History books about India

"The translations are in many different hands. Some few are in Sir H. Elliot's own handwriting, others were made by different English officers, but the majority of them seem to have been the work of munshís. With the exception of those made by Sir H. Elliot himself, which will be noted whenever they occur, I have compared the whole of them with the original texts and the errors which I have had to correct have been innumerable and extensive. But with all my care it is to be feared that some misreadings may have escaped detection, for it is very difficult for a reviser to divest himself entirely of the colour given to a text by the original translator."

"Where power had, for a short time, enabled the Moslims to usurp the mastery, the usual bigotry and cruelty were displayed. At Debal, the temples were demolished, and mosques founded; a general massacre endured for three whole days; prisoners wore taken captive; plunder was amassed.... At Nairun, the idols were broken, and mosques founded, notwithstanding its voluntary surrender ... the temples were treated like ‘churches of the Christians, or synagogues of the Jews...’"

"If the artificial definition of Dionysius be correct, that "History is Philosophy teaching by examples," then there is no Native Indian Historian; and few have even approached to so high standard. Of examples, and very bad ones, we have ample store, though even in them the radical truth is obscured by the hereditary, official, and sectarian prepossessions of the narrator; but of philosophy, which deduces conclusions calculated to benefit us by the lessons and experience of the past, which adverts on the springs and consequences of political transactions, and offers sage counsel for the future, we search in vain for any sign or symptom. Of domestic history also we have in our Indian Annalists absolutely nothing, and the same may be remarked of nearly all Muhammadan historians, except Ibn Khaldún. By them society is never contemplated, either in its conventional usages or recognized privileges; its constituent elements or mutual relations; in its established classes or popular institutions; in its private recesses or habitual intercourses. In notices of commerce, agriculture, internal police, and local judicature, they are equally deficient. A fact, an anecdote, a speech, a remark, which would illustrate the condition of the common people, or of any rank subordinate to the highest, is considered too insignificant to be suffered to intrude upon a relation which concerns only grandees and ministers, "thrones and imperial powers"... In Indian Histories there is little which enables us to penetrate below the glittering surface, and observe the practical operation of a despotic Government and rigorous and sanguinary laws, and the effect upon the great body of the nation of these injurious influences and agencies."

"If, however, we turn our eyes to the present Muhammadan kingdoms of India, and examine the character of the princes, and the condition of the people subject to their sway, we may fairly draw a parallel between ancient and modern times, under circumstances and relations nearly similar. We behold kings, even of our own creation, sunk in sloth and debauchery... Under such rulers, we cannot wonder that the fountains of justice are corrupted; that the state revenues are never collected without violence and outrage; that villages are burnt, and their inhabitants mutilated or sold into slavery; that the officials, so far from affording protection, are themselves the chief robbers and usurpers; that parasites and eunuchs revel in the spoil of plundered provinces; and that the poor find no redress against the oppressor's wrong and proud man's contumely. When we witness these scenes under our own eyes, where the supremacy of the British Government, the benefit of its example, and the dread of its interference, might be expected to operate as a check upon the progress of misrule, can we be surprised that former princes, when free from such restraints, should have studied even less to preserve the people committed to their charge, in wealth, peace, and prosperity?"

"The few glimpses we have, even among the short Extracts in this single volume, of Hindús slain for disputing with Muhammadans, of general prohibitions against processions, worship, and ablutions, and of other intolerant measures, of idols mutilated, of temples razed, of forcible conversions and marriages, of proscriptions and confiscations, of murders and massacres, and of the sensuality and drunkenness of the tyrants who enjoined them, show us that this picture is not overcharged, and it is much to be regretted that we are left to draw it for ourselves from out the mass of ordinary occurrences, recorded by writers who seem to sympathize with no virtues, and to abhor no vices. Other nations exhibit the same atrocities, but they are at least spoken of, by some, with indignation and disgust."

"These deficiencies are more to be lamented, where, as sometimes happens, a Hindú is the author. From one of that nation we might have expected to have learnt what were the feelings, hopes, faiths, fears, and yearnings, of his subject race ; but, unfortunately, he rarely writes unless according to order or dictation, and every phrase is studiously and servilely turned to flatter the vanity of an imperious Muhammadan patron. There is nothing to betray his religion or his nation, except, perhaps, a certain stifihess and affectation of style, which show how ill the foreign garb befits him. With him, a Hindú is "an infidel," and a Muhammadan "one of the true faith," and of the holy saints of the calendar, he writes with the fervour of a bigot. With him, when Hindús are killed, "their souls are despatched to hell," and when a Muhammadan suffers the same fate, "he drinks the cup of martyrdom." He is so far wedded to the set phrases and inflated language of his conquerors, that he speaks of "the light of Islám shedding its refulgence on the world," of "the blessed Muharram," and of "the illustrious Book." He usually opens with a "Bismillah," and the ordinary profession of faith in the unity of the Godhead, followed by laudations of the holy prophet, his disciples and descendants, and indulges in all the most devout and orthodox attestations of Muhammadans."

"They will make our native subjects more sensible of the immense advantages accruing to them under the mildness and and equity of our rule... We should no longer hear bombastic Bábús, enjoying under our Government the highest degree of personal liberty, and many more political privileges than were ever conceded to a conquered nation, rant about patriotism, and the degradation of their present position. If they would dive into any of the volumes mentioned herein, it would take these young Brutuses and Phocions a very short time to learn, that in the days of the dark period for whose return they sigh, even the bare utterance of their ridiculous fantasies would have been attended, not with silence and contempt, but with the severer discipline of molten lead or empalement."

"These considerations, and many more which will offer themselves to any diligent and careful peruser of the volumes here noticed, will serve to dissipate the gorgeous illusions which are commonly entertained regarding the dynasties which have passed, and show him that, notwithstanding a civil policy and an ungenial climate, which forbid our making this country a permanent home, and deriving personal gratification or profit from its advancement, notwithstanding the many defects necessarily inherent in a system of foreign administration, in which language, colour, religion, customs, and laws preclude all natural sympathy between sovereign and subject, we have already, within the half-century of our dominion, done more for the substantial benefit of the people, than our predecessors, in the country of their own adoption, were able to accomplish in more than ten times that period; and, drawing auguries from the past, he will derive hope for the future, that, inspired by the success which has hitherto attended our endeavours, we shall follow them up by continuous efforts to fulfil our high destiny as the rulers of India."

"Hindu writers have been entirely excluded from holding public offices, and all the worshipping places of the infidels and great temples of these infamous people have been thrown down and destroyed in a manner which excites astonishment at the successful completion of so difficult a task. His Majesty personally teaches the sacred kalima to many infidels with success. All the mosques in the empire are repaired at public expense. Imama, criers to the daily prayers, and readers of the khutba, have been appointed to each of them, so that a large sum of money has been and is still laid out in these disbursements."

"In the city of Agra there was a large temple, in which there were numerous idols, adorned and embellished with precious jewels and valuable pearls. It was the custom of the infidels to resort to this temple from far and near several times in each year to worship the idols, and a certain fee to the Government was fixed upon each man, for which he obtained admittance. As there was a large congress of pilgrims, a very considerable amount was realized from them, and paid into the royal treasury. This practice had been observed to the end of the reign of the Emperor Shah Jahan, and in the commencement of Aurangzeb's government; but when the latter was informed of it, he was exceedingly angry and abolished the custom. The greatest nobles of his court represented to him that a large sum was realized and paid into the public treasury, and that if it was abolished, a great reduction in the income of the state would take place. The Emperor observed, 'What you say is right, but I have considered well on the subject, and have reflected on it deeply; but if you wish to augment the revenue, there is a better plan for attaining the object by exacting the jizya. By this means idolatry will be suppressed, the Muhammadan religion and the true faith will be honoured, our proper duty will be performed, the finances of the state will be increased, and the infidels will be disgraced.' 'This was highly approved by all the nobles; and the Emperor ordered all the golden and silver idols to be broken, and the temple destroyed."

"Much of the contemporary evidence on temple desecration cited by Hindu nationalists is found in Persian materials translated and published during the British occupation of India. Especially influential has been the eight-volume History of India as Told by its Own Historians, first published in 1849 and edited by Sir Henry M. Elliot, who oversaw the bulk of the translations, with the help of John Dowson. But Elliot, keen to contrast what he understood as the justice and efficiency of British rule with the cruelty and despotism of the Muslim rulers who had preceded that rule, was anything but sympathetic to the “Muhammadan” period of Indian history."

"The superficiality and jejuneness of Elliot's remarks compels us to conclude that he could not, or would not, study with care the Persian historians he held in contempt."

"The Hindu feels it his duty to dislike those whom he has been taught to consider the enemy of his religion and his ancestors; the Mussalman, lured into the false belief that he was once a member of a ruling race, feels insufferably wronged by being relegated to the status of a minority community. Fools both! Even if the Muslims eight centuries ago were as bad as they were painted, would there be any sense in holding the present generation responsible for their deeds. It is but an imaginative tie that joins the modern Hindu with Harshavardhana or Asoka, or the modern Mussalman with Shihabuddin or Mahmud."

"To realize Medieval India there is no better way than to dive into the eight volumes of the priceless History of India as Told by its Own Historians which Sir H. M. Elliot conceived and beganot, and which Professor Dowson edited and completed with infinite labour and learning. It is a revelation of Indian life as seen through the eyes of the Persian court annalists. It is, however, a mine to be worked, not a consecutive history, and its wide leaps in chronology, its repetitions, recurrences, and omissions, render it no easy guide for general readers."

"Elliot and Dowson's great work, in spite of a chorus of disparagement by some modern Indian historians, still holds the field even now for more than a hundred years, against any translations in Urdu or Hindi. Scholars are still learning from and working on Elliot's meritorious volumes..."

"The study of medieval Indian history in modem times may be said to have begun about a century ago when, in the eighteen-sixties, and under the patronage of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the Indo-Persian chronicles of the medieval period began to be printed in the Bibliotheca Indica Series, and in 1867-77 appeared Elliot and Dowson’s History of India as Told by its Own Historians. Elliot’s work contained in eight fairly bulky volumes translations of extracts from most of the then known Persian chronicles, and soon became indispensable for the researcher on medieval history. The original Persian works were so eulogistic of the cruelties of Muslim conquerors and rulers that the great painstaking scholar Elliot and his followers were perforce constrained to be critical of medieval Indian rulers, and this school held the ground for quite some time."

