THERE IS A common prejudice in modern social sciences that views the question of toleration through a simple linear narrative and presents a plausible progressivist view of the relation between religion, modernity, and the practice of toleration. I would like to suggest that this belief is detrimental to a real understanding of historical evidence, drawing primarily on the complex experience of the Indian subcontinent.
WHAT IS WRONG WITH COMMON MODES OF SEEING THE PROBLEM
Modern social science absorbed from the Enlightenment a persistent tendency to present a narrative of linear development of human civilization in which each successive stage is viewed as an improvement on the previous one, and at the time of the rise of modern social theory this form of thinking was also permeated by an uncritical Orientalist prejudices against other cultures. Developments in modern Europe were usually considered the final achievements of humanity in every field; although it was at times acknowledged that previous cultures had startling achievements to their credit, these were nearly always considered deficient in relation to the full achievement of humanistic principles in European modernity.
1 As religious toleration was considered a significant value of social life, it was given a genealogy that accorded with these two background beliefs.
2 Instances of religious accommodation from around the world were often collected and compared condescendingly with the achievements of the modern Western rationalist state, which realized principles of political toleration in religious life. Applying the same historiographic principles to an understanding of Indian history, colonial historians, who were the first to produce modern Indian historiography, often spoke approvingly of earlier imperial states and rulers like Asoka, the Mauryan emperor who pledged nonviolence after a devastating war in Kalinga, and the Mughal emperor Akbar as rulers who “anticipated” modern principles of toleration between different faiths. But the underlying premises of that historiography always regarded these situations as
episodic—transient periods of accommodation in a history marked by unremitting religious hatred. Careful analysis shows both sides of this picture—of the past and the implicit one of the present, which persuades us to picture the past in that precise way—to be misleading. Equally misleading is the tendency, deeply embedded in “universal histories” of nineteenth-century Europe, that saw histories of all cultures at all times trying to resolve the central problems of modern life and coming up with imperfect solutions.
3 This view is misleading on at least two separate counts: in suggesting, first, that the solutions devised by such rulers were similar in principle to modern secularism, only less perfect, and, second, that the nature of conflict between religious groups in premodern times was fundamentally the same as in modern history. Evidence from Indian history encourages us to think of comparative history in a more decentered fashion—i.e., not with the presumption that all previous history is failed attempts to achieve modern solutions. It serves to show that religious diversity was a question faced by entirely different cultures at very different historical moments, and they strove to find solutions to these questions that were entirely disparate, but comparable. In this chapter I shall present four episodes from a long and complex history—to illustrate the patterns of political construction by means of which societies sought to bring some resolution to this fundamentally contentious question.
WHAT IS INTERESTING ABOUT INDIAN HISTORY
In European history the question of religious conflict increasingly became a serious intellectual and political issue after the Reformation. All major religions develop great internal diversities of doctrine and observance through historical evolution; this was true of European Christianity. But for a long time those diversities did not lead to a serious political conflict that threatened to destroy the entire civilization of Europe. Christianity in Europe faced two kinds of challenges from diversity. Enclaves of other religious groups, especially Jewish groups, existed within a primarily Christian continent, but the Jews of Europe never had either the numbers or the political organization to act as serious contenders to Christian hegemony.
4 Second, periodic eruption of heterodoxies remained relatively minor, so that the Church successfully policed and contained them through its internal mechanisms of social control. These asymmetric challenges to Catholic orthodoxy were contained partly by religious mechanisms of control like the Inquisition and partly by direct use of political power. After the conquest of Spain for Catholicism, and the expulsion of Jews and Muslims, Europe did not face serious challenges arising out of religious diversity until the Reformation. Although for centuries, Europe faced the
external threat of Islamic military power, in recurrent wars with the expanding Ottoman Empire, Islam never occupied a stable internal region within European Christian space. The Turks failed to infiltrate middle Europe in sufficiently large numbers until the late twentieth century.
The contrast with the Indian case is interesting—first, because of the sheer length of time over which religious diversity constituted a source of social and political “conflict” in the subcontinent and, second, because the two forms in which religious diversity can emerge in a society were both present in India.
5 The first instance of religious diversity—between Vedic religion and Buddhism—arose through a process of schism, much like the case of European Christianity during the reformation. The second major instance of religious diversity came through the arrival of Islam, leading after the thirteenth century to a major presence of Islam in the society and polities of the Indian subcontinent.
6 Indian history thus shows both routes to religious diversity—through internal evolution of a religious field and through the entry and entrenchment of a religion from outside leading to large-scale conversion.
CONFLICT BETWEEN VEDIC RELIGION AND BUDDHISM
Religious diversity became a source of social contention and destructive political conflict when Buddhism and Jainism arose to challenge the dominance of Vedic religion (which is often unmindfully called ancient Hinduism). The character of this diversity was both like and unlike the schism of European Christianity. It was like the Christian schism in the sense that evolution of these religious doctrines came from within the internal development of existing religion: it was a process in which a society once professing a single religious faith gradually came to face the challenge of contending and seriously critical views. In another respect the Buddhist schism was quite different from the division of Christianity. Buddhism, in particular, but also many of the reform religious sects assailed the
varna hierarchy—the
sociological structure of castes attached to Vedic religion. Buddhism offered a challenge not merely to religious doctrines and observances (which could also be deeply contentious: for instance, the central place of sacrifice in the Vedic system of
karma and the Buddhist injunction against the taking of life in the name of religion), but it also proposed a serious modification of the hierarchic practices of the social order. Modern nationalist authors interpreted the Buddhist threat to Vedic religion as a global rejection of caste practice, probably an anachronistic, excessively radical portrayal. Recent scholarship suggests more cautiously that the Buddha’s challenge was to the dominance of the Brahmin caste stratum, rather than for an abolition of the entire caste order, probably connected to the fact that he came from the
varna of political rulers, and his religious teachings spread widely among
sresthis, merchant groups thriving in this material culture. But historic differentiation of religious culture after the rise of Buddhism produced another significant effect. Although the field of religious life split primarily between the two major systems, Vedic Mimamsa and Buddhism,
7 it also led to a finer process of fragmentation. The rise of other doctrines and their contending sects—like the Jainas who shared a great deal with Buddhists—and the implicit differentiation among the “orthodox” about how the Buddhist heterodoxy should be met created a field of immense doctrinal and observational plurality. Instead of splitting into two massive systems that could engage a struggle until death, religious life went through a period of great philosophical questioning, doctrinal differentiation, and institutional fragmentation—moderating to some extent the ferocity of a purely binary confrontation. Four different aspects in this development should be disentangled for closer analysis:
a) the map of doctrinal differences,
b) the manner in which religious diversity affects the structure of society and its established group interests,
c) the response of the holders of political power to the emergence of religious diversity and the potential of conflict,
d) intellectual strategies fashioned by philosophers to deal with fundamental differences.
