Abraham Eraly - The Age of Wrath - A History of the Delhi Sultanate

BECAUSE OF THIS antithetical character of Hinduism and Islam, there was very little socio-cultural interaction or mutual influence between the two communities