BJP’s History Purge Overlooks The Rich Muslim Heritage

By Moin Qazi, New Age Islam 23 October 2023 The Tinctured Canvas Of India’s Rich Diversity: The Erosion Of India’s Secular Fabric ----- The Most Effective Way To Destroy People Is To Deny And Obliterate Their Own Understanding Of Their History. — George Orwell The Taj Mahal is one of India's most iconic sites. But this year, millions of students across India won't delve into the Mughal Empire that constructed it. Instead, Indian students have new textbooks that have been purged of details on the nation's Muslim history, its caste discrimination and more, in what critics say warps the country's rich history in an attempt to further Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist agenda. When Indian children began the school year this week, students in thousands of classrooms were issued new textbooks on history and politics that either watered down or purged key details from India's past that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling party finds inconvenient to its Hindu nationalist vision for the country. The Indian government has been accused of rewriting history to fit its Hindu nationalist agenda after school textbooks were edited to remove references to Mahatma Gandhi's opposition to Hindu nationalism, as well as mention of a controversial religious riot in which the prime minister, Narendra Modi, was implicated. India's recent textbook purges show a similar disregard for history and facts, with the government seeking to alter how it was traditionally taught and cherry-pick what it wants students to learn — and what it wants to ignore. On top of the demonisation agenda is the Mughals. a dynasty that ruled parts of northern and central India during its heyday from about 1560 to 1720 Despite removing the 1400-year-long Muslim rule from textbooks, it will be impossible to destroy the forts, palaces, and cities built by the Muslims and, of course, their contribution to Indian arts, music, and cuisine. And, of course, the administrative structure to manage the massive Mughal Empire has changed very little since it and is still used today. If Indians want to document the history or censor sections of history texts, it should not be done with the sledgehammer approach as has been done. Among the essential contents removed are chapters on the history of the Mughals, the Muslim rulers who controlled much of India between the 16th and 19th centuries. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has pursued a Hindu nationalist agenda that has moved India away from its secular foundations, has been open about its desire to rewrite the country's history and break away from what it describes as the "slave mentality" of colonial oppressors. Historically the Muslims were pioneers in developing several branches of mathematics in South Asia and India’s most iconic landmark, the Taj Mahal, is a testament to their architectural prowess. In a time when we should be trying to build bridges between the West and Islam to address suspicions and misunderstandings, the Indian government’s behaviour hinders the process. The democratic world needs Modi to showcase awareness and a strong sense of empathy. The American essayist Edward Abbey once said: “A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.” If Modi does not change his ways, India will need to look for such a faithful patriot. Among the deleted passages from 12th-grade history and politics texts, Gandhi's "steadfast pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity provoked Hindu extremists so much that they made several attempts to assassinate" him. Gandhi "was particularly disliked by those who wanted India to become a country for the Hindus, just as Pakistan was for Muslims." "Instances, like in Gujarat, alert us to the dangers of using religious sentiments for political purposes. This poses a threat to democratic politics." Textbook Wars A key piece of the BJP’s agenda involves twisting history to demonize Muslims, and Hindu nationalists often zero in on the Mughals. Chief among Hindu nationalist disinformation about the Mughals is that these kings fuelled Hindu-Muslim conflict, a phenomenon that largely developed during British colonial rule (1757–1947). By vilifying earlier Indian kings, the British deflected attention from their exploitative and harmful colonial enterprise. Contemporary Hindu nationalists follow British colonial ideas regarding Indian history—but they go further in attacking the Mughals. Sometimes Hindu nationalists falsely accuse the Mughals of committing genocide. Other times they falsely malign the Mughals as colonialists, which depicts them—and by extension all Muslims today—as a foreign threat to India. Hindu nationalists have in turn attacked the Taj Mahal as a Mughal-built monument, omitting it from tourist booklets and promoting the conspiracy theory that it used to be a Shiva Temple. They have removed parts of Mughal history from school textbooks. This renders many Indian children ignorant of key parts of their history, including that the Mughals built a multicultural empire, patronized Hindu and Muslim religious groups, and relied on Hindu elites known as Rajputs to rule. Purging Brings A New History Having gained political ascendancy, Hindutva Bhakts are trying to bend historical, archaeological and linguistic evidence to their will by appointing people to committees and academic positions based on their political orientation, irrespective of their qualifications. This process is damaging institutions of higher learning and eventually corrupting the history and science taught in schools across the nation in an attempt to raise a generation imbued with their ideology. However, before that indoctrination can proceed full-steam, the BJP must comprehensively counter the established account of India’s history, which places the roots of Sanskrit and Vedic civilization outside India’s borders. The governing party's leaders have also tried to minimize the founding fathers' arguments for why India's diversity could survive only under a secular umbrella, co-opting the legacy of many lay leaders as they push to remake India into a Hindu-first nation. The purge of books on Indian Muslims and the vandalisation of monuments are also part of a broader campaign to undermine the community and its rich history. The Taj Mahal is an iconic 17th-century mausoleum built by another Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan, but Modi's deputies frequently disparage it in remarks. The obliteration of India's Islamic history and culture is also reflected in rewriting school textbooks in provinces ruled by the BJP. Mughal rulers such as Akbar and Shah Jahan, who embellished India's cultural legacy, are being reintroduced in academia as debauched, villainous invaders who robbed India of its Hindu heritage. The cuts are wide-ranging. Chapters on the country's historic Islamic rulers are either slimmed down or gone; an entire chapter in the 12th-grade history textbook, "Kings and Chronicles: The Mughal Courts," was deleted. The books omit references to the 2002 riots in the Indian state of Gujarat, where hundreds of Indian Muslims were killed while Modi was the state's leader. Details on India's caste system, caste discrimination and