Doctrinally, Buddhist faith rejected fundamental ideas of Vedic religion. It assailed two related fundamental Vedic doctrines—that purity of ethical life is less important than performance of propitiatory ritual practices, which would purify or redeem an individuals’ life irrespective of his moral attentiveness and probity.
8 Against this highly ritualistic conception of religious life, early Buddhism presented a spare, deeply ethical counterconception that nearly dispensed with the idea of God, not to speak of the innumerable deities of conventional Vedic worship. Some of their background beliefs—like transmigration of the soul and the cycle of rebirths—Buddhists shared with Vedic believers. With further evolution of Buddhist religion, finer philosophical differences emerged and led to fierce intellectual debates; but by the nature of these debates these were confined to specialist intellectuals like philosophers and logicians. Ordinary people were unlikely to be keenly interested in the disputes about the nature of negation or the temporal unity of selves.
Rejection of ritualism was inextricably connected to a challenge to the power of the religious elite—Brahminical groups who were allowed by the rules of the caste order to officiate at the sacrificial ceremonies and controlled cultural power over ancient Indian society. In its historical evolution, Buddhism later developed elaborate institutions of priesthood, like the monastic orders of Bhikkhus and Sramanas whose members renounced the life of householders and preserved the institutional and doctrinal order of the Buddhist faith. The Brahminical order lacked such a disciplined and highly institutionalized ecclesiastical structure: its priestly class of officiating Brahmins represented a more diffuse and unorganized elite. Simply by questioning ritual supremacy and the “purity” of the Brahmins,
9 and allowing lower-status groups like merchants, ritualized outsiders like lower artisanal castes, and women a place in religious life and an equal place in worship, Buddhism undermined fundamental social principles on which the Vedic order rested. It is plausible to believe that this relative egalitarianism/antihierarchical ideology drew converts to Buddhist religion, and clearly, for several centuries, ancient Indian society was split by the competitive presence of the two major religious orders until the decisive decline of the Buddhist alternative at the end of the first millennium. This terminal decline raises a number of explanatory puzzles.
10An analysis of the global situation of religious diversity in ancient India shows some interesting features of religious contestation. First of all, it is clear that, in a society marked by the dominance of a single religious faith and its attendant institutions, religious elites like the Brahmins enjoyed undivided social dominance, and usually they exercise some social-ethical superiority over the wielders of political power.
11 A schism in the dominant religion, interestingly, opens an opportunity for political elites, wielding royal power and using their obligation to provide protection for all their subjects to use this principle to turn the tables on religious elites. When a society has a plurality of religious elites, and they dispute each others’ claim to exclusive moral dominance, royal authority can emerge as a mediator and the true preserver of social order, and this reverses the relation between religious and political power. It becomes the social task of the political rulers to secure a state of affairs that keeps religious disputes within reasonable limits. Notably, this can happen only if political elites do not directly take sides in disputes between religions. Ancient Indian history shows both kinds of examples. At the time of intense conflict between Vedic and Buddhist religious systems, some political rulers participated enthusiastically in the conflict between the two religions, since it was plausible to interpret the contention as one between good and evil. Buddhists regarded the Vedic features of ritualism, Brahminical hierarchy, and animal sacrifice as ethically repugnant and morally reprehensible. Vedic supporters viewed Buddhists as people who undermined the structure of social and normative order and questioned scriptures which had superhuman authority and sanction behind them.
12 Early religious conflict in India demonstrated why these disputes can easily become uncommonly bitter and violent. Refusal to believe in religious doctrine is viewed by believers not as a defiance of important legal systems of human creation but of injunctions possessing extrahuman, divine sanction. Defiance of human authority might be seen as detestable but within the limits of tolerance, calling for forbearance of something repugnant, but of divine authority it is regarded as ethically unbearable. When a religious dispute is seen thus as a Manichaean division between good and evil, it is tempting on the part of religious elites to enlist the power of secular rulers. Ancient Indian history, and particularly religious lore, offers numerous instances of this response to the conflict between Vedic and Buddhist religion.
13But it appears that a more common response of political rulers toward the challenge of religious diversity was a different strategy. Inscriptional and literary evidence indicate that more commonly ancient rulers applied an implicit distinction between private belief and the public sphere of religious life of the state, and although kings often declared their private religious faith, they desisted from converting that into a state religion, which immediately implied inferior or contested status for people of opposing or different religious persuasions. Evidence points to a common practice where kings would provide patronage to different religious groups and sects, would allow the existence of their religious institutions—like Buddhist monasteries and opulent Saiva temples—patronize schools for the philosophical pursuit of religious doctrines, and simply tolerate the diversity of faith observances of their subjects, unless these threatened what they regarded as the basic order of decency and domesticity. An ancient Sanskrit drama, the
Agamadambara, by the celebrated Kashmiri Saiva philosopher Jayanta Bhatta, is fascinating not merely because of its presentation of intricate philosophic disputes but also its basic picture of the political sociology of an ancient kingdom.
14 In the play the king follows principles of government that were widely adopted by political elites in the entire subcontinent.
In terms of sociological theory, two features appear to be significant in this historical period. It shows first that there are two basic possibilities: either the political regime participates in the disputes of religious ideas, converting the question into one of good and evil, which draws the political state into religious wars and moves inevitably toward a religious homogenization of the principality. It seems that more commonly Indian rulers followed the alternative option—of viewing different religious paths as different approaches to resolving an uncommonly difficult question, of right and wrong in the human condition—and adopted an attitude of neutrality. By implication, this forced them to institute a division between two roles of the ruler—his
individual path of good religious life and his
public obligation to allow all his subjects to follow a religious path of their choice without hindrance from the state or other faiths. This required an implicit distinction between something like personal religion and state religion and the two functions of the king—as a good person and a good ruler. This strategy worked on the basis of a loose connection between the ruler and the collectivity of his subjects. Characteristics of belief were not seen as transferable from the society to the government: the government or regime was not a regime of its people in the modern sense, which requires a much tighter connection between the properties of the “people” and the properties of the state and its governing class. The clearest expression of this theory of rule in the context of deep religious diversity is emblematically contained in the Asokan edicts, which state explicitly that all
pāsandas (religious faiths) are welcome in the empire. One edict recommends, as a way of assisting religious accommodation, that even in the midst of religious disputation “adherents should exercise moderation in praising their own faith.”