"Elliot and Dowson state that religious bigotry was characteristic of the Indian past. They do confess that in presenting the translations from Persian and Arabic sources, their intention is to highlight the oppressive rule of Muslim kings. They state that the intolerance of the Mohammedans led to idols being mutilated, temples destroyed, forced conversions, confiscations, murders and massacres, not to mention the sensuality and drunkenness of tyrants. Such descriptions were intended to convince the Hindu subjects that British rule was far superior and to their advantage. This was not an isolated attitude and is reflected in many British writings on Indian history. Religious bigotry was frequently read into the texts translated in the nineteenth century, which coloured the reading of the Turko-Persian texts. For example, where Utbi says, ‘He (Mahmud) made it obligatory on himself to undertake every year an expedition to Hind,’ the translation of this passage in Elliot and Dowson’s work reads, ‘the Sultan vowed to undertake a holy war to Hind every year’."

"In March 1985, two Hindus, Chandmal Chopra and Sital Singh, entered a Writ Petition at the Calcutta High Court alleging that the Koran violated Indian law because it “incites violence, disturbs public tranquility, promotes, on ground of religion, feelings of enmity, hatred and ill-will between different religious communities and insults other religions or religious beliefs of other communities in India.”... Quickly dismissing the petition, Judge Bimal Chandra Basak played the ever-popular “out of context” card, explaining that “some passages containing interpretation of some chapters of the Koran quoted out of context cannot be allowed to dominate or influence the main aim and object of this book. It is dangerous for any court to pass its judgement on such a book by merely looking at certain passages out of context.”"

"While the Koran abounds with sayings which incite violence, insult the religious beliefs of other communities and even exhort the Muslims to kill and murder non-Muslims, the problem is aggravated by yet another fact which has been true in the past and is universally true in our own times, that unlike other communities Muslims are, and even fresh converts tend to become, highly orthodox people and follow the sayings of the book with a fanatical zeal with the result that whichever country has their sizable number amongst its population can never have peace on its soil... The offending expressions contained in the Koran . . . are not so offensive in their translation in which they are so quoted as they are in the original verses in Arabic or in Urdu, the very sound of whose inimitable symphony not only sends the Muslims to tears and ecstasy but arouses in them the worst communal passions and religious fanaticism which have manifested themselves in murder, slaughter, loot, arson, rape and destruction or desecration of holy places in historical times as also in contemporary period not only in India but almost all over the world."

"Some passages containing interpretation of some chapters of the Koran quoted out of context cannot be allowed to dominate or influence the main aim and object of this book. It is dangerous for any court to pass its judgement on such a book by merely looking at certain passages out of context.”... “In my opinion it cannot be said that [the] Koran offers any insult to any other religion. It does not reflect any deliberate or malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings of non-Muslims. Isolated passages picked out from here and there and read out of context cannot change the position."

"Jurisprudence will never be able to find a parallel to the Calcutta High Court's amazing response to such a difficult and dangerous proposition What English judges even today would not dream of entertaining became an arguable case for an Indian judge. Fortunately Justice Binal Chandra Basak who dismissed the matter after the hue and cry forced Government of India to rush the Attorney General to Calcutta ... was quick to see the immense scope for mischief in the petition."

"The way certain chosen passages arbitrarily picked up from the Holy Quran are being used to demonise the Muslim religion is bound to create feelings of ill-will in the society against the second largest section of citizens and thereby disturb social tranquility in the country. What is being overlooked is the fact that the message and spirit of some religious texts can be appreciated only by those who have a certain degree of respect, if not reverence, for them -- those reading such texts with irreverence or hostility can never be at ease with their teachings. And it is indeed true of all religions. Well known is the fact that some of the ancient religious texts of the great Hindu religion are replete with apparently very cruel words and harsh injunctions for the “lower castes”."

"Religious polemics are bitter relics of the past. We cannot afford to revive them in the 21st century India rightly proud of its scientific advancement and technological excellence. If we go on searching each other’s religious texts to find isolated passages which may not appear prima facie palatable to us, it is not going to lead us anywhere. Such passages are things of the past. No one is acting on these now; no one indeed needs to. There is a lot more in all religious texts which can bring us together. We have to concentrate on those refreshingly humane texts and try to come closer – bring all our people closer."

"The Holy Quran – the same Quran in which ignorant critics find a verse which according to their understanding asks Muslims to kill kafirs – after declaring that "Mankind is one single community" [II:213, X:19] pronounces in no uncertain terms: "If anyone kills one person it is like he has slain the whole mankind; and if anyone saves one life it is like he has saved the whole mankind" [V: 32]. And, as regards the much-talked about and misunderstood term "kafir", it is the same Quran proclaiming unequivocally that "For every community God has appointed religious rituals, they must not quarrel in respect of these rituals. [XII: 67]."

"What is indeed more reassuring and thought-provoking in respect of inter-religious harmony is the fact that numerous injunctions in the Holy Quran and the Sacred Vedas are more or less identical in their meaning and message – all teaching their respective followers the same lessons in devotion to the Creator of Universe and mutual love and respect among mankind. "All mankind belongs to God, He rewards all those who are virtuous and punishes all evil-doers" proclaim both the Rigveda [I: 80.11] and the Quran [LIII:31]. Rigveda’s injunction "Pray to God as you wish but with humility and quietness; He does not like those who cross limits" [VI: 16.46 ] finds its exact parallel in the Quran [VII 54-55]. The ancient Indian philosophy of "vasudhev kutumbukam" compares with Islam’s injunction al-khalqu ‘ayalillah [mankind is God’s family]. It is these common teachings of the Hindu and Islamic scriptures, as also the other countless pearls of wisdom found in each of these, that need the attention of members of both the communities – not those which may even be remotely interpreted to be annoying for one community or the other."

"We do not stand for a ban on the publication of the Quran. We take this opportunity to state unambiguously that we regard banning of books, religious or otherwise, as counterproductive. In the case of the Quran, we believe and advocate that more and more non-Muslims should read it so that they know first hand the quality of its teachings."

"Let it be realized by everybody concerned that India has always been and remains, the citadel of the most bigoted and bloodthirsty zealotry of Islam. The historical reasons for why it is so, are many. I do not have the time to detail them here. The main reason may be told. Islam in India has been what it has been because India has continued to stare at Islam as its greatest failure. Islam in India has never been able to relax, as it could do in countries which it converted completely. And it will not relax till Hindus learn to knock out its ideological fangs which are rooted in the Quran."

"The only voice which was heard against this nation-wide exercise in suppressio veri suggestio falsi in the field of medieval Indian history, was that of the veteran historian, R.C. Majumdar. For him, this “national integration” based on a wilful blindness to recorded history of the havoc wrought by Islam in India, could lead only to national suicide. He tried his best to arrest the trend by presenting Islamic imperialism in medieval India as it was, and not as the politicians in league with Stalinist and Muslim historians were tailoring it to become."

"Alas for poor Jadunath Sarkar, who must have turned in his grave if he were buried. For, after reading his History of Aurangzib, one would be tempted to ask, if the temple-breaking policy of Aurangzeb is a disputed point, is there a single fact in the whole recorded history of mankind which may be taken as undisputed? A noted historian has sought to prove that the Hindu population was better off under the Muslims than under the Hindu tributaries or independent rulers.”"

"This caravan loaded with synthetic merchandise has, however, continued to move forward. Eight years later (1982), it was reported that “History and Language textbooks for schools all over India will soon be revised radically. In collaboration with various state governments the Ministry of Education has begun a phased programme to weed out undesirable textbooks and remove matter which is prejudicial to national integration and unity and which does not promote social cohesion. The Ministry of Education’s decision to re-evaluate textbooks was taken in the light of the recommendations of the National Integration Council of which the Prime Minister [Indira Gandhi] is Chairman. The Ministry’s view was that history had often been used to serve narrow, sectarian and chauvinistic ends.”"

"There is plenty of primary literature available in Arabic and Persian regarding the rise, development, and doings of numerous sufi silsilas in India. Some of this literature has been translated into Urdu and English as well. A study of this literature leaves little doubt that sufis were the most fanatic and fundamentalist elements in the Islamic establishment in medieval times. Hindus should go to this literature rather than fall for latter-day Islamic propaganda. The ruin of Hindus and Hinduism in Kashmir in particular, can be safely credited to sufis who functioned there from the early thirteenth century onwards."

"The logic which declares Tengiri to be a satan and denounces Chengiz Khan as an archcriminal but which, in the same breath, proclaims Allah as divine and hails the Ghaznavis, Ghuris, Timurs and Baburs as heroes, is, to the say the least, worse than casuistry."

"Muslims in India have often sought shelter under Sections 153A and 295A of the Indian Penal Code (I.P.C.) for preventing every public discussion of their creed in general and of their prophet in particular.1 Quite a few publications which examine critically the sayings and doings of the Prophet or other idolized personalities of Islam, have been proscribed under Section 95 of the Criminal Procedure Code (Cr.P.C.) as a result of pressure exerted by vociferous, very often violent Muslim protests. Little did they suspect that the same provisions of the law could be invoked for seeking a ban on their holy book, the Quran. The credit for this turning of tables goes to Chandmal Chopra of Calcutta."

"The case had caused considerable excitement among the “believers” (Mu'mins) and interest among the “infidels” (KAfirs) in April-May, 1985. The press in India and abroad gave many headlines to what was rightly regarded as an unprecedented event in the history of religion. It was the first time that a Pagan had questioned the character of a document hailed as the very Word of God by a People of the Book. The roles now stood reversed. So far it had been the privilege of the Peoples of the Book to ban and burn the sacred literature of the Pagans."

"The Telegraph dated May 14 carried a PTI report datelined Islamabad, May 13: “Pakistan’s minister of state for religious and minority affairs, Mr. Maqbool Ahmed Khan, said today that the petition against the Quran moved in the Calcutta high court was the ‘worst example of religious intolerance.’ The Pakistan President. Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, was quoted by an Urdu daily as saying that the facts of the case were being ascertained. Mr. Khan alleged that religion and life and property of minorities were unsafe in India and urged the Indian government to ‘follow the example of Pakistan’ in ensuring freedom of religion....Thus the theocratic state of Pakistan made it an occasion for delivering lectures to Indians on the subject of religious freedom and the rights of minorities. Nobody who was anybody in India at that time is known to have reacted to this assault from an Islamic state which had driven out most of its Hindu minority, and was treating the rest as non-citizens."

