Reinstituting the Colonial History of Medieval India
(6 MARCH 2016)
WELL FRIENDS, MY YOUNG FRIENDS, AS a dinosaur, I’m just a few months younger than Romila is. We came here in the beginning of JNU, and therefore it was very, very exciting to be here. JNU was in its formative phase, and the formative phase is always extremely exciting. JNU was not merely an institution where we worked and got our salaries from and so on and so forth. JNU is something that resides in our hearts; anything that happens here, any call from JNU, and one responds immediately. When I was invited here I began to wonder – lots of doctors, medical doctors around the world, institutions around the world, they are doing very expensive research on what is called age fighting, no, anti-ageing process, on finding an anti-aging treatment; I think the best anti-ageing treatment is to come to JNU, interact with the students of JNU. Nothing sheds off more decades from your age than interaction with JNU students. It’s so wonderful because JNU was meant to be a different university, even as any university should be, but JNU, above all, was meant to question received wisdom, was meant to question established truths. Questioning does not mean demolishing, questioning does not mean opposing; questioning nationalism does not mean becoming anti-national, questioning patriotism does not mean you become anti-patriotic. Questioning means trying to understand phenomena. When you question nationalism, you are trying to understand the phenomenon of nationalism, and nationalism is not just one phenomenon; it is a very, very diverse and complex set of phenomena, it is a whole host of phenomena. Whether it is nationalism or patriotism or any other ism that you talk of, it’s a whole host of phenomena and therefore understanding that, questioning that is trying to understand that ensemble of phenomena, and that’s why JNU promotes so much of questioning. Please forgive me for a little autobiographical note, I think it was 30 or 31 January 2004, my last working day in JNU, and I was to give my last lecture to my class, after teaching history for forty-four years – eleven years in Delhi University and thirty-three years in JNU. Believe me, I still prepared my last lecture for three hours before I delivered it, because in JNU you can’t go to class without preparing your lecture. So that’s JNU, that’s why we love JNU so much.
Now I’ll take off from a point that Romila touched upon, that’s very, very crucial. By the way, before I go on to that let me bring in Fernand Braudel, who was one of the landmark historians in the world in the twentieth century, and his last book is called The Identity of France.1 He opens that book by virtually asking, in the twentieth century: Is France one country? Is France one society? Is France one nation? He traces the immense diversities of every kind through France’s history in Vol. 1, and concludes in Vol. 2 that France began to develop as a society and as a nation only after the coming of the radio and, later on, television when French became the language of all of France, when French nationalism came to be accepted by all of France. Yet, even in the twentieth century, there is still a region called Bretagne (Brittany in English) whose inhabitants resent being called French, though they are French obviously; they speak French, they still resent being called French just as the Scots resent being called British or English. The Soviet Union never became a nation even under a very strong state and the most powerful bureaucracy. One can go on with examples. So, nationalism is a concept which is still evolving even in the most advanced nations; it’s not a settled question in any country, in any region of the world, and therefore, it has to be understood, it has to be questioned, it has to be queried all the time.
But I’ll come back to James Mill, whom Romila referred to. James Mill, as she said, and as we all know, divided Indian history into three periods – Hindu period, Muslim period, British period, with his notion of ‘civilization’ as the analytical category.2 Prior to that there was no notion of periodization in Indian history. The difference between past and present was known, naturally, as it is in every society, the difference between what transpired ages ago and what is happening now. That change has occurred in the past through to the present was obviously known, but there was no notion of ancient and medieval past, there was no such notion, not only in India but anywhere else except in Europe. In Europe, this tripartite division which is so familiar now had come only towards the end of the seventeenth century, in 1688 to be precise,3 and then it spread to the rest of the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Its spread around the world was not due to its innate intellectual vigour but had a great deal to do with the emergent global power relations. It reached Japan and China towards the end of the nineteenth century and got incorporated in the study of history there in direct or modified form.4 In India it was used for the first time – the ancient/medieval/modern model – in 1903. But it was used in a different form – it coincided with James Mill’s division of historical time into the Hindu, the Muslim and the British periods.5 The change in nomenclature established no change in the substance; for that Indian historians were to wait until after Independence.