15With the rise of modern history, the strange decline of Buddhism became a puzzle and a matter of intense dispute. Some modern historians simply concluded that absence of evidence of persecution against religious groups simply indicates the erasure of evidence by powerful interests. (Just as, in a different field, the lack of evidence of large peasant uprisings simply means for some modern historians the suppression of their history. On the other hand, more textually oriented historians argue that this way of thinking simply turns European history into a normative frame through which Indian history is not merely interpreted, but even its factual base is conceived. Peasant uprisings must have happened all over the world at all times, only in some cases their evidence is either lost or successfully suppressed.) The intriguing question of the disappearance of Buddhism raises similar historiographic puzzles. A strand of modern historiography, on the basis of evidence that Buddhist
viharas or monasteries were demolished by hostile monarchs,
16 paints a picture of religious conflict in early medieval India remarkably similar to European history of the sixteenth century. Actually, this similarity of construction is the point of historiographic contention: it is precisely the similarity to European history that makes this case plausible to some and entirely unconvincing to others. Other interpreters of this history, like P. V. Kane, provide an equally unpersuasive theory that Buddhism declined simply because of the degradation of its principles into licentious tantric doctrines and sexual practices, which ordinary householders mainly rejected out of moral repugnance. This remains a puzzle for historians of religious life: it is hardly likely that Buddhism could have been eradicated from India either by simply moral revulsion of ordinary householders against abhorrent sexual deviance or by systematic political persecution.
The “disappearance” of Buddhism raises another interesting question. It is incontrovertibly true that, after the tenth century, Buddhist religion declined in even those parts of India where it had enjoyed a dominant ideological presence. From both Kashmir and Bengal, in two extremities of North India, Buddhist religion totally disappeared. Organized Buddhist religious life—through the community of the
sangha and the powerful institutional presence of the Viharas which acted as powerful centers of congregational and intellectual life—slowly declined; and evidence suggests that Buddhist scholars and religious elites responded to a combination of pressures and incentives to migrate with their knowledge systems to Tibet. Yet, the triumph of Vedic religion over the Buddhist challenge was a contradictory and complex affair. Kashmiri Saiva religion played the preeminent role in the intellectual contest against Buddhist doctrines and philosophic schools and, in a sense, secured the “triumph” against the heterodoxy. Yet Saiva doctrines absorbed significant complexes of ideas from Buddhist thought in several fields. Some of their philosophical speculation, it has been argued, drew major ideas from Buddhist philosophers. Saiva religion abandoned the strict Vedic adherence to the birth-based precedence of caste and evinced a far softer attitude toward the question of hierarchy. Even Sankara, who is a major figure in the struggle against Buddhist doctrines and often shows an ambiguous attitude toward caste practice, was regarded by later interpreters as a
pracchanna bauddha—a hidden Buddhist.
17 Later texts show a more ambiguous approach toward caste hierarchy, less certain about the justifiability of birth-based distinctions.
18 The
Sukraniti states, “Na jatya brahmnascatra ksatriya vaisya eva na, Na sudro na ca vai mleccho bhedita guna-karmabhih.”
19 Not merely the ethical spirit behind the statement, but even its peculiar locutions are notably similar to the strictures against the Brahmins in the
Dhammapada.
20Finally, in actual observance of popular religion, numerous Buddhist practices, occasionally associated with tantrism and more permissive sexual rules, remained influential. It appears that some of these strands of inexplicit forms of Buddhist religion revived and reentered the Hindu mainstream through Vaisnava, Saiva, and Sakta religious traditions, all of which selectively absorbed Tantric elements. The historical fate of Buddhism thus showed a strange and complex pattern—of explicit conflict between two traditions in philosophic and institutional terms and yet a contrary history of popular accommodation and absorption, a tendency to tolerate heterodox practice subsumed under a vague, often perfunctory, acceptance of an orthodox order. This also points to a long-term tendency toward constant interpenetration and mixture of religious ideas and observances, so that characterization of beliefs made sense only at a high level of doctrinal or philosophical abstraction. At lower levels of popular practice, it often became hard to distinguish between strictly Hindu, Buddhist, or Muslim religious practice or, inside Hinduism, between Saiva, Vaisnava, and Sakta sects. This spirit of something going beyond ecumenism is captured in a verse from the Subhasita-ratna-bhand-agarah:
yam saivah samupasate siva iti brahmeti vedantino
bauddhah buddha iti pramanapatavah karteti naiyayikah
arhan-nityatha jainasasanaratah karmeti mimamsakah
sohyam bo vidadhatu banchitaphalam trailokyanatho harih21
Read carefully, this verse makes some interesting moves regarding the grounds of religious accommodation. It not merely tolerates other religious paths, extending its hospitality to cover most of the significant religious traditions in India.
22 In a surprising move, both imprecise and radical, it does not merely recognize the value of all religious paths, but turns all forms of the divine into various names of one single God, who is worshipped by all. The absences in this passage are insignificant philosophically, because it obviously contains a principle that can be extended to other faiths.
23CONFLICT AND ACCOMMODATION IN MEDIEVAL INDIA
Buddhist and Jain religions emerged as heterodoxies from inside the field of Vedic religious orthodox beliefs, as schisms or consequences of a process of religious differentiation. Islam came from outside—by two quite dissimilar routes. Small communities of Islamic believers existed in enclaves on the western coast, primarily connected to the long-standing trade links with the Arabian peninsula.
24 But the major entry of Islam occurred through the expansion of Islamic political empires into Afghanistan and further into the North Indian delta from the thirteenth century. However, the substantial presence of Islam in medieval India was primarily due to large-scale conversion. After the establishment of a segment of the Ghaznavid Empire in the region around Delhi, the kingdom evolved into an independent political entity, inaugurating a long period of uninterrupted political dominion over North and Central India by Islamic dynasties, which ended only with the rise of the British power in the mid-eighteenth century. During a period of nearly seven centuries, large parts of India saw two major changes related to the presence of Islam—the conversion of large communities to Islamic faith and establishment of political rule by Muslim elites in not merely the major parts of the North Indian space but also in settled regional kingdoms in major centers of North, South, and Eastern India. Bengal and Kashmir—two regions once dominated by Buddhist presence, became regions of dominant Muslim faith. Interestingly, in the main part of the subcontinent, despite long and uninterrupted periods of Islamic political governance, Hindu sects constituted the statistical majority—a fact that would play a major role in the political dynamic of modern India.
