While Daniyal made valid points about the nature of Hindutva, the case he made was largely a piece of whataboutery, discussing Alexander, Ashoka, Shivaji and the Marathas, while ignoring the man of the moment, Taimur himself. Daniyal exhibited a failing common to the Indian Left which, since the 1980s, has tended to emphasise deficiencies of Hindu faith and culture while overlooking those of Islam.

Let me clarify, before rebutting Daniyal’s argument, that I am very far from having any sympathy for the Hindutva cause. For proof, read my column about the lunacy of Hindutva history, or this one about Hindutva myths frequently taken as historical truth, this one contesting the idea of the Indus-Saraswati civilisation and discussing how caste discrimination makes itself felt in architecture, urban planning and sanitation; a further exploration of why the Indus Civilisation could not have been Vedic; a take-down of the popular idea of Rajput military success; a repudiation of the notion that yoga as we know it reaches back millennia; a critique of beef bans, written after I signed on to a PIL against one such prohibition in Maharashtra; and a piece underlining the extremist nature of Narendra Modi’s ideology against attempts to paint him as reasonable.

Taimur/via Wikimedia Commons

Logic flaws

To get on to Daniyal’s whataboutery, here is Exhibit A: “Ashoka or Alexander, both of whom led bloody campaigns … are common names among the supposed peoples they conquered. Sikandar, the Persian version of Alexander, is a common name across Iran and the subcontinent.”
It is true that Iskander and Sikander are common names in West Asia, but what Daniyal does not take into account is that Alexander’s conquests pre-dated Islam. His best-known victory came against the Achaemenid emperor Darius III, whose capital Persepolis he destroyed. The Achaemenid kings were Zoroastrian, and to this day, Alexander remains one of history’s great villains in the eyes of members of that faith. Parsis are commonly named after Achaemenid kings like Cyrus/Kurush and Darius/Dara, but not after Alexander. Since Muslim Iranians don’t identify with the Achaemenid kingdom the way Zoroastrians do, they bear no grudge against the Macedonian general.

Let’s consider the Mauryan emperor next, whose name, in Daniyal’s words, “carries no particular taboo in Orissa in spite of the Kalinga war”. The reason for this is rather obvious. Ashoka is revered in India not because of his bloody victory against the Kalinga army but his remorse in its aftermath. Ashoka means “without sorrow” but it his shoka that makes him great. His rejection of gratuitous violence, which was forgotten by Indians but returned to our consciousness after the decipherment of Brahmi in the 19th century, has made him an important figure in the history of pacifism, to which India has arguably contributed more than any other nation or civilisation.

Our most important source for the story of the Kalinga war is Ashoka’s own descriptions in his edicts. There is no extant account of the losing side’s perspective on the battle. But that should not lead us to conclude that the losing side had no view to express. Absence of evidence should never be construed as evidence of absence. That, unfortunately, is a trap into which Daniyal falls when he writes, “This rage is, of course, largely ahistorical. Taimur, for example, finds little mention in historical works written by Hindus at the time or even hundreds of years after.”

Since no historical works written by Hindus in Taimur’s time exist, it is hardly surprising that none makes mention of him. But it would be equally surprising if Muslim rulers’ discriminatory treatment of people professing other faiths did not leave behind a residue of resentment, one that has built up over the generations and today undergirds Hindutva.

Is it ahistorical to condemn past religious bigotry, given that it happened in eras before liberal humanism established itself as the governing philosophy of many nation-states, India included? Daniyal believes so. He writes, “The past truly is a different country and to make it fit modern standards of morality, a fair bit of invention needs to be indulged in.” While the idea that morality has differed over time is hardly controversial, using it as cover to provide moral clean chits to past rulers seems less reasonable than delving into the specifics of history to form judgements.

Question of ethics

Take the case of Shivaji, the third king Daniyal counterposes to Taimur: “Gujarat, where Hindutva has been a powerful political force for decades now, has adopted Shivaji with even more gusto, building statues in cities like Surat, which, ironically, were sacked by the Maratha chief early on in his career”. It’s true that Surat suffered substantially in the war between Mughals and Marathas, but Shivaji’s conduct during his raids on the town did not lack an ethical dimension. In Travels in the Mogul Empire, Francois Bernier records how the Maratha warrior ensured the safety of a Catholic priest named Father Ambrose for he had heard of his reputation as a saintly man, and also spared merchants known for their charity. Moreover, in contrast to Taimur’s sack of Delhi, Surat witnessed no wholesale massacre during the two major raids Shivaji conducted.

