History Of India

"But the worst effect of partition has been that 1947 has tended to produce two historiographies based on territorial differentiation. Comparing the works of Ahmad Ali entitled Culture of Pakistan with Richard Symond's The Making of Pakistan (London, 1950) on the one hand and Humayun Kabir's Indian Heritage and Abid Hussain's National Culture of India on the other, W. Cantwell Smith says that the Pakistani historian 'flees from Indian-ness, and would extra-territorialize even Mohenjodaro (linking the Indus-valley civilisation with Sumer and Elam) as well as the Taj (yet though left in India, the monuments and buildings of Agra and Delhi are entirely outside the Indian tradition and are an essential heritage and part of Pakistani culture, - p.205), and omits from consideration altogether quite major matters less easily disposed of (such as Asoka's reign, and the whole of East Pakistan) The Indians 'on the other hand seek for the meaning of Muslim culture within the complex of Indian 'unity in diversity' as an integral component.'27 So, after 1947, besides the 'objective' and 'apologist', 'Secular' and 'Communal' versions, there are the Pakistani and Indian versions of medieval Indian history."

"“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....” Accordingly, “Twenty states and three Union Territories have started the work of evaluation according to guidelines prepared by the NCERT....”"

"By ‘established’ historians I mean self-proclaimed secular, progressive or left historians who have established an academic empire and try to stifle any voice of dissent or truth. At times, they obfuscate matters."

"Without weighty grounds, we must not push aside unanimous Indian tradition; else one practises scepticism, not criticism."

"Even more unexpected is the divorce of the Muslim part of the history of medieval India from the study of Islam as a religion and as a system of thought in its wider extra-Indian setting. Thus, the discussion of the posture of the sultans of Delhi and of the Mughal padshahs towards the Muslim religious establishment—of such questions as whether, for example, the Delhi sultanate was in any sense a theocracy or whether Akbar’s religious activities were unislamic, was kept isolated from a general consideration of the background of Islamic ideas on government as they had developed historically and from a consideration of the actual currents of religious thought and feeling in the Muslim community in Akbar’s time. In such a standard work as Vincent. Smith’s Akbar, The Great Mogol, no attempt is made to examine what constituted orthodoxy and unorthodoxy among Muslims of that time, or to describe the content of the religious controversies in which Akbar was involved in the light of developments in Muslim thinking outside India. It seemed to be assumed that Indian Islam was more Indian than Islamic and that it was proper to interpret the aspiration of Islam to be both a religious and a political order as in practice an aspiration merely to be a political order."

"It is perhaps impossible to sustain completely (on present evidence) the hypothesis that Muslim historical writing on medieval India is completely controlled by political considerations. It may be no mere coincidence, however, that works emphasizing the community of interests and the cultural intercourse of Hindus and Muslims tended to appear in the nineteen-twenties, that works emphasizing their polarity in religion and thought but suggesting that political co-operation had been and could be secured, tended to appear in the nineteen-thirties, and that works emphasi- zing theseparate political achievements and destiny of the Muslims in South. Asia tended to appear in the nineteen-forties, The situation of Aligarh today may also be not unconnected with the appearance there of Marxist interpretations of medieval history. It is interesting to speculate—for I can attempt no more—whether any of the attitudes of medieval Muslim historiography have been carried over into modern Muslim historiography on medieval India. There appears to be the same intense consciousness of Islam as the unique, vital, final way of life and thought. There is the same inarticulate premiss that the writing of history should justify the ways of Muslims to men. There is the same assumption that history is purposive, teleological; there is the same urge towards a universal schematic view of history. May not the personification of ‘the Muslim doctrine of equality and toleration’ or ‘the Quranic con- ception of God’ as ‘a revolutionary force of incalculable value for the attainment of human welfare’ and their treatment as final causes in history be the consciousness of the sovereignty of God in modern dress? The significant feature of Professor Habib’s Marxist interpretation of medieval Indian history is not that Marxism has absorbed Islam but that Islam has absorbed Marxism."

