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Hindu-allergic Secularism?
Marxist Distorians

Arun Shourie writes: "The design is... to attribute evil to the religion of our country, Hinduism; it is to present Islam as the great progressive force which arose; it is to lament the fact that humanity did not heed the teachings of progressive men like Muhammad -- till the "remarkable and comprehensive" Russian Revolution of 1917!"

Where was Romila Thapar's moral indignation when this skewed history was being imposed on the impressionable children of West Bengal?

(source: Indians will no longer be impressed by Marxist histrionics - By Rajeev Srinivasan rediff.com).

Refer to Eminent Historian Displeased with The Ayodhya Verdict – By Dr. Koenraad Elst and Media Manipulation - By Sandeep and Ayodhya: Has India really moved on? – By Amitabh Tripathi and Verdict leaves ‘secular intellectuals’ aghast – By Swapan Dasgupta and Ram Ki Nagari, once again – By Kanchan Gupta

Refer to Ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Bangladesh - muktomona.com.  Refer to Left loves Islamism – By Daniel Pipes July 15th 2008 Op-ed daily pioneer.com. Watch Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against The West. In Arun Shourie's book, Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud - By Arun Shourie Harper Collins India ISBN 8172233558 gives an account of what these Indian objective Historians have been up to.  For more refer to Hindu Holocaust Museum. Refer to Heroic Hindu Resistance to Muslim Invaders (636 AD to 1206 AD) - By Sita Ram Goel. Voice of India, New Delhi.

Refer to Ignore this genocide, we're secular - By Rajeev Srinivasan - rediff.com - The selective amnesia of the English media in India is simply breathtaking. There appears to be a cardinal rule: Never publish anything that would be in the least bit negative about Muslims in general and Pakistanis in particular; or about Christians; or about Marxists in general and the Chinese in particular. .

The so-called objective rational Historians, as against the "national" Historians, either tow the western liberal line or the western Marxist line and write their Histories so as to present the Hindus as the extremists who are engaged in myth making. Unfortunately, it will take a long time for undoing the harm done by the Marxist historians to the Indian psyche: "they have used these institutions to sow in the minds of our people [the Hindus] the seeds of self-hatred.

(For more please refer to IndiaStar Review and Indians will no longer be impressed by Marxist histrionics - R. Srinivasan - rediff.com). For more information, refer to Romila Thapar on Mahmud Ghaznavi - By Koenraad Elst).  

However, according to the official court chronicle, Aurangzeb "ordered all provincial governors to destroy all schools and temples of the Pagans and to make a complete end to all Pagan teachings and practices." The chronicle sums up the destructions like this: "Hasan Ali Khan came and said that 172 temples in the area had been destroyed...His majesty went to Chittor, and 63 temples were destroyed...Abu Tarab, appointed to destroy the idol-temples of Amber, reported that 66 temples had been razed to the ground."

(Note: In an interview in Le Monde, same Marxist historian, Romila Thapar cheerfully predicted that India won't be able to stay together. Effectively, to a question about secessionist movements, she was quoted as saying, and did indeed say to the Le Monde interviewers: "What one can foresee, perhaps, for the end of the next century, is a series of small states federated within a more viable single economic space on the scale of the subcontinent."

(source:
Interview in Le Monde - Un entretien avec Romila Thapar - with Patrice De Beer & Vijay Singh - Le Monde, 11 May 1993).

Serge Trifkovic author of The Sword of the Prophet: History, Theology, Impact on the World has pointed out:

"During the struggle for independence, Gandhi and Nehru downplayed historic Moslem atrocities so that they could pretend a facade of Hindu-Moslem unity against the British. (Naturally, this façade dissolved immediately after independence and several million people were killed in the religious violence attendant on splitting British India into India and Pakistan).

After independence, Marxist Indian writers, blinkered by ideology, suppressed the truth about the Moslem record because it did not fit into the Marxist theory of history. Nowadays, the Indian equivalent of political correctness downplays Moslem misdeeds because Moslems are an "oppressed minority" in majority-Hindu India. 