"The panic on the part of the State and Union governments could not but produce some more unsavoury results. Muslim mobs in India and elsewhere had been incited by all those who mattered in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. They started taking to the streets and turning violent. The Statesman dated May 13 published the following news date-lined Dhaka, May 12: “At least 12 people were killed and 100 wounded when Bangladesh police fired on a demonstration yesterday in the border town of Chepal Nawabgunj, 320 km. from here. Some 1000 demonstrators, belonging to the fundamentalist Jamaat-i-Islami, were protesting against a case filed by two Indian civilians in Calcutta High Court calling for a ban on the Quran in India. The town chief administrator said today that the police opened fire in self-defence when the demonstrators went on a rampage throwing missiles and setting ablaze government property. Yesterday’s incident followed a demonstration by at least 20,000 Jamaat-i-Islami supporters in the capital on Friday {May 10}.” The demonstrators in Dhaka, according to other reports, were trying to storm the office of India’s High Commission when they were stopped by the police."

"The metropolitan magistrate,... pronounced on 31 July 1986, “With due regard, to the Holy Book of ‘Quran Majeed’, a close perusal of the Ayets shows that the same are harmful and teach hatred and are likely to create differences between Mohammedans on one hand and the remaining communities on the other.”"

"Much water has gone down the Ganges after Lammens wrote in 1929. Islamic Apologetics in India since then has progressed by leaps and bounds. The Quran has been roped in to prove that Islam stands for equality of all religions and religious tolerance."

"The same logic leads to another and a very ominous conclusion. JihAd cannot be regarded as something which happened only in the past. On the contrary, it is an ever-present possibility in India. The Quran will create a jihAd whenever and wherever the “infidels” provide an opportunity. Pious Muslims in every place and at all times, are taught to see, or seek, or provoke situations in which solutions prescribed by the Quran can be practised."

"Starting with the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, this flattering of Muslims by praising Islam culminated in Mahatma Gandhi’s sarva-dharma-samabhava - the opiate which lulled the Hindus into a deep slumber such as they had never known vis-à-vis Muslim aggression....Anyone who questioned the pious proposition that the Quran was as good as the Vedas and the Puranas, ran the risk of being nailed down as an “enemy of communal harmony”.....That part of the “Muslim minority” which had voted for Pakistan but had chosen to stay in India, restarted the old game when India was proclaimed a secular state pledged to freedom of propagation for all religions. It revived its tried and tested trick of masquerading as a “poor and persecuted minority”. It cooked up any number of Pirpur Reports. The wail went up that the “lives, liberties and honour of the Muslims were not safe” in India, in spite of India’s “secular pretensions”. At the same time, street riots were staged on every possible pretext. The “communal situation” started becoming critical once again. .... And once again, the political leadership came out with a make-belief. The big-wigs from all political parties were collected in a “National Integration Council”. It was pointed out by the leftist professors that the major cause of “communal trouble” was the “bad habit” of living in the past on the part of “our people”. Most of the politicians knew no history and no religion for that matter. They all agreed with one voice that Indian history, particularly that of the “medieval Muslim period”, should be re-written. That, they pleaded, was the royal road to “national integration”."

"Though, by the logic of this tribe, the best promoters of India’s unity were the British. They did far more and succeeded to a much greater extent in imposing a unity on India. By that logic, General Dyer of the Jallianwala Bagh fame comes out with flying colours as the foremost builder of an Indian nation. He was also very ruthless in gunning down unarmed people who were not impressed by the “benefits of the British Raj”."

"It was not so long ago that the Bible enjoyed a stranglehold similar to that of the Quran over vast populations in the West. The theocracies propped up by the Bible in Europe and America had enacted similar sagas of slaughter and pillage for several centuries. But a sustained Western scholarship showed up the Bible for what it was. “It would be more consistent,” proclaimed Thomas Paine, “that we call it [the Bible] the work of a demon than the word of God.” The spell of Jehovah was broken. ... The rest is history. Christianity is now seeking a refuge in countries like India where its rout in the West remains unknown."

"It is only in one respect that the Quran revealed by Tengiri might have differed from the Quran revealed by Allah. It seems that, quite unlike Allah, Tengiri was not intolerant towards revelations other than his own."

"The one name which Muslims hate and fear most is that of Chengiz Khan. He is a spectre which has haunted Muslim historians for centuries. He swept like a tornado over the then most powerful and extensive Islamic empire of Khwarazm. In a short span of five years (1219-1224 CE), he slaughtered millions of Muslims, forced many others including women and children into slavery, and razed to the ground quite a few of the most populous and prosperous cities of the Muslim world at that time."

"The scholars of European Enlightenment who were influenced by Hindu, Chinese, Greek and Roman traditions of spirituality and culture, have judged Jehovah quite correctly and identified him as the main source of darkness which prevailed in Europe during the Middle Ages. But they have so far neglected Allah of the Quran and not weighed him in the same balance of rationalism, humanism and universalism on which Jehovah was weighed and found wanting."

"Myers wrote a desolate letter home to his friends lamenting what he had seen in a small, impoverished Hindu village in the countryside. The army had “lined up people from their houses, shot down the lines, killing close to six hundred.” The people in nearby villages heard the gunfire and fled. The rice mills were burned to charcoal, the rice to ash. The handful of villagers who had returned told their stories through sobs. A tall, frail Bengali man took Myers to his scorched house: “a room with a rice ash heap and charcoaled bed stead, nothing remained to show us that his three children and wife had lived there, died there. Another old man, pan stained teeth, mucus glazed eyes, (glaucoma or tears?), whimpered the loss of his family.”"

"“There was clear targeting of Hindus,” says Scott Butcher. “You might also talk about going after Bengalis as a racial or cultural group. It was an extraordinarily brutal crackdown.”"

"Senior Pakistani officers would later admit much of this targeting before a secret Pakistani postwar judicial inquiry. It noted that “senior officers like the COAS [chief of army staff] and CGS [chief of general staff] were often noticed jokingly asking as to how many Hindus have been killed.” One lieutenant colonel testified that Lieutenant General A. A. K. Niazi, who became the chief martial law administrator in East Pakistan and head of the army’s Eastern Command, “asked as to how many Hindus we had killed. In May, there was an order in writing to kill Hindus” from a brigadier. (Niazi denied ordering the extermination of the Hindus.) Another lieutenant colonel said, “There was a general feeling of hatred against Bengalis amongst the soldiers and the officers including generals. There were verbal instructions to eliminate Hindus.”"

"Still, he thought, genocide was the right description for what was happening to the Hindus. So the consulate “began to focus our ‘genocidal’ reporting on the Hindus.” The military crackdown, he cabled, “fully meets criteria of term ‘genocide.’ ”"

"He explained that the Pakistani military evidently did not “make distinctions between Indians and Pakistan Hindus, treating both as enemies.” Such anti-Hindu sentiments were lingering and widespread, Blood wrote. He and his staff tenaciously kept up their reporting of anti-Hindu atrocities, telling how the Pakistan army would move into a village, ask where the Hindus lived, and then kill the Hindu men. There was little evidence, he said, of the killing of Hindu women and children. (He also pointed out that the Bengali Muslims abhorred this slaughter.) Blood and his team emphasized the “international moral obligations to condemn genocide … of Pakistani Hindus.”"

"The Indian prime minister’s secretariat knew that there was sure to be a rush of refugees, likely to overwhelm the local authorities in West Bengal. But the actual scale was a shock: the lieutenant governor of Tripura, an Indian state jutting deep into East Pakistan, alerted Gandhi to “the unexpectedly large influx of refugees.” As one of Gandhi’s senior aides remembered, her government now really began to worry. The expulsions seemed massive and systematic."

"Schanberg saw Pakistani soldiers throwing phosphorus grenades into thatch huts and setting villages ablaze, apparently to deny hiding places to the guerrillas. He reported that, at a minimum, tens of thousands of people had been systematically killed by the army. The troops had killed much of the Bengali leadership class, including engineers, doctors, and students. He wrote, “As smoke from the thatch and bamboo huts billowed up on the outskirts of the city of Comilla, circling vultures descended on the bodies of peasants, already being picked apart by dogs and crows.”"

"Yahya was effusive in his gratitude to Nixon. In a warm letter, he sympathized about the American public pressure that Nixon was withstanding, and insisted that reports of atrocities were Indian-inspired exaggerations. He was “deeply gratified” that the United States saw the crisis as “an internal affair” to be resolved by Pakistan’s government. This was certainly Kissinger’s view. Even relatively minor insults to Pakistan’s sovereign prerogatives were too much for him. When it was suggested that Yahya promise that U.S. food aid would get to rural Bengalis, Kissinger recoiled at that “substantial challenge to the West Pakistan notion of sovereignty.” He said, “It would be as though, in our civil war, the British had offered food to Lincoln on the condition that it be used to feed the people in Alabama.”"

"Kissinger worked Nixon up. “It shows you’re a weakling, Mr. President,” he said. “[T]hese leaks are slowly and systematically destroying us.… It could destroy our ability to conduct foreign policy.”"

"In public, Indian officials such as Swaran Singh would impeccably speak up for sovereignty. But behind closed doors, he coached his officials to take the opposite line: “repression internally has resulted in the uprooting of six million refugees. With what stretch of the imagination is this an internal matter?” Upending the argument, he accused the United States of meddling in Pakistan’s internal affairs by helping a military junta to slaughter the Bengali majority: supporting Yahya was “truly interference in the internal affairs.” He instructed his diplomats, “You can use your genius for the purpose of thinking of other such arguments.”"

"One reputable Indian government official, himself a Bengali, relied on his local sources to remind Haksar what the refugees were fleeing: with encouragement from the Pakistan army, volunteers deliberately killed the Hindu men. He darkly wrote that it was not hard to imagine what had happened to the women. There were some Hindu families hidden in the granaries of “kind hearted Muslims who are against these deliberate atrocities but who find themselves entirely helpless.”"

"These kinds of stories were echoed six million times—the number of refugees that India officially estimated it was now sheltering. That number was, the Indian foreign ministry claimed, unparalleled in the world’s history."

"Anyway, the donations were, as Haksar told Gandhi, “very disappointing.” India would need some $400 million to look after these refugees for half a year, and more were coming every day. By the White House’s reckoning, the Indians netted merely about $20 million from the whole world, as well as roughly $12 million from the Soviet Union."

"The Nixon administration had ample evidence not just of the scale of the massacres, but also of their ethnic targeting of the Hindu minority—what Blood had condemned as genocide. This was common knowledge throughout the Nixon administration. Kissinger once told the president himself, “Another stupid mistake he [Yahya] made was to expel so many Hindus from East Pakistan. It gave the Indians a great cause” for war. Kissinger, in a memorandum drafted by Saunders, alerted Nixon to the difficulty of getting Hindu refugees to return. The undersecretary of state said to Nixon, “The Hindu population has suffered strong persecution, and many have fled the country.”"