"Modern Muslim writing in English on medieval India is an expression of the Muslim urge in modern times either to accept terms from, or to come to terms with, or to impose terms upon, twenticth-century South Asia. With the possible exceptions of Ibn Hasan’s and Abdul Aziz’s work on the Mughals and Muhammad Bashir Ahmad’s work on the administration of justice in medieval India, interest in the past is not really academic. The practical intentions of the historians are underlined by their interest more in the similarity than in the dissimilarity between past and present; in the search for uniformity rather than for the diversity in the human past. ‘They tend to regard the past as valid and the interests of the people of the ppast as valid only in relation to the present. They award the ‘verdicts of History’. They tend to assume the existence of eternal entities in human history, of which events are but the expressions—such entities as nation, lass, autocracy, democracy, Hindu-Muslim antagonism, toleration and equality—regarding them almost as causative factors outside the historical process instead of as convenient linguistic descriptions of human behaviour. Tt may reasonably be alleged that, in practice, itis impossible to jump into the skins of other people of one’s own time, still less of time past; the his- torians under discussion do not, in general, appear to make that aim even their ideal, What matters is where the history of South Asia is proceeding. What matters is to write a significant abridgement of the past which can be thrown at the heads of one’s opponents, not an encyclopaedia of the past which cannot be thrown at anyone's head because itis so firmly and weightily anchored in its own milieu."

"Modern Muslim historiography on medieval India has been chiefly a form of Islamic apologetic, justifying the ways of medieval Muslims to the modern world and, in the process, commenting on the future of Muslims in South Asia as the authors see it. It will have been noticed that Muslim writing on medieval India tends to concentrate upon such figures as Akbar and Aurangzib and upon the period when Islam made its first political impact upon South Asia, There is an urge to discuss such questions as ‘whether Akbar stood for Hindu-Muslim unity, whether Aurangzib was a ‘communalist and if so whether he was governed by religious or political considerations and whether the Ghorid conquest of north India was ‘a good thing’ or ‘a bad thing’. There is too the desire, not always of course conscious, to establish that whatever Muslims did in medieval India was right if not in terms of religion then in terms of politics."

"Modern Muslim historiography on medieval India, in English, is in its methods and in its concepts clearly not sired by Muslim historiography in India before Sir Saiyid Ahmad Khan's day. It is a response to western thought, as mediated by the British, not a convolution within Muslim culture itself. It is imitative, not original. That is not, of course, to imply that the relation between western and modern Muslim historiography on medieval India is simply that of seal and wax impression, However, modern Muslim historical writing has taken over the idea that history is a form of critical inquiry into the past from evidence and not merely a repetition of testimony and authority. It assumes that the object of history is to answer questions about human actions performed in the past. It employs the academic critical apparatus of footnotes, appendices, bibliography, and is clearly a very sophisticated form of activity."

"In approaching Muslim historical writing on medieval Muslim India in the nineteen-twenties it must be remembered that Muslim historians were immigrants into an already settled colony. By 1925 Elphinstone, Elliot, and Dowson, Stanley Lane Poole, William Irvine, Henry Beveridge, Wolseley Haig, Vincent Smith, and W. H. Moreland among the British, and Sir Jadunath Sarkar, Ishwari Prasad, and C. Vaidya among the Hindus, had mapped out the territory and staked their claims. Either the Muslims had to challenge the whole land settlement or be content to prospect in the interstices of existing homesteads; whichever course they chose to adopt they were obliged to adapt their behaviour and modify their attitudes in relation to the existing settlers. Moreover, since they had been taught to use the same tools as those earlier settlers their own economy tended almost inescapably to conform with or to complement that which they found in being. That is not to say that Muslim historians of the nineteen-twenties and later did not challenge existing conceptions of medieval Indian history; they did, but often by merely asserting their opposites. They proposed to correct optical illusions about medieval India by prescribing different pairs of spectacles, not by advising therapeutic methods which would change the capacity of the eyes themselves."