"And Indian leftist intellectuals always blame India first and hate their own Hindu civilization, just their equivalents at Berkeley blame America and the West."

"Unlike Germany, which has apologized to its Jewish and Eastern European victims, and Japan, which has at least behaved itself since WWII, and even America, which has gone into paroxysms of guilt over what it did to the infinitely smaller numbers of Red Indians, the Moslem aggressors against India and their successors have not even stopped trying to finish the job they started. To this day, militant Islam sees India as "unfinished business" and it remains high on the agenda of oil-rich Moslem countries such as Saudi Arabia, which are spending millions every year trying to convert Hindus to Islam. One may take some small satisfaction in the fact that they find it rather slow going. "

(source: Islam’s Other Victims: India - By Serge Trifkovic - frontpagemag.com). For more on Islamic Terrorism refer to chapter on Glimpses XV and to Al-Qaeda letter says Taj next target - ibnlive.com.

(image source: History of India - By A V Williams Jackson). 

***


As for this equality the facts are that Islam practiced slavery on an unprecedented scale, and that its treatment of Kafirs was anything but brotherly (unless you think Aurangzeb's treatment of his broad-minded brother Dara Shikoh is normative). 

Tolerance in Hinduism can be found in books like the Rig-Veda and the Bhagavad Gita:

"Let good thoughts come to us from all sides", or "The truth is one but the wise call it by many names", or Krishna saying that "Whoever invokes a deity by whatever name, it is Me he invokes".

"For 50 years this bunch (leftist historians) has been suppressing facts and inventing lies. How concerned they pretend to be about that objective of the ICHR! How does this concern square with the guidelines issued by their West Bengal Government in 1989 which Outlook magazine itself quoted -

"Muslims rule should never attract any criticism. Destruction of temples by Muslim rulers and invaders should not be mentioned."?

(source: Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud - By Arun Shourie Harper Collins India ISBN 8172233558 p. 9). Refer to Ignore this genocide, we're secular - By Rajeev Srinivasan - rediff.com). Refer to Heroic Hindu Resistance to Muslim Invaders (636 AD to 1206 AD) - By Sita Ram Goel. Voice of India, New Delhi.

Marxist history's Pak perspective - By Sandhya Jain

Pakistani textbooks of the medieval era resonate with the heroic exploits of Islamic invaders such as Arabs, Central Asians, Turks, Persians and Afghans who mercilessly plundered Peshawar, Lahore, Multan and Sind for centuries. Both the Pakistani and old NCERT textbooks fail to mention that Arab forays into Gujarat and Rajasthan were successfully repelled for decades by martial groups like the Pratiharas. Indeed, the Arabs in Sind failed to make headway east of the Indus for hundreds of years.

The kid-glove treatment of Islam in old NCERT textbooks goes to absurd lengths. Arjun Dev's Story of Civilisation discusses Prophet Muhammad and the first three Khalifas, but does not mention the Sunni-Shia schism and the violent death of the Prophet's son-in-law. Yet while writing about the Bhakti movement, he emphasizes the so-called divisions in Hindu society.  

Both Satish Chandra (Medieval India for Class XI) and Arjun Dev glorify Islam as an egalitarian, scientific, beneficent civilization and carefully avoid mentioning jihad and the extremely violent nature of Arab expansion, which even Pakistani intellectuals call "Arab imperialism." This conscious falsification of facts has naturally given rise to controversies over the old books.

But in India, any depiction of Hindu bravery and success in thwarting the Islamic invaders is labelled communal; "secularism" demands showing Hindus as welcoming Muslim rule.

Thus, regarding Mahmud of Ghazni's forays into India, Satish Chandra states that Anandapala's father was routed several times by the raider. Ignoring the heroism of native defenders, he praises Mahmud's courage. Personally, I felt nauseated by Chandra's sycophantic assertion: "Mahmud marched across Rajputana in order to raid the fabulously rich temple at Somnath without encountering any serious resistance on the way".