"Kissinger was repeatedly alerted about this genocide. Harold Saunders informed him about reports that the Pakistan army was “deliberately seeking out Hindus and killing them,” while a senior State Department official notified him that Pakistan’s policy was “getting rid of the Hindus.” In a Situation Room meeting, another State Department official plainly told Kissinger, “Eighty percent of the refugees are Hindus.” In the same meeting, the CIA director doubted the prospects of refugees returning to East Pakistan, no matter what Yahya said to them: “The way the Pakistanis have been beating up on the Hindus, the refugees would have to be convinced they wouldn’t be shot in the head.”"

"This was about as far as Kissinger could be from the teeming miseries of West Bengal and Tripura while still inside India. The Indian government asked him to come visit the refugee camps for himself. If he had served in another White House, he might have at least made a side trip to Calcutta, or perhaps have been packed off to one of the hundreds of camps in West Bengal to see U.S. dollars at work feeding the destitute. But Kissinger refused. Samuel Hoskinson, Kissinger’s aide, says, “It’s not really Henry’s kind of thing.” Kissinger was clear that, as an Indian diplomat noted, “he would not be able to visit any of the refugee camps.”"

"Nixon was somber, but Kissinger was giddy with success. “The cloak and dagger exercise in Pakistan arranging the trip was fascinating,” he said. “Yahya hasn’t had such fun since the last Hindu massacre!”"

"At the White House, Kissinger worried that “when Kennedy comes back, he will blow the roof off.” He was right: the senator returned to Washington, haunted by what he had seen, to deliver a jeremiad against Nixon."

"Kissinger was put off by Gandhi’s mention of her democratic mandate: “Then she started praising herself, she said in effect that yes, this praise was well deserved, that I ran an election campaign.… And she said it was wrong to treat them the same way as the Pakistanis. Oh, it was really revolting, God.”"

"Kissinger urged Nixon to be tough on her. “I think publicly you should be extremely nice,” said the national security advisor—and at this point the tape is bleeped out, to hide whatever words he used to urge being rougher in private.... Kissinger, doing a little slobbering of his own, reassured the president: “How you slobbered over her in things that did not matter, but in the things that did matter, you didn’t give her an inch.”"

"She thought he was worthy to be an ambassador or an assistant secretary of state, or more, despite Nixon and Kissinger. “For some reason they thought it could be kept quiet! All of those killings!”"

"Even when his own officials denied him such evidence, he persisted, at one point furiously saying, “Henry, I just want the Indians to look bad. I want them to look bad for bombing that orphanage”—an incident that the U.S. consulate and the UN representative in Dacca believed had actually been done by a Pakistani airplane, in order to discredit India’s air force. But such hypocrisies are beside the point."

"A senior Indian official put the Bengali death toll at three hundred thousand, while Sydney Schanberg, who had excellent sources, noted in the New York Times that diplomats in Dacca thought that hundreds of thousands of Bengalis—maybe even a million or more—had been killed since the crackdown started on March 25. Even the lowest credible Pakistani estimates are in the tens of thousands, while India sought vindication with bigger numbers: Swaran Singh quickly claimed that a million people had been killed in Bangladesh."

"No very strict line can be drawn between Animists and low-class Hindus."

"...the wild jungle tribes in Central India, though the persons who profess the latter stoutly advance a claim to be considered Hindus."

"'It would be a mistake to suppose that Buddhism and Jainism were directed from the outset consciously in opposition to the caste system. Caste, in fact, at the time of the rise of Buddhism was only beginning to develop; and in later days, when Buddhism commenced its missionary careers, it took caste with it into regions where upto that time the institution had not penetrated.'"

"At one corner of a vast mound known as Ramkot, or the fort of Rama, is the holy spot where the hero was born. Most of the enclosure is occupied by a mosque built by Babar from the remains of an old temple, and in the outer portion a small platform and shrine mark the birth place."

"If Ajodhya was then little other than a wilderness, it must at least have possessed a fine temple in the Janamasthan; for many of its columns are still in existence and in good preservation, having been used by the Musalmans in the construction of the Babari Mosque. These are of strong, close- grained, darkcolored or black stone called by the natives kasauti and carved with different devices"

"Firoz Tughlak, foiled in his attempt to seize' Khargu, who fled to Kumaun, appointed an Afghan governor at Sambhal with orders to invade the country of Katehar every year, to commit every kind of ravage and devastation, and not to allow it to be inhabited until tire murderer was given up."

"‘In ancient times the lower portion of the river seems to have borne the name of its confluent the Saraswati or Sarsuti, which joins the main stream in Patiala territory. It then possessed the dimensions of an important channel . . . At present, however, every village through which the stream passes has diverted a portion of its waters for irrigation, no less than 10,000 acres being supplied from this source in Ambala District alone . . . During the lower portion of its course, in Sirsa District, the bed of the Ghaggar is dry from November to June, affording a cultivable surface for rich crops of rice and wheat.’"

"... the entry ‘Saraswati (Sarsuti)’, defined as a ‘sacred river of the Punjab, famous in the early Brahmanical annals’. We learn that the river rises ‘in the low hills of Sirmur State, emerges upon the plain at Zadh Budri [Ad Badri], a place esteemed sacred by all Hindus’, and, before joining the Ghaggar, ‘passes by the holy town of Thanesar and the numerous shrines of the Kuruksetra, a tract celebrated as a centre of pilgrimages, and as the scene of the battle-fields of the Mahabharatha’. The Gazetteer repeats, ‘In ancient times, the united stream below the point of junction appears to have borne the name of Sarsuti, and, undiminished by irrigation near the hills, to have flowed across the Rajputana plains . . .’ ‘Some of the earliest Aryan settlements in India were on the banks of the Saraswati, and the surrounding country has from almost Vedic times been held in high veneration. The Hindus identify the river with Saraswati, the Sanskrit Goddess of Speech and Learning.’"

"‘In the year A.D. 1000 it [the Sutlej] was a tributary of the Hakra, and flowed in the Eastern Nara . . . Thus the Sutlej or the Hakra—for both streams flowed in the same bed—is probably the lost river of the Indian desert, whose waters made the sands of Bikaner and Sind a smiling garden.’"

"He burned six mounds (1 mound is 37 kilos) of sacred threads worn by Hindus after massacring them (Hasan, Tarikh-i-Kashmir). He killed the Hindus who put a tilak-mark on their forehead ( Hasan, Tarikh-i-Kashmir). He burnt many of the books of the Hindus. Srivara wrote: "Sikander burnt all books the same wise as fire burns hay". Srivara also recorded: "All the scintillating works faced destruction in the same manner that lotus flowers face with the onset of frosty winter." (Srivara, Zaina Rajtarangini). Sikandar drowned many Hindus in the Dal Lake (Jonraj, Kings of Kashmir). According to some sources only eleven families of Brahmins were left in Kashmir due to Sikandar's policies."

"The number slain in the battle and the pursuit was computed at 100,000, and the spoil, which included large numbers of captives consigned to slavery, enriched the whole of the Muslim armies, for the troops were permitted to retain the whole of the plunder except the elephants. The victors destroyed Vijayanagar, which they occupied for six months, plundered the country,.."

"“Between 1387 and 1395 the Deccan was visited by a severe famine, and Muhammad’s53 measures for the relief of his subjects displayed a combination of administrative ability, enlightened compassion, and religious bigotry. A thousand bullocks belonging to the transport establishment maintained for the court were placed at the disposal of. those in charge of relief measures, and travelled incessantly to and fro between his dominions and Gujarat and Malwa, which had escaped the visitation bringing thence grain which was sold at low rates in the Deccan, but to Muslims only.”"

"The Hindus now had reason to repent their breach of the humane treaty between Muhammad I and Bukka I for never, in the course of a long series of wars, did cither army display such ferocity as did Ahmad's troops in this campaign. His temper, not naturally cruel, had |been goaded by the spectacle of the atrocities committed by the Hindus after the disastrous campaign of Pangul, and he glutted his revenge. Avoiding Vijayanagar, the siege of which had been discovered to be an unprofitable adventure, he marched through the kingdom, slaughtering men and enslaving women and children. An account of the butchery was kept, and whenever the tale of victims reached 20,000 the invader halted for three days, and celebratpd the achievement with banquets and the beating of the great drums. Throughout his progress he destroyed temples and slaugh- tered cows, he sent three great brazen idols to Gulbarga to be dishonoured, and omitted nothing that could wound the natural affections, the patriotism, or the religious sentiments of the Hindus."

"Forcible opposition to temple destruction was offered only in Rajputana, Malwa, Bundelkhand and Khandesh, which were remote from the centre of the imperial authority, and even there only when the emperor was not present. But we read of reprisals in the second half of the reign by certain Rajput and Maratha chiefs, who de- molished converted mosques in retaliation or stopped the chanting of the call to prayer in their locality. In some places the jizya collector was expelled after plucking his beard out. The first extensive outbreak of Hindu reaction against this policy of persecution took place among the sturdy Jat peasantry of the Muttra district, where the local commandant ‘Abdun-Nabl was a bigoted oppressor. In 1669 the Jats rose under a leader named Gokla of Tilpat, Mlled ‘Abdun-Nabi,"

"Surrender availed nothing. The unhappy prisoners were paraded in long lines, given a little parched grain and a drink of water, and beheaded. Every Afghan tent had heads piled before its doors. The plunder of the camp was prodigious, and the women and children who survived were driven off as slaves."