Khafi Khan, a 17th-century annalist whose version of events is very different from the one favoured by Hindu and Marathi chauvinists and who considered Shivaji an enemy, had this to say about the Maratha king’s treatment of Muslims and Islam: “He made it a rule that whenever his followers were plundering, they should do no harm to mosques, the book of God or the women of anyone. Whenever a copy of the sacred Quran came into his hands, he treated it with respect and gave it to some of his Muslim followers”.

There is an ecumenical tradition in India that is among the civilisation’s greatest ethical achievements, which stretches back to the time of Chandragupta Maurya in the fourth century BCE, was eloquently theorised by Abul Fazl during Mughal emperor Akbar’s heretical period, and is visible in the actions of Shivaji described by Khafi Khan. On many occasions, these high ideals were not visible in practice, but it is disingenuous to suggest, on that basis, that there is no difference between the Indic tradition of ecumenism and syncretism on the one hand, and Islam’s history of discrimination on the other.

Daniyal is perfectly correct in alluding to, “the castiest Manu Smriti, a book of law linked to India’s crippling 2,000 year old system of caste apartheid”, but his analysis is unbalanced by his dismissal of resentment among non-Muslims created by the trail of desecrated shrines and vandalised icons that stretches from Muhammad’s command to destroy the idol and temple of Al-lāt in the city of Taif to the destruction of the Lion of Al-Lat by ISIS in Palmyra.

Iconoclasm and the inequitable treatment of non-believers has been a rule rather than exception in Islamic cultures, just as caste is the rule rather than an exception in Hindu and Indian culture. These cultural drawbacks continue to resonate in contemporary society and politics, and both ought to be identified and called out with the same vigour.

Having said this, rules are never uniformly or invariably applied. While the Left takes refuge in shoddy scholarship of the kind offered by American historian Richard Eaton in an effort to minimise the deleterious impact of Islamic iconoclasm, Hindutvavadis, and even mainstream publications like Lonely Planet display a conscious or unconscious anti-Muslim bias. It is only by looking at historical sources dispassionately that one can come to any conclusions about particular acts of destruction. How does the evidence stack up in Taimur’s case? I begin with a brief account of the historical context before pronouncing judgement on the Central Asian conqueror.

The Defeat by Timur of the Sultan of Delhi, Nasir Al-Din Mahmum Tughluq, in the winter of 1397-1398; The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2014.101/via Wikimedia Commons

II
It started 800 years ago, with a man named Temujin. In 1205 AD, when he was a little over 40, he united the nomads of Northeast Asia’s grasslands, and took the title Chinggis Khan, Mongol for “Great Ruler”. The name is often spelled Genghis or Changaiz. Centuries of inflation and debasement have turned Khan into a common surname among Muslims, and created the false impression that Chinggis was a devotee of Allah.

Having established his rule over “all the people who live in felt tents”, Chinggis turned his attention to kingdoms beyond his own. He, and later, his children and grandchildren, visited a scale of destruction upon China, Iran, the Caucasus, and Russia far beyond anything those societies had experienced before. Dozens of major cities never recovered from Mongol wrath, and the population of the world dropped substantially in the period of their main conquests.

In the course of establishing the largest land-based empire in history, the Mongols destroyed the Abbasid Caliphate and its capital Baghdad. Arabs have had few military successes in Asia since, to the point that an Arab army managing not to lose a war miserably in our time is received by the Arab street as a triumph.

The Mongol empire gradually broke up into smaller Khanates, the heads of which adopted many of the beliefs and practices of the cultures they ruled. In West and Central Asia, this meant converting to Islam. In the Khanate of Transoxania in the late 14th century, a general named Timur (variously known as Tamerlane, Tamburlaine, and Taimur-e-lang) grew enormously powerful. He tolerated puppet rulers for a while, but eventually deposed them to become king himself. He adopted the title “Amir”, meaning general, because only descendants of Chinggis could be Khans.

Unstoppable and ruthless

Timur’s army was as powerful and ruthless as the unstoppable force assembled by Chinggis a century and a half previously. It slaughtered soldiers and civilians on a genocidal scale everywhere it went, as the Mongols had done. His ambition was to recreate the Mongol empire as it had been at its zenith, and he conquered Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia in that quest. He then invaded India, a land Mongol armies had failed to penetrate thanks to the brilliance of the likes of Allaudin Khilji.

The Delhi Sultanate was wobbly in Timur’s time, which allowed him to take control of the capital in 1398, after which he unleashed a massacre of the kind with which the rest of Asia had grown depressingly familiar but would stand out as a uniquely horrific moment in Indian history.