What is the implication of this tripartite division – Hindu, Muslim and British? The implication is that James Mill, as a utilitarian, was against all religions; he had very, very great contempt for Islam, but he had even greater contempt for Hinduism. The ‘Hindoos’ he characterized as ‘dissembling, treacherous, mendacious, to an excess which surpasses even the usual measure of uncultivated society’. He believed that modern states should function with modern institutions, modern rational thought, etc., emulating Europe’s post-Enlightenment rationality. So he had contempt for any earlier forms of state functioning and, therefore, he declared that earlier forms were Hindu and Muslim; that is to say, nothing else mattered prior to the coming of the British rule. All that mattered was whether the religion of the ruler was Hindu or Muslim, that’s all. Therefore, James Mill essentialized one notion, that of religious identity. Kanhaiya Kumar very rightly reminded us JNU people that we use too much of jargon, which is often not intelligible. Essentialization is not much of a jargon, but let me, nonetheless, taking advice from him, explain what essentialization means. It means that if Kanhaiya Kumar stands up and says my name is Kanhaiya Kumar, immediately we understand that he is a Hindu, he is a boy. That he is also a Marxist by persuasion, that he is a political and social activist, that he has a certain social, economic and family background, that he has certain aspirations for himself and for his society – all that becomes irrelevant. What remains relevant is that he is a Hindu boy, that’s about all, nothing else matters. Our friend Umar Khalid has been shouting from housetops that he is an atheist; in fact, when he was charged with being sympathetic to Jaish-e-Mohammed, his young sister said on TV that he didn’t bother even about Mohammed himself, much less about Jaish-e-Mohammed. And yet he will be projected as a Muslim, because his name is Muslim; that’s what essentialization means.
All of us have many, many different aspects to our existence: we are male, we are female, we are urban, we are rural, we are educated, we are uneducated, we are devoutly religious, we are devoutly atheistic, this, that, and the other, all kinds of facets – each one of us is an ensemble of all kinds of facets. Our existence is not just one identity, it has many, many identities. But all of those identities are reduced to just one, namely, the religion, and that in history to the religion of the ruler. Therefore, Hindu and Muslim periods means that nothing else mattered but the religion of the ruler. He was a Hindu or a Muslim ruler. Whether he was a good ruler, a bad ruler, efficient ruler, inefficient ruler, whether he conquered territories, didn’t conquer territories, whether he cared for the development of agriculture, industry, towns, trade, none of that matters. So Mill essentialized the study of pre-British history in these terms of Hindu and Muslim, and therefore justification of colonialism, that colonialism brought modernity, modern institutions, enlightenment, etc., to India. He also asserted that Indians were alien to the notion of change, any change, until the British brought it home to them.6 This notion indeed was predominant among all major European thinkers in the eighteenth, nineteenth and good part of the twentieth century and was the unquestioned premise for understanding India – indeed of the whole of the Orient – among such intellectual giants as Montesquieu, Hegel and not least Karl Marx.7
Now, it’s not as if the identities of Hindu and Muslim were not known earlier, obviously they were known. Professor Romila Thapar has written that excellent book, The Past Before Us, and she has also talked about the theme for a while now, where she shows an enormous range of perceptions of the history of India, a huge range. There’s not one perception of the past. History has been seen in many, many different ways in early India, sometimes intertwined with religion, sometimes independently of it. Let me talk of medieval India. In medieval India, history takes a different form from that in early India; it has a very strong Islamic colour to it, in the sense that one historian, Arab historian Tarif Khalidi, writes that Islam brought not only a new religion to the world, but also a new concept of history.8 The pre-Islamic Arab world was not illiterate: there was poetry in it, there was arithmetic, accounting, there was genealogy, etc. But there was no concept of history as we or as anybody understood it in the seventh century. So Islam brought a new discipline there, that of history, and from there it spread to wherever Islam spread. In medieval India also historians were imbued with this idea of Islam as an aspect of history writing, and therefore, the era that they used, mostly, though not all of them, was the Hijri era. So, Islam is present in history writing in medieval India, but is history writing a branch of theology in India? No, it is not a branch of Islamic theology. Why not?