Actually, fifty thousand civilians died defending the city and Mahmud was so delighted after destroying the temple and its principal icon that he assumed the title "butshikan" (destroyer of images). Yet Chandra defends Mahmud in precisely the same way as the Pakistani textbooks and pompously declares: "It is not correct to dismiss Mahmud as just a raider and plunderer." Actually, those of us who are fighting for a true history of India have no desire to "dismiss" Mahmud. Our struggle is to explicitly "admit" him at the Bar of History as raider, plunderer, iconoclast, et al.

An old Arab once extolled the Hindu virtue of undying loyalty: "No moth burns itself on a flame that is dead, except in Hindustan."

(source: Marxist history's Pak perspective - By Sandhya Jain - dailypioneer.com - August  16 2004). 

"One example that helps to unpack this problem of political correctness can be found in discussions of the destructions of the Buddhist universities at Taxila and Nalanda. These two events are often cited as examples of the negative impact the Islamic invasions had on India's sciences and education. Prior to its destruction, Nalanda University had tens of thousands of students and provided "free education and residence for ten years or more" and "accepted students of other faiths [besides Buddhism] and instructed all in the Vedas, Philosophy, Grammar, Rhetoric, Composition, Mathematics, and Medicine in addition to Buddhist doctrines. It attracted students from different parts of India, China, and Southeast Asia."

(source: The Groan-I: Loss of Scholarship and High Drama in 'South Asian' Studies  - By Yvette C. Rosser - infinityfoundation. For more information on Nalanda, please refer to chapter on Education in Ancient India).

Noble laureate V. S. Naipaul has said "The millennium began with the Muslim invasions and the grinding down of the Hindu-Buddhist culture of the north. This is such a big and bad event that people still have to find polite, destiny-defying ways of speaking about it. In art books and history books, people write of the Muslims "arriving" in India, as though the Muslims came on a tourist bus and went away again. The Muslim view of their conquest of India is a truer one. They speak of the triumph of the faith, the destruction of idols and temples, the loot, the carting away of the local people as slaves, so cheap and numerous that they were being sold for a few rupees.  The architectural evidence- the absence of Hindu monuments in the north is convincing enough. This conquest was unlike any other that had gone before. There are no Hindu records of this period. Defeated people never write their history. The victors write the history. The victors were Muslims. For people on the other side it is a period of darkness."

(source: V.S. Naipual interview - Outlook India November 15 1999).
 For more on Naipaul, refer to chapter on Quotes 251-270). 

Trinidad-born V S Naipaul says Hindu militancy is a 'creative force'. "Dangerous or not, it's a necessary corrective to history and will continue to remain so."  

"There has probably been no imperialism like that of Islam and the Arabs." "Islam seeks as an article of faith to erase the past; the believers in the end honour Arabia alone; they have nothing to return to. Islam requires the convert to accept that his land is of no religious or historical importance; its relics were of no account; only the sands of Arabia are sacred."

Asked How did you react to the Ayodhya incident? Naipaul answered: "Not as badly, as the others did, I am afraid. The people who say that there was no temple there are missing the point. Babar, you must understand, had contempt for the country (that) he had conquered. And his building of that mosque was an act of contempt for the country."

(source: Interview by Dilip Padgaonkar The Times of India 18 July 1993).

Sir V. S. Naipaul asserts that Islam in the Indian sub-continent was much more disruptive than British colonial rule. In Among The Believers he asserts that Islam is an eraser of past histories, that wherever Islam conquers it determinedly stamps out preceding civilisations, just as in India and Indonesia, it stamped out the Buddhist-Hindu legacy and destroyed historical memory.

"In India, unlike Iran, there never was a complete Islamic conquest. Although the Muslims ruled much of North India from 1200A.D. to 1700A.D., in the 18th century, the Mahrattas and the Sikhs destroyed Muslim power, and created their own empires, before the advent of the British....The British introduced the New Learning of Europe, to which the Hindus were more receptive than the Muslims. This caused the beginning of the intellectual distance between the two communities. This distance has grown with independence....Muslim insecurity led to the call for the creation of Pakistan. It went at the same time with an idea of old glory, of the invaders sweeping down from the northwest and looting the temples of Hindustan and imposing faith on the infidel. The fantasy still lives: and for the Muslim converts of the subcontinent it is the start of their neurosis, because in this fantasy the convert forgets who or what he is and becomes the violator."