The dynasty Timur created out of nothing returned to almost nothing within a few generations. His successor, Shahrukh, moved the capital to Herat, where the Amirzadas, or sons of Timur (Mirzas for short), adopted Persian culture and urbane manners. In the boondocks to the north, a Mirza named Zahiruddin Muhammad was born in 1483, descended from Timur on his father’s side and on his mother’s from Chinggis. His Mongol uncles couldn’t pronounce his high-faluting name, and called him Babur instead.

An Uzbek descendant of Chinggis named Muhammad Shaibani Khan was rising through the ranks at this time, and became the Timurids’ nemesis. Babur , who had taken hold of the principality of Kabul, visited his richer cousins in Herat to seal a coalition against Shaibani. He was entranced by the poetry, painting, and architecture of the Timurid capital, but soon understood that his cousins were too soft to take on the wily Uzbek. Soon after he returned to the relative safety of Kabul, Herat was overrun, leaving Babur the last Mirza standing.

The desire grew within him to reign over an empire worthy of a man descended from the two greatest conquerors Asia had known. He said to himself, “My great-grandfather conquered Delhi and placed a vassal on its throne. Those guys have declared themselves independent and stopped sending tribute, but if you really think about it, I am the rightful ruler of Hindustan.”

Eventually, he felt confident enough to grab what he believed was his due, riding into India at the head of a few thousand skilled horsemen and defeating an army many times the size of his own. He then did something unique, something that set him apart from the many warriors who had come through the North-Western mountains and fought their way to the Indo-Gangetic plain. He stayed on and ruled, establishing an Indian dynasty of his own.

'Delhi after sack of Timur Lang, 1398'. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

III

Massacre at Loni

Even back in the 14th century, waging war required rudimentary justification. Timur’s favourite one was that the land he planned to invade was not Islamic, or not Islamic enough. India, with its tens of millions of kafirs, was an easy sell.

The act that defines Timur in my mind took place in the town of Loni a few days before the battle against Delhi’s Tughlaq Sultan. One of Timur’s emirs expressed the fear that the men, women and children they were dragging with them would break free and attack from the rear while the army was occupied in battle. Timur’s solution was to have a hundred thousand adult males slaughtered before the battle. But this was not the most appalling aspect of his order. He insisted that individual owners would put their own slaves to death rather than outsource the task. Anybody failing to kill would be killed himself.
The chronicler of Timur’s reign Sharafud-din Yazdi records how a Maulana named Naseruddin, “one of the most venerable doctors of the court, who could never … kill a single sheep, was constrained to order … fifteen slaves to be slain.”

There was nothing Islamic, or even Mongol, about the nature of the Loni massacre. The barbaric act demonstrates that Timur, for all his unsurpassed comprehension of war, lacked any moral compass. He revelled in torture and death in the way only a psychopath could. Any additional cruelty engendered by religious bigotry was but a tiny addition to his gruesome record. As a role model, he falls some way short of Alexander, Ashoka and Shivaji.

IV
Given the facts I’ve outlined, I’d be unlikely to name a son of mine Taimur, though that’s neither here nor there. For those upset by Kareena and Saif’s choice, I have a remedy. Saif’s sister Zoha is married to Kunal Khemu. I propose a campaign to persuade them to name any future son after a Hindu warrior, to restore the cosmic balance upset by the Taimur episode.

My vote goes to Hemu, Adil Shah Suri’s general, because – Hemu Khemu.

Are the current batch of TV anchors listening?

Bipan strongly believed that the government’s concessions do create communal fever. Giving the example of the Punjab crisis in 1986, he cited how the concessions given to the Akalis first and then to the Hindus “resulted in creating a feeling of hatred and distrust between the two communities.”[9] During the lecture he delivered in Lucknow on ‘Communalism – the Way Out’, he also said that “the teaching of history had been one of the major instruments for spreading communal ideology. Certain largely circulated language magazines were also responsible for infusing communalism.”[10] Recently, we had come across a statement by the Rajashtan state minister for education on how major changes are being made in the school curriculum so that “no one like Kanhaiya Kumar is born.”[11]

The year 1988-89 is regarded as the times of Mandal and Kamandal, referring to the caste and religious resurgence in India. Govind Nihalani adapted Bhisham Sahni’s Hindi novel, Tamas as a lengthy feature film to be serialized on Doordarshan. The Hindu right wing strongly objected to it and multiple court cases were filed and a debate ensued on artistes’ freedom and hurt-sentiments. Bipan Chandra was consulted by Doordarshan before the serial was approved for telecast. In an article published in January 1988, on the eve of the Republic Day, Bipan is quoted to observe, “If Tamas had been stopped, it would have become impossible to criticise even sati on television”.[12]