The entry of Islam into medieval Indian society brought in a new, harder form of religious diversity. Prior religious life in India was marked by a great diversity of religious beliefs—between “Hindu” strands on the one side and Buddhists and Jains on the other—but, additionally, there was considerable differentiation amongst “Hindu” sects of numerous kinds, Saivas, Vaisnavas, and Jains in South India and among Vaisnavas, Saivas, and Saktas in the North. However, it could be argued that these religious groups shared some common fundamental beliefs and could be viewed as different segments of a vast common group that outside observers like the Islamic scholar Al-Biruni would classify as a single, but internally heterogeneous faith community.
25 External groups regularly made incursions into India before the entry of Islamic empires; some of them came as military conquerors, but stayed on as inhabitants, eventually losing their ethnic and religious distinctiveness. Presumably, the religious self-definitions of these groups and their sociological organization were weaker, to allow the encircling Hindu society to absorb them into the highly mobile and flexible arrangements of caste society.
26 Most of these groups of immigrants disappeared without trace in the dynamic structure of Hindu society, often embedded as distinct caste groups linked to specific occupations. Islamic groups possessed much sharper doctrinal self-definition, more effective military power, and a distinctive sociological structure, which prevented a similar incorporation into the Hindu caste hierarchy.
27 Remarkably, Islamic empires in North or Central India rarely attempted a serious process of conversion of the common population to Islam, and Al-Biruni’s (973–1048) account already showed that observers assumed the long-term coexistence of these two religions in the same society as a settled fact of social life.
28 Medieval Indian society demonstrated religious diversity—like medieval Europe or the Islamic Middle East, but on a different scale and form. In Europe small Jewish communities existed inside a predominantly Christian society and political order. Persian and Ottoman Empires of the Middle East contained long-standing Christian and Jewish communities,
29 but these were relatively small groups that did not disturb the primary Islamic character of these societies. The presence of Islam in medieval Indian society was on quite a different scale, and, crucially, the Islamic empires presided over a society of predominantly Hindu subjects. This produced two requirements for the political order and social structure. The political order had to find a way of balancing the faiths of the rulers and the large majority of their subjects. The society had to develop arrangements for the coexistence of two religious faiths that were significantly different in some ways.
Coexistence of two religious orders created an unusual state of affairs in medieval India. A primary point of doctrinal dispute between the Hindu sects and Islam was the question of idolatry. Islamic faith considered making images of God sacrilegious because no finite image could produce an adequate representation of His infinite qualities. By contrast, the Hindu religious imagination was compulsively productive of icons and images. Under early Islamic rule some Hindu and Buddhist temples were destroyed, though the impulse behind that may have been a combination of secular considerations of gathering wealth rather than establishment of true belief.
30 Hindu religious practice continued to thrive in the Islamic empires, and Muslim rulers appeared content to impose a tax on nonbelievers (
jaziya) that made them eligible to equal political protection by the state. The interpretation of the
jaziya has proved a contentious theme in recent historiography. Modern historians often make an anachronistic argument about the tax, viewing its imposition as a mark of
discrimination against a religious community, a sign of inferior status.
31 Hindu nationalist historians rehearsed the instances of temple destruction and imposition of the religious tax: Islamic historians, accepting the same view of the tax, try to show its leniency, the numerous instances of exception.
32 But the tax had another side that is entirely disregarded in modern discussions. By the payment of the tax, groups that professed other religious faiths became entitled to equal protection from the Islamic state: the payment of the tax constituted a sign of fealty toward Islamic political authority by the other religious groups, and its acceptance constituted an obligation of nondiscrimination in security on the part of the Islamic state. Thus imposition of the
jaziya by a devout religious ruler meant, on one side, that these groups were of a different religious faith, but also, on the part of the ruler, an acceptance of a
religious duty to provide security to subjects of other religions.
Despite deep and fundamental doctrinal differences, in some ways the social order of the Hindus and Muslims appear remarkably similar. Both religious doctrines stressed limitations on the powers of the political “sovereign”: the
constitution of society—the order of everyday life—was subject to an imperturbable, unchangeable order set down by the rules of religion and interpretable by religious experts—the Brahmins and the ulema—and beyond the powers of secular authority to destroy or to modify significantly. The constitution of society, therefore, was kept outside the purview of political power, providing both stability to social life and an important limitation on the power of the rulers and their propensity to tyrannical rule.
33 Both religious orders therefore implicitly ruled out social engineering on a vast scale that is taken to be the privilege of modern sovereign states. This underlying sociological similarity of the two religious communities was reinforced by a further inexplicit factor—the productive structure of society was regulated by an occupational grid of the caste order. Converts to Islam remained
economically integral parts of the caste-based occupational order,
34 and since conversion happened primarily in groups rather than by individual decision, change of religious faith did not subvert the occupational structure of caste society. Even after conversion to Islam, a group of fishermen, or weavers, would still remain in their hereditary occupations, and thus segments of caste society. This seems to be a partial answer to the puzzle—why Muslims and Christians in Indian society appear to be unproblematic members of the caste order, despite the egalitarian doctrines of their religious faith.
Two types of responses by political authorities to the evident fact of religious diversity can be discerned from the numerous historical chronicles of medieval India. In the absence of precise historical statistics, it is hard to surmise how the communities were spatially distributed or their precise numbers. In early stages of the Delhi sultanate, political elites were distracted by constant political upheaval and quick turnover of dynasties. Constant reconfigurations of alliances among military and political elites kept them entirely absorbed in affairs of the state. Iltutmish, the second ruler of the Slave dynasty, when pressed by priestly groups to show more ardor for imposition of Islamic laws, made practical points of expostulation. As long as Muslim rulers were a small minority in the society, it was unpractical; if larger numbers converted to Islam, in future, it might become possible to follow more exact Islamic legal rules, in effect, shifting the responsibility on to the religious leaders.
35 This practical rule of general noninterference in the social affairs of their Hindu subjects appears to have been the dominant political practice.
36 It can be suggested, inferentially, from the reproach more orthodox writers directed at political rulers that they appeared, in their view, not to make serious efforts for the conversion of their subjects. Barani, the major chronicler of the Delhi sultanate, commends Sultan Allauddin Khilji for adopting measures which reduced the status of the Hindus both politically and economically.
37 It can be inferred from this that he disapproved of statecraft that avoided taking sides in the religious question and did not view the state as a vehicle of the expansion of Islam. Such scholarly reproaches, and evidence of occasional urging from orthodox religious leaders that the state should view itself as an arm of the Islamic faith, only proves that these policies were exceptions, not the rule. By and large, political power allowed the practice of different religious faiths in social life, and the period of the sultanate was marked by a form of practical coexistence of the two large religious communities.