When is history a branch of theology? Let me illustrate this first and then I’ll explain why medieval history writing is not a branch of theology. In medieval Europe, the historians were all ecclesiasts, for that was the only literate class in Europe then. The rulers were generally illiterate, it was from the second or the third generation of a dynasty that the rulers began to read and write. But the literate class was only the church fathers; they were thus the only historians. Being church fathers, not only did they live in the precincts of the church, but their mindsets also were entirely shaped by their religion. In their religion, God is omnipresent, God is omniscient, God knows everything. Whatever has happened in the past, whatever is happening today, whatever will happen in the future, God knows all that. In God’s mind, everything is clear – past, present and future are clear. We humans do know a little bit of the events of the past, a little less of what is happening before us in the world and nothing whatsoever of what the future has in store for us. But God knows everything because what’s happened in the world in the past, is happening now or will happen in the future is a manifestation of God’s will, of divine will. God has willed this war to take place, this flood to take place, this earthquake to take place, this fellow to succeed to the throne, etc. It is God’s will which is manifesting itself in historical events. So there are two aspects here: one is that all of history is universal history, for all events in the world happen as parts of God’s design. History thus is a single universal whole, a single unit. And the second is that all historical events merely unfold a divine pattern, God’s will, which is actually a causative force extraneous to human beings and to history.
In medieval India, neither of these facets occurs in history writing. Interestingly, even as history is visualized as world history within the fold of Islam, the ‘world’ that this history comprises is histories of several regions, chiefly where Islam had already spread and established its supremacy. It is thus not a universal history, but is the history of either different, often adjacent, regions or, in most cases, of single regions. Within regions it is reduced to dynastic history, within dynasty, there’s regnal history – wherein each reign is a single unit, and when you come to the current sultan, each year becomes a single unit. It’s a stupendous craft of reduction from ‘world’ history to regional history, further down to dynastic history, to regnal history, to annual history; it’s a reduction of superb craftsmanship.
The second distinctive aspect is chronology. The Arab–Muslim historians are very strict about sticking to the exact chronological sequence of events. This feature has been passed on to the craft of history writing wherever Islam spread. In its Indian version, each event is treated as a single, individual event; no event is related to any other event. Even their narration is like this. ‘In this year, this event took place’; they would narrate that event and then move on to the next event by announcing ‘and another event that took place was this’ and they would describe that event. There is no connection between one and the other event; each event is a single, individual entity, which is contrary to European history where everything is part of a pattern; here, there is no pattern in history. The second thing is that in Europe, medieval Europe, history, as has been emphasized again and again, is a manifestation of divine will, God’s will; in medieval India, history is a manifestation of the will of the ruler, or at best, the nature of the ruler, i.e., individual will, human will, not divine will. Therefore, you have people like Alauddin Khilji, who was a very strong ruler and therefore he conquered lots of territories; Firoz Shah Tughlaq was a very weak ruler and hence didn’t conquer any territory; Akbar was very liberal and therefore he followed a very liberal religious policy, etc. You must have, in your undergraduate days, read about this – weak ruler and strong ruler. All of this comes from medieval Indian historiography, the notion of ruler’s will or ruler’s nature being the determinant of historical events or indeed history in general. In this sense, medieval Indian historiography is very fundamentally different from medieval European historiography and, therefore, it is not a branch of theology, notwithstanding the use of Hijri era, and the fact that it owes its origin to Islam, in Arabia.9
Now, once you have human nature as the determining element of the events you are narrating, you have a whole range of natures among rulers; no two persons have the same nature. I just mentioned to you, Alauddin Khilji was a very strong ruler, Firoz Shah Tughlaq was a very weak ruler. You have even theorization on this. The most important historian of the fourteenth century, Ziauddin Barani, posits that man’s nature comprises contradictory qualities.10 It’s only a balanced mixture of these contradictory qualities that leads to success, and an imbalanced mixture leads to failure. And in fact he says even God’s nature comprises contradictory qualities. And those of you who remember your chapter on Muhammad Bin Tughlaq would recollect that Muhammad Bin Tughlaq’s nature, according to Barani, was an unbalanced mixture of contradictory qualities, and that is why he failed as a ruler. But you have other rulers who are very strong, tough and ruthless, like Balban, who would cut down dense forests to chase and punish rebels, or others like Firoz Shah Tughlaq who undertook construction of lots of canals to improve irrigation for cultivation, and so on and so forth. Everyone’s nature is different and therefore you have a range of explanations that are given to you by medieval Indian historians. What James Mill does is that he reduces this great range of explanations to one single explanation – the fact that the ruler is a Muslim is all that matters. Period. That’s all that needs to be understood, nothing else needs to be taken into account. No variation, no change, no range, nothing. The ruler is a Hindu or a Muslim, that’s all. And therefore, we began to adopt that periodization and that mode of history writing in the nineteenth century, and for a part of the twentieth century, we kept going along that path.
