The Condition of Hindus under Muslim Rule
Dr. Jadunath Sarkar
The Hindusthan Standard, Kolkata
Puja Annual (Deepavali special) 1950
[Note from Hindu Vivek Kendra: This article was written
in 1950 when one was not accused of being communal merely
because one spoke the truth.]
What was the condition of the Hindus under Muslim rule in
India? This is a very natural question, and in the
present situation of the country the inquiry has a
significance of the deepest practical importance. Every
tree is judged by its fruit; and the ideal Muslim
Government of India, namely, a theocracy administered for
Allah by His agents, showed its unmistakable practical
consequences in the moral, intellectual and economic
condition of the people of this vast sub-continent when
Muslim rule ended and British administration began. When
Wellesley and the Marquis of Hastings established British
paramountcy after overthrowing the six-century old Muslim
domination, what Indian does not blush as he reads in the
history of that conquest, how hopelessly weak our country
was in defence, how abjectly degraded in spirit and
education our people were, and how inefficient and
corrupt the public administration, conducted entirely by
'natives' had become?
True, our Hindu rulers had shown a similar bankruptcy of
capacity at the end of the Hindu period, when youthful
Islam first attacked India. But in that age the Hindu
intellect was still active and it continued to produce
gems of thought and heroes of action even during he early
stage of the expansion of Islamic political sway over the
country. But in the age of Wellesley and Hastings, 1798-
1818, Muslim rule had turned India into a sort of
"Darkest Affica" as regards culture, thought and
character, and we had to take our inspiration for a new
birth of the spirit only by turning to Europe in the 19th
century.
The poison lay in the very core of Islamic theocracy.
Under it there can be only one faith, one people, and one
all overriding authority. The state is a religious trust
administered solely by His people (the Faithful) acting
in obedience to the Commander of the Faithful, who was in
theory and very often in practice too, the supreme
General of the Army of militant Islam (janud). Every
Muslim sovereign claimed to be the Khalif of the Age, and
as such the "Commander of the Faithful" and shadow
(representative) of God - the true sovereign. There could
be no place for non-believers, not even for the heretical
sub-divisions of Islam (such as the Shias in a Sunni
state like that of the Sultans and Padishahs of Delhi) in
its administration. Even Jews and Christians could not be
full citizens of it, though they somewhat approached the
Muslims by reason of their being "People of the Book" -or
believers in the Bible, which the Prophet of Islam
accepted as revealed, though insufficient for salvation,
unless supplemented by his Quran. The Muslim attitude to
these Ahal-i-Kitab is well expressed in the following
verses quoted by AI Badayieni, an orthodox literary
champion of Islam and enemy of the liberal philosophers
Abul FazI and Faizi:
"The water touched by a jew is impure:
But it will do to wash the corpse of a Christian"
Zimmis
As for the Hindus and Zoroastrians, they had no place in
such a political system. If their existence was tolerated
it was only to use them as hewers of wood and drawers of
water, as tax-payers "Khiraj-guzar" for the benefit of
the dominant sect of the Faithful.
They were called Zimmis or people under a contract of
protection by the Muslim state on condition of certain
services to be rendered by them and certain political and
civil disabilities to be borne by them to prevent them
from growing strong. The very term zimmi is an insulting
title like "the Protected Princes" of British India. It
connotes political inferiority and helplessness like the
status of a minor proprietor perpetually under a
guardian; such protected people could not claim equality
with the citizens of the Muslim theocracy. Could the late
Gaikwar Sayaji Rao, as he trembled and hobbled before
George V at the Delhi Darbar of 1912, be called a ruler
bound in equal alliance with the British King, or even
possessed of the same rights as a British peer?
Quote:Thus by the basic conception of the Muslim state all non-
Muslims are its enemies and it is the interest of the
state to curb their growth in number and power.