"There may, however, be other supplementary explanations of the neglect of medieval Muslim history in South Asia. It was not expedient soon after the banishment of Bahadur Shah and the destruction of the last vestiges of Mughal culture at Delhi and at a time when it was hoped to conciliate the British politically, to remind the world of the power which Muslims had once enjoyed in South Asia and to provoke fears that the loss of this power was so much regretted that the Muslims must always be fundamentally disloyal. In any event, for those who had lived through the sack of Delhi and the repression of the Muslim aristocracy thereafter, it was perhaps too painful to study a South Asia in which Muslims had been all-powerful. Furthermore, it must be remembered that Sir Saiyid Ahmad and the Aligarh school were, as some of their descendants still are, resolutely non communal in politics. To study the history of medieval India, particularly with the methods of history dominant in historical writing on South Asia in the late nineteenth century, with its literal reliance on ‘authorities’, could only have resulted in antagonism between Hindus, whose pusillanimous ancestors were, in medieval Muslim histories, usually being sent to hell, and Muslims whose virile ancestors were always doing the despatching. Sir Saiyid and the Aligarh school were educationists not politicians; they conceived the differences between Hindu and Muslim as of the same order as those between Catholic and Protestant in nineteenth-century England; nothing should be said to prevent the growth of a sense of nationhood transcending religious differences. Finally, it is possible that the balance of the history curriculum at Aligarh, with its emphasis upon English and European history, was tilted against the study of medieval Muslim history. Nor, one suspects, was this tilting of the balance regretted at Aligarh in the period before 1914. Only in the study of western history and of the western approach to history could Muslims discover and understand the new world pressing in upon them. In sum then, the interests of the western-influenced Muslim intelligentsia in South Asia before the nineteen-twenties were more Islamic than Indian and more religious than historical. �"

"The significant feature of Professor Habib’s Marxist interpretation of medieval Indian history is not that Marxism has absorbed Islam but that Islam has absorbed Marxism."

"Historical science runs into such problems in India as the researchers of the ancient history of other countries and peoples can- not even conceive of."

"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. ... 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”."

"The whole tenor of this tendentious scheme for "national integration" becomes fully explicit in the following fiat from the Ministry of Education: “Characterisation of the medieval period as a dark period or as a time of conflict between Hindus and Muslims is forbidden. Historians cannot identify Muslims as rulers and Hindus as subjects. The state cannot be described as a theocracy, without examining the actual influence of religion. No exaggeration of the role of religion in political conflicts is permitted… Nor should there be neglect and omission of trends and processes of assimilation and synthesis.” [...] The only way which this ruling sees out of what it calls “the communal strife” is that Hindu history should be substantially diluted and tailored to the needs of Islamic imperialism, and that Muslim history should be given a liberal coat of whitewash or even made to pass muster as national history. This has been the main plank in the platform for “national integration”. Hitherto this Experiment with Untruth was confined mainly to Muslim and Communist “historians” who have come to control the Indian History Congress, the Indian Council of Historical Research, and even the University Grants Commission. Now it has been taken up by the National Integration Council. The Ministry of Education of the Government of India has directed the education departments in the States to extend this experiment to school-level text-books of history. And this perverse programme of suppressing truth and spreading falsehood is being sponsored by a state which inscribes Satyameva Jayate on its emblem. ... But that is about all that can be said in commendation of the scheme sanctioned by the National Integration Council and sponsored by the Ministry of Education. The rest is recommendations for telling lies to our children, or for not telling to them the truth at all."

"With regard to the problem of communalism whether it be Hindu- Muslim, Vaishnava-Saiva or Shia-Sunni it may be assumed that the people of India have come of age. If that is so the historians of India should neither look for forces of communal synthesis nor for those of conflict; they should just look for facts as they unfold themselves in the historical process. If they only look for facts supporting synthesis they may be good nationalists but they would at the same time be inverted communalists. Let history be our psychoanalyst. Once we are able to accept ourselves for what we are we will be able to give the right direction to our present and future. … A historian’s commitment to history must remain untouched by his loyalties, political, religious or others."

"In the late Sixties and early Seventies, historical research got entangled in the larger politics of the state in which the Congress under Indira Gandhi and the Communist Party of India found themselves on the same wave length. The establishment of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) in 1969 under the chairmanship of Prof. R. S. Sharma was largely the result of this politics. Besides being an eminent scholar, Prof. Sharma's sympathy for the Left ideology in general and for the CPI in particular was well-known. His close association with the then Education Minister and CPI sympathiser, Nurul Hasan, was common knowledge. During his chairmanship, there were allegations from many historians that ICHR was being used for propagating history from a Marxist standpoint. The nexus between ICHR and NCERT was also mentioned in the same vein. [….] During the Emergency, people watched with dismay the camaraderie between the Congress and the CPI and in that context the role played by the Left historians was not overlooked. [….] At the micro- level, it was the Left-oriented historians versus the rest. [….] The battle apparently looked like one between ‘secular’ and `communal’ historians but behind the facade was the realpolitik of the Congress and the CPI, on the one hand, and the Janata bandwagon, on the other."

