upheld an honourable 'code of war.' Thus when a Hindu king vanquished the Mussulman, he sent him back to his home with presents befitting his position. When a Mussulman happened to get a Hindu he destroyed him. More often than not the invaders used base treachery to conquer. The Indians were not used to it.

The historian Will Durant sums up in his History of

1.The Liberator (1954), by Sisir Kumar Mitra. He was a professor of History at Vishvabharati, Tagore's University at Santiniketan.

2.Dr. K. M. Munshi (1887-1971), eminent novelist, writer, politician, and founder of the well-known Institute of Indian culture, the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan.

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Civilization: "The Mohammedan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within."

Naturally, the Mohammedans were not the first to invade India. Greeks, Huns and many other tribes had come to this rich land before them; and they had done what all invaders have been doing from the beginning of human history. But once they had settled down they had mingled and been absorbed into the culture of the land, enriching it. Islam was the first culture that could not, or would not, mix, as oil from the Middle East does not mix with water from the Ganges —or any other water of the world for that matter.

On what tenets is Islam founded ? The question rises in my mind today, in April 1990, as I write this chapter. What is this Islamic culture in reality? Swami Vivekananda put it succinctly: "There has not been a religion which has shed so much blood and been so cruel to other men. In the Koran there is the doctrine that a man who does not believe these teachings should be killed; it is a mercy to kill him!" In my simplicity, I had until now believed that God was love and joy and compassion. . . . "And the surest way to get to heaven, where there are beautiful houris and all sorts of sense enjoyments, is by killing these unbelievers."¹

1. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, II, 352-3.

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And yet. Yet religions like Islam or Christianity — and most others —claim universal Brotherhood as their doctrine. "Mohammedans talk of universal brotherhood, but what comes out of that in reality?" asked Swamiji. And he answered his own question. "Why, anybody who is not a Mohammedan will not be admitted into the brotherhood; he will more likely have his own throat cut. Christians talk of universal brotherhood ; but anyone who is not a Christian must go to that place where he will be eternally barbecued."¹

That strange chimera, a rational religion! Is it not passing strange how every monotheistic religion claims to be the sole possessor of Truth? Then again, their attempt to shut up Truth in a single Book! The "Book" being generally interpreted by a narrow brain that tries to box in God within its own limitation. Just let someone try to interpret it in a different way, and see the consequences! "All fanaticism," explained Sri Aurobindo, "is false, because it is a contradiction of the very nature of God. The Divine Being is eternal and universal and infinite. ..."

Be that as it may, it seems to me a quirk of fate that in India of today—which is supposed to be a Hindu-majority country —Muslims and Christians can "openly declare their pride in their religions when Hindus doing so are termed obscurantists, fundamentalists and zealots," as a clear-headed Indian so aptly put it.

At any rate, when the British came to India, they found the Hindu and Muslim masses —the latter mostly descendants of local converts — living amicably enough side by side.

1. Ibid., II,380

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