The ideal
aim was to exterminate them totally, as Hindus,
Zoroastrians and Christian nationals have been liquidated
(sometimes totally, sometimes leaving a negligible
remnant behind) in Afghanistan, Persia and the Near East.
The last remnants of the descendants of Alexander's
soldiers, settled in north-eastern Afghanistan, were
ground down to accept Islam and their province's name
changed from Kafiristan to Nuristan (province luminious
with Islam) in our own lifetime.
Whatever tended to strengthen the Hindus would ipso facto
constitute a menace to Islamic predominance. The same was
seen in the late lamented British Indian Empire, when a
Bengali who learnt military science in Mexico or France
immediately became a political suspect and was ever
afterwards shadowed by the CID as a potential traitor.
But the British, while curbing the martial spirit of our
educated classes, did not try to crush the Hindu mind at
its source: they did not forbid the study of Hindu
philosophy and the practice of the Hindu religion, rather
encouraged them and opened the gates of the Temple of
Western Science to us. Not so, the orthodox Muslim rulers
of India.
Part II
Temple Destruction
The temples of the Hindus often served as seats of
learning besides being scenes of religious worship. The
late Sister Nivedita never wearied in her praise of the
vast temples of South India as exactly like the Cathedral
closes of medieval England. Here in, the many cloisters
running along the inside of the boundary walls, the young
students lived and studied and they joined in the arati
in the evening. To strike at the great temples was to
strike at the roots of Hindu learning through Sanskrit,
then the only vehicle of higher education. Instances are
on record of Hindu teachers and preachers being put to
death by Firuz Shah, Aurangzib and other pious Muslim
sovereigns - who are still extolled as model rulers of
the theocracy. In addition, a slow but sure policy was
adopted for removing all temples from the face of India.
Aurangzib at the very beginning of reign (1658) wrote in
his Benares Farman, "According to our Holy Law, long
standing temples should not be demolished, but no new
temple should be allowed to be built." But he himself did
not follow even this limited restraint of the Shariat. In
his letters collected by his "disciple" and "secretary"
Inayetullah Khan, we find one that states: "The temple of
Somnath was demolished early in my reign and idol-worship
there put down. It is not known what the state of things
there is at present. If the idolaters have again taken to
the worship of images, then destroy the temple in such a
way that no trace of the building may be left." On 9th
April 1669, he issued a general order to the governors of
all the provinces of his Empire to demolish the schools
and temples of the infidels and to put down strongly
their teaching and religious practices. (His official
history, Maasir-i-Alamgiri, Persian text, p. 81). How
this order was everywhere carried out throughout his
reign of half a century, can be read in detail with dates
in my History of Aurangzib, Vol. Ill, chapter 34,
appendix V. At the very end of his life, a new temple
built near Murshidabad was demolished under strict
official orders. The letter translated from Persian is
given in my introduction to Bankim Chandra's Sitaram,
Bangiya Sahitya Parishad edition.
It has been urged by this pious Emperor's ignorant
admirers that temples were destroyed only when they were
strongholds of rebels and centres of plots hatched by his
political enemies. A Persian report, written from Delhi
and preserved among the state records of Jaipur, tells us
that Aurangzib had sent an order to the ever-loyal Raja
of Jaipur to demolish a large number of temples in his
dominions, and when His Majesty read the Muhtasib's
report that the order had been faithfully carried out, he
cried out in admiration, "Ah, he (i.e. Raja Ram Singh
Kachhwa) is a khanazad, i.e., a hereditary loyal slave."
So much for his modem apologists. Even in our own days,
Osman Ali Khan, ninety per cent of whose, subjects are
Hindus, rejoiced thus in a ghazal of his own composition
which was published in the periodical Rahbar-I-Daccan
(25, February 1939):
Band naqus hua sunke nara-e-takbir Zalzala a ho gaya
rishta-e-zunnar poi bho.
It means: The pealing of conches and the ringing of bells
have been stopped on hearing the shout Allah-o-Akbar. An
earthquake is shaking the sacred threads (worn by
Hindus).