(source: http://www2b.abc.net.au/news/forum/forum43/posts/topic16200.shtm).

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, he argued that Islam destroyed the cultures of peoples who converted to it, comparing its "calamitous effect" on the world with colonialism. He has said that he does not have time to read the works of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy.

(source:  Naipaul accuses Saudi Arabia of financing terrorism  - hindustantimes.com).

"How do you ignore history? But the nationalist movement, independence movement ignored it. You read the Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru, it talks about the mythical past and then it jumps the difficult period of the invasions and conquests. So you have Chinese pilgrims coming to Bihar, Nalanda and places like that. Then somehow they don't tell you what happens, why these places are in ruin.

They never tell you why Elephanta island is in ruins or why Bhubaneswar was desecrated. 

 

Great Temple of Bhubaneswar

(image source: History of India - By A V Williams Jackson). 

For a documentary on Hindu temples, refer to The Lost Temples of India.

***

You see, I am less interested in the Taj Mahal which is a vulgar, crude building, a display of power built on blood and bones. Everything exaggerated, everything overdone, which suggests a complete slave population. I would like to find out what was there before the Taj Mahal. But I would like to see this past recovered and not dodged. That foolish man Nirad Chaudhuri, who wrote one good book, then went into kind of absurd fantasy, he built a whole book around somebody who came with the invaders, Al-Beruni, who said, “the Hindus are very violent and aggressive people”. Their land is being taken away from them, they are being destroyed and enslaved and he says this. This foolish man Chaudhuri builds a book around this statement; that is the kind of absurdity we have to avoid."

(source: 'How do you ignore history?' - interview - economictimes.indiatimes.com - January 13 ' '03).  Refer to Heroic Hindu Resistance to Muslim Invaders (636 AD to 1206 AD) - By Sita Ram Goel. Voice of India, New Delhi.

Nobel Laureate Sir V S Naipaul says:

"Let us consider two late dates. In 1565, the year after the birth of Shakespeare, Vijayanagar in the south is destroyed and its great capital city laid waste. In 1592, the terrible Akbar ravages Orissa in the east. This means that while a country like England is preparing for greatness under its great queen, old India, in its sixth century of retreat, is still being reduced to nonentity. The wealth and creativity, the artisans and architects of the kingdoms of Vijayanagar and Orissa would have been destroyed, their light put out.

"You say that India has a secular character, which is historically unsound. You say that Hindu militancy is dangerous. Dangerous or not, it is a necessary corrective to the history I have been talking about. It is a creative force and it will prove to be so." "It is important for India to operate at the limit of technology. India must never again fall behind. I actually think that the subcontinent is safer now (after India went nuclear)."

"This is actually a very important question (why India is no longer original in art). This is where we come face to face with the Indian calamity. When places like Vijayanagar and Orissa were laid low, all the creative talent would also have been destroyed. The current was broken. We have no means of knowing what architecture existed in the north before the Muslims. We can only be certain that there would have been splendours like Konarak and Kancheepuram. Since the current has been broken, there can be no revival. I am thinking principally of course of architecture. The Mughal buildings are foreign buildings. They are a carry-over from the architecture of Isfahan. In India they speak of the desert. They cover enormous spaces and they make me think of everything that was flattened to enable them to come up. Humayun's tomb is, I suppose, the chastest and the best.
The Taj is so wasteful, so decadent and in the end so cruel that it is painful to be there for very long. This is an extravagance that speaks of the blood of the people.

“India has been a wounded civilization because of Islamic violence: Pakistanis know this; indeed they revel in it. It is only Indian Nehruvians like Romila Thapar who pretend that Islamic rule was benevolent. We should face facts: Islamic rule in India was at least as catastrophic as the later Christian rule. The Christians created massive poverty in what was a most prosperous country; the Muslims created a terrorized civilization out of what was the most creative culture that ever existed.”