"‘A breed of cerebral czars’ [has ensconced themselves in positions of control] ‘individuals with whom certain institutions have become far too incestuously associated, who not only have the power to hand out tenures but also to send their followers abroad through several new fellowships’... ‘Academic feudalism,’ says a lecturer at JNU, ‘is so acute in History because there are so many opportunities now.’ Academic feudalism – that is, the relations that develop between an influential professor and his protégés – takes many forms. ... Sometimes, the feudal lord treats his followers as ideological allies to further the cause of liberalism or Marxism-Leninism on committees and in the university generally. And sometimes academic feudalism manifests itself as a power-sharing arrangement between a particular teacher and his students to keep ‘outsiders’ out of the staff room. ... In JNU, an eminent nationalist historian, Professor Bipan Chandra, was so well known for placing his students in departmental posts that others did not even bother to apply if they did not have his support. Tripta Wahi, convenor of the Delhi University Teachers’ Association (DUTA) and lecturer at Hindu College, DU, says that the appointments made by the senior historian could not be challenged by anyone because of his reputation. ‘Yet the people he has placed in my college are totally mediocre. In fact they are third divisioners whose only claim to fame is that they do not teach any school of History which is at variance with their teacher.’ …Academic feudalism is often the result of doctrinal strife which sometimes spills over into bitter personal animosities … Consequently, a student of DU complains, ‘We have to be very careful. If a post-modernist tutor thinks our work is too traditional he may not recommend us for a scholarship abroad. But if we happen to fall under the supervision of an old-fashioned Leftist who thinks us too post-modernist, he may give us a bad mark…’"

"One of the main purposes of history books, as taught in different countries in the world, is to instill a sense of national pride and honor —in short, to inculcate a sense of patriotism and nationalism. Whether it is the United States, Great Britain, Russia, Germany or China, this is certainly the case today and has been so as long as these countries have existed as modern nations... However, India is a strange and unique country in which history books are often anti-national in nature. India has largely kept intact the British approach to Indian history devised in the colonial era. Students of such textbooks come away apologetic or confused about their country and its traditions. Textbooks in Marxist ruled states of India like West Bengal and Kerala leave their students with a sense of the greatness of Communism... History books in India try to ignore the dominant Hindu ethos of the country and its history before the Islamic period... The real danger in India is not the arising of a chauvinistic nationalism like that of Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy...but a lack of national spirit and historical consciousness that keeps people alienated from their roots and the country divided."