To illustrate what it does to history, I’ll give you two examples, what this reduction to essentialization does. Annette S. Beveridge translated Babur-Nama into English and it is an excellent translation, absolutely fabulous translation. Now it has been superseded by another translation, but for about a hundred years this was a standard translation and a good translation. In the Babur-Nama, Babur mentions twice on the same page that he went to Ayodhya, he notes the administrative arrangements he made there and does not forget the shikar he undertook. However, he doesn’t mention any Ram temple, he doesn’t mention Ram, he doesn’t mention any temple, he doesn’t mention the demolition of any temple, doesn’t mention the construction of the Babri Masjid, or any masjid by him.11 However, in the translation, there is an appendix inserted by Mrs Beveridge, the translator. It says, in this year Babur went to Ayodhya. There he must have come across a very old, sacred temple of the Hindus, and as a faithful follower of his faith – I’m just paraphrasing, I don’t remember the exact words – he must have destroyed that temple and given the order to erect a mosque.12 Now this is what follows from essentialization – because Babur was a Muslim, he must have done all of this. That he actually demolished an existing temple, there is no evidence of that, and even Mrs Beveridge is not sure, but she presumes that Babur must have done all that because he was a Muslim!13
But let me take up a bigger example than this. You see, as an essentially Muslim ruler, or rulers, what would be their primary duty when they are ruling over India, such a vast territory as India, with a massive non-Muslim population? Their primary duty would be to convert these non-Muslims to Islam; that would be expected of a very faithful follower of Islam, essential Muslim, etc. That is required, naturally, and follows from the essentialization of a Muslim ruler. Now, let us look at the process of conversions to Islam, I don’t want to go into many details, but touch upon it very briefly.14 The Muslim population in the Indian subcontinent before Partition – India, Pakistan, Bangladesh together – is the largest population in the whole world; now the region is divided, so Indonesia has the largest Muslim population but, if you put the three countries together, it is the largest Muslim population in the world. And yet there is not a single book on how these conversions took place, the largest population, and we don’t know how these conversions have taken place in India.15 Why is there no book? It’s not that historians haven’t thought of writing a book, but because there is no data available to let the historians do research on this massive theme. Why is there no data available? It is interesting that of the numerous court histories written in the Persian language from the Delhi Sultanate to the end of the Mughal Empire, covering a period of some six centuries, there is very scant reference to conversions undertaken by the rulers. Most histories were written by Muslim authors, some by Hindu historians. Among them was a range of historians – some very highly charged Muslims like Mulla Abdul Qadir Badauni, Akbar’s courtier, and others like Abu’l Fazl, who discounted Islam as the only true religion, and several others in-between, but it is extremely rare that any one of them, zealot or ‘liberal’, Muslim or Hindu, refers to proselytization by the ruler. Nor is there much data on it in popular, vernacular literature, which abounds in medieval India. But knowing that massive conversions did take place, why are references to it so scarce? The only reasonable explanation is that had conversions taken place at the hands of one single agency by force or otherwise, or in one short period of time, there is no way it could have escaped getting into record of one sort or another at the hands of one writer or the other. Conversions took place over very long stretches of time and through a number of agencies and for a number of motivations; hence the absence of a dramatic element lets these off the record.
There is a second aspect of the problem. In the last census before Independence, 1941, the Muslim population in India was estimated to be just short of 25 per cent, i.e., one in every four Indians was a Muslim. In 1826, one Bishop Hebbar mentions that one in every six Indians was a Muslim. Going by this data there was a 50 per cent rise in Muslim population in over a century when the British were ruling here.