(source: OutlookIndia.com, 15 November 1999 and  http://www.indpride.com/vsnaipaul.html).

 

For a documentary on Hindu temples, refer to The Lost Temples of India.

Refer to chapter on Survarnabhumi and Sacred Angkor

***

In the official court chronicle, Maasiri Alamgiri, which records numerous orders for and reports of destructions of temples. Its entry for 2 September 1669 tells us: "News came to court that in accordance with the Emperor's command his officers had demolished the temple of Vishvanath at Banaras". Moreover, till today, the old Kashi Vishvanath temple wall is visible as a part of the walls of the Gyanvapi mosque which Aurangzeb had built at the site. Aurangzeb didn't stop at razing temples: their users too were leveled. There were not just the classical massacres of thousands of resisters, Brahmins, Sikhs. What gives a more pointed proof of Aurangzeb's fanaticsm, is the execution of specific individuals for specific reasons of intolerance. To name the best-known ones: Aurangzeb's brother Dara Shikoh was executed because of 'apostasy' (i.e. taking an interest in Hindu philosophy), and the Sikh guru Tegh Bahadur was beheaded because of objecting to Aurangzeb's policy of forcible conversions. Percival Spear's statement is a most serious case of negationism. Now, the great whitewash over the Muslim role in Indian history, carried out by leftist historians, has been exposed.

(source: Negationism in India: Concealilng the Record of Islam - By Koenraad Elst p. 49-50).

Watch History of Ayodhya - videogoogle.com.

Why did Aurangzeb demolish the Kashi Vishvanath ? by Koenraad Elst, Leuven (Belgium), 21 November 1998 http://members.xoom.com/KoenraadElst/articles/aurangzeb.html). 

Refer to Ignore this genocide, we're secular - By Rajeev Srinivasan - rediff.com). Refer to Heroic Hindu Resistance to Muslim Invaders (636 AD to 1206 AD) - By Sita Ram Goel. Voice of India, New Delhi.

Noble laureate V. S. Naipaul says: " What is happening in India is a new, historical awakening. Gandhi used religion in a way as to marshal people for the independence cause People who entered the independence movement did it because they felt they would earn individual merit.

Today, it seems to me that Indians are becoming alive to their history. Romila Thapar’s book on Indian history is a Marxist attitude to history, which in substance says: there is a higher truth behind the invasions, feudalism and all that. The correct truth is the way the invaders looked at their actions. They were conquering, they were subjugating. And they were in a country where people never understood this. Only now are the people beginning to understand that there has been a great vandalizing of India. Because of the nature of the conquest and the nature of Hindu society such understanding had eluded Indians before. What is happening in India is a mighty creative process. Indian intellectuals, who want to be secure in their liberal beliefs, may not understand what is going on, especially if these intellectuals happen to be in the United States. But the sense of history that the Hindus are now developing is a new thing. Some Indians speak about a synthetic culture: this is what a defeated people always speak about. The synthesis may be culturally true. But to stress it could also be a form of response to intense persecution.

(source: An area of awakening - Interview by Dilip Padgaonkar The Times of India,18 July 1993).

"I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the tenth century or earlier time disfigured, defaced, you know that they were not just defaced for fun: that something terrible happened. I feel that the civilization of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions. And I would like people, as it were, to be more reverential towards the past, to try to understand it; to preserve it; instead of living in its ruins. The Old World is destroyed. That has to be understood. The ancient Hindu India was destroyed."

(source: Interview by Sadanand Menon - The Hindu, 5 July 1998).

Marxist writers have glorified Arab imperialism. M. N. Roy, author of The Historical Role of Islam, 1981, calls the "Arab Empire", a magnificent monuments to the memory of Muhammed. 

(source: On Hinduism Reviews and Reflections - By Ram Swarup p. 42).

