Excerpts from talk on “India and Indian Culture” - Part 3

[Guest guest]

Excerpts from talk on “India and Indian Culture” delivered by Anbil Ramaswamy, at “Alterra Sterling House (Senior Care Facility) at 1277 S. Sawburg Rd, Alliance, OH 44601 on 22nd September 2007 (An All- American audience) – Part 3

How such a prosperous culture came to be set at naught?

 

The Muslims

 

For about five centuries from the thirteenth, Indo-Muslim states were driven by a 'theology of iconoclasm' - not to mention fanaticism, lust for plunder, and uncompromising hatred of Hindu religion and places of worship. Religious conversion with conquest - with conquest serving to facilitate conversion, and conversion serving to legitimize conquest became an unending vicious circle.

 

Hindu rulers in those days derived authority and legitimacy due to their association with a royal temple - typically housing an image of a ruling dynasty's state-deity (usually Vishnu or Siva). Such temples were systematically looted, defiled or destroyed, for detaching a defeated ruler from his most prominent insignia of legitimacy. From about the sixth century on, images and temples associated with dynastic authority were considered politically vulnerable.

 

The sultanate was in constant flux as five dynasties rose and fell: the Slave dynasty (1206-90), Khalji dynasty (1290-1320), Tughlaq dynasty (1320-1413), Sayyid dynasty (1414-51), and Lodi dynasty (1451-1526). The Khilji dynasty, under Alauddin (1296 - 1316), succeeded in bringing most of South India under its control for a time, although conquered areas broke away quickly

 

Sabuktigin and his son Mahmud of Ghazni (r. 998-1030) invaded India for material reasons. The earlier Ghaznavid rulers raided and looted Indian cities, including their richly endowed temples loaded with movable wealth, with a view to financing their larger political objectives far to the west.

Turkish rulers established themselves in north India, and never ceased in spoiling the temples.

The Paramara dynasty attacked and plundered Jain temples in Gujarat.

Ulugh Khan sacked in February 1299, Gujarat's famous temple of Somnath and sent its largest image to Sultan `Ala al-Din Khalji's court in Delhi.

Firuz Tughlaq invaded Orissa in 1359 and ravaged the most important temple of Jagannath in Puri and carried off the stone image of the god and installed it to Delhi "in an ignominious position"

Lodi dynasty of Afghans in early 16th century, indulged in indiscriminate temple desecration. Sultan Ibrahim Lodi in 1518 stormed the famous fortress and seized a brass image of Nandi evidently situated adjacent to the chieftain's Siva temple. The sultan brought it back to Delhi and installed it in the city's Baghdad Gate. Golconda's army, in 1579, sacked the popular Ahobilam temple, whose ruby-studded image was brought back to Golconda and presented to the sultan as a war trophy. Although the Ahobilam temple had only local appeal, it had close associations with prior sovereign authority since it had been patronized and even visited by the powerful and most famous king of Vijayanagara, Krishnadevaraya. Because of the temple's political significance, it was thought necessary to desecrate it,

 

Epigraphic evidence and literary sources spanning a period of more than five centuries (1192-1729) reveal at least eighty instances of temple desecration.

 

Malik Kafur (fl. 1296 - 1316), a general in the army of Alauddin Khilji, ruler of the Delhi sultanate from 1296 to 1316 invaded the south. In 1294 he led the sultan’s army against the capital city of the Yadava kingdom, Devagiri. He led further invasions southward into the Kakatiya dynasty and eventually into the Pandyan Kingdom in far southern India, winning immense riches for the sultanate. Kafur’s invasion of Pandya was the farthest south that any Muslim invasion would ever reach in India.

 

He stormed the most sacred Sri Ranganatha temple for SrivaishNavas at Srirangam. While Sruta prakasika chariar Swami who was 90+ in age stayed back in Srirangam raising a wall to conceal the main image, Pillai Lokacharya another nonagenarian carried the Utsava murthy to the north for safe custody. Swami Vedanta Desika took charge of the holy Sruta prakasika and the two sons of their author to Sathyakaalam (in present day Karnataka State). Thousands of devotees were butchered overnight but Swami Desika and his wards somehow escaped death and stayed in Sathyakalam until the invasion was vacated by Krishna devaraya’s army.

 

 

The Moghuls:

The Moghuls who succeeded were only a slight better in their treatment of Hindus, probably because, they had family feuds and patricides etc that kept them busy. Babur (1526-1530), Humayun (1530- 1556), Akbar (1556- 1605), Jehangir (1605 – 1627), Shah Jahan (1627 – 1658) and Aurangazeb also known as Alamgir I (1618 –1707) imposed “Jezia” tax on the infidels and ruthlessly enforced collections.

The BritishThe British “came to trade but remained to rule”.

Friedrich Max Müller (December 6, 1823 – October 28, 1900), was a German philologist and Orientalist . He was amazed to find a wide variety of differences among the different ethnic groups that were divided by language, customs and habits. But all of them from the Himalayas in the north to Cape Kanyakumari in the South, from Gujarat in the West to Bengal in the East were bound mysteriously by the magic thread of Vedic literature especially the two great epics of Srimad Ramayana and Mahabharata.

 

He wanted to strike at the root of this bonding. In a letter to his wife, he said:

“The translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent on the fate of India and on the growth of millions of souls in that country. It is the root of their religion, and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, is the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3000 years”

 

For this purpose, he learned Sanskrit through which religion expressed itself in those days. Later, he studied the scriptures. By the time he completed his studies, he became so fascinated by the morals conveyed therein that he became a slave to the scriptures. True to what Oliver Goldsmith put it in his “Deserted Village” “Those who came to scoff remained to pray”, he became one of the votaries spearheading the study of Vedic scriptures and opening the eyes of the West to the enormous wealth it contained.

 

Müller wrote both scholarly and popular works on the subject of Indology, a discipline he introduced to the British reading public, and the Sacred Books of the East, a massive, 50-volume set of English translations prepared under his direction, stands as an enduring monument to Victorian scholarship.

While the Muslims sought to convert Hindus at the point of the sword, the British tactics consisted in brain-washing the elite through inducements. Macaulay 'used to refer to people as “born of Indian ancestry but adopting Western culture as a lifestyle, or display attitudes influenced by colonisers” all in a derogatory tone, and the connotation is one of disloyalty to one's country and one's heritage. The passage to which the term refers is from his Minute on Indian Education, delivered in 1835.

 

It reads, “It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population”

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What were the reasons for the “cake walk” by the invaders?

1. Hindus in general were Satvic by nature following their “Sanatana Dharma” (eternal duties) prescribed in the Sastras.

2. The warrior classes (Kshatriyas) responsible for the protection of their country and their subjects dissipated their energies in fighting with each other instead of facing a common enemy. Dr. D.S. Sharma in his “Crescent in India” humorously observes that “When they were not fighting others, they fought amongst themselves”! 3. Some of the Hindu rulers were so cowardly that they joined the enemy forces in quashing their brother rulers. This naturally gave a handle for the unscrupulous invaders to adopt a “divide and rule” policy- which the British perfected into a fine art!

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