"The facts concerning the persecution of Hindus in the pre-modern age were a matter of consensus until recently. For contemporary political reasons, the Congress movement under Mahatma Gandhi and especially under Jawaharlal Nehru thought it opportune to minimize or deny this painful history. They invented a history of Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai totally at variance with the information given in the primary sources. The job of rewriting history in this sense was subsequently taken up in right earnest by the post-independence generation of vocal Marxist scholars, who gained firm control of the guiding history institutions under Indira Gandhi. For those unfamiliar with modern Indian history: the Marxists, already pushy for acquiring as much power in the institutions as they could grab, were handed a near-monopoly on institutional power in India's academic and educational sector by Indira Gandhi ca. 1970. Involved in an intra-Congress power struggle, she needed the help of the Left. Her confidants P.N. Haksar and Nurul Hasan packed the institutions with Marxists, card-carrying or otherwise. When, during the Emergency dictatorship (1975-77), her Communist Party allies threatened to become too powerful, she and her son Sanjay removed them from key political positions but, in a typical instance of politicians' short-sightedness, they left the Marxists' hold on the cultural sector intact. ...After coming to power in 1998, the BJP-dominated government has made a half-hearted and not always very competent attempt to effect glasnost (openness, transparency) at least in the history textbooks. They ordered the writing of new history textbooks for the schools. This led the Marxists to start a furious hate campaign against the so-called "saffronization" (hinduization) of history... Since some ignorant dupes of these Marxists denounce as "McCarthyist" anyone who points out their ideological inspiration, it deserves to be emphasized that "eminent historians" like Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma and Irfan Habib are certified as Marxists in standard Marxist sources like Tom Bottomore's Dictionary of Marxist Thought . During the official historians' Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute in 1991, the pro-mosque team's argumentation and several other anti-temple pamphlets were published by the People's Publishing House, a Communist Party outfit. One of the recent textbook innovations most furiously denounced as "saffronization" was the truism that Lenin's armed seizing of power in October/November 1917 was a "coup d'état". And in early 2003, while they were unchaining all their devils against glasnost , the Marxists ruling West Bengal deleted from a textbook a passage in which Mahatma Gandhi's biographer Louis Fischer called Stalin "at least as ruthless as Hitler". Such are the true concerns of the "secularists" warning the world against the attempts at glasnost in India's national history curriculum. History falsification comes in different forms and has concentric lines of defence and attack. At the time of unlimited "secularist" self-confidence and belligerence, this went as far as to deny that any Islamic persecution or oppression of Hindus had taken place. When that proved untenable, it was claimed that intolerance had admittedly existed but that it had been unrelated to Islam, that it was a general phenomenon typical of the medieval period."

"What the BJP government claims to offer, what all scholarly historians want, and what is loathed by the Marxists who have dominated the cultural and educational establishment since decades, is glasnost: openness, an end to the dead hand of Marxist dogma in Indian history-writing. However, it is quite wrong to say that the Sangh Parivar takes this job "very seriously". It took three years before relieving leading Marxists of their influential positions (Prasar Bharati, NCERT, IHC). Most of its new nominees were not up to the job, some because of ill-health (e.g. K.S. Lal and B.R. Grover, both now deceased), some because they had never functioned in an academic setting. It should not be forgotten that for decades, at least since ca. 1970 when the Marxists led by P.N. Haksar and Nurul Hasan were given a lot of effective power in this sector in return for their support to Indira Gandhi, distinctly non-Marxist young historians found their access to an academic career blocked by the Marxist hegemons. Of the new textbooks, some are impeccable and are welcomed as undeniable improvements, e.g. Meenakshi Jain's presentation of the Muslim period, arguably the most sensitive and controversial part of the series. Some of the others, by contrast, have been criticized or ridiculed even by fair-minded observers."

"But the negationists are not satisfied with seeing their own version of the facts being repeated in more and more books and papers. They also want to prevent other versions from reaching the public. Therefore, in 1982 the National Council of Educational Research and Training issued a directive for the rewriting of schoolbooks. Among other things, it stipulated that: "Characterization of the medieval period as a time of conflict between Hindus and Muslims is forbidden." Under Marxist pressure, negationism has become India's official policy. (...) India has its own full-fledged brand of negationism: a movement to deny the large-scale and long-term crimes against humanity committed by Islam. This movement is led by Islamic apologists and Marxist academics, and followed by all the politicians, journalists and intellectuals who call themselves secularists. In contrast to the European negationism regarding the Nazi acts of genocide, but similar to the Turkish negationism regarding the Armenian genocide, the Indian negationism regarding the terrible record of Islam is fully supported by the establishment. It has nearly full control of the media and dictates all state and government parlance concerning the communal problem (more properly to be called the Islam problem)."

"For her class of people, a “professional historian” is a historian with academic status. They are very status-conscious and constantly pull rank, especially when faced with informed arguments. For a scholar, this is weak, but for sophomores, it is uppermost in their minds: climbing the status ladder. When you know the academic circles, you become far less inclined to be over-awed by academic status: many professors have obvious ideological prejudices and bend their findings to suit their presuppositions. Moreover, in many countries to some extent, and certainly in India, scholars in the humanities are selected for ideological conformity with the dominant school. After nearly half a century, this has led to a situation where a post of “eminence” is simply equivalent with ideological conformity, at least passively (not raising your head), often actively (furthering the dominant paradigm)."