" While the Ottomans moved into South-East Europe, the Moghul invasion of India destroyed much of Hindu and Buddhist civilization there. The recent destruction by Moslems in Afghanistan of colossal Buddhist statues is a reminder of what happened to temples and shrines, on an enormous scale, when Islam took over. The writer V. S. Naipaul has recently pointed out that the destructiveness of the Moslem Conquest is at the root of India's appalling poverty today. Indeed, looked at historically, the record shows that Moslem rule has tended both to promote and to perpetuate poverty."

(source:
Relentlessly and Thoroughly - By Paul Johnson National Review Online). 

The History of India as Told by its own Historians -  By Elliot and Dawson, paints a very grim picture of Muslim hordes who attack the Pagans with merciless cruelty. 

Gautam Sen, who teaches in the London School of Economics & Political Science, and is a member, Indo-UK Roundtable has written about history written by India's Stalinist historians:

"The Islamic conquest of India, by contrast, is regarded as no worse than a temporary cricket pitch invasion, followed by the resumption of normal play. The Stalinist insistence, that past Islamic invasions of India were inconsequential, is novel in the extreme, since such a belief about the meaning of military conquest, is embraced by historians nowhere else. Yet this remarkable fantasy is now an axiom that has taken hold among a majority of American and British academic specialists working on India as well. They are also engaged in a grossly inaccurate chorus of denunciation of Hinduism and its political manifestations as a calamity only barely exceeded by Nazism."

(source:
Righting and rewriting Indian history - By Gautam Sen).
Refer to Ignore this genocide, we're secular - By Rajeev Srinivasan - rediff.com).

Columnist Sandhya Jain observes:

"The discerning reader would be savvy enough to realize that the objective of Leftist scholarship is to prove, despite all available evidence, that the Islamic invasion was really India's age of enlightenment. Hence the denigration of the Vedic Age and the stubborn insistence that the Aryans were not indigenous people. This is why Bipan Chandra protests if medieval Muslim rulers are described as "foreign" Objecting to the "artificial glorification of all and sundry who fought against Sultanate and Mughal rulers", he derides glorification of ancient India as "undue national pride (which) has its own negative aspects".

(source: A history of impotent rage - By Sandhya Jain The Daily Pioneer).

 

The Chittor Tower of Victory, a nine storey structure built by Maharana Kumbha of Mewar - Chittorgarh

Rajput women committed mass suicide to save their honour in the face of the imminent entry of victorious Muslim armies, e.g. 8,000 women immolated themselves during Akbar's capture of Chittorgarh in 1568 (where this most enlightened ruler also killed 30,000 non-combatants).

***

"The killing of men and enslaving of women and children was standard practice in Islamic conquests. Thus when Mohammed bin Qasim conquered the lower Indus basin in AD 721, he entered Multan and, according to the Chach-Nama, "6,000 warriors were put to death, and all their relations and dependents were taken as slaves." This is why Rajput women took to immolating themselves en masse to save their honor in the face of the imminent entry of victorious Muslim armies, eg. 8,000 women immolated themselves during Akbar's capture of Chittorgarh in 1568 (whereas this most enlightened among Muslim rulers also killed 30,000 non-combatants).

Even peacetime was not all that peaceful, for as Fernand Braudel wrote in his book, A History of Civilization

"Islamic rule in India as a "colonial experiment" was "extremely violent", and "the Muslims could not rule the country except by systematic terror. Cruelty was the norm - burnings, summary executions, crucifxions or impalements, inventive tortures. Hindu temples were destroyed to make way for mosques. On occasion there were forced conversions. If ever there were an uprising, it was instantly and savagely repressed: houses were burned, the countryside was laid waste, men were slaughtered and women were taken as slaves."

Alauddin Khilji is hailed by secularist historians as India's first socialist, and with reason. "Alauddin is notorious for having pauperized the Hindus to the utmost limit", in a deliberate policy of pushing the Hindus so deep into material hardship that they would be too busy with sheer survival to even think of rebellion." While the earlier Muslim writers had described Indian prosperity, after the establishment of the Sultanate the population got impoverished, and remained so under the Moghuls: "The poverty of Indians was noticed in the later periods by foreigners."