Another trend of interaction emerged in medieval India that was driven by a religious, not political impulse. Contrary to the casual “clash of civilization” thesis, which suggests that religious cultures, when they are brought into contact historically, inevitably produce political and ethical conflict, much evidence points in the opposite direction. It is true that religious systems of thought tend to associate their own peculiar principles with the sanction from God and therefore tend to induce conflict with contending demands of different moral principles claiming divine origin. In India a major source of ideological conflict between Hindu and Muslim faiths was the question of images and iconoclasm. The Hindu religious world teems with images, because Hinduism persists in thinking complex thoughts through an imagic translation that makes them more intelligible, memorable, and aesthetically available. Original doctrines of Islam were hostile to the idea of trying to capture the infinite quality of God in necessarily finite images; and it generated a powerful philosophical justification of strict monotheism, deeply critical of the idea of image worship. Despite these deep differences, Sufi traditions of worship developed an interest in Hindu traditions, particularly in the fields of literary composition, music, and art. Saints of various Sufi persuasions and their artistic representatives, like the poet Amir Khusrau, devised forms of worship and artistic production around them (like Qawwali singing) that sought points of convergence and exchange with Hindu devotional traditions. Transforming the original idea of a transcendent God, who could not be grasped by the intellectual faculty of the human mind or be encompassed by its aesthetic imagination, into a being who could be reached only by a perfected love, Sufi mystics inaugurated a new kind of devotional culture that made it easy for Hindu religious devotees to understand and interact with their language of worship. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, religious reflection in India produced forms of devotion that transcended the intellectual and imaginative barriers between the two religions. Kabir’s poems often invoke a God who is impossible to describe in terms of either religion, who lives inside or close to the human heart—a radical rejection of orthodoxies that undermined all symbols of religious division. “Na main devala na main masjid na kabe Kailas mein, Moko kahan dhundo re bande main to tere pas mein.”
38 Through further evolution of these intellectual moves in Sufi religious thought, by the eighteenth century saints like Bulleh Shah could develop a closely reasoned doctrine of mutual respect and interchange between the two main religious communities. It displayed two powerful arguments, moving beyond the injunction of tolerance as bearing practices that were repugnant in the interest of social peace into suggesting that different religious paths were leading to the same God.
39 Often, religious thinkers make startling remarks about social identity.
40Traditions of accommodative religious reflection in India have been generally acclaimed for their tolerance; but their philosophic moves deserve more detailed analysis. From an examination of Sufi thought in Kabir and Bullhe Shah, we can observe some of the most radical steps in religious reasoning. First, they reinterpret religious diversity in a radically different way from the orthodox of the two faiths: instead of agreeing with the divisive orthodox belief that one’s own religion’s road to God is the true one, and that the others were erroneous paths at best, if not direct roads to a damning life of ethical perdition, they consider the different roads to God as different paths invented by the human imagination to grasp an entity who is inherently beyond its powers of cognitive capture.
41 God’s infinity is thus turned into an argument for accommodation of divergent religious paths, as contextually determined and adequate ways of approaching his nature. Given this admission of the lack of fit between finite human intelligence and God as an infinite object, religious diversity is turned from a worrisome problem into a field of parallel experiments from which devotees of each religion had to learn. The difference of other religions, thus, is turned around, from the threat of untruth into a partnership in the same deep religious quest that, by the nature of the object it seeks, can never be concluded. No single path can ever be exhaustively right, and therefore all remain instructive and valuable. Both Kabir and Bullhe Shah make a further move by introducing two other ideas. If God is infinite, omnipresent, and therefore present in and to every seeking, he is inside every human being in some sense, in Kabir’s wonderfully complex phrase, “main to tere pas mein,” in which the two meanings of “being close to you” and “being inside you” cannot be disentangled.
42 The phrase can also mean a combination of “being near you” and “being within your grasp.” If God is present everywhere, so that everything is an intimation of his existence, and an invitation to see him, and if he is inside every morally thoughtful person, external signs of his presence become “meaningless.” He does not exist in or is equivalent to either the temples of Hindus or the mosques of the Muslims; in the extreme move of Bullhe Shah, these external symbols can be destroyed or dispensed with. In poetic composition the philosophic order of derivation is reversed: because God lives inside very heart, breaking a temple or a mosque is not a destitution of the divine from this world. Finally, if God and a worshipful life are conceived this way, the road is opened toward a more radical line of thinking: we can move into “a world of the blind” where no one asks for one’s caste or sect, no one minds how others live. At the end of this line of reasoning, it is possible to arrive at the luminously ambiguous end where the devotee can utter a strange skeptical question: “Bullha, kaun jane main kaun?” a self-addressed question, “Who knows who I am?” Inattentively, we can view this as a poetic equivalent of a Kantian attributeless self, the basis of modern liberal conceptions of tolerance. In fact, however, this is a very different idea that wishes to extend toleration not by becoming blind to others’ attributes but transcending them. It is interesting to note, however, that the practical consequences of philosophically divergent arguments can be entirely convergent.
It could be objected that this tradition of religious accommodation represented a small field of intersection between the two religious communities that lived their everyday lives primarily according to more orthodox interpretations of what their faith demanded. Real social life in India was marked by peaceful coexistence with a sense of strong difference, rather than a visionary attempt at the mixture of multiple religions. And, in any case, it could be argued, this is evidence drawn primarily from the realm of religious and philosophical thought. Actual arrangements in common public life showed remarkable parallel developments. If rulers of the sultanate period allowed the practice of Hindu religion by default—without serious ideological justification–major figures of the Mughal Empire (sixteenth through eighteenth centuries) fashioned both principled arguments and institutional practices that supported religious toleration explicitly. Historians of political thought have pointed out that Mughal rulers came from a peculiar regional history inside the Islamic world. Khorasan, the region from which the dynasty emerged, witnessed the rise of a flourishing Islamic culture that later fell under imperial control by the non-Islamic Mongols, and its intellectuals developed intricate arguments for toleration of the subjects’ faith by conquering rulers by drawing on the resources of Aristotelian political theory.