What reaction this policy naturally provoked among the
Marathas, Sikhs, Jats and Bundelas when the brute force
of the Muslim Government declined in the 18th century is
a well-known tale of Indian History.
Economic Repression
The Emperor Aurangzib (reign 1658-1707) was an orthodox
Hanafi Sunni sovereign and the political exemplar of
Muhammadan writers, past and present. Every regulation of
his Government was determined like that of Firuz Tughlaq
and Sikandar Lodi - by the letter of the Quranic law. He
reimposed the jaziya or tax per head on the Hindus. The
Quran (IX, 29) calls upon the Muslims "to fight those who
do not profess the true faith, till they pay jaziya with
the hand in humility (ham sagkhirun)." This was a poll-
tax payable by Hindus (and also Christians) for
permission to live in their ancestral homes under a
Muslim sovereign. The object of Aurangzib in imposing it
(by a decree operating from 2nd April, 1679), was "to
spread Islam and depress the infidel faith" as his own
Secretary words it.
Quote:The Italian traveller Nicholo Manucci
at the very time noted this fact: he writes, "Many
Hindus, who were unable to pay turned Muslim to obtain
relief from the insults of the tax-collectors, Aurangzib
rejoices that by such exactions these Hindus will be
forced into embracing the Muhammadan faith."
It has been pleaded in our times that the jaziya was a
fair tax paid by the Hindus for exemption from compulsory
military service. But it was only as late as May 10,
1855, when English and French sympathy had to be secured
by the Sultan of Turkey for the war against Russia that a
decree was issued, replacing the jaziya as a tax on the
free exercise of religion by a tax for exemption from
military service in European Turkey. (See Encyclopaedia
of Islam, i, 1052). We should not forget that every
Muslim was exempt from the payment of jaziya even when he
did not serve in the army, nor was called up as a
conscript; and those Muslims who did serve received full
wages for the work.
Besides, the true nature of the jaziya can be clearly
seen from the Quranic commentary on the method of
collecting the tax; it is laid down that the zimmi must
pay the tax personally; if he sends the money by the hand
of an agent, it is to be refused; the taxed person must
come on foot and pay the money standing, while the
receiver should be seated, etc. This explains the Quranic
direction, ham sagkhirun, i.e. "with marks of
humiliation." That these rules were enforced in India is
illustrated by many examples cited in the Persian
manuscript records, Akhbarat.
In addition to the obligation to pay this poll-tax, the
Hindu was subjected to many disabilities by the very
constitution of the Muslim theocracy. He must distinguish
himself from the Muslims by wearing a humble dress, and
sometimes adding a label of a certain colour to his coat.
He must not ride on horse-back or carry arms - though
wearing the sword was a necessary part of the dress of
every gentleman of that age. He must show a generally
respectful attitude towards Muslims - "Natives must salam
every sahib they meet on the road." The Hindu was also
under certain legal disabilities in giving testimony in
law courts, protection under the criminal law, and in
marriage. Finally, in the exercise of his religion he
must avoid any publicity that may rouse the wrath of the
followers of the Prophet.
Can this "depressed" sect be called citizens of the
Muslim state? No, answers that most authoritative work,
the Encyclopaedia of Islam, Vol. I, pp. 958-959.
Under the Canon Law, as followed in Islamic countries, a
man who converts a Muslim to some other faith is liable
to death at the hands of any private Muslim, and so also
is the apostate from Islam. A Muslim murdering a Hindu on
private grounds was not subjected to the choice between
payment of "the price of blood" and death at the hands of
the heir of the murdered man - which was the legal right
of Musalmans aggrieved in such conditions.
So much for the political and legal equality of all sects
in the Islamic theocracy.