"In general, the historical writings of Englishmen from about the last quarter of the 19th century were, more or less, tinged by the spirit of imperialism which they inherited as a legacy from the British rule in India during the preceding century. The most typical example of such a historical work is furnished by V. A. Smith’s Oxford History of India (1919) on a smaller scale, and The Cambridge History of India, Vols. V(1929) and V1I(1932), on a more comprehensive scale. One may be pardoned for gathering the impression from these books, that they were pro- ducts of men who honestly believed in the doctrine-—‘my country, right or wrong,’—and used the medium of history to defend British imperialism which had by that time come in for a good deal of criticism both in India and abroad. The Cambridge History of India, Vols. V-VI, the last great historical work on modern India written by British historians, looks at India purely from the standpoint of British officials and statesmen. Its attention was mainly directed to, and its interest was primarily concerned with, the British dominion and British administration. While minute details are given on these points, the story of Indians, as such, is almost completely ignored. One may go through the two ponderous volumes without gaining any idea of the great cultural renaissance in India in the 19th century which transformed her from the Medieval to the Modern Age. While reference is made in detail to official transactions or administrative machinery, there is hardly any reference. except by way of casual mention as a part of administrative history, to the great social and religious reforms, literary revival, and political aspirations, which so strongly marked the 19th century. One comes across enthusiastic references to British Governors-General, Governors and even lesser officials, but looks in vain for the names and careers of men like Rammohan Roy, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, Bankim Chandra Chatterji, Ramkrishna Paramahamsa, Keshab Chandra Sen, Swami Vivekananda, Dayananda Saraswati, Surendra Nath Banerji, M. G. Ranade, Dadabhai Naoroji. Pherozeshah Mehta, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and a host of others, who will be remembered as makers of Modern India, long after the names of officials, with whose careers the two volumes of Cambridge History abound, have been completely forgotten. (xxiii-xxv)"

"But the errors of Cambridge History are not of omission only. The errors of commission are equally, if not more. grave and serious. Differing in spirit even from the old English historians of British India, it has put forth only the official or imperial view of British transactions in India, without any attempt to discuss the dissentient views, It suppresses truth in many cases where the preservation of good name for the British rulers requires it; worse still, it repeats the official calumny against Indian rulers concocted by the British Government of the day in order to justify their unjust action against them, though a little inquiry would have sufficed to demonstrate the totally unreliable character of the evidence on which the statements of the Government of India were based. Typical instances of the former ate supplied by the accounts given of the annexation of Burma, Awadh, Nagpur, Jhansi, Sindh and the Panjab, as well as dealings of Ellenborough with Sindhia. As regards the latter, it is only necessary to refer to the grounds on which the rulers of Mysore, Coorg, Cachar, and Satara were dethroned, and an armed expedition was sent against Manipur and its Commander-in-chief, Tikendrajit, was hanged. (xxiii-xxv)"

"The chronicles unfortunately do not portray the culture of the ghazis; they give detailed descriptions of battles, but cultural information is confined to the rulers and their courts."

"The rulers of India, whether Turks, Pathans, or Mughals, used Islamic vocabulary to legitimise their rule in the eyes of their Muslim chiefs and the ‘ulamā. Amīr Taimūr (1336–1405), the Turco-Mongol conqueror who attacked India in 1397–99 with legendary cruelty and devastation, uses purely religious language in defense of his action in his memoir Malfūẓāt-e-Taimūrī.294Ẓahīruddīn Bābar (1483–1530), the first ruler of the Mughal dynasty of India, in his memoir Bābar-Nāmah, also uses the vocabulary of jihad when he confronts the Hindu ruler Rānā Sangrām Singh (1484–1528), the ruler of Mewar, in the battle of Tarain but not when he defeats the Muslim ruler Ibrāhīm Lodhī (r. 1517–1526)... In short, the recourse to the vocabulary of jihad was part of seeking legitimacy through religion if the occasion demanded. The frequency of its use might increase or decrease according to the ruler’s known preferences but it remained a handy resource for most part of Muslim political ascendancy in India."

"The weaknesses of medieval chronicles are well-known. Their style is by and large turgid and ornamental; their narrative is often exaggerated. And this applies as much (if not more) to figures as to facts. A few no doubt are trustworthy but many of them are extremely faulty with regard to figures and statistics ; and almost all of them let their imagination and their pen run riot. Consequently, even when they are not quite reticent on demograghic matters, they are neither very informative nor always reliable."

"Ziyauddin Barani is an eye-witness historian, but his figures and data are not always precise. When sometimes he means to convey‘a very large number’, he gives the figure of 100,000.... Let us take another fourteenth century historian, Shams Siraj Afif. If Barani has a weakness for 100,000, Afif is very fond of 180,000, so that the slaves of Firoz Tughlaq numbered 180,000, the revenue from his 1200 gardens was 180,000 tankahs, and in his war with Shamsuddin Ilyas Shah (A.D. 1353), he killed 180,000 men in Bengal. The immensity and coincidence of the numbers create misgivings... It must be emphasised, however, that large figures by themselves, though sometimes frightening, may not always be incorrect."

"The accounts of the Muslim writers surely suffer from certain weaknesses, The greatest drawback of the early Muslim chroniclers is that they never cared to know about the non- Muslim people of the country. They never even refer to Hindu social order, its caste system, its philosophy or religion. Unlike the later historians like Abul Fazl and Badaoni, who tried to understand the social and cultural milieu of the country, chronicles like Hasan Nizami and Ziyauddin Barani do not refer to the vast majority of the Hindus at all. Only rarely do they speak about them but then only in derogatory terms, which also shows their ignorance."

"Lastly, historiography of the Sultanate period suffered from an extreme narrowness of scope. Early Indo-Muslim historians made history revolve round the great men of religion and government—prophets, sultans, nobles and saints. It never came down to the life and conditions of the common man, the poor, the lowly and the lost. The religious orientation of the works had the effect of further narrowing their scope to the campaigns and adventures of Muslim political and military chiefs in an infidel country. The large majority of the population – the Hindus – figured only on the fringe of such works as infidel enemies, to understand whom the great Al-Biruni had stayed back in India and written a marvel of a book."

"Major Nasseau Lees pleads that the works of such court historians who were hired to extol the virtues of their patrons, should not however be condemned as of little historical worth. He writes: ...a main peculiarity of Muhammadan writers—and which is of the essence of all sound history...is regard for truth Where...is the Emperor in modern times who would so truthfully and so frankly record his own follies and vices as the Emperor Jehangir had done in his Memoirs or autobiography...? Where is nowadays the empire in which an author could dare to write of his despot rulers in the unmeasured terms in which Abdal Kadir of Badaon had written of the Emperor Akbar? Where in the whole range of the literature of that period of the world history can we find a more valuable and complete compendium of the political, religious, social, commercial, and agricultural institutions of a nation than is contained in the Akbar compiled by Abul Fazal?"

"There would appear to be three main characteristics for which the Islamic or the didactic religious framework of Muslim historiography, as exemplified by the five writers discussed, was responsible. First, an almost exclusive concentration of the deeds of Muslims in Hindistan. For Barani, ‘Afif, Yahya ibn Ahmad and ‘Isami, non-Muslims are as the furniture and properties for the stage on which the drama of the Muslim destiny and the Muslim political achievement in Hindistanis played. The Hindus are not mentioned, for the most part, except as the passive material on which Muslims impose their will. It is the function of the Hindus to provide opportunities for the practice of Muslim virtue ; they are never interesting in themselves, but only as converts, as capitation tax-payers, or as corpses. .... For them, indeed as for Muslim historians outside India, the only significant history is the history of the Muslim community ; they are historians of the res gestae of the politically prominent members of a group united by ties of common faith rather than historians of the whole people of the area controlled by the Delhi sultan. They are, so to speak, the first Muslim communalists in India."

"The account of the conquest of Sind points at a practical compromise with idolatry, but in general there is nothing more striking in the Arabic literature on Sind and Hind than its constant obsession with the idol worship and the polytheism of the Indians. Islamic tradition almost equates Indian culture with idolatry."

"By the theory of its origin the Muslim State is a theocracy. Its true king is God, and earthly rulers are merely His agents, bound to enforce His law on all. Civil Law is completely subordinated to Religious Law and, indeed, merges its existence in the latter. The civil authorities exist solely to spread and enforce the true faith. In such a State, infidelity is logically equivalent to treason, because the infidel repudiates the authority of the true king and pays homage to his rivals, the false gods and goddesses. All the resources of the State, all the forces under the political authorities, are in strict legality at the disposal of the missionary propaganda of the true faith."

"Therefore, the toleration of any sect outside the fold of orthodox Islam is no better than compounding with sin. And the worst form of sin is polytheism, the belief that the one true God has partners in the form of other deities. Such a belief is the rankest ingratitude (kufr)* to Him who gives us our life and daily bread."

"Islamic theology, therefore, tells the true believer that his highest duty is to make ‘‘exertion (jihad) in the path of God,’’} by waging war against infidel lands (dar-ul-harb) till they become a part of the realm of Islam (dar-ul-Islam) and their populations are converted into true believers. After conquest the entire infidel population becomes theoretically reduced to the status of slaves of the conquering army. The men taken with arms are to be slain or sold into slavery and their wives and children reduced to servitude. As for the non-combatants among the vanquished, if they are not massacred outright,—as the Canon lawyer Shafi declares to be the Quranic injunction,— it is only to give them a respite till they are so wisely guided as to accept the true faith."

"The conversion of the entire population to Islam and the extinction of every form of dissent, is the ideal of the Muslim State. If any infidel is suffered to exist in the community, it is as a necessary evil, and for a transitional period only. Political and social disabilities must be imposed on him, and _ bribes offered to him from the public funds, to hasten the day of his spiritual enlightenment and the addition of his name to the roll of true believers.* The growth of the infidel population in number or wealth would, therefore, defeat the very end of the State. Hence, a true Islamic king is bound to look on jubilantly when his infidel subjects cut each other's throats, for ‘‘whichever side may be slain, Islam is the gainer,” (har tarf ke shawwad kushta sud-i-Islam ast). If for instance, two rival orders of Hindu monks fought each other to the death for precedence in bathing in a holy tank, a Muslim king like Akbar was expected to abdicate his function of guardian of the public peace, and assist them in mutually thinning the number of the infidels."

"A non-Muslim, therefore, cannot be a citizen of the State; he is a member of a depressed class; his status is a modified form of slavery. He lives under a contract (zimma) with the State: for the life and property that are grudgingly spared to him by the Commander of the Faithful he must undergo political and social disabilities, and pay a commutation-money (jaziya). In short, his continued existence in the State after the conquest of his country by the Muslims is conditional upon his person and property being made subservient to the cause of Islam."

"He must pay a tax for his land (kharaj), from which the early Muslims were exempt; he must pay other exactions for the maintenance of the army, in which he cannot enlist even if he offers to render personal service instead of paying the poll-tax; and he must show by humility of dress and behaviour that he belongs to a subject class. No non-Muslim (zimmi) can wear fine dresses, ride on horseback or carry arms; he must behave respectfully and submissively to every member of the dominant sect.*"

"The zimmi is under certain legal disabilities with regard to testimony in lawcourts, protection under criminal law, and marriage. The State, as the other party in the contract (zimma), guarantees to him security of life and property and a modified protection in the exercise of his religion :—he cannot erect new temples, and has to avoid any offensive publicity in the exercise of his faith. But everything short of open physical persecution,—everything that would not be a flagrant breach of the contract of protection, can be legitimately practised by the Muslim ruler to reduce the number of the undesirable alien sect."