Siyasatnameh, a major text from Khorasan, argued that since provision of security to subjects was an obligation of all rulers, if security of subjects was expanded to include security of their mental life of beliefs, this derived a responsibility of non-Islamic rulers to protect the religious life of their Muslim subjects. Mughal rulers followed these principles in administering their kingdoms. Application of this political theory of rule was not surprising except in one highly significant respect. People subjected to political rule of another religion might, unsurprisingly, advance arguments of this kind; but rulers who are secure in their political power are not under similar pressure to accept them. The extension of these ideas by Babar, the first Mughal ruler, to his dominions in North India showed something more than the inertia of a received tradition, but rather a vivid understanding of the complexity of political power in a society of religious plurality. Such ideas about imperial rule in a mixed society were further elaborated in utterly remarkable ways by Akbar. The most notable aspect of Akbar’s political practice was the direct connection between his religious explorations and modification of political institutions. Seriously interested in religious questions, Akbar appears to have initiated religious discussions among the differing strands of Muslim religious schools, but was driven by their contentiousness and mutual disrespect to seek a wider exploration of religious ideas, drawing in Zoroastrians, Catholics, Jains, and eventually the great variety of Hindu sects into a vast, unending exploration of religious truth and ideals of good life. His explorations were so unorthodox and his conduct so unconventional that orthodox Muslim chroniclers were convinced that he was no longer a true believer in Islam,
43 and some Christian missionaries visiting his court kept on reassuring the Church of the imminence of his conversion.
44 Clearly, these representations failed to capture the true nature of his explorations, which were probably hard to characterize within the existing religious languages. Later he invited a select intellectual elite to an order called Din-I-Ilahi, which modern interpreters have similarly struggled to describe—because it defied the normal definitions of religion. Hostile colonial historians portrayed it as an autocratic vision of imposing a new religious doctrine by the power of the state—a reading hardly confirmed by the lightness of touch with which it was pursued.
45 It appears in retrospect that it was not a religious system, rather a theory of comportment—both intellectual and practical—in a complex field of religious diversity, which surpassed the current languages of thought and practice.
In line with his realization that no religious orthodoxy deserved to be credited with a full understanding of religious life and the nature of God, Akbar devised institutional forms in his empire that reflected the benign implications of this pluralism. It was not skepticism about religious truth itself, unlike the road taken in Europe after the scientific revolution, but a skepticism about the absolutist claims of all faiths. During the second part of Akbar’s reign, when he slowly extricated himself from the tutelage of orthodox counselors, he adopted policies unprecedented for his age –removal of the
jaziya, implicitly according Hindus equal religious status inside the political realm, welcoming scholars and intellectuals from other religions into the religious debates and discussions held in his Ibadat Khana (the house of worship) and extending patronage to Sanskrit scholars and intellectuals.
46 These policies were continued by his successors, until the time of Aurangzeb, who interpreted his obligations to Islam in a more conservative fashion. Politically, Akbar’s empire was based on a growing system of alliances with subsidiary Hindu rulers, and his administration, particularly its revenue system, was run by immensely powerful Hindu officials like Todarmal. At the high point of Mughal rule, large segments of social life—like the realm of commerce—remained primarily under the control of Hindu merchants, and in several fields of government, like revenue and general administration, the state pursued a policy of employing in high positions officials from both religious communities. In art and literature especially, the Mughals followed a policy of wide-ranging patronage, under which not merely court artists or intellectuals but also independent Sanskrit scholars and intellectuals participating in the thriving intellectual life in Varanasi enjoyed stipends, prizes, and general royal acclaim. As the Mughal Empire fell into decline in the eighteenth century, through a few short, disastrous reigns after Aurangzeb, the dominance of a single empire over a large, politically united territory crumbled. It was replaced by a messier tapestry of smaller kingdoms and Nawabis. During this period of descent into more complex system of smaller regional states, the older culture of religious accommodation and political exchanges remained, continuing the Mughal cultural heritage and political doctrines as a social common sense.
These two diachronically separate narratives of religious strife and attempts at resolution—in ancient and medieval India—show remarkable similarity. Precisely because it is hard to suggest a direct continuity between the statecraft at the end of the first millennium and in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, their similarity appears striking. In both periods the political class in North Indian society faced a problem with the same sociological structure: how should political authority deal with a given, unalterable situation of religious diversity? Brutal forms of political power could have been used to turn the society into a religiously homogeneous field, but this faced two difficulties. Political authority before the invention of modern states were comparatively ineffective in realizing large, abstract goals of state policy, and even ferocious use of force might have failed to get the desired results. Secondly, use of force in religious matters can always give rise, as Locke vividly argued, to the problem of dissimulation of belief.
47 To the people who pursue serious religious conversion, use of force is never a guarantee of a true ethical change.
48 Two approaches to religious diversity are apparent in the range of political events in these two stages of Indian history. Political rulers often simply adjust to the fact of religious diversity and practically define a field of public political action from which religious life is exempted. Effectively, this separates public life into two separate fields—of religious and mundane matters—and left religious life to a kind of self-regulation, without political interference. Rulers in the situation fictionally described in the
Agamadambara follow a policy of benign neglect, of practical noninterference in the face of religious diversity. Indirectly, this also imposes an obligation on the religious groups to keep their differences within reasonable limits, as Dhairyarasi’s speech recommends.
49 Delhi sultans appear to have followed this strategy. But there is also a second, more complex policy, under which the ruler makes a distinction between his
personal life as a religious individual and his
public role as ruler of the principality. In his personal capacity he has the same obligation to lead an ethical life as all other individuals and can choose a particular religious persuasion. In his capacity as the ruler of the state, he would provide patronage to all communities of worshippers amongst his subjects. There could thus be two quite different arguments for leaving the subjects’ religious life alone. The first argument was against overreach: the political power of the state was not an effective instrument to forcibly produce religious homogeneity in the subject population. The second argument was for ethical respect for all religious creeds from a perception of the philosophical difficulty of knowing the infinite nature of God and his creation and the problem of undecidability of one single pattern of truly moral conduct. Though the two arguments were based on entirely different philosophic considerations, their practical implications for state policy were similar. Premodern Indian history does not offer a romantic picture of uninterrupted religious harmony, as nationalist narratives often claimed; but there are intelligible techniques of religious accommodation that preserved an immense range of religious diversity despite the presence of powerful imperial orders. Examples of Asoka and Akbar are significant—not because they represent the normal state of affairs, but because they constitute the extreme point of a wide continuum of techniques of toleration. Ordinarily, rulers may not have reached the height of philosophic curiosity or ethical self-reflection of these figures, but they maintained an institutional structure in which state power did not ordinarily interfere with the religious life of individuals or communities. The nationalist picture of uninterrupted religious harmony may not have been true, but the historic facts were quite different from the contrary picture—of centuries of religious strife, developed by colonial knowledge systems in the name of a positivist history of premodernity.