Then again let us look at the demographic distribution of the Muslim population in the undivided subcontinent. The massive majority of the Muslim population is concentrated in four peripheral regions: Kashmir, what is now Pakistan, what is now Bangladesh, and in Malabar in Kerala, isn’t it?
Now, these are the four geographical peripheries of the subcontinent which were also the political peripheries of the medieval Indian state, where the hold of the state was either non-existent (as in Kerala) or very sporadic and far from firm over long periods. Thus in the heartland of the Muslim rule – Bihar, Delhi, UP, East Punjab – the Muslim population never exceed 10 per cent; if it was around 15–16 per cent in 1941, it was obviously much lower than that earlier – at best 7–8 per cent, 10 per cent, whatever. Therefore, the argument that the Muslim state was converting people to Islam falls flat on its face if you look at the demographic map of India. I’m not suggesting that the state had no hand in it – the state also had its hand in it. In fact, my Muslim friends here might not be very pleased to hear this but nonetheless, as a historian let me just say that the state converted people to Islam as a kind of punishment; that is to say, if you commit a crime against the state, the only punishment for crime is your beheading, but if the ruler is kind or the ruler considers past services or usefulness of the man himself, he’ll say, okay I will not kill you if you convert to Islam. So it’s a second-level punishment being given to them. Second, sending people to Hajj is the second-biggest punishment you can give them. Whenever the state is angry with some Muslim noble, they send him to Hajj. So, it’s not as if the state did not have a hand in conversions, but that the simple explanation flowing from essentialization of ‘Muslim’ rule is extremely tenuous. So, you get a distorted picture of history. You lose a whole range of explanations of history, you get one explanation which is a false explanation in terms of historical data. Therefore, you get a bad kind of history from this, just one monolithic kind of history.
Now, this sort of history lasted until about the 1950s. Fortunately or unfortunately, this is also the kind of division that our historians, Indian historians, have adopted, as Romila has already pointed out. But things began to change in the late 1950s, early ’60s. I happen to be one of those who belong to that fortunate generation. I was a student of the undergraduate and postgraduate programmes at Delhi University in the second half of the 1950s. I studied that kind of history which I am now describing, Hindu and Muslim and so on and so forth. It was called medieval India but it was actually Hindu and Muslim periods, that kind of history. Suddenly, from the late 1950s, early ’60s there was a wave of change; suddenly you started talking of class at the mass level, rather than religious identity of the ruler, as the driving force of history.16 Religious identity as a category of analysis was central to that kind of history; that was suddenly replaced by a new category called class, which had nothing do with religion and was no longer centred on the individual ruler. History found its explanation in terms of class exploitation and class upheavals and so on. You take peasantry as a whole, and not divide it into Hindu and Muslim peasantry and so on. Thus started a new kind of historical explanation; history’s landscape changed in the late 1950s and early ’60s and the colonial legacy began to give way quickly within under a decade. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, a new threshold was crossed again and a fascinating range of themes emerged. Themes like the history of the notion of time, for example, history of the notions of space, history of interpersonal relationships, intercultural interactions, history of the household, history of gender, ecology, the natures of states and so forth.17 Therefore, a fascinating new world emerged from the late 1980s onwards and then in the twenty-first century, alternatives to old chronicles and court histories and texts, etc., began to be explored in the vernacular literatures, folklore, folk songs, etc., not as sources of history but as alternative perspectives of history in some outstanding recent works. A new world is opening up, so we have left colonial history far, far behind. And I must say that the British are themselves revisiting their earlier generations’ assumptions and conclusions under the influence of Indian historians; they are themselves giving up this kind of colonial, historical writing. But that’s the problem with the RSS and the BJP: they want us to ignore all the recent marvellous developments in history and go back to James Mill, go back to colonial history understood exclusively in terms of Hindu and Muslim, that’s all. Nothing else matters, except Hindu and Muslim, to them. The religion of the ruler is all that matters and of course all Muslim rulers are essentialized as cruel, perverse and oppressive. Do you want to go back to that kind of history?
[To a resounding ‘No’ from the audience, the speaker concludes,] ‘That is why you are under attack!’
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