Part III
Women's Fate
What most wounded the hearts of the non-Muslims -
Christians and Jews, as much as Hindus - was the lot of
non-Muslim women under Muslim sway. Whatever may have
been the theory, in practice everywhere it amounted to
this that conversion of the victim to Islam sanctified
the seduction or abduction of non-Muslim women. Kinglake
in his Eothen gives an illustration of it from Turkey as
late as 1830-40: In the city of Nablous, a Muslim Shaikh
of great wealth and local influence had accidentally seen
a beautiful young Christian girl, recently married to a
Christian youth, and plotted to "gratify his passion by
inducing her to embrace his own creed: if he could get
her to take this step, her marriage with the Christian
would be dissolved, and then there would be nothing to
prevent him from making her his own wife... The Shaikh
was a practical man;... he sent no tracts, not even a
copy of the holy Quran. An old woman acted as missionary.
She brought her a whole basket, full of arguments -
jewels, and shawls and scarves. Poor Mariam (the
Christian bride)! She put on the jewels and took a calm
view of the Mahomedan Religion in a little hand-mirror -
she could not be deaf to such eloquent earrings, and the
great truths of Islam came home to her young bosom in the
delicate folds of the Cashmere (shawl); she was ready to
abandon her faith." (Chapter 25).
Similar cases were known in Mughal India and have been
tried in British law courts too, owing to the convenient
doctrine that conversion to Islam dissolves a woman's
previous lawful marriage.
Of the forcible abduction of Hindu women by powerful
grandees and even by Nawabs, which went unpunished and
was not even treated as "cognisable" by the then police
and judiciary, examples are frequent in the histories and
travel-reports of that time. It will be enough to say
here that the French Chief of Chandemagore, M. Jean Law,
who came to fight the English for Siraj-ud-daula, but
arrived too late (after Plassey had been fought), tells
in his Memoire that the young nawab used to ride to any
village where his servants reported the existence of a
beautiful young woman, and then get her abducted and
placed in his harem. This was in 1757.
About the same time Shuja-ud-daula, the Nawab Wazir of
Lucknow, took a fancy on a young Khatri virgin whom he
had seen during his ride, and after getting her abducted
by his servile tools and ruining her turned her out of
his harem. The story is told without any blush by the
historian of his house, Sayyid Ghulam Ali Naqavi in his
Imad-us-Sadat.
The parda system was introduced among the free Arab women
after the incident of Zainab. It has become a rigid
institution among Hindus and Muslims in Northern India,
where Muslim rule was most extensive and lasted longest.
The fact that parda is not observed among the Hindus of
Madras, Maharashtra, Kerala and the Mongoloid fringe
(except among a few rich families that pretend to be
Rajputs) clearly indicates how it originated in North
India during Muslim rule.
Seduction or abduction sanctified by the recital of the
Kalima was only one among the various devices practised
for increasing the number of Muslims by hook or crook.
Public service except of the lowest kind was denied to
the Hindus who were vastly in the majority and usually
superior in capacity. It is recorded by Abul Fazi that
the Muslims of his time called Akbar an apostate from
Islam, a kafir chiefly because he had sought to unite the
nation by granting toleration to all religions (Sulh-i-
kul, peace to all) and by including highly competent
Hindus among his umara or upper nobility of office.
Conversely Aurangzib is admired by many even today, for
having "by one stroke of pen" dismissed all the Hindu
clerks and imposed discriminating custom duties on the
Hindus merchants, while allowing the goods of his co-
religionists to pass free.
In Western Rajputana there is a sect called Bishnois who
are a branch of the Vishnu-worshippers, but have many
nonconformist tenets and practices and do not honour the
Brahmans as priests. Aurangzib wrote to his local
governor there to prevent them from amalgamating with the
orthodox or regular Hindus, but to try every means of
bringing them over to Islam by inducing them to drop
their remaining Hindu rites and beliefs. His orders to
this effect have been preserved among the Persian records
of the Jaipur State. Thus under Islamic theocracy,
religion ceased to be a concern of the human soul in its
quest for the Creator but degenerated into a mere
instrument of political gerrymandering.
