Doctoring history and colouring Aurangzeb’s political decisions with religious fanaticism

History in India is a peculiar thing to talk about. Recently, there has been a spate of articles on the issue of the Aurangzeb Road. Some wrote in favor of the name change, slamming Aurangzeb on the ground of all the atrocities he had inflicted on the poor Hindus, while others found in it an act of immaturity. Still others were averse to the ‘Aurangzebing of Aurangzeb’ because apparently, so much attention to that road was, in a sense, ‘bringing him to life’ and would give the ‘ignorant’ Muslims another reason to sympathise with the ‘bigot’. In my quest to dig further, I came across blogs and websites that were very genuinely unearthing historical facts. Most were VERY scholarly written. And, the websites ‘sympathetically’ informing the audience of past historical events. One dispassionate reading of these blogs and websites will assuredly help you notice the words dripping with sarcasm, suggestive innuendos and half-truths, driven by preconceived notions. For instance, I came across this one particular website which took pains to prove that ‘Aurangzeb was indeed a good Muslim, how else could he not be, when he was following the Quran and the Prophet in every act of his, including the many temple desecrations?’

Some worthy mentions, however, would be Harbans Mukhia’s article, ‘The Past Cannot be Righted by Inflicting Wrongs on History’, where he rues our ‘colonial’ perception of history keeping it ‘tied to a singular pole of religion’. He says, “James Mill had taught us to treat the rulers of the “Hindu” and the “Muslim” periods not as rulers whose actions are guided by complex considerations but simply by their religious affiliation. It is this colonial lesson that we propagate today when we view Akbar and Aurangzeb (and everyone else) as merely a “good” Muslim or a “bad” Muslim. Of course, all Hindu rulers are invariably “good”, no questions asked.” Another would be Narayani Gupta’s ‘History needs informed debate, not the erasure of Aurangzeb to install Kalam‘, where she says, “…Aurangzeb has received the most attention. Any mishap could be blamed on him—even a swarm of bees in a well in a Bihar village was confidently attributed by a little girl to Aurangzeb,” and that he was ‘described in terms so unfavorable as to be just as damning’. In the EducationPlus appeared an article ‘Teaching divided Histories’ by Sriram Naganathan. He takes note of how anti-India the Pakistani history textbooks are but very cleverly overlooks how anti-Pakistan our history textbooks have become over the years.

One article, however, caught my eye- ‘Hindu temple destructions a myth: Richard Eaton’ by India Facts Research Centre. It is an ambitiously written critique of Richard Eaton, a teacher of South Asian history at the University of Arizona and author of many books, based on his statement in an interview- ‘the total number of temples that were destroyed across those six centuries (from 1000 to 1600) was 80, not many thousands as is sometimes conjectured by various people. Excerpts from the article:

“(muslim rulers)…from the very early invasions, they not only looted prosperous kingdoms and temples, but made it a point to destroy Hindu temples obeying the diktats of Islam. Equally, they built mosques using the material of the demolished temple.”

” …there’s a wealth of evidence that shows that a lot of temples were indeed destroyed during the same time that Islam entered India.”

“Professor Mohammed Habib of the Aligarh Muslim University in his book, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni (1924) quotes contemporary writers who spoke about Mahmud Ghazni’s plunders.”

“Considering that he (Mahmud) gave orders to destroy all the temples, that in itself raises the suspicion about Eaton’s claim of 80 temples. Assuming he didn’t manage to reach Eaton’s number, there were other Muslim kings who followed Ghazni and his precedent…”

The article gives evidences from manuscripts still preserved at the Bikaner Museum in Rajasthan, from Persian translations of ‘firmans’, more so with a link to a website run by FACT – India, owned by Francois Gautier, a French political writer, and (ignoring other minor evidences from the times of the British rule) from the very infamous book ‘Hindu Temples: What happened to them’ co-authored by S.R.Goel, Arun Shourie and two others. The article concludes on the lines- ‘He (Eaton) has deliberately suppressed the actual count of the number of Hindu temples destroyed by medieval muslim rulers’, ‘He is ignorant of medieval Muslim history of India’, ‘Eaton does not present a shred of evidence…to back his 80-temples-destroyed claim!’, ‘…it is nothing short of an intellectual crime’ and that his claim is ‘not only false but that Richard Eaton is an Incorrigible Liar.‘