"Every device short of massacre in cold blood was resorted to in order to convert heathen subjects. In addition to the poll-tax and public degradation in dress and demeanour imposed on them, the non-Muslims were subjected to various hopes and fears. Rewards in the form of money and public employment were offered to apostates from Hinduism."

"The leaders of Hindu religion and society were systematically repressed, to deprive the sect of spiritual instruction, and their religious gatherings and processions were forbidden in order to prevent the growth of solidarity and a sense of communal strength among them. No new temple was allowed to be built nor any old one to be repaired, so that the total disappearance of all places of Hindu worship was to be merely a question of time. But even this delay, this slow operation of Time, was intolerable to many of the more fiery spirits of Islam, who tried to hasten the abolition of “‘infidelity’” by anticipating the destructive hand of Time and forcibly pulling down temples."

"This motive sanctified all his massacres and outrages in the eyes of his fellow-believers. Again, in 1569, when a noble named Husain Khan went on a private predatory expedition into the Sewalik mountains on ‘‘hearing that the bricks of the temples were of silver and gold, and conceiving a desire for this and all other unguarded treasures, of which he had heard a lying report,’’ the pious historian Al Badayuni (ii. 125) calls it a religious war. When Muhammad Adil Shah sent his armies to attack the Hindus of the Karnatak, whose only fault was their wealth, his Court historian designated this campaign of slaughter, rapine and outrage as the realization of a long cherished pious resolution. (Bas. Sal. 304.) The murder of infidels (kafir-kushi) is counted a merit in a Muslim. It is not necessary that he should tame his own passions or mortify his flesh; it is not necessary for him to grow a rich growth of spirituality. He has only to slay a certain class of his fellow-beings or plunder their lands and wealth, and this act in itself would raise his soul to heaven."

"Nor has it been conducive to the true interests of its followers. Muslim polity formed ‘‘the faith- ful’’ into a body with no other profession than war. As long as there were any fresh lands to conquer and any rich kafirs to plunder, all went well with the State.* | The dominant body prospered and multiplied rapidly ; even arts and industries, literature and painting of a certain type were fostered. But when the tide of Muslim expansion reached its farthest limit and broke in vain on the hills of Assam and Chatgaon, or the arid rocks of Maharashtra, there was nothing to avert a rapid downfall. The State had no economic basis, and was not able to stand a time of peace. Repose was fatal not only to its growth but to its very life."

"When public offices are distributed in consideration of race or creed and not of merit, when birth and not efficiency is the qualification demanded in those who are to serve the State, public posts rightly come to be regarded as the spoils of war ; the official system becomes a hereditary form of military pension and not a machinery for doing certain necessary services to the community at a minimum cost and maximum efficiency. The non- Muslim populations are, therefore, driven to conclude that they have no lot or part in such a State; it is alien to them, and its fall would mean no injury to the community but only a personal loss to a body of self-seekers. The Islamic theocracy when set up over a composite population has the worst vices of oligarchy and of alien rule combined."

"Therefore, the growth and progress of non- Muslims, even their continued existence, is incompatible with the basic principles of a Muslim State. The political community is in a condition of unstable equilibrium, till either the dissenters are wiped out or the sceptre passes out of Muslim hands. The literal interpretation of the Quranic Law sets up a chronic antagonism between the rulers and the ruled, which has, in the end, broken up every Islamic State with a composite population. And the reign of Aurangzib was to illustrate this truth in a form clear to the meanest intellect."

"When a class of men is publicly depressed and harassed by law and executive caprice alike, it merely contents itself with dragging on an animal existence. With every generous instinct of the soul crushed out of them, with intellectual culture merely adding a keen edge to their sense of humiliation, the Hindus could not be expected to produce the utmost of which they were capable; their lot was to be hewers of wood and drawers of water to their masters, to bring grist to the fiscal mill, to develop a low cunning and flattery as the only means of saving what they could out of the fruits of their own labour. Amidst such social conditions, the human hand and the human mind cannot achieve their best; the human soul cannot soar to its highest pitch. The barrenness of the Hindu intellect and the meanness of spirit of the Hindu upper classes are the greatest condemnation of Muhammadan rule in India. The Islamic political tree, judged by its fruit, was an utter failure."

"Aurangzib began his attack on Hinduism in an insidious way. In the first year of his reign, in a charter granted to a priest of Benares, he avowed that his religion forbade him to allow the building of new temples, but did not enjoin the destruction of old ones. During his viceroyalty of Gujrat, 1644, he had desecrated the recently built Hindu temple of Chintaman in Ahmadabad by killing a cow in it and then turned the building into a mosque. He had at that time also demolished many other Hindu temples in the province; these were probably new constructions. An order issued early in his reign has been preserved in which the local officers in every town and village of Orissa from Katak to Medinipur are called upon to pull down all temples, including even clay huts, built during the last 10 or 12 years, and to allow no old temple to be repaired."

"Next, he took a step further, and in the | 2th year of his reign (9th April, 1669) he issued a general order ‘“‘to demolish all the schools and temples of the infidels and to put down their religious teaching and practices.” His destroying hand now fell on the great shrines that commanded the’ veneration of the Hindus all over India,—such as the second temple of Somnath* built by the pious zeal of Bhimadeva soon after the destruction of the older and more famous one at the hands of Mahmud of Ghazni, the Vishwanath temple of Benares, and the Keshav Rai temple of Mathura, that ‘“wonder of the age’’ on which a Bundela Rajah had lavished 33 lakhs of Rupees. And the governors of the provinces had no peace till they could certify to the Emperor that the order of demolition had been carried out in their respective provinces."

"The holy city of Mathura has always been the special victim of Muslim bigotry. It was the birth- place of Krishna, the most popular of the ‘‘false gods’’ of India,—a deity for whom _ millions of “‘infidels’’ felt a personal love. The city stood on the king's highway between Agra and Delhi, and its lofty spires, almost visible from the Agra palace, —-seemed to taunt the Mughal emperors with lukewarmness in “‘exalting [slam and casting in- fidelity down.’" Aurangzib’s baleful eye had been directed to the Hindu Bethlehem very early. He had appointed a “‘religious man,’’ Abdun Nabi, as faujdar of Mathura to repress the Hindus."

"On 14th October, 1666, learning that there was a stone railing in the temple of Keshav Rai, which Dara Shukoh had presented to it, Aurangzib ordered it to be removed, as a scandalous example of a Muslim's coquetry with idolatry. And finally in January 1670, his zeal, stimulated by the pious meditations of Ramzan, led him to send forth com- mands to destroy this temple altogether and to change the name of the city to /slamabad. Ujjain suffered a similar fate at the same time. A systematic plan was followed for carrying out the policy of iconoclasm. Officers were appointed in all the sub-divisions and cities of the empire as Censors of Morals {muhtasib), to enforce the regulations of Islam, such as the suppression of the use of wine and bhang, and of gambling. The destruction of Hindu places of worship was one of their chief duties, and so large was the number of officers employed in the task that a ‘‘Director General’? (darogha) had to be placed over them to guide their activity."

"How strictly the imperial orders were enforced we can see from the fact that even in remote East Bengal and Orissa, on the extreme frontier of the empire, the local officers sent their men round to pull down all the temples and smash all the images within their jurisdictions. In June 1680, the temples of Amber, the capital of the loyal State of Jaipur, were broken down."

"Neither age nor experience of life softened Aurangzib’s bigotry. When an old man of over eighty, we find him inquiring whether the Hindu worship, which he had put down at Somnath early in his reign, had been revived through the slackness of the local governor, and, again, telling one of his generals to take his own time in destroying a certain famous temple in the Deccan, as ‘‘it had no legs to walk away on.’’ In 1674 he confiscated all the lands held by Hindus as religious grants (wazifa) in Gujrat. [Mirat, 305.]"

"As the scholars and divines of the tiiae informed Aurangzib, the books on Muslim Canon Law lay down that the proper method of collecting the jaziya is for the zimmi to pay the tax personally; if he sends the money by the hand of an agent it is to be refused; the taxed person must come on foot and make the payment standing, while the receiver should be seated and after placing his hand above that of the zimmi should take the money and cry out, “‘O, zimmi! pay the commutation money.”’"

"By imperial orders the jaziya was reimposed on the “‘unbelievers’’ in all parts of the empire from 2nd April, 1679, in order, as the Court historian records, to ‘‘spread Islam and put down the practice of infidelity."" When the news spread, the Hindus of Delhi and its environs gathered together in hundreds and stood on the bank of the Jamuna below the balcony of morning salute in the palace-wall, and piteously cried for the withdrawal of the impost. But the Emperor turned a deaf ear to their plaintive wail. When next Friday he wanted to ride to the Jama Mosque to attend the public prayer, the whole road from the gate of the Fort to the mosque was blocked by a crowd of Hindu suppliants, whose number was swollen by all the shopkeepers and craftsmen of Delhi city and the cantonment bazar, out for a demonstration. The crowd did not disperse in spite of warning; and the Emperor after waiting vainly for an hour ordered elephants to be driven through the mass of men, trampling them down and clearing a way for him. The Hindu protest continued for some days, but in the end the Emperor's firmness triumphed and the subject people ceased to protest. A temperate and reasoned letter from Shivaji urging the impolicy of the new impost and appealing to Aurangzib to think of the common Father of man- kind and the equality of all sincere beliefs in God’s eyes, met with no better success."

"In levying the jaziya, Aurangzib was deaf to the pleadings of pity and political expediency alike. In Mughal Deccan, particularly in Burhanpur, the tax could be realized only by force. But Aurangzib was inexorable and ordered the Prefect of the City police to chastise every defaulter. This had the desired effect, and a strict collector like Mir Abdul Karim increased the yield of the tax from Rs. 26,000 a year for the whole city to more than four times the amount in three months for half the city only (1682). When a minister wished to oust his rival from favour, he had only to complain that the latter had excused some Hindus from paying the poll-tax;* and the Emperor would plainly tell the lenient revenue minister, ‘“‘You are free to grant remissions of revenue of all other kinds; but if you remit any man’s jaziya—which | have succeeded with great difficulty in laying on the infidels, it will be an impious change (bidat) and will cause the whole system of collecting the poll-tax to fall into disorder.”’"

"An army of Muslim collectors and amins,— usually men of reputed scholarship and orthodoxy, —spread over the country to assess and realize the tax. So large was their number, that in 1687 an Inspector-General of jaziya was appointed to tour through the four provinces of the Deccan and see that these men did their work properly. (M.A. 297.)"