(source:
The Saffron Swastika - By Koenraad Elst Voice of India 2001 ISBN 8185990697 p. 824-826). 

Refer to Heroic Hindu Resistance to Muslim Invaders (636 AD to 1206 AD) - By Sita Ram Goel. Voice of India, New Delhi.

Secularism and India

The renewed secular jihad declared by the media in the wake of the Gujarat backlash accuses Hindutva of communalising the atmosphere in the country. Liberal intellectuals can afford to do so only because they are safe in a country whose frontiers are defended by a Hindu army. In an imaginary case scenario they could not have preached this secularism under the reigns of Allauddin Khilji, Giyasuddin Tughlak, Babur or Aurengzeb. They cannot do so even in Srinagar, let alone Islamabad or Dhaka for even though secularism is dear to them, life is dearer than secularism.

Was there something ironic when 57 innocent pilgrims were scorched to death inside the Sabarmati express, when the name Sabarmati had become synonymous with peace, non-violence and tolerance? On the other hand the carnage was actually a product of the political Gandhianism of minority appeasement that emanated from Sabarmati in the 1920s and 30s. 

 

(image source: History of India - By A V Williams Jackson). 

***

Marxist attitude to History

In an interview, V. S. Naipaul: I don't see it quite in that way. The things you mentioned are quite superficial. What is happening in India is a new, historical awakening. Gandhi used religion in a way as to marshal people for the independence cause. People who entered the independence movement did it because they felt they would earn individual merit.

Today, it seems to me that Indians are becoming alive to their history. Romila Thapar's book on Indian history is a Marxist attitude to history which in substance says: there is a higher truth behind the invasions, feudalism and all that. The correct truth is the way the invaders looked at their actions. They were conquering, they were subjugating. And they were in a country where people never understood this.

Only now are the people beginning to understand that there has been a great vandalising of India. Because of the nature of the conquest and the nature of Hindu society such understanding had eluded Indians before.

What is happening in India is a mighty creative process. Indian intellectuals, who want to be secure in their liberal beliefs, may not understand what is going on, especially if these intellectuals happen to be in the United States. But every other Indian knows precisely what is happening: deep down he knows that a larger response is emerging even if at times this response appears in his eyes to be threatening.

But the sense of history that the Hindus are now developing is a new thing. Some Indians speak about a synthetic culture: this is what a defeated people always speak about. The synthesis may be culturally true. But to stress it could also be a form of response to intense persecution. In Ayodhya the construction of a mosque on a spot regarded as sacred by the conquered population was meant as an insult. It was meant as an insult to an ancient idea, the idea of Ram which was two or three thousand years old.

(source: An area of awakening - An interview with Sir V. S. Naipaul - By Dileep Padgaonkar, The Times of India, July 18, 1993). 

As Naipaul observes, post-conversion, there is a tendency to obliterate the past.

(source: Secularism and India Inc - Priyadarsi Dutta -  Dailypioneer.com).

Swami Vivekananda talking about Muslims, the monk says they "brought murder and slaughter in their train and until then peace prevailed in India".

Here is what Sri Aurobindo had to say on Islam in a letter to a disciple on September 12, 1923: "The Mahomedan or Islamic culture hardly gave anything to the world which may be said to be of fundamental importance and typically its own.... I do not think it has done anything more in India of cultural value. It gave some new forms to art and poetry. Its political institutions were always semi-barbaric."

(source: The Hindu Soul in search of Its Body - Balbir Punj).

Sir Sidney Low (1857-1932) writes about Benares:

"Benares is the metropolis of Hinduism...and like a queen, Benares sits by the Ganges, albeit a queen with purple robes somewhat patched and tattered and a throne of ivory and clay.

The stream of the sacred river sweeps past in a wide crescent of pale yellow water, and Kashi, 'the Splendid,' as the Hindus call the city...."

"The Mohammedans tramped heavily on Kashi, and most of its older shrines disappeared. If you want to see the true memorials of Hindu art, in its stronger days, you must go elsewhere, to Madura or Tanjore or Congevaram or to the temples of Ellora, enriched with sculptured figures almost Hellenic in their austere simplicity. Benares, like Rome, has passed under the hoof of the spoiler."