50COMING OF THE MODERN STATE AND ITS TECHNIQUES
The replacement of premodern political structures by a modern state was a slow and staggered process. Initially, the British came into the turmoil and uncertainty of Mughal decline as an organized commercial interest, but they slowly had to get entangled in political intrigues to secure conditions for their commercial enterprise. Elements of modern state techniques—like statistical accounting, a modern organization of the military, introduction of new systems of taxation and revenue collection, reforms toward a modern bureaucracy at the upper levels of the colonial administration—all happened serially and slowly, as the colonial enterprise required them. By the mid-nineteenth century the outlines of a colonial version of the modern state could be observed, signaled by the transformation of India’s status as a colony of the British crown, rather than an empire incongruously controlled by the East India Company. In the initial stages, British administrators tried to follow the policy of the preceding Mughal Empire—of strict neutrality in the religious affairs of the society now under their control. In early stages of empire, their problems came from a surprising angle: British missionaries saw the establishment of the colonial empire as a great opportunity for large-scale conversion to Christianity. But colonial administrators showed a surprising lack of enthusiasm for these conversion projects and expressed fear that interference with religious practice might lead to rebellion, an unnecessary cultural provocation that might undermine the new empire.
51 In line with this perception, British authorities often interpreted the rebellion of 1857, exactly a century after the decisive battle of Plassey, as a response to religious interference.
52The colonial state continued to follow a policy of noninterference in religious affairs, a role that the British, as outsiders, could claim to play better than the Mughals. The most significant changes in the colonial period came from an altogether different source. The British colonial state, once it was properly established, could not carry on the pretense of mere succession to the “marginal” Mughal state, because the introduction of modern state processes fundamentally altered the nature of the relation between the state and the population under its control. Intellectuals from all segments of the diverse Indian society wondered deeply about what made colonialism itself possible: how could such a small number of officials from an imperial center so distant control a society of such vast proportions. For most of these intellectuals the answer lay in the nature of the modern state, particularly what Foucault has analyzed as its disciplinary techniques. Observant nationalists were proto-Foucauldian. The European state was not simply a state in a different geographical region with a different administrative principle: it was an entirely different kind of machine, one that supervised the systematic generation of entirely new types of collective intentionalities and resultant forms of collective action. It was the utterly superior effectiveness of the modern state-machine that explained the unprecedented capacity of European states to expand their political dominion over other continents. The historic process through which this state emerged and its final shape was an object of endless fascination for Indian political intellectuals from the nineteenth century. This transformation consisted of two different processes: first, one through which conventional empires crumbled and were replaced all over Europe by nation-states. Empire-states in European premodernity, and their vestiges even in modern times, like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had unstable territorial borders and great internal diversity. In most cases these states did not seek to establish a tight relation of mutual self-ownership between the people and the state. This relation was viewed as exigent, external, and loose, not animated by any deeply emotive cultural principle. Nation-states that replaced older empires were different in every respect. Territorial boundaries of nation-states became relatively stable, if not fixed, after the initial period of general transition from empires to nations as Europe’s primary political form. This, in turn, was seen as normatively justified, because each state was supposed to be the state
of a specific people, a homogeneous group united in a Herderian fashion by their unique language and its culture. Access of unprecedented power to the European states was seen as a combination of
nationalist cultural homogeneity and
disciplinary political technique. The idea of the European nation-state, based on a culturally homogeneous people, intensively mobilized by disciplinary apparatuses of control, exerted a tremendous fascination on the political imagination of early modern India—both attracting and alarming political leaders and intellectuals.
ENUMERATION PROCESSES
A transformation that the colonial state initiated without clear perception of its long-term consequences was the process of enumeration, resulting in the production of a new objectified picture of the state’s two major constituents, its territory and population. Mapping the space of the subcontinent with modern cognitive techniques produced, for the first time, a reliable territorial picture of this space. This made possible the obsession of modern states and nations with a new kind of territoriality. Perhaps even more significant for modern political life were the techniques of gathering statistics for populations, an indispensable constituent process of modern governmentality. Joining these two types of objectified knowledge, it became possible for the first time in history to produce a picture of a world in which mapped territories were inhabited by counted populations: everybody interested in political life knew how many Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs resided in which towns, villages, and districts, along with the numbers of different castes, of language speakers. For the life of religious communities, this counting process produced new pictures of these collectivities as comprehensive entities—numbers of all Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. These large, abstract, statistical conceptions created a new ontology of populated space, superseding premodern conceptions of religious sects, which were more the objects of face-to-face personal experience. Earlier, in real religious life, in places of worship, in fields of everyday social interaction, people met individuals of differing sects performing ordinary acts of religious life. The new abstract enumerated communities were quite different in character—monstrously large in numbers, surpassing all possible scale of everyday social action, looming over a new kind of political field in which these were to be seen as putative agents of political action. This led to a highly significant reallocation of functions within what we call religion—besides its metaphysical-ethical functions is added a new political function. In time, the metaphysical-ethical side of religion is gradually restricted to private observance, and the new political identities of religious groups dominate interchanges in the public sphere. The religious community is reconceived—from being primarily a
community of worshippers, it is viewed, and views itself increasingly as a community of collective actors.
53 The enumeration process inaugurates what is a new ontology of religious communities, not just a new epistemic for the social world. It changes not the ways of seeing communities, but ways of being communities. Existence of religious communities acquires an entirely new dimension and a new meaning. This new understanding of communities fatally crossed the emerging understanding of the nation-state, creating an understandable apprehension among groups who feared that they might become minorities in modern political orders. But another crucial new idea regarding the state contributed to this sense of foreboding.
STATE AS AN INSTRUMENT OF REFLEXIVE ACTION OF SOCIETIES
In premodern India, as we saw, both Hindu sects and Muslim believers held an underlying common belief that the constitution of society was divinely sanctioned and beyond the powers of the mundane state to reconstitute. Secularity in one sense signals the dismantling of this fundamental idea of unchangeability of the social order of things. Infusion of modernist ideas first destroys uncritical acceptance of the rules of traditional social order like caste restrictions and exclusions, but eventually these partial rejections generate a larger, more fundamental sense of the
plasticity of the social world. Not only are particular social rules transformable, but the entire order of society can be changed to conform to ideals conceived by critical political thought. But this possibility of global social change, which captures the imagination of the nineteenth century, requires an instrument for the accomplishment of these transformations. Gradually, the state comes to be seen as the instrumentality for such reflexive changes of society—massive transformations in which the society views itself as an object of transforming action and alters its own structures. This is the truly significant meaning of the state’s “sovereignty”—a sovereignty against its own society. The function of the sovereign state is only partly to defend itself from aggression of other states and secure its borders; its primary function becomes the organization of reflexive action upon the structure of society itself—through a constant expansion of its taxation base and its bureaucratic apparatus.