Before I decided to peruse Eaton’s writing, I wanted to delve into the sources of these evidences. A review of the writings of Mohammed Habib by Sanjay Subodh was published in the Journal of History and Social sciences. One can glean from his study the ill intentions our colonisers had while rewriting our history, extolling the barbarism of the previous Muslim rule to justify their act of colonization of Indians and presenting it to be ‘better’. He says, “The idea of Islam was equated with that of activities of Mahmud of Ghazni and consequently the presentation of Mahmud became the form in which the knowledge about Islam was to be etched on the minds of the natives.” Further, we find that Habib ‘did not see Mahmud as a propagator of the faith who came to India for the sake of Islam’ and that he was ‘far from a missionary’ but with political motives. Somehow, the authors of the critique seem to have missed the whole point of Habib’s writing.

‘In short, it is clear that temples had been the natural sites for the contestation of kingly authority well before the coming of Muslim Turks to India. Not surprisingly, Turkish invaders, when attempting to plant their own rule in early medieval India, followed and continued established patterns.

My next subject of research was Francois Gautier. The page dedicated to Aurangzeb and his ‘translated’ (note the word ‘translated’) firmans also gave the mission of FACT- India, which says, ‘…committed to highlighting the magnificence of India and the threats to its sovereignty.’ This made me wonder about the ‘threat’ he was referring to. Certainly, he seems to be hounded by a spectre of Muslims raiding India and other such bloodcurdling stories. Dig in a little deeper and you will find his Facebook post on Aurangezeb, speaking of his museum in Pune, dedicated to the Great Shivaji, and then he rants on Aurangzeb as everybody else. His article ‘India’s self denial’ on Archaeology Online will reveal his biased kaleidoscope of Muslim history in India and his apparent love and respect for the Hindu ‘caste system’ quoting ‘India’s Great Sage and Avatar of the Modern Age, Sri Aurobindo’. Apparently, it ‘was’ quite similar to the class system in Europe that came out of good intentions, but was only vilified and manipulated later by other ‘secular’ historians. But to take the class system of Europe as a standard is naive. The world is aware of the chaos and oppression that the class system in Europe brought about and the racist idea of superiority that the elite in Europe harped on for years. On the issue of the refugees flocking to Europe for safety, he says particularly about ‘Muslims’, ‘They will be given houses, loans, education for their children, residents’ permits and eventually passports. But they won’t integrate, will keep their ways and eventually some of them, or some of their children, will bite the hands that fed them. We have seen it in India with Bangladesh.” His view of RSS- ‘they are doing a remarkable job.’Newlaundry posted his video ‘Can you take it Francois Gautier?’ where he speaks to Madhu Trehan on ‘his love for Indian spirituality, the need for a militant Hindutva, how the people of Gujarat should be on trial and not Modi, the need for a nationalist leader who’s not scared to go to war and more’. It is clear, his words though very sophisticatedly articulated, are fraught with contempt, hate-mongering and condascension where he narrow-mindedly judges people based on their religious beliefs. What is more apalling is the number of ‘well dones’, ‘good jobs’ and ‘salutes’ he receives for his Facebook posts, not to forget the thousands of ‘likes’.

Before we judge a book by its content, one also needs to know its writers, and where their thought pattern is coming from. The well acclaimed Khushwant Singh had a lot to tell about Arun Shourie and the like. In his article ‘When telling the truth becomes a crime’ for the Hindustan Times, he recalls his last encounter with Arun Shourie.

“At one of the Shouries’ dinner parties….The conversation was largely about L K Advani’s Rath Yatra from the temple of Somnath to Ayodhya. I had no doubt that the excercise was undertaken with the evil intent to destroy Babri masjid. Passing by, Arun remarked: “Who says it is a mosque?” I was taken aback…. I could not hold back and said to Shourie, “Arun, have you ever seen any building with three domes and a wall facing Makkah which is not a mosque?” He did not reply. Since then we have been on opposite sides; he on the mosque breakers.’

“I stopped associating with Arun Shourie. I read of his rise to eminence as a Cabinet Minister and a Member of the BJP’s think-tank. His book on Dr Ambedkar offended Dalits… Being hurt himself, he wanted to hurt other people…”

The comments to his article are obviously degrading.

Coming back to Richard Eaton, his historical analysis, ‘Temple desecration in pre-modern India’ was published in Frontline (volume 17- issue 25 as Part I and Part II). He isn’t unaware of S R Goel’s book, as one may think. He says, “While Hindu nationalists like Sita Ram Goel have endeavoured to document a pattern of wholesale temple destruction by Muslims in this period, few professional historians have engaged the issue, even though it is a properly historical one.” Much of the ‘translated’ extracts that are quoted as evidence by our historians were ‘translated’ during the British rule. From the original preface of the ‘influential’ work by Sir Henry M Elliot (History of India as told by its Own Historians), one can read his intention of writing Indian History. He paints Muslim rulers in the darkest of colors and as Eaton says, “With the advent of British power, on the other hand, “a more stirring and eventful era of India’s History commences … when the full light of European truth and discernment begins to shed its beams upon the obscurity of the past….”” Elliot expressed the hope that his published translations “will make our native subjects more sensible of the immense advantages accruing to them under the mildness and the equity of our rule.” In short, it was to make place for the British rule in the hearts of the Indians. He further comments on the use of ‘selective translations’ of Persian chronicles and ‘selective use of epigraphic data’ by historians to give base to their claim of temple desecrations. Mahmud of Ghazni looted and raided not only ‘Hindu cities in India’ but also ‘Muslim cities in Iran’. His aim was a political one- to finance his ‘larger political objectives’ and to ‘pay his soldiers’. Eaton gives the statistics of his looting the Iranian city of Ray in 1029 as an example, which refutes the claim that he specifically targeted Hindu temples. Any place of wealth would satiate his ambition.

He gives a remarkable insight into the political environment that revolved around places of worship in ancient india- that is, the King and the deities were thought to share sovereignty. The later Muslim rulers who had come to India with the intention of conquering land, saw temples as politically active centres. He says, “When such authority was vested in a ruler whose own legitimacy was associated with a royal temple – typically one that housed an image of a ruling dynasty’s state-deity,…- that temple was normally looted, redefined, or destroyed, any of which would have had the effect of detaching a defeated raja from the most prominent manifestation of his former legitimacy. Temples that were not so identified, or temples formerly so identified but abandoned by their royal patrons and thereby rendered politically irrelevant, were normally left unharmed.” But the practice of desecrations was well established in the Indian peninsula well before the Muslims set foot on Indian soil. Temples were considered ‘politically vulnerable’ from about the sixth century AD. To quote, ‘Given these perceived connections between temples, images, and their royal patrons, it is hardly surprising that, as Richard H. Davis has recently shown, early medieval Indian history abounds in instances of temple desecration that occurred amidst inter-dynastic conflicts.’ And then, he goes on to give a list of temple desecrations by rulers including the Pallava king Narsimhavarman I, the Pandyan king Srimara Srivallabha who invaded Sri Lanka and ‘took back to his capital a golden Buddha image’, Herambapala, who ‘seized a solid gold image of Vishnu Vaikuntha’, the same image later ‘seized by the Candella king Yasovarman’. Another instance is that of the Chola King Rajendra I who had ‘seized’ a number of images including ‘Durga and Ganesha images from the Chalukyas. Rajadhiraja, another Chola King, ‘defeated the Chalukyas and plundered Kalyani.’ After a weighty amount of evidences of desecrations, Eaton says, ‘In short, it is clear that temples had been the natural sites for the contestation of kingly authority well before the coming of Muslim Turks to India. Not surprisingly, Turkish invaders, when attempting to plant their own rule in early medieval India, followed and continued established patterns.’ As to the table of 80 desecrations by Muslim rulers he says that it does not give a ‘complete picture’, because ‘the facts in the matter were never recorded, or the facts were recorded but the records themselves no longer survive.’ He refutes all claims to the mass desecrations as ‘no contemporary evidence supports the claims’ but the ‘historicity’ of 80 appears reasonably certain.’ Those interested may find his references.