But Aurangzeb, the iconoclast, broke the idols of the sacred city in vain."

(source: A Vision of India - By Sir Sidney Low 1911 p. 263-266. For more information refer to infinityfoundation.com). Refer to Heroic Hindu Resistance to Muslim Invaders (636 AD to 1206 AD) - By Sita Ram Goel. Voice of India, New Delhi.

Ayodhya and End of Negationism 

Here is just one example from the 19th century, written by Mirza Jan, the author of a historical work known as Hadiquah-I-Shuhada that appeared in 1856: 

“…wherever they found magnificent temples of the Hindus….the Muslim rulers in India built mosques, monasteries, and inns, appointed mu’assins, teachers and store-stewards, spread Islam vigorously, and vanquished the Kafirs. Likewise they cleared up Faizabad and Avadh (Ayodhya), too from the filth of reprobation (infidelity), because it was a great center of worship and capital of Rama’s father. Where they stood a great temple of (Ramajanmasthan), there they built a big mosque…what a lofty mosque was built there by king Babar!” 

Some of the old sources used by Mirza Jan have yet to be unearthed, but one which he quotes from a Persian work known as Sahifah-I-Chihal Nasa’ib Bahadurshahi written in 1707 by a grand-daughter of the Moghur emperor Aurangazeb is particularly interesting. The Moghul princess declares: 

“…keeping the triumph of Islam in view, devout Muslim rulers should keep all idolators in subjection to Islam, brook no laxity in realization of Jizyah (religious tax on Hindus), grant no exceptions of Hindu Rajahs from dancing attendance on Id days and waiting on foot outside mosques till end of prayer…and keep in constant use for Friday and congregational prayer the mosque built up after demolishing the temples of the idolatrous Hindus situated at Mathura, Banaras and Avadh…”   

 

Dharwar - near Pune

            (image source: History of India - By A V Williams Jackson)

                ***

The Encyclopedia Britannica volume 1, 1985. 15th edition, has to say about Ayodhya: 

“There are few monuments of any antiquity. Rama’s birthplace is marked by a mosque, erected by the Moghul emperor Babur in 1528 on the site of an earlier temple.  

This leaves no doubt that all regarding either the fact of the temple destruction, or the motives behind their destruction – especially of the holiest of them, situated at Mathura, Benares and Ayodhya. In the face of such overwhelming evidence, it is an exercise in futility to try to deny it.  Negationism is simply not an option. 

It is important to remember the point made by Sir V. S. Naipaul, author of India: A Wounded Civilization (Vintage Books ISBN 1400030757) that the Ayodhya demolition must be viewed as a symbol of awakening historical awareness on the part of the Hindus. To the Hindus, the site is hallowed by the birth of their hero, Rama, regarded by them as the embodiment of truth, generosity, bravery, chivalry and an incarnation of God Vishnu. It is a sacred spot.  Hindus will not forget history. And writers, intellectuals, and journalists who are ignoring this are failing in their responsibility. They are taking the easy way out by hiding behind slogans like ‘Secularism’ and platitudes like “We must not reopen the wounds of history.” This is not scholarship, but cowardice.  

Every living nation has national symbols and Ayodhya is one of India’s. Just like an American would not let stand a mosque built by someone after demolishing Mount Vernon (George Washington’s home) or the Statue of Liberty, which Americans see as a national monument, same way for Hindus, it is a sacred spot. 

(source: A Hindu View of the World - By N. S. Rajaram and Profiles in Deception - By N. S. Rajaram ISBN: 81-85990-65-4). Refer to Heroic Hindu Resistance to Muslim Invaders (636 AD to 1206 AD) - By Sita Ram Goel. Voice of India, New Delhi.

Ayodhya and Integration of Hindu Society - Please refer to Koenraad Elst excellent book -  Ayodhya and After - By Koenraad Elst).

 

 

 

 

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