When James Mill periodised the Indian History into Hindu period, Muslim period and British period, he not only gave the tool to British to pursue their policy of ‘divide and rule’, he also gave the potent weapon to the future pursuers of communal politics to intensify the divisive policies in the future. The Muslim communalists later claimed that India was ruled by Muslims and Hindu communalists claimed that Muslims are foreigners and this has been the land of Hindus from times immemorial.

One was reminded of the deep penetration of this communal view of History when, Yogi Aditaynath, the CM of Uttar Pradesh announced that the upcoming Mughal Museum in Agra to be recast as Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Museum. As per him such a historical museum is a reflection of subservient mentality and the symbol of ‘mentality of slavery’. The Mughal Museum’s foundation was laid by Akhilesh Yadav, an earlier Chief Minister of UP. The Museum was to come up near Taj Mahal in Agra and was to show the cultural aspects and armaments of Mughal kings. The aim was to give a boost to the tourism industry in UP.

Same Taj is downgraded now by the Hindu communalists. One P.N.Oak has been trying to propagate that it was Tajo Mahlaya, Shiv Tample, which was converted into Mausoleum by Shahjahan. The fact as recorded by Tavernier, a French jeweller in his travelogues, tells us that Shahjahan built it in memory of his wife Mumtaj Mahal. The same is also inferred from the account books of Shahjahan’s Court, which give a detailed break of regular expenses for the construction of this tomb. The land was acquired from Raja Jaisingh with due compensation.

As Yogi came to power he omitted Taj from the places of importance in UP. His recent utterances that remembering Mughals is symbol of slave mentality are in tune with the communal ideology which regards Islam as alien religion and Muslims as foreigners. As such we see that Indian History has been looked up in three particular ways. One was the Gandhi-Nehru, Indian nationalist interpretation where India is a place of rich diversity. The Muslim kings who ruled parts of India ruled here and lived here as the part of the land. Most of the Muslim kings respected the diverse religious tradition prevailing here.

Mahatma Gandhi points out, “The Hindus flourished under Moslem sovereigns and Moslems under the Hindu. Each party recognised that mutual fighting was suicidal and that neither party would abandon its religion by force of arms. Both parties, therefore, decided to live in peace. With the English advent quarrels recommenced.”

Similarly Jawaharlal Nehru, in his book Discovery of India, shows the thick interaction between Hindus and Muslims leading to what he famously termed as ‘Ganga Jamani Tehjeeb’, the beautiful portrayal of this is seen in the serial Shyam Benegals’ ‘Bharat Ek Khoj’.

Is this period, in which some parts of the country were ruled by Muslim Kings, (not only Mughals, there were the ones’ from others dynasties also Ghulam, Khaljis, Gazanavid’s and in South Bahamanis, Haider and Tipu) a period of slavery? While some kings like Mahmud Gazanavi, Mohammad Ghori, Ghengis Khan did plunder for wealth, the kings who ruled here became part of this land. They presided over a system of exploitation, like any other king, in which the producer was the farmer. This was true of any king, anywhere for that matter.

This period in no way can be called a period of slavery of the country. Country’s slavery begins with the British, who ruled here and plundered our wealth and implemented the policy of super exploitation of peasantry. Shashi Tharoor has done a good job (An Era of Darkness) in showing how India contributed nearly 23% of global GDP and British brought it down to mere 3% by the time they left. On the plus side of British rule was that while social structure did not change in pre British period, during British rule social changes towards democratic society did start taking place with the introduction of railways, communication, modern education, modern Judiciary etc.   

The communalists, Muslim and Hindus take off from the British in interpreting the History as a fight between Hindus and Muslims, and twisting it in a way where their own selves are shown to be the real owners of the land and also victims of the other community. The British plunder and impositions are hidden under the carpet in their scheme of understanding.

At yet another level Ambedkar sees the Indian History primarily as the clash between the values of equality of Buddhism against the caste and gender hierarchy inherent in Brahmanism.

All Hindus kings were not great and all Muslims kings were not villains. Akbar and Dara Shukoh stand out as upholders of diversity, picking up from other religions, while Shivaji ensured that the taxation on poor peasants is curtailed.

As such the real heroes of Independent India are those who contributed to building Modern India. The three major streams of this are Gandhi, who united the country in the bond of anti colonial struggle, Ambedkar who endeavoured for social equality and democratic rights, and Bhagat Singh who stood for the cause of the poor while fighting against British rule in India. It is these values which should inspire modern India and not the values of Kings, which are essentially based on social inequality and taxation of peasants. All the positive developments strengthening pluralism and diversity with equality are the principles and values we need to look up to in times to come.

Mughal museum was just a small attempt to uphold the cultural background of our lived past and in no way symbol of subservience or of slave mentality. Unfortunately we are living in times where full attempts are going on to erase the symbols; like this upcoming Museum along with changing the names of cities (Allahabad, Faiazabad, Mughal Sarai), the Muslim contribution to Indian culture.

* The writer is a human rights defender and a former professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT Bombay). 