minority communities are missing. The infamous book, 'The History of India', as 'Told by Its Historians', has done the most incredible damage to Muslim history authored by Elliot and Dawson. There was a time when this book was widely prescribed in schools and colleges. A casual glance at a few pages would reveal the authors' determined effort to poison readers' minds against Muslim rulers. The authors, keen to contrast what they understood as the justice and efficiency of British rule with the so-called cruelty and despotism of the Muslim rulers who had preceded that rule, were anything but sympathetic to the "Muhammadan" period of Indian history. Today's politics in India's history textbooks promote communal strife by creating a historical consciousness that gives pride of place to religion and proposes a narrative that traces back community identities and antagonisms and legitimizes their existence. Several new studies from Western scholarship also show that the Mughals were pluralists and catholic in their outlook and policies. A Time To Heal The present government's interest in this historical course correction is not new. There has always been a school of thought ideologically opposed to the conventional understanding of how medieval kings ruled. Followers of this school of thought question the sources suggesting that medieval Muslim kings and royals often struck alliances with their Hindu counterparts. Textbooks have been quietly edited to remove meaningful chunks of history from India's Mughal era, including the achievements of that Muslim dynasty, even though their legacy lives on in iconic architecture, cultural traditions, and so much more. References to independent India's first education minister, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad — a senior figure in the country's struggle for freedom from British rule, a close comrade of Mahatma Gandhi and a beacon of Hindu-Muslim unity — have also been purged. Yet the intelligentsia in India has barely registered even a whimper of protest over this brazen bulldozing of history. This is no less than lying to students. It hurts academic scholarship and access to the most basic facts for future generations. The medieval historical period is such a crucial era of India's past — one when the country's economy might have reached its peak, among other achievements — and excluding it from the curriculum would amount to gross intellectual dishonesty. Historical narratives are always open to alternate views, revision, debate and healthy discussion, but omitting facts is an unacademic approach. Perhaps more than the harm to historical academic scholarship, these deletions can be conceived as a message to Indian minorities. By obliterating essential parts of India's Muslim past from textbooks, the government seems to give in to those who believe that the country's history and future belong only to Hindus. Akbar’s Unique Experiences According to Audrey Truschke, a Mellon post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University, much of the current religious conflict in India has been fuelled by ideological assumptions about that period rather than an accurate rendering of the subcontinent’s history. In her book, ‘Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court’, Truschke says that the heyday of Muslim rule in India from the 16th to 18th centuries was, in fact, one of “tremendous cross-cultural respect and fertilization,” not religious or cultural conflict. A leading scholar of South Asian cultural and intellectual history, Truschke argues that this more divisive interpretation developed during the colonial period from 1757 to 1947. “The British benefited from pitting Hindus and Muslims against one another and portrayed themselves as neutral saviours who could keep ancient religious conflicts at bay,” she says. “While colonialism ended in the 1940s, the modern Hindu right has found tremendous political value in continuing to proclaim and create endemic Hindu-Muslim conflict. “Meanwhile, it is a welcome development that the Supreme Court has ended the name-changing spree of cities and their streets. While dismissing a petition which sought directions to restore the names of places changed by "foreign barbaric invaders", the Supreme Court said, "A country cannot remain a prisoner of the past". Biased Historians The tragedy, however, is that historians have not documented the entire history without bias. These historians were motivated by resentment against Muslims and were more loyal to their ideology than facts. Zealot rulers patronized them. Several ideology-minded scholars, even among intellectuals, courted the rulers by destroying and dismantling anything Islamic. So much so that chauvinists appropriated Islamic architecture and Hindu ideologies. In several cases, the rulers actively patronized the rewriting of history to suit their ideology. The most significant challenge for authentic historians is to resurrect Islamic heritage and purge them of alien accretions. One brave and passionate historian who has taken upon this audacious task is Syed Ubaidur Rahman, whose zeal and passion for this mission are admirable. Rahman has culled a vast corpus of unique insights from the humongous mountain of history and condensed them in such an incredible style that the book's conciseness keeps the reader engrossed and helps him understand medieval history in its proper perspective. Hindu nationalist ideologues still periodically subject Indian Muslims to loyalty tests. As the great British statesman James Baldwin writes in Notes of a Native Son: "People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them." A reappraisal of history can alone put the record straight and clear the misconceptions created by partisan historians, in whose works fantasy, conjecture and stereotypes have replaced fact and reality. Or else we will confirm the fears of the great thinker, Walter Benjamin: "The victors write history." The paradox underlying this puzzle has been written with rare clarity in the dedication template of Bhagwan S Gidwani, author of 'The Sword of Tipu Sultan', who devoted 13 years to part-time research on his book in the archives of half a dozen countries for writing his novel. It reads: "To the country which lacks a historian; to men whom history owes rehabilitation." Efforts are afoot to rewrite the Indian history of the recent past. Muslims need to make conscious efforts to preserve their account. It is not an easy job and requires resources and determination. Muslim organizations must take the lead or support those filling the gap in their ways. The issue of renaming places has been prominent in public discussions for quite some time now. This case rested on the argument that many monuments are named after "looters" who came from abroad. However, the two-judge bench of Justice K M Joseph and Justice B V Nagarathna said that one cannot revisit history selectively and that there is no space for bigotry in Hinduism. ----- Moin Qazi is the author of the bestselling book, Village Diary of a Heretic Banker. He has worked in the development finance sector for almost four decades. URL: https://newageislam.com/interfaith-dialogue/bjp-history-muslim-heritage/d/130955 New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism