Audrey Truschke - It is High Time to Discard the Pernicious Myth of India’s Medieval Muslim ‘Villains’ // Interview: ‘Aurangzeb is a severely misunderstood figure’
Whatever happened in the past, religious-based violence is
real in modern India, and Muslims are frequent targets. It is thus disingenuous
to single out Indian Muslim rulers for condemnation without owning up to the
modern valences of that focus.
The idea that medieval Muslim rulers wreaked havoc on Indian
culture and society – deliberately and due to religious bigotry – is
a ubiquitous notion in 21st century India. Few people seem to realise that
the historical basis for such claims is shaky to non-existent. Fewer openly
recognise the threat that such a misreading of the past poses for modern India.
Aurangzeb, the sixth Mughal Emperor (r. 1658-1707), is
perhaps the most despised of India’s medieval Muslim rulers. People cite
various alleged “facts” about Aurangzeb’s reign to support their contemporary
condemnation, few of which are true. For instance, contrary to widespread
belief, Aurangzeb did not destroy thousands of Hindu temples. He did not perpetrate
anything approximating a genocide of Hindus. He did not instigate a large-scale
conversion program that offered millions of Hindu the choice of Islam or the
sword.
In short, Aurangzeb was not the Hindu-hating, Islamist
tyrant that many today imagine him to have been. And yet the myth of malevolent
Aurangzeb is seemingly irresistible and has captured politicians, everyday
people, and even scholars in its net. The damage that this idea has done is
significant. It is time to break this mythologized caricature of the past wide
open and lay bare the modern biases, politics, and interests that have fuelled
such a misguided interpretation of India’s Islamic history.
A recent article on this website cites a series of
inflammatory claims about Indo-Muslim kings destroying premodern India’s Hindu
culture and population. The article admits that “these figures are drawn from
the air” and historians give them no credence. After acknowledging that the
relevant “facts” are false, however, the article nonetheless posits that
precolonial India was populated by “religious chauvinists,” like Aurangzeb, who
perpetrated religiously-motivated violence and thus instigated “historical
injustices” to which Hindus can rightly object today. This illogical leap from
a confessed lack of reliable information to maligning specific rulers is the
antithesis of proper history, which is based on facts and analysis rather than
unfounded assumptions about the endemic, unchanging nature of a society.
A core aspect of the historian’s craft is precisely that we
cannot assume things about the past. Historians aim to recover the past and to
understand historical figures and events on their own terms, as products of
their time and place. That does not mean that historians sanitise prior events.
Rather we refrain from judging the past by the standards of the present, at
least long enough to allow ourselves to glimpse the logic and dynamics of a
historical period that may be radically different from our own.
In the case of Indian Muslim history, a core notion that is
hard for modern people to wrap our heads around is as follows: It was not all
about religion. Aurangzeb, for instance, acted in ways that are rarely
adequately explained by religious bigotry. For example, he ordered the
destruction of select Hindu temples (perhaps a few dozen, at most, over his
49-year reign) but not because he despised Hindus. Rather, Aurangzeb generally
ordered temples demolished in the aftermath of political rebellions or to
forestall future uprisings.
Highlighting this causality does not serve to
vindicate Aurangzeb or justify his actions but rather to explain why he
targeted select temples while leaving most untouched. Moreover, Aurangzeb also
issued numerous orders protecting Hindu temples and communities from
harassment, and he incorporated more Hindus into his imperial administration
than any Mughal ruler before him by a fair margin. These actions collectively
make sense if we understand Aurangzeb’s actions within the context of state
interests, rather than by ascribing suspiciously modern-sounding religious
biases to him.
Regardless of the historical motivations for events such as
premodern temple destructions, a certain percentage of modern Indians
nonetheless feel wronged by their Islamic past. What is problematic, they ask,
about recognising historical injustices enacted by Muslim figures? In this
regard, the contemporaneity of debates over Indian history is crucial to
understanding why the Indo-Islamic past is singled out.
For many people, condemnations of Aurangzeb and other
medieval Indian rulers stem not from a serious assessment of the past but
rather from anxieties over India’s present and future, especially vis-à-vis its
Muslim minority population. After all, one might ask: If we are recognising
injustices in Indian history, why are we not also talking about Hindu rulers?
When judged according to modern standards, medieval rulers the world over
measure up poorly, and Hindu kings are no exception. Medieval Hindu political
leaders destroyed mosques periodically, for instance, including in Aurangzeb’s India. Going back more than a
millennium earlier, Hindu rulers were the first to come up with the idea of
sacking one another’s temples, before Muslims even entered the Indian
subcontinent. But one hears little about these “historical wrongs” for one
reason: They were perpetrated by Hindus rather than Muslims.
Religious bigotry may not have been an overarching problem
in India’s medieval past, but it is a crucial dynamic in India’s present. Religious-based
violence is real in modern India, and Muslims are frequent targets. Non-lethal
forms of discrimination and harassment are common. Fear is part of everyday
life for many Indian Muslims. Thus, when scholars compare medieval Islamic rulers like Aurangzeb to
South Africa’s twentieth-century apartheid leaders, for example, they not
only display a surprising lack of commitment to the historical method but also
provide fodder for modern communal fires.
It is high time we discarded the pernicious myth of India’s
medieval Muslim villains. This poisonous notion imperils the tolerant
foundations of modern India by erroneously positing religious-based conflict
and Islamic extremism as constant features of life on the subcontinent.
Moreover, it is simply bad history. India has a complicated and messy past, and
we do it and ourselves no justice by flattening its nuances to reflect the
religious tensions of the present.
The present Bharatiya Janata Party government believes
Mughals are not part of India’s history. Your book is about how Sanskrit,
sought to be made mainstream by the government, flourished under the Mughals.
How do we reconcile the two?
We don’t reconcile the two perspectives. Rather, we ask two
key questions. One, who is on firmer historical ground in their claims? Two,
what are the political reasons for the BJP wanting to erase the Mughals (or at
least most of the Mughals) from India’s past? The bulk of my work concerns the
honest excavation of history. The Mughals are a significant part of Indian
history, and Sanskrit is a significant part of the story of the Mughal empire.
Those facts may be inconvenient for the BJP and others, but as a historian I do
not temper my investigation of the past in deference to present-day concerns.
However, I realise that history matters in the present, perhaps especially in
modern South Asia. One present-day implication of my work is to point up the
flimsy basis of the BJP’s version of India’s past.
In an ironical way, as the present government fights to push Sanskrit into mainstream discourse, your work concentrates on the Mughals, whom the BJP dislikes, and their engagement with Sanskrit.
The BJP only wants a certain version of Sanskrit in the
mainstream. They no doubt love Kalidasa, but I cannot imagine the BJP endorsing
students to read the Sanskrit accounts of the Mughals written by Jains in the
16th and 17th centuries. India has a great treasure in its Sanskrit tradition,
but that treasure is not only classical poetry and the Indian epics, but also
the immense diversity of Sanskrit literature.
Who were the Mughal rulers under whom there was active exchange of Sanskrit and Persian ideas, in your account?
Sanskrit flourished in the royal Mughal court primarily
under three emperors: Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan. However, we should not
make the error of attributing Aurangzeb’s lack of interest in Sanskrit to his
alleged bigotry. Aurangzeb is a severely misunderstood historical figure who
has suffered perhaps more than any of the other Mughal rulers from present-day
biases. There are two main reasons why Sanskrit ceased to be a major part of
Mughal imperial life during Aurangzeb’s rule. One, during the 17th century,
Sanskrit was slowly giving way to Hindi. This was a wider literary shift in the
subcontinent, and even under Shah Jahan we begin to see imperial attention
directed towards Hindi-language intellectuals at the expense of Sanskrit.
Aurangzeb’s reign simply happen to coincide with the waning of Sanskrit and the
rise of literary Hindi.
Second, as most Indians know, Aurangzeb beat out Dara Shikoh
for the Mughal throne. Dara Shikoh had been engaged in a series of
cross-cultural exchanges involving Sanskrit during the 1640s and 1650s. Thus,
from Aurangzeb’s perspective, breaking Mughal ties with the Sanskrit cultural
world was a way to distinguish his idioms of rule from those of the previous
heir apparent. In short, Aurangzeb decided to move away from what little
remained of the Mughal interest in Sanskrit as a political decision, rather
than as a cultural or religious judgment.
As a side note, let me clarify that while Akbar inaugurated
Mughal engagements with Sanskrit, he did so for slightly different reasons than
many people think. Akbar’s reputation is that he was open-minded and tolerant,
almost a protosecular figure. This can be a misleading characterisation. Akbar
was interested in Sanskrit for its political valence in his empire, not as some
personal religious quest. Akbar also had no qualms about harshly judging
perspectives that he viewed as beyond the pale. A good example is that he
questioned Jain thinkers about whether they were monotheists because to be
otherwise would mean being evicted from the Mughal court (Jains assured him
that they believed in God).
What was the interaction between the Mughal elites and Brahmin Hindus and Jain religious groups like?
Brahmans, for example, assisted with Mughal translations of
Sanskrit texts into Persian. The method was that Brahmans would read the
Sanskrit text, verbally translate it into Hindi (their shared language with the
Mughals), and then the Mughals would write down the translation in Persian.
Jains and Brahmans alike assisted the Mughals with astrology. Brahmans cast
Sanskrit-based horoscopes for the Mughal royal family. On at least one occasion,
Jains performed a ceremony to counteract an astrological curse on Jahangir’s
newborn daughter. My forthcoming book, Culture of Encounters,
devotes an entire chapter to reconstructing the social history of links between
Mughal elites and Brahmans/Jains.
You argue that the ideology underpinning violence — such as what took place in the 2002 pogrom, in which more than 1,000 Muslims died, or the current intolerance towards them — erases Mughal history and writes religious conflicts into Indian history where there was none, thereby justifying modern religious intolerance. Is it correct to then deduce that there was no religious conflict in the court of the Mughals?
No. First, there was plenty of violence in Mughal India.
Violence and conflict are enduring features of the human experience and I would
never suggest otherwise. Even under Akbar, violence was commonplace. A far
trickier question, however, is, how much Mughal-led violence was
religious-based or motivated by religious conflicts? Generally, the Mughals
acted violently towards political foes (whether they were Rajput, Muslim,
Hindu, or otherwise was irrelevant). It is very difficult for many modern
people to accept that violence in pre-modern India was rarely religiously
motivated. In this sense, pre-colonial India looked very different than
pre-modern Europe, for example. But we lack historical evidence that the
Mughals attacked religious foes. On the contrary, some scholars have even
suggested that modern “Western” ideas about religious toleration were, in part,
inspired by what early European travellers witnessed in the Mughal Empire.
That said, there were limited instances when the Mughals
persecuted specific individuals over religious differences. A good example is
that Akbar sent a few of the Muslim ulama on hajj to Mecca,
which meant that they were effectively exiled from the court. Some of these ulama were
murdered on their way out of India.
Is there a problem with a Marxist interpretation of history as is being argued now by the BJP government?
Marxist history is limiting, in my opinion. This strain of
thought tends to emphasise social class and economic factors in determining
historical trajectories. Modern historians have a much wider range of
approaches at their disposal that better situate us to understand other aspects
of the past.
Mughal history is such a contentious part of history in the Hindu nationalist imagination. How do you propose to shed light, and create space for a scholarly engagement with the period? It also comes at a time when there is a wave of revisionism in India.
My approach is that of a historian. I seek primary sources
from numerous languages and archives, read deeply in secondary scholarship, and
attempt to reconstruct the most accurate vision of pre-colonial India possible.
My work has plenty of present-day implications, but those come secondary and
explicitly after the serious historical work. This approach is unappealing to
many in modern India (and across the world). It is painstaking, requires
specialist knowledge, can be slow, and often leads to nuanced conclusions. But
there are also plenty of people, non-academics, who view what is going on in
modern India with scepticism. For those who want it, my work offers a
historically sound foundation for challenging modern political efforts to
revise the past.
What are the dangers of rewriting history?
So far as the dangers of rewriting history and subscribing
to narrow interpretations of specific texts, there are many risks. One is that
we risk rising intolerance going forward, something already witnessed on both
popular and elite levels in 21st century India. Another risk is that we cheapen
the past. India has a glorious history and one of the richest literary
inheritances of any place on earth — it would be unfortunate to constrict our
minds to the point where we can no longer appreciate these treasures.
You argue that “a more divisive interpretation of the relationship between the Mughals and Hindus actually developed during the colonial period from 1757 to 1947”, a legacy that the present Modi government appears to have inherited. But while the British positioned themselves as neutral saviours, who will emerge as the neutral saviours now?
In the BJP vision, I believe that the new saviour is the BJP
itself and affiliated Hindu nationalist groups that will restore India to its
proper, true nature as a land for Hindus. This is an appealing ideology for
many people, which is part of what makes it so dangerous. I maintain that
India’s greatness is found in its astonishing diversity, not some invented,
anachronistic, monolithic Hindu past. Part of the sad irony of the BJP’s
emphasis on rewriting Indian history is precisely that India has a deep and
compelling history, which so many seem intent to ignore.