But one must remember that these acts ‘occurred on the cutting edge of a moving military frontier.’ The Khalji rulers raided to amass wealth which they needed to defend North India from the Mongol attacks. With regards to Babur, he says that the notion of destruction of a temple at Ayodhya was expounded by S.K.Banerji in 1936, to which ‘the author offered no evidence that there had ever been a temple at this site, much less that it had been destroyed by Mir Baqi, Babur’s officer. He continues, ‘the mosque’s inscription records only that Babur had ordered the construction of the mosque, which was built by Mir Baqi and was described as ‘the place of descent of celestial beings’, and that ‘it is the mosque itself that is so described.’

He then gives instances of desecration of temples that were considered important to the constitution of the enemy kings. “The temple’s political significance,” he says, “and hence the necessity of desecrating it, would have been well understood by Murahari Rao, himself a Marathi Brahmin”, who had ‘sacked the Ahobilam temple’ and presented the seized image to his Sultan. As is evident, ‘acts of temple desecration were never directed at the people, but at the enemy king and the image that incarnated and displayed his state-deity.’

In the second part of his study he presents a number of instances of ‘temple protection’. Once a particular area was annexed, all places of worship were treated as state property, were given grants, maintained by the state and were forbidden to be disturbed by any under official law. For instance, Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq appointed Muslim officials to repair a Siva temple in Kalyana Other instances of maintenance involve Sultan Shihab al-Din of Kashmir, who ‘rebuked his Brahmin Minister for having suggested melting down Hindu and Buddhist images in his kingdom as a means of obtaining quick cash’ and Sikandar Lodhi, who was advised by his ministers against desecrations which was prohibited under law. Regarding Aurangzeb, he quotes the instance where the King upon receiving news of harassment of Hindu residents in Banaras, ordered ‘Therefore, upon receiving this order, you must see that nobody unlawfully disturbs the Brahmins or other Hindus of that region, so that they might remain in their traditional place and pray for the continuance of the Empire.’ What is misquoted by most historians, is the line after this, ‘nor should new temples be built’, which Eaton says, applied only to Banaras for ‘reasons unknown’, because in the rest of the kingdom, there were instances of many temple constructions.

But it wasn’t just Eaton who came up with these facts. Sir Thomas W. Arnold in his book ‘The Preaching of Islam’ agrees to the fact that history was used as a propaganda tool to blacken the characters of Muslims and by extension, Islam itself.

In the later part, he reveals several instances of desecrations that were meted out as punishment to certain officials on grounds of treason or open rebellion. ‘…from a juridical standpoint’, Eaton explains, ‘ruling authorities felt justified in treating that temple as an extension of the officer, and hence liable for punishment.’ Instances involve Adil Shahi Sultans on treason of Shivaji Bhonsle, a Maratha rebel, who had taken over a port and disturbed trade, Shah Jahan for the open rebellion of Raja Jajhar Singh, Aurangzeb against the rebellion of landlords in Banaras and treason by Jai Singh, grandson of Raja Man Singh, who had initiated escape of Shivaji, his bitter enemy, from imperial detention, and the Jat rebellions during which the ‘patron of that city’s congregational mosque had been killed’, so he ordered the city’s temple to be demolished because it ‘had become associated with imperial enemies.’ The order of desecrating all places of worship by Aurangzeb, which is often clamored by our historians, Eaton clears some dust off that too. Apparently, the previous lines of the commonly stated order by the king, indicated something else, and that ‘the order was in response to specific reports of an educational nature and was targeted at investigating those institutions where a certain kind of teaching had been taking place,’ and was pertaining to a certain place and so was not a general order from the King. Another noteworthy point that he comes up with is that in punishing disloyal Muslim subjects or during annexation of other Muslim lands, no act of mosque desecration occurred. This was so because Mosques or shrines, he says, had no ‘personal connection with a Muslim monarch’. It simply had no potential of garnering the attention of the King’s Muslim enemies or disloyal subjects, and so they were politically inactive or irrelevant. He says, ‘they were considered detached from both sovereign terrain and dynastic authority.’

Eaton refutes claims of mass desecrations further. If this was really the case, all temples would have ceased to exist, but it was not so. He adds, “The fundamentally non-religious nature of these actions is reflected in the fact that contemporary inscriptions in Sanskrit or in regional languages never identified Indo-Muslim invaders in terms of their religion, as Muslims, but generally in terms of their linguistic affiliation (most typically as Turk, “turushka”). That is, they were construed as but one ethnic community in India amidst many others.” What we need to remember is that historical events have contexts and so should not be treated separately.