Other pieces by Dr. Puniyani:

Kashi- Mathura: Will temple politics be revived?
Scapegoats and Holy Cows
India’s composite culture and Muslim stalwarts

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Image courtesy Global Thought Columbia University

This year, the tenth Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer memorial lecture was delivered by Professor Akeel Bilgrami on 8 December, 2017, in the wake of the twenty fifth anniversary of the planned demolition of Babri Masjid and the beginning of the devastating Bombay riots. There could not have been a better occasion and time to learn about the history of communalism in modern India because the event was organised to commemorate the life and work of Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer, who tirelessly worked for communal harmony during his lifetime and was also the founder of the Centre for Study of Society and Secularism, Mumbai. Professor Bilgrami, who is Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, and has been deeply invested in the study of secularism all his life, was gracious enough to meet me before the lecture and talk to me about the rise of communal ideology in India in recent years, especially after the rise of BJP in India.

When I asked him rather naively what lies ahead for a generation wracked by communal violence — a generation that wants to fight the forces causing such violence – he responded by saying that we need to understand the specific nature of such violence, and in doing so, gauge exactly when such violence took its root. But he provided an important caveat – he suggested that we need to first understand the difference between antecedents and roots while looking at the recent history of communal violence in India before we consolidate a movement to fight it. Historians, especially those belonging to progressive circles, often hark back to the Hindu Mahasabha and its opposition to important nationalist movements, the role people like Savarkar, Mookherjee and others played in consolidating a monolithic Hindu identity that defines itself in opposition to Muslim identity. This is an important antecedent, that is, the birth of the Hindu Mahasabha certainly foreshadows later instances of communal violence in India in general, but the roots of the communal violence we see now lie elsewhere. They lie in the formation and the implementation of the Mandal Commission in 1990. The BJP’s dream of a singular, unified Hindu identity was about to be disintegrated and divided along caste and class lines. Both L.K Advani and Atal Behari Vajpayee nearly threatened to withdraw their support if the government did not review its stand. According to Professor Bilgrami, the rise of the BJP in its current avatar should be traced back to this important event. The eighties and the nineties, therefore, planted new roots of communal violence in India. This may also further help us understand how the hindutva side of the BJP government and its political economy, which is a neo-liberal economy, prop each other up. Their apathy for the deprived classes also comes from their failure to gauge the millennia-long violence against dalits and minorities in our country. The ban on beef, the mindless torture on minorities by self-styled gaurakshas, demonetisation are some of the symptoms of this apathy (stemming from their desire to consolidate a singular undivided Hindu identity) from recent times.

This brings us to his illuminating lecture on the relationship between populism or populist rhetoric and fascism which points to the limits of liberal discourse to address the rise of communal or rightwing ideology in India. Populism is defined as a political approach that aims to disrupt the existing social order by mobilising the common people against elites. But, populism has become a word of “opprobrium”, to borrow a word from Professor Bilgrami’s lecture, for both the rightwing and those who belong to progressive circles because of the blatant appropriation of the term and populist rhetoric by the former (we must not forget that Modi’s rise can be attributed to his populist rhetoric of being a common man – someone who garnered favour because of his humble background as a one-time chaiwalla, to say nothing about the election of Ram Nath Kovind — who is a dalit — as the president of India) and the unfortunate failure of the latter to capture the common man’s concerns. He expresses concern over a “movement vacuum” in our country, a gap filled by some important student movements in recent times, but a consolidated fight against rightwing forces cannot ignore the roots of the communal violence seen in recent times, and has to take into account the question of caste and thereby define a strong populist movement by reclaiming populism as an approach that is in favour of dalits and muslims in our country.

In order to explain the fascist tendencies of rightwing-communal ideology in India, I quote these memorable lines from his talk:

Apart from the feature of finding the external enemy within (the Jews then, Muslims now) and despising and subjugating it, there are several other details:  above all there is the sinister and powerful paramilitary organisation of the RSS shaping the ideological outlook of the government (no other right wing nationalism in the world, so far as I know has anything quite like this); then there is the menace of a vigilante youth group (the ABVP) mimicking the Balillas in Mussolini’s Italy, bullying students on campuses who raise deep questions about caste or about economic inequality or about Kashmir or…; then there is the calling critics of the government ‘treasonous’ and ‘anti-national’; then there is the constant talk of purity in caste which echoes racialist attitudes on blood and descent in European fascism, and finally there is the ‘fusion’ of the interests of the corporations and the state which was Mussolini’s explicit definition of fascism and which is exemplified in the strident neo-liberal aspirations of the Indian government with widespread support among a wide range of classes including of course, as I said, the middle classes. 

Perhaps now, the newly elected dalit leader Jignesh Mevani from the Vadgam constituency of Gujarat can guide the way and stand as a beacon in such dire times.
 

Akeel Bilgrami is an Indian-born philosopher of language and of mind, and the author of Belief and Meaning, Self-Knowledge and Resentment, and Politics and the Moral Psychology of Identity  as well as various articles in Philosophy of Mind as well as in Political and Moral Psychology. Bilgrami is currently the Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University in New York.

Sneha Chowdhury is member of the editorial collective of the Indian Writers’ Forum.

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum.
 

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