Bipan told the TOI news service that the serial does not open old wounds, rather it might help prevent future wounds as it shows how communal riots break out. He is reported to have said that the serial supports the fact that the ideology of communal organisations was not based on the “profoundly humanist” Indian culture but was rather borrowed from Nazism.[13] Deriving two lessons from Tamas, Bipan said that it is very important to act fast and diffuse the tension once communal tension is in the air, and Tamas also shows that the basic Indian culture has been anti-communalism, as is shown by people who tried to save the victims, irrespective of their religion.[14]

Image: India Today

In March 1989, while visiting Bombay, he spoke with TOI on issues like casteism, democracy, and regional chauvinism.[15]Talking on the connections between textbooks, education and the rise of communalism and racism, he said,
 

Emphasising the need for responsible mass writing by academicians, he said it is important because through a study of history “not just the statesman but also the citizen learns what we have become and how. It enables individuals to make a choice, whether the individual is the Prime Minister or average citizen.”[17]Bipan strongly encouraged, almost forced, historians like Romila Thapar, to write textbooks as he believed that “writing textbooks is a national duty of academics”.[18]

In March 1992, Bipan wrote a comment in support of the Indian history Congress (hereafter IHC), after the controversies over the Ujjain session in December 1991 when the Hindu right-wing tried to capture the history congress by using money power to enrol wholesale or in bulk life members. Answering the critics for whom Indian IHC is a pleasure trip to its participants, he wrote, “Most of the delegates travel at their own expense by second class. They stay in student hostels, bring their own beddings, stand in long queues before the latrines, often bathe without hot water, and eat meals which are Gandhian in their simplicity.”[19]He also highlighted the point that IHC had to take steps “to ensure that history teaching, writing and historical research remain the business of historians while political groups and parties confine themselves to making history, good or bad.”[20]

During NDA-I regime, Murli Manohar Joshi, the then Union minister of human resource and development had called such historians and academicians “intellectual terrorists”. Most of the NCERT textbooks written by left-leaning historians, like Romila and Bipan, were taken back from the shelf and major changes, suiting the needs of the fascist regime were made in the school textbooks, particularly history.

In 2002, the saffron brigade crossed all the limits when they handed over a 7-year-old boy to the police for being an “intellectual terrorist”. The event occurred at the Bhopal session of the IHC in January 2002.[21]The crime of this 7-year old “terrorist” was that he was trying to sell an “objectionable” booklet titled Communalisation of Education: The History Textbook Controversy. The book contains articles by Romila, Bipan, Irfan Habib, RS Sharma, Satish Chandra, and Arjun Dev. Reprints of newspaper articles by Vir Sanghvi, Dileep Padgaonkar, and others, and the text of deletions made from NCERT’s history textbooks were included in this booklet.

Srikanth, the 7-year old “terrorist”, son of Prof. Sucheta Mahajan, and nephew of Profs. Mridula and Aditya Mukherjee, all at JNU, students and colleagues of Bipan, and co-authors of India’s Struggle for Independence, had accompanied his parents to the congress. While selling copies of the booklet to IHC delegates, a man accosted him and threatened to hand him over to the police.[22] Srikanth was actually taken to the police posted at the venue.

The saffron brigade has always used intimidating tactics to “expose” the Marxists and people/organisations who they consider as threats to their existence in India. The tactic continues, this time the difference is that Bipan is not alive to put forth his defence and launch scathing attack on the saffron brigade playing with historical facts and history writing in particular.

We have a Destroy-History Inc. ruling the country. We must assert ourselves and tell them that you do not teach us who Bhagat Singh is; as historians, we must tell them that history writing is a serious business and you keep your “melodramatic” TV anchors and MPs away from this very serious discipline. You do not possess that critical qualification needed to produce an unbiased, objective history, because your only qualification is enacting a “high-voltage drama” in TV rooms and the Parliament, you don’t even know the difference between a TV studio and Parliament. We will resist the attempts of communal forces to replace historians like Bipan, Romila, and Irfan with a PN Oak, we will not let you scrap Mughal history, and we will not let you teach us that Taj Mahal is a Shiva Temple.

Let’s wage a fight against this fascist regime, which is not only trying to appropriate our great icons like Ambedkar, Bhagat Singh, and Bose, but, as Kanhaiya Kumar said, they are actually “encroaching” upon these icons.

Let’s stand in defence of history and historians.

(Sudha Tiwari is a PhD research scholar at the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU, New Delhi.)

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