The strict theory of the Shariat, however, did not always
and everywhere prevail in Muslim India; such uniformity
of pressure was impossible in this vast continent of a
country. In practice, the Hindus were left to toleration
of a sort and freedom in business in villages and remote
corners, where the mullas did not penetrate and even in
cities when the ulema slept under a just Sultan. The two
creeds touched each other at the very top and at the very
bottom only. As T. W. Arnold remarks: "In mysticism they
found a common basis for religious thought. In Kashmir a
Muhammadan ziarat frequently marks the site of a Hindu
Tirtha; it is then stated to be the tomb of a saint
(Pir)... Such survivals from Hinduism are more marked in
villages and country districts remote from the influence
of the Ulema. Here the Muslims still continue to worship
the tutelary godlings of the village and join the Hindu
festivals."
In addition, some mixed sects were formed, which
attempted to bring about a reconciliation between Muslims
and Hindus; but they were dissenting bodies, and stood
clearly removed - like outcasts - from the vast orthodox
bodies of the two sects. The worst mischief done by the
dominance of Islam in the state was its reaction in
brutalising the Hindu character. Hinduism in many places
lost its liberal tolerant character, which sees God in
every being and admits that every religion, if sincerely
practised, will lead to salvation. "Just as the water of
the Ganges, flowing through a hundred mouths, all enters
the ocean, so the different paths of salvation prescribed
by the different scriptures of the world all lead to
God." (Kalidas). Hindus now learnt to retaliate and pay
the ruling bigots in their own coins. The Jaipur Raja
(bout 1660-100) reconverted some former Hindus from Islam
by Suddhi. Shivaji's general Netaji Balkar had been
forced by Aurangzib in 1646 to embrace Islam as Muhammad
QuIi, but in 1676 the great Maratha king "made him Hindu
again by Prayashchitta." When the pealing of conches in
Hindu temples was obstructed, a Rajput raja forbade the
chanting of the Azan or the Muslim call to prayer. One
jaziya-collector's beard were plucked in Berar, another
of these harsh officers was beaten to death in Rutlam.
The Sikhs retaliated for the desecration of their temple
by the Muslims and the slaying of cows in Amritsar
(1762): when they returned in full force they compelled
their Muslim prisoners to work in chains under the lash
and cleanse the temple and wash the ground with hog's
blood. The mere murder of an infidel (such as a Hindu or
European Christian officer) is considered a pious deed by
the Pathan ghazis of the North-West Frontier Province
(like the murder of Lord Mayo). By a most deplorable
reaction, whenever such a murderer was convicted and
hanged by the British courts, for some years a tuft of
dry grass used to be placed on the navel of the corpse
and set fire to, before it was buried, to ensure that his
soul "went to hell by way of fire". In the late 18th
century a body of Sikh horsemen came to Delhi and
demolished a mosque in Rikabganj as an act of vengeance.
In Lord Robers' Afghan Campaign the Gurkhas (and Sikhs?)
treated the Pathan dead in the same way till stopped by
British orders. (See Ashe's Afghan War.)
Such was the condition to which the Hindus were reduced
by Islamic theocracy. Did the dominant sect profit by
this policy? What was the moral and intellectual
condition of the faithful at the end of Muslim rule in
India? They were even more unhappy and helpless than the
Hindus to face the moving modern world. Look outside for
the reason of it.
Palestine, the holy land of the Jews, Christians and
Islamites, had been turned into a desert haunted by
ignorant poor diseased vermin rather than by human
beings, as the result of six centuries of Muslim rule.
(See Kinglake's graphic description). Today Jewish rule
has made this desert bloom into a garden, miles of sandy
waste have been turned into smiling orchards of orange
and citron, the chemical resources of the Dead Sea are
being extracted and sold, and all the amenities of the
modern civilised life have been made available in this
little Oriental country. Wise Arabs are eager to go there
from the countries ruled by the Shariat. This is the
lesson for the living history.