"Most importantly, for the ancient period, Indian Marxist and other anti-Hindu historians posit a massive conflict (between Aryan invaders and natives) in spite of the total absence of either textual or archaeological evidence for such conflict; while for the medieval period, they wax eloquent about an idyllic “composite culture” and deny a massive conflict spanning centuries (viz. between Muslim invaders and Hindu natives), against the copiously available evidence for this conflict, both textual and archaeological. This observation is entirely correct: both ancient and medieval history have been rewritten in the sense of belittling and blackening Hindu civilization and extolling its enemies."

"For those unfamiliar with modern Indian history: the Marxists, already pushy for acquiring as much power in the institutions as they could grab, were handed a near-monopoly on institutional power in India's academic and educational sector by Indira Gandhi ca. 1970. Involved in an intra-Congress power struggle, she needed the help of the Left. Her confidants P.N. Haksar and Nurul Hasan packed the institutions with Marxists, card-carrying or otherwise. When, during the Emergency dictatorship (1975-77), her Communist Party allies threatened to become too powerful, she and her son Sanjay removed them from key political positions but, in a typical instance of politicians' short-sightedness, they left the Marxists? hold on the cultural sector intact. In the good old Soviet tradition, they at once set out to falsify history and propagate their own version through the official textbooks. After coming to power in 1998, the BJP-dominated government has made a half-hearted and not always very competent attempt to effect glasnost (openness, transparency) at least in the history textbooks. This led the Marxists to start a furious hate campaign against the so-called 'saffronization' of history."

"The medieval period of Indian history has been a source of propaganda for historians with ideological predilections. .... But the tradition of tailoring and embroidering the past for influencing the course of future developments did not die with the departure of the British. The burden of carrying forward this admittedly unscientific historiography has now been enthusiastically assumed by their Marxist prototypes. Being victims of ideological myopia, the Marxist historians of India have cared to see only that aspect of reality which falls within the range of their narrow vision. Those aspects of reality which fall beyond it have been either left unexplained or treated merely as an extension of that which they have perceived and, therefore, utterly unworthy of their serious attention."

"Many of those who read history at Delhi in the mid-1970s and later, still bear the ugly scars inflicted by the thought police of sarkari Marxism. 'There are two interpretations of history', a leading representative of the Red Cretin Brigade used to inform his students casually, 'the bourgeois interpretation and the Marxist interpretation, and the Marxist interpretation is the correct one.' ...Whereas the British Marxists established their reputation by crafting their radical concerns their Indian counterparts took cheeky short cuts. it may also explain why substantive research on Indian history has increasingly become the prerogative of British, and a few American and Australian universities. The presiding deities of Indian historiography have meanwhile devoted themselves to writing politically correct text books that present history as chapters of received wisdom. They have also drafted resolutions for the Indian History Congress and written articles in the press on the Ayodhya issue."

"India is the guru of the nations, the physician of the human soul in its profounder maladies; she is destined once more to remould the life of the world and restore the peace of the human spirit. But Swaraj is the necessary condition of her work and before she can do the work , she must fulfil the condition."

"The four-fold ramification of the Swadeshi movement industrial, educational, cultural and political—and its spread all over India unnerved the Government of India. It was not long before they realized that a local movement for removing a local grievance was being slowly, but steadily, developed into an all-India national movement against British rule. Lord Minto found it difficult to kill the hydra-headed monster let out of the basket of his predecessor. Lord Curzon."

"At this time our nation is in a bad state in regards education and wealth, but God has given us the light of religion and the Quran is present for our guidance, which has ordained them and us to be friends. Now God has made them rulers over us. Therefore we should cultivate friendship with them, and should adopt that method by which their rule may remain permanent and firm in India, and may not pass into the hands of the Bengalis... If we join the political movement of the Bengalis our nation will reap a loss, for we do not want to become subjects of the Hindus instead of the subjects of the "people of the Book...""

"There are many evils in this country. The only remedy for every one of them is freedom for the nation."

"The Gita which had been subjected to sectarian interpretations for several centuries past, was rescued by Bankim Chandra from the quagmire of casuistry... In days to come, the Gita was to become the greatest single inspiration for revolutionary action. Many a freedom fighter mounted the gallows with the Gita in his hands and Bankim Chandra’s Vande Mãtaram on his lips."