But it wasn’t just Eaton who came up with these facts. Sir Thomas W. Arnold in his book ‘The Preaching of Islam’ agrees to the fact that history was used as a propaganda tool to blacken the characters of Muslims and by extension, Islam itself. In fact, he dedicates chapters to Islamic laws and how ‘religious tolerance’ is of utmost importance in a state governed by Islam.

So who are these archeologists and historians who give us evidences of temples having been demolished? Another worthy read is ‘Was there a Temple under the Babri Masjid? Reading the ‘Archaeological Evidence’ by Supriya Varma and Jaya Menon, who are ‘witnesses to a major part of excavations carried out by Archaeological Survey of India’ at the disputed Babri masjid site. The paper was published in the Economic and Political Weekly which chronicled the events right from how the ‘chief priest of Hanumangarhi took over the eastern part of the masjid courtyard’, the partition built by the British government, to the surreptitious placing of the idols inside the masjid, and ignoring of various petitions and complaints filed by the Muslims to the order passed to forbid Muslims from entering the area and consequent demolition, first by using crowbars by vengeful men with the help of the government. The researchers have very aptly, recorded every detail of how the temple pillars were ‘created’ as evidence, the many complaints they had filed with regards to irregularities and manipulation, poor recording of data, entry of non-archaeologists, outdated methods of excavating and ignoring possible evidence of an old mosque beneath it. One noteworthy point is how ASI reports of some concrete evidence when there wasn’t any in any of the deplorably maintained records of the site’s excavations. With regard to ASI they say, ‘Most archaeologists in India, when it comes to the historical period, see archaeology in the role of affirming what is written in the texts or prevails in oral traditions. This was also the mindset behind the projects on the archaeology of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata’.

The authors agree that both ‘textual’ and ‘archaeological’ evidences are required but to affirm the ‘chronology’ of any incident described in the text is ‘difficult’. They continue that the ASI practices are marked by this ‘uncritical use of early texts’. Plus, there is ‘serious absence of academic engagement and training at ASI and that the archaeologists look upon themselves as ‘government officers’ as they are ‘directly answerable to the central government.’ Moreover, ASI has full control over the archaeological sites of excavations and one has to obtain their permission for entry into any. Any finds and researches or conclusions from others are, apparently, ‘not recognized until scrutinised by the ASI.’ The problem is, ‘…academically, the work that archaeologists of the ASI have produced has little standing within the social sciences in India and abroad’. However, the problem is worse than just that. To quote further, “these (ASI excavations) involve ‘everything else but research. It is about money, corruption, public performance, politics, favouritism, personal gains, and everything else. Research is just an excuse. Go and ask any archaeologist and ask what is research and you will know that it means nothing to him.” In their notes, the researches say, that these are excerpts from a PhD thesis on the ASI submitted to the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University in 2007 by Ashish Chadha which was based on his interviews with ASI personnel. To get into the institute of archaeology one needs to have ‘personal connections’ with archeologists of ASI, and none else apart from the institute is accepted into ASI. Read further their notes, and you will come across ”all senior archaeologists in the ASI have right-wing sympathies. They might not be RSS pracharaks, but they are openly with the BJP…”

With regards to the Indian Council of Historical Research, it has been in the news for all the wrong reasons, saffronisation being just one of them.

Its strange how they keep clamouring about correcting the made up wrongs done centuries ago by Muslim rulers and talk of the present Muslims in the same breath, while they easily ally with our colonisers, who were oppressors involved in mass killing with rock-solid evidence and who left us just a few years ago.

One must know that Muslims (or any other minority) don’t need a certificate of patriotism from our historians who are busy doctoring our past, which is by now a well-established fact. To pose arguments, and to be able to engage in healthy debates in a wholesome tone with no hidden sarcasm and implications, alone is the sign of a ‘civilised’ mind. Our sensibilities are yet to reach that level of maturity when we, despite our intellectual differences, look at one another amicably, and be averse to any emotional rant of ‘us and them’. As long as poisonous minds keep working in our country as politicians, historians, writers, journalists and researchers with their ever growing supporters, national harmony will remain a dream never to be fulfilled.