"The officially avowed policy in reimposing the jaziya was to increase the number of Muslims by putting pressure on the Hindus."

"From time immemorial, service in the revenue department had brought daily bread to middle class Hindus able to read and write. Under Aurangzib, ‘“‘qanungo-ship on condition of turning Muslim"’ became a proverbial expression; and several families in the Panjab still preserve his letters patent in which this condition of office is unblushingly laid down. Several other instances of it are also recorded in the extant news-letters of his Court."

"In 1671 an ordinance was issued that the rent-collectors of the Crownlands must be Muslims, and all viceroys and taluqdars were ordered to dismiss their Hindu head clerks (peshkars) and accountants (diwanian) and replace them by Muslims. As the oficial historian of the reign exultantly points out, ‘By one stroke of the pen he dismissed all the Hindu writers from his service.”" (M.A. 528.) It was found impossible to run the administration after dismissing the Hindu peshkars of the provincial governors, but in some places Muslims replaced Hindu kroris (district rent-collectors). Later on, the Emperor yielded so far to necessity as to allow half the peshkars of the revenue minister and paymaster’s departments to be Hindus and the other half Muhammadans."

"In March 1695 all Hindus, with the exception of the Rajputs, were forbidden to ride palkis, elephants or thorough-bred horses, or to carry arms. (K. K. ii. 395; M. A. 370.)"

"On certain days of the calendar, the Hindus all over India hold fairs near their holy places. Men, women and children in vast numbers gather together, nominally to bathe in the sacred water, worship the idol, or follow the religious procession, but mainly to buy things in the booths set up and the packs opened by the traders. To our village women in particular such fairs are the only means of relieving the monotony of their hfe of toil and the only occasion for an outing in the whole year. Here they meet their distant friends and kinsfolk, and enjoy the show. The Indian Muslims, no less than the Hindus, flock to such gatherings. They offer a combination of amusement, business and piety, probably in a gradually decreasing proportion. The traders do a roaring business. The Mughal Govern- ment on such occasions earned a large sum from market-toll in each of the provinces. A very grand fair of this kind used to be held at a tank in the village of Malwa up to the 14th century; but Firuz Shah Tughlag put it down with bloodshed. Aurangzib revived the same policy and in 1668 forbade such fairs throughout his dominions. (Elliot, in. 380. K. K. nn. 212.) The coincidence was ominous: the Tughlaq empire perished only one generation after Firuz."

"Early in 1669 a most formidable popular rising took place in the Mathura district. The Indian peasant, especially in Agra, Mathura and Oudh, was a bad taxpayer in Muslim times, and the collection of revenue often required the use of force. Akbar’s wise regulations for giving fixity to the State demand and protecting the ryots from illegal exactions had disappeared with him. Under his successors a revenue collector was, no doubt, removed from his post when his oppression became intolerable and the public outcry against him repeatedly reached the Emperor’s ears. But such cases were exceptional. In the Mathura district in particular, nothing was done by Government to win the love and willing obedience of the peasantry, but rather a policy was followed which left behind it a legacy of undying hatred."

"For instance, we read how a local faujdar named Murshid Quli Khan Turkman (who died in 1638) took advantage of his campaigns against refractory tenants to gratify his lust. When the villagers were defeated he seized all their most beautiful women and placed them in his harem. Another practice of this licentious officer is thus described in the Masir- ul-umara (iii. 422): ‘On the birthday of Krishna, a vast gathering of Hindu men and women takes place at Govardhan on the Jamuna opposite Mathura. The Khan, paint- ing his forehead and wearing a dhoti like a Hindu, used to walk up and down in the crowd. Whenever he saw a woman whose beauty filled even the Moon with envy, he snatched her away like a wolf pouncing upon a flock, and placing her in the boat which his men had kept ready on the bank, he sped to Agra. The Hindu [for shame] never divulged what had happened to his daughter.”’"

"There were other temptations as well for seducing Hindus from their faith. Some of the converts were, by the Emperor’s orders, placed on elephants and carried in procession through the city to the accompaniment of a band and flags. Others got daily stipend, four annas at the lowest ….. A third instrument of the policy of putting economic pressure on unbelievers was the granting of rewards to converts and the offering of posts in the public services on condition of turning a Muslim ….. Infidels were bribed into accepting the royal faith by the offer of many allowances, robes of honour and posts, liberation from prison, or succession to disputed property‛."

"Jizya was first imposed by Prophet Muhammad, who bade his followers, ‚Tight those who do not profess the True Faith (i.e. Islam) till they pay Jizya with the hand in humility‛. As Sarkar writes, ‚the last two words of this command have been taken by the Muslim commentators to mean that the tax should be levied in a manner humiliating to the tax payer. Hence it was laid down that the zimmÍ must pay the Jizya personally and not through an agent, that he must come on foot, make the payment standing while the Jizya receiver should be seated and with his hand above that of the payer take the money crying out ‘O ZimmÍ, pay the Jizya’."

"On the poor, therefore, the incidence of the tax (Jizya) was at least 6 % of the gross income; on the middle it ranged from 6 to 1/4 %, and on the rich it was even lighter than 2 1/2 per thousand. In violation of modern canons of Taxation, the Jizya hit the poorest portion of the population hardest. It would never be less than Rs. 3 1/2 on a man, which was the money value of nine maunds of wheat flour at the average market price, at the end of the 16th century. The State, therefore, at the lowest incidence of the tax, annually took away from the poor man the full value of one year’s food as the price of religious indulgence‛, he writes."

"Shivaji’s escape from captivity caused lifelong regret to Aurangzib. As the Emperor wrote in his last will and testament: “The greatest pillar of Government consists in keeping of information about everything that happens in the kingdom, — while even a minute’s negligence results in shame for long years. See, the flight of the wretch Shiva was due to carelessness, but it has involved me in all these distracting campaigns to the end of my days.”"

"But whatever might be the moral quality of the means he employed, his success was a dazzling reality. This jagirdar’s son proved himself the irrepressible opponent of the Mughal empire and all its resources. This fact deeply impressed the minds of his contemporaries in India and abroad. Aurangzib was in despair as to how he could subdue Shivaji. A significant statement is made in a news- letter of his Court in 1670 that the Emperor read a des- patch from the Deccan, reporting some raids of Shivaji, and then “remained silent.” In the inner council of the Court he often anxiously asked whom he should next send against Shivaji, seeing that nearly all his great generals had failed in the Deccan, and Mahabat Khan irreverently replied with a sneer at Abdul Wahhab’s influence over the Emperor, “No general is necessary. A decree from the Chief Qazi will be sufficient to extinguish Shiva!” The young Persian king, Shah Abbas II, sent a letter taunting Aurangzib, “You call yourself a Padishah, but cannot sub- due a mere zamindar like Shiva. I am going to India with an army to teach you your business.”"

"To the Hindu world in that age of renewed persecution, Shivaji appeared as the star of a new hope, the protector of the ritualistic paint-mark (tilak) on the forehead of Hindus, and the saviour of Brahmans. (Bhushan’s poems.) His Court and his son’s became the rallying-point of the opposition to Aurangzib. The two rivals were both super- men, but contrasts in character."

"The life of Aurangzib was one long tragedy, — a story of man battling in vain against an invisible but inexorable Fate, a tale of how the strongest human endeavour was baffled by the forces of the age. A strenuous reign of fifty years ends in colossal failure. And yet this king was one of the greatest rulers of Asia in intelligence, character, and enterprise. He was, in an extraordinary degree hardworking, active, moral, and inspired by the sense of duty. He denied himself pleasure and repose, steeled his heart against the seductions of the senses and the appeals of pity and human weakness, and governed his people according to the beat ideals of his age and creed. And yet the result of fifty years of strong and good administration by this Puritan in the purple was the hopeless breaking up of his empire. This tragedy in history was developed with all the regularity of a perfect drama."

"No fusion between the two classes was possible even with the passage of centuries, as they differed like poles in ideal and life. The Hindu is solitary, passive, other-worldly; his highest aim is self-realisation, the attainment of personal salvation by individual effort, private devotions and lonely austerities. To him birth is a misfortune and his fellow- beings so many sources of distraction from his one goal. Not by enjoyment of God’s gifts but by renunciation, not by joyous expansion but by repression of emotion, is he to attain to bliss."

"The Muslim, on the other hand, is taught to feel that he is nothing if not a soldier of the militant force of Islam; he must pray in congregation; he must give proof of the sincerity of his faith by undertaking jihad or active exertion for the spread of his religion and the destruction of unbelief among other men. He is a missionary and cannot be indifferent to the welfare of his neighbours’ souls; nay, he must be ever alive to his duty of promoting the salvation of others by all means at his command, physical as much as spiritual. Then, again, Islam boldly avows that it is good for us to be here, that God has given the world to the faithful as an inheritance for their enjoyment."

"Sir Jadunath Sarkar stood for something that's increasingly rare in historical scholarship today: intellectual honesty and personal integrity. He wasn't afraid to follow the evidence, even if it led to uncomfortable truths. He didn't write to please political dispensations or academic peer groups. He wrote because he believed that history must be rooted in fact, not theory. What stands out to me is his meticulous use of primary sources. His multi-volume work on Aurangzeb remains, even today, one of the most rigorous and well-documented studies of any Indian monarch. He was fluent in Persian, worked directly with Mughal court chronicles, letters, and firmans, and refused to sugarcoat what he found. That courage to show Aurangzeb as he was, rather than how we might wish him to be remembered (as is done today by agenda-driven propagandists masquerading as historians) is exactly what a serious historian should aspire to. In today's environment, where ideological allegiance often takes precedence over archival depth, Sarkar reminds us of the importance of scholarly discipline. He is not just a historian of the past he's a role model for the kind of history-writing India needs in the present."

"For instance, we read how a local faujdar named Murshid Quli Khan Turkman (who died in 1638) took advantage of his campaigns against refractory tenants to gratify his lust. When the villagers were defeated he seized all their most beautiful women and placed them in his harem. Another practice of this licentious officer is thus described in the Masir- ul-umara (iii. 422): ‘On the birthday of Krishna, a vast gathering of Hindu men and women takes place at Govardhan on the Jamuna opposite Mathura. The Khan, paint- ing his forehead and wearing a dhoti like a Hindu, used to walk up and down in the crowd. Whenever he saw a woman whose beauty filled even the Moon with envy, he snatched her away like a wolf pouncing upon a flock, and placing her in the boat which his men had kept ready on the bank, he sped to Agra. The Hindu [for shame] never divulged what had happened to his daughter.”’"