"The tale contains an institutional warning also: for this is not the first time that the project to write the history of the freedom movement has been hijacked, and eventually derailed. In the Introduction and Appendix to his three-volume History of the Freedom Movement in India, Dr R.C. Majumdar recorded what happened to the original project – how at his instance the Indian Historical Records Commission passed a resolution in February 1948 that a history of the country’s struggle for freedom ought to be prepared;... how the first volume was prepared;... how the government.. alleged that there had been some differences in the Board about the content of the first volume which had been circulated; how suddenly the Board was dissolved; and the project handed over to a previous secretary of the education ministry; how some of the members become turncoats. The result? Mediocre volumes which no one reads, volumes which further what was then the official line… By contrast the British produced their version …. There was the Indian side to the events. This was available at the time in the recollections of those who had led the movement against the British – for many of them were still alive; it was available in their private papers. The Towards Freedom Project was to garner this record. As control over institutions passed to the Leftists, the entire project was yoked to advancing their line and theses."

"No one would die of starvation in independent India. Its grain would not be exported. Cloth would not be imported by it. Its leaders would neither use a foreign language nor rule from a remote place 7,000 feet above sea level. Its military expenditure would not be heavy. Its army would not subjugate its own people or other lands. Its best-paid officials would not earn a great deal more than its lowest-paid servants. And finding justice in it would be neither costly nor difficult."

"The official history of the freedom movement starts with the premises that India lost indendence only in the eighteenth century and had thus an experience of subjection to a foreign power for only two centuries. Real history, on the other hand, teaches us that the major part of India lost independence about five centuries before, and merely changed masters in the eighteenth century."

"Swaraj is my birthright, and I shall have it!"

"Uncompromising opposition to Gandhi and his cherished Hindu convictions meant that communists were cut off in a considerable measure from the mainstream of the patriotic struggle."

"These rulers were often men of ability, and their followers were gifted with fierce courage and industry; only so can we understand how they could have maintained their rule among a hostile people so overwhelmingly outnumbering them. All of them were armed with a religion militaristic in operation, but far superior in its stoical monotheism to any of the popular cults of India; they concealed its attractiveness by making the public exercise of the Hindu religions illegal, and thereby driving them more deeply into the Hindu soul. Some of these thirsty despots had culture as well as ability; they patronized the arts, and engaged artists and artisans—usually of Hindu origin—to build for them magnificent mosques and tombs; some of them were scholars, and delighted in converse with historians, poets and scientists."

"The book was written by Shykh Zeenu’d-Din, a Muslim theologian who lived in the reign of Ali I Adil Shah (1557-1580 CE) of Bijapur. His aim was “the arousing of the faithful to engage in holy warfare against the worshippers of crucifixes [Portuguese Christians]” who were engaged in “infamous machinations against the religion of Islamism” in Malabar."

"‘Further, the Imam-Ahmud (on whom be peace!) has related on the authority of Al-Mikdad that he heard the Prophet (for ever blessed) to exclaim: “There shall not remain a dwelling in the city, or on the plain, on which Allah shall not cause to descend the word of Islamism, which shall dignify him [who is] already righteous, and condemn him who lives in sin, to the salvation of the one, and the everlasting ruin of the other.” For those whom “Allah would exalt, will he make of the number of true believers, whilst, those whose destruction has been predetermined, shall seal it by rejecting this holy faith, which indeed,” said I, “has Allah for its author and its end.” Now be it known, that Allah most high bath willed, that the faith of Islamism should flourish throughout the chief of the inhabited regions of the earth; in some countries making the sword and compulsion the means of its dissemination, in others preaching and exhortation…’"

"The Census of India Report of 1901 says that “the tyrannical Murshid Kuli Khan enforced a law that any Amal, or Zamindar, failing to pay the revenue that was due… should, with his wife and children, be compelled to become Muhammadans”, but the practice was much older as vouched by the Banshasmriti."

"“While the Muhammadan population was still scattered, it was customary for each householder to hang an earthen water-pot (badana) from his thatched roof, as a sign of his religious belief. One day a Maulvi, after some years’ absence, went to visit a disciple, who lived in the centre of a Hindu village, but could not find the ‘badana’. On enquiry he was told that the Musalman villager had renounced his faith and joined an outcaste tribe. On his return to the city, the circumstances being reported to the Nawab, a detachment of troops was ordered out, the village surrounded, and every person in it compelled to become Muhammadan.”"

"Of course, we had to stop advancing during the Mohammedan tyranny, for then it was not a question of progress but of life and death."

"The year A.D. 1000 was a fateful year for India. In that year, Mahmud of Ghazni first invaded it. That event, in my opinion, divides Ancient from Medieval India."

"India south of the Vindhyas was under Hindu rule in the 13th century. Even in North India during the same century, there were powerful kingdoms not yet subjected to Muslim rule, or still fighting for their independence… Even in that part of India which acknowledged the Muslim rule, there was continual defiance and heroic resistance by large or small bands of Hindus in many quarters, so that successive Muslim rulers had to send well-equipped military expeditions, again and again, against the same region… As a matter of fact, the Muslim authority in Northern India, throughout the 13th century, was tantamount to a military occupation of a large number of important centres without any effective occupation, far less a systematic administration of the country at large. .... The Khalji empire rose and fell during the brief period of twenty years (A.D 1300-1320). The empire of Muhammed bin Tughlaq… broke up within a decade of his accession (A.D. 1325), and before another decade was over, the Turkish empire passed away for ever… Thus barring two every short-lived empires under the Khaljis and Muhammad bin Tughlaq… there was no Turkish empire in India. This state of things continued for nearly two centuries and a half till the Mughals established a stable and durable empire in the second half of the sixteenth century A.D."

"Judged by a similar standard, the patronage and cultivation of Hindu learning by the Muslims, or their contribution to the development of Hindu culture during their rule . . . pales into insignificance when compared with the achievements of the British rule... It is only by instituting such comparison that we can make an objective study of the condition of the Hindus under Muslim rule, and view it in its true perspective."

"And yet some writers delude themselves with the mistaken belief that they can change their country's history by distorting it, or brain-wash generations of young students, or humour fundamentalist politicians through such unethical exercise. To judge what happened in the past in the context of today's cultural milieu and consciously hide the truth, is playing politics with history. Let history be accepted as a matter of fact without putting it to any subjective interpretations. Yesterday's villains cannot be made today's heroes, or, inversely, yesterday's Islamic heroes cannot be made into robbers ransacking temples just for treasures. Nor can the medieval monuments be declared as national monuments as suggested in some naive 'secularist' quarters. They represent vandalism. No true Indian can be proud of such desecrated and indecorous evidence of 'composite culture'. 'History,' says Froude, 'does teach that right and wrong are real distinctions. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of humanity.' It is nobody's business to change this moral law and prove the wrongs of the medieval period to be right today by having recourse to misrepresentation of history. Manipulation in the writing of medieval Indian history by some modern writers is the worst legacy of Muslim rule in India."

"Marxist history also lays claim to be counted as objective history. The phrase ‘objective history’ is very attractive, but sometimes under this appellation, all shadows are removed and medieval times are painted in such bright colours by Marxist historians as to shame even the modern age. At others, modern ideas of class-conflict, labour-exploitation and all that goes with it, and many other modern phenomena and problems are projected backwards to fit in the medieval social structure. The word ‘religion’ is tried to be eschewed because it is thought to be associated with bitter memories. If the medieval chronicler cries out ‘Jihad’, it is just not heard: but if he cries aloud persistently, it is claimed that he never meant it. The Marxists or leftists read into history what they think history should be. All this makes the content of Marxist history dubious, needing it to be buttressed by brochures, statements and booklets under a number of signatures. Often, Marxist writers work in groups, mutually admiring each other’s discoveries."

"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."

"Early in the seventeenth century, Muhammad Sharif Hanafi, the author of Majalis-us-Salatin (composed C.E.1628) and a much travelled man, carried the same impression about the Southern region of the country. Writing about Carnatic he says: “All the people… are idolaters. There is not a single Musalman. Occasionally a Musalman may visit the country deputed by Nizam Shah, Adil Shah or Kutb Shah, but the natives are all infidels.”"