In Indian political thought, from the late nineteenth century, these new perceptions about the state combine to produce an entirely new field of questions. Enumeration of social groups, particularly of these abstract religious communities, and a clear picture of their habitational patterns induce political actors to think in terms of majorities and minorities—both locally and nationally. Early moves toward limited representative institutions encourage these trends. It becomes clear to perceptive observers of political life that concepts of nationalism and representative politics are transforming the idea of the state from a distant ruling mechanism into a more powerful and intrusive machine, and the new state was based on a new kind of tight relation with its people, through influential ideas of popular sovereignty.
Paradoxically, although Indian intellectuals received Western modernist ideas as “emancipatory,” it is clear that, in their reflections on the transforming nature of political life, some ideas about the state coming from modern Europe are seen as bearing deeply problematic implications. Some of the most perceptive and influential thinkers of modern India begin to raise serious questions about the appropriateness of the state structure of modern Europe in Indian conditions of deep religious and social heterogeneity. Interestingly, among modern thinkers, Gandhi, Iqbal, and Tagore—three of the most influential authors of the early twentieth century—express significant anxieties about the modern state, despite their grave differences on various fundamental questions. In the early twentieth century two kinds of critical arguments are advanced by intellectuals that were to become highly consequential. Gandhi and Tagore viewed the European nation-states with alarm, not so much for their internally exclusivist character as for their tendency to behave in an aggressive imperialist fashion against their colonies and against each other. And both saw the external aggressiveness of European nationalism as being connected to the internal aggressiveness of atomistic individuals fostered by the capitalist economy. As Ashis Nandy has pointed out, both considered modern nationalism to be an ideology centered on the primacy of the state and sought expressions of patriotism that avoided the state-centric visions common to ordinary modernists.
54Iqbal evinced an anxiety for the future that also focused on the European nation-state as the paradigmatic form of modern political organization. He saw the pressures of a homogenizing culture in European nation-states and expressed concern about the fate of minorities in India. If the nation-state was democratic because it was in a sense the state of the people, the vehicle of popular sovereignty, this was likely to work as long as the states were culturally homogeneous, if citizens possessed one single national identity. If the citizenry was constituted by different religious communities, the tight connection between the state and the nation, its exclusive people, would work against minorities, and the conflict of majority and minorities would break it apart. Modern nation-states were intrinsically inhospitable to minorities. The new optics of majorities and minorities produced a contradictory effect -heightening both the attraction and fear of the nation-state. As early nationalism began to coalesce and evoke a sense of a rising people, minorities felt an intensifying anxiety about their place in this future state.
55 If the state became a new kind of state
of the people, what would happen to those who might not easily fit the self-definition of this people? Ironically, some of these critical reflections did not explore a radical rejection of the form of the nation-state as a feasible historical possibility, instead seeking a nation-state of their own. Those who were alarmed by the logic of the nation-state saw their only remedy in the creation of another nation-state—which, ironically, would not remove the problem but shift its sufferings onto some group other than one’s own. Since individual identities were always multiple,
56 any nation-state based on this form of purity of the people was a chimera; all majorities could contain minorities with a slight shift in the criteria of identities. The cult of the European-style nation-state—which sought to unite a territory with a people with a common history, common language, common culture, and common religion—led to an impasse, a future of either unremitting conflict within states or an endless process of fragmentation. The partition of British India demonstrated both the immense power of this form of thinking and its fatal flaws. The idea of partition, proposed by the British and accepted by the leadership of the two new states, was a desperate attempt to find a Westphalian solution to the question of religious diversity in the subcontinent. Its subsequent history showed the immensity of this reckless miscalculation. Despite a partition, claiming an immense toll of human misery, what it sought to achieve eluded the two successor states. Indian history was not successfully forced into the patterns of the European. After partition, India retained a very significant Muslim minority, so the question of how to deal with them remained a critical question of institutional construction. Pakistan, initially under the illusion of religious homogeneity, soon realized that unity in one dimension of identity could be ripped apart by other diversities, and the treatment of internal diversity continued to be the crucial test of the viability of a state.
The process of constitution making in India illustrated the difficulties of applying to an intrinsically diverse society the form of the European-style nation-state. The institutions that were devised after independence departed from some central premises of that state form and constructed a legal edifice built on quite different premises, some of which, purely sociologically, resembled premodern techniques of statecraft.
57 The constitution rejected the idea of a confessional basis of the state and interpreted secularism not as a rejection of religious life but as equal respect to all religious faiths,
58 anchoring the state not on the marginalization of religious beliefs but on accommodation. It abandoned the idea of a single national language, despite fierce advocacy from the supporters of Hindi, and declared fifteen languages to be “national languages” of India—a politically intelligent, if administratively inconvenient device.
59 Although the constitution was primarily based on a liberal conception of rights conferred on individuals, it sought to reassure minorities by offering them collective rights to preserve their faith and cultural forms.
60 In other words, it sought an institutional translation of the principles of premodern statecraft into the sociological conditions of modern existence. The modern Indian state is, paradoxically, based on the direct repudiation of some of the fundamental attributes of the modern state in Europe. Demands of political modernity in Indian history could be met only by innovation and improvisation of institutions, not by plagiarizing European constitutional ideas.
This narrative of toleration in Indian history runs against the grain of much modern historical writing. From the mid-nineteenth century, writers of modern history about India’s past habituated their readers to a narrative of a very different kind. The long centuries of premodernity were interpreted by colonial historians as a period in which Hindus, conceived in the modernist way as a “people,” nation, or race, were conquered and subjugated by Muslims. And their subsequent history was seen as a chronicle of unceasing religious tension, modeled after the history of Europe in the period of religious wars. Ironically, this was a deeply anachronistic application of modernist categories of collectivities to times when such identities would have been unintelligible to historical actors. Cases of conflicts between social groups were read as a long history of religious animosity that ended only with the establishment of the modern, unfanatical colonial empire that brought the sobriety of rational mediation between fanatical warring faiths. Modernity, on this conventional historical understanding, ended a period of hostility between irrationally irreconcilable religious communities. It appears in retrospect that this history was itself a major obstacle to a sober understanding of the record of the Indian past. And we require a constant critical analysis of the history of writing history.
It is recorded in Saahifa-i-Nat-i-Muhammadi that one day the ulama of the Court of Iltutmich (1211–36) went to the sultan and said that since the Brahmins were the worst enemies of the Prophet of Islam, devotion to the Prophet enjoined upon the King of Islam to force the Brahmins either to change their faith or to suffer execution. Iltutmich was rattled to receive this demand from the court ulama. He replied he would give an answer the following day. The next days the king’s minister told the ulama that since the Muslims in the kingdom were like “salt in food,” their demand could not possibly be met in such a situation. However, he said, when the situation changed and the population of the Muslims increased it might be to act according to the demand of the ulama.
S. Nurul Hasan, pp. 66–67.