"Shah Jahan’s order to demolish temples in Banaras stated, “It has been previously represented that there were some of the finest Hindu temples at Banaras. In former reigns, the foundations of many new ones had been laid, some of which had been completed, while others still remained in an imperfect state; and these the opulent among the pagans were desirous of seeing finished. The infidel-consuming monarch, who is the guardian of true religion, had therefore commanded that at Banaras and throughout the entire imperial dominions, wheresoever idol-temples had been recently built, they should be razed to the ground. Accordingly, in these days it was reported from the province of Allahabad that 70 had been demolished at Banaras alone”"

"When the environs of Orchha became the site of the royal standards, an ordinance was issued authorising the demolition of the idol temple, which Bir Singh Deo had erected at a great expense by the side of his private palace, and also the idols contained in it…"

"It was at the time of this bounty of Sultán Bahlol [Lodi], that the grandfather of Sher Sháh, by name Ibráhím Khán Súr,*The Súr represent themselves as descendants of Muhammad Súr, one of the princes of the house of the Ghorian, who left his native country, and married a daughter of one of the Afghán chiefs of Roh. with his son Hasan Khán, the father of Sher Sháh, came to Hindu-stán from Afghánistán, from a place which is called in the Afghán tongue "Shargarí",* but in the Multán tongue "Rohrí". It is a ridge, a spur of the Sulaimán Mountains, about six or seven kos in length, situated on the banks of the Gumal. They entered into the service of Muhabbat Khán Súr, Dáúd Sáhú-khail, to whom Sultán Bahlol had given in jágír the parganas of Hariána and Bahkála, etc., in the Panjáb, and they settled in the pargana of Bajwára."

"Sher Shah gave to many of his kindred who came from Roh money and property far exceeding their expectations." ... "To every pious Afghan who came into his presence from Afghanistan, Sher Shah used to give money to an amount exceeding his expectations, and he would say, 'This is your share of the kingdom of Hind, which has fallen into my hands, this is assigned to you, come every year to receive it.'" And to his own tribe and family of Sur, who dwelt in the land of Roh, he sent an annual stipend of money, in proportion to the members of his family and retainers; and during the period of his dominion no Afghan, whether in Hind or Roh was in want, but all became men of substance. It was the custom of the Afghans during the time of sultans Bahlul and Sikandar, and as long as the dominions of the Afghans lasted, that if any Afghan received a sum of money or a dress of honour, "that sum of money or dress of honour was regularly apportioned to him, and he received it every year". Sher Shah Suri too said, "It is incumbent upon kings to give grants to imams; for the prosperity and populousment of the cities of Hind are dependent on the imams and holy men... whoever wishes that God Almighty should make him great, should cherish Ulama and pious persons, that he may obtain honour in this world and felicity in the next."

"“…The nobles and chiefs said, ‘It seems expedient that the victorious standards should move towards the Dekhin’…Sher Shah replied: ‘What you have said is most right and proper, but it has come into my mind that since the time of Sultan Ibrahim, the infidel zamindars have rendered the country of Islam full of unbelievers, and having thrown down masjids and buildings of the believers, placed idol-shrines in them, and they are in possession of the country of Delhi and Malwa. Until I have cleansed the country from the existing contamination of the unbelievers, I will not go into any other country’…”"

"…Upon this, Sher Shah turned again towards Kalinjar… The Raja of Kalinjar, Kirat Sing, did not come out to meet him. So he ordered the fort to be invested, and threw up mounds against it, and in a short time the mounds rose so high that they overtopped the fort. The men who were in the streets and houses were exposed, and the Afghans shot them with their arrows and muskets from off the mounds. The cause of this tedious mode of capturing the fort was this. Among the women of Raja Kirat Sing was a Patar slave-girl, that is a dancing-girl. The king had heard exceeding praise of her, and he considered how to get possession of her, for he feared lest if he stormed the fort, the Raja Kirat Sing would certainly make a jauhar, and would burn the girl... “On Friday, the 9th of RabI’u-l awwal, 952 A.H., when one watch and two hours of the day was over, Sher Shah called for his breakfast, and ate with his ‘ulama and priests, without whom he never breakfasted. In the midst of breakfast, Shaikh NizAm said, ‘There is nothing equal to a religious war against the infidels. If you be slain you become a martyr, if you live you become a ghazi.’ When Sher Shah had finished eating his breakfast, he ordered Darya Khan to bring loaded shells, and went up to the top of a mound, and with his own hand shot off many arrows, and said, ‘Darya Khan comes not; he delays very long.’ But when they were at last brought, Sher Shah came down from the mound, and stood where they were placed. While the men were employed in discharging them, by the will of Allah Almighty, one shell full of gunpowder struck on the gate of the fort and broke, and came and fell where a great number of other shells were placed. Those which were loaded all began to explode. Shaikh Halil, Shaikh Nizam, and other learned men, and most of the others escaped and were not burnt, but they brought out Sher Shah partially burnt. A young princess who was standing by the rockets was burnt to death. When Sher Shah was carried into his tent, all his nobles assembled in darbAr; and he sent for ‘Isa Khan Hajib and Masnad Khan Kalkapur, the son-in-law of Isa Khan, and the paternal uncle of the author, to come into his tent, and ordered them to take the fort while he was yet alive. When ‘Isa Khan came out and told the chiefs that it was Sher Shah’s order that they should attack on every side and capture the fort, men came and swarmed out instantly on every side like ants and locusts; and by the time of afternoon prayers captured the fort, putting every one to the sword, and sending all the infidels to hell. About the hour of evening prayers, the intelligence of the victory reached Sher Shah, and marks of joy and pleasure appeared on his countenance. Raja Kirat Sing, with seventy men, remained in a house. Kutb Khan the whole night long watched the house in person lest the Raja should escape. Sher Shah said to his sons that none of his nobles need watch the house, so that the Raja escaped out of the house, and the labour and trouble of this long watching was lost. The next day at sunrise, however, they took the Raja alive…”"

"…Upon this, Sher Shah turned again towards Kalinjar… The Raja of Kalinjar, Kirat Sing, did not come out to meet him. So he ordered the fort to be invested, and threw up mounds against it, and in a short time the mounds rose so high that they overtopped the fort. The men who were in the streets and houses were exposed, and the Afghans shot them with their arrows and muskets from off the mounds. The cause of this tedious mode of capturing the fort was this. Among the women of Raja Kirat Sing was a Patar slave-girl, that is a dancing-girl. The king had heard exceeding praise of her, and he considered how to get possession of her, for he feared lest if he stormed the fort, the Raja Kirat Sing would certainly make a jauhar, and would burn the girl..."

"The king had heard exceeding praise of her, and he considered how to get possession of her, for he feared lest if he stormed the fort, the RAjA KIrat Sing would certainly make a jauhar, and would burn the girl..."

"It is an account of a journey undertaken in 1823 by ‘Ãzam Jãh Bahãdur “after he ascended the throne of the Carnatic as Nawwãb Wãlãjãh VI.” The author, Ghulãm ‘Abdul Qadir Nãzir, was his court scribe who accompanied the Nawwãb on this journey. Nãzir does not tell us that his patron was a Nawwãb only in name as he was living in Madras on British charity, his ancestral principality of Arcot having been ceded to the British in 1801. What he says instead is how the “Nawwãb” lost his temper when he learnt that the Muslims in his retinue were visiting the Hindu temples at Chidambaram and how he “gave strict orders” to British officers of the place “that no Muslim should be allowed to go over to the temple and enter it.” At a later stage, we are told that “the party marched forth… to the accompaniment of music provided by dancing girls of the Hindu cornmunity.” The account names numerous Sufis etc., who came to the districts of Chingleput, North Arcot, South Arcot, Tiruchirapalli and Thanjavur and established Muslim places of worship."

"It is said that in ancient days Trichila, an execrable monster with three heads, who was a brother of Rawan, with ten heads, had the sway over this country. No human being could oppose him. But as per the saying of the Prophet, ‘Islam will be elevated and cannot be subdued’, the Faith took root by the efforts of Hazarat Natthar Wali. The monster was slain and sent to the house of perdition. His image namely but-ling worshipped by the unbelievers was cut and the head was separated from the body. A portion of the body went into the ground. Over that spot is the tomb of the Wali, shedding rediance till this day."

"Shah Bheka when he was at Trichinopoly during the days of Rani Minachi, the unbelievers who did not like his stay there harassed him. One day when he was very much vexed, he got upon the bull in front of the temple, which the Hindus worship calling it swami, and made it move on by the power and strength of the Supreme Life Giver. They abandoned the temple and gave the entire place on the aruskalwa as present to the Shah."

"Qayim Shah… came here from Hindustan. He was the cause for the destruction of twelve temples. He lived to an old age and passed away on the 17th Safar AH 1193."

"Hazarat Nur Muhammad Qadiri was the most unique man regarded as an invaluable person of his age. Very often he was the cause of the ruin of temples. Some of these were laid waste. He selected his own burial ground in the vicinity of the temple. Although he lived five hundred years ago, people at large still remember his greatness."

"The British Raj in India has treated Savarkar’s book as most dangerous for their existence here. So it has been banned. But it has been read by millions of our countrymen including my humble self. In trying to elevate the events of 1857, which interested historians and administrators had not hesitated to call for decades as an ‘Indian Mutiny’, to its right pose of Indian War of Independence, albeit a foiled attempt at that, it is not a work of patriotic alchemist turning base mutineering into noble revolutionary action. Even in these days, what would the efforts of Subhas Bose’s Azad Hind Fouj be called if Savarkar’s alchemy had not intervened? True, both the 1857 and 1943 ‘wars’ have ended in failure for our country. But the motive behind—was it mere mutineering or War of Independence? If Savarkar had not intervened between 1857 and 1943, I am sure that the recent efforts of the Indian National Army would have been again dubbed as an ignoble mutiny effectively crushed by the valiant British-cum-Congress arms and armlessness. But thanks to Savarkar’s book, Indian sense of a ‘mutiny’ has been itself revolutionized. Not even Lord Wavell, I suppose can now call Bose’s efforts as a mutiny. The chief credit for the change of values must go to Savarkar, and to him alone. But the greatest value of Savarkar’s book lies in its gift to the nation of that Torch of Freedom in whose light a humble I and a thousand other Indians have our dear daughters named after Laxmi Bai, the Rani of Jhansi. Even Netaji Bose in a fateful hour had to form an army of corps after Rani of Jhansi. But for Savarkar’s discovery of that valiant heroine, Rani of Jhansi should have been a long-forgotten ‘mutineer’ of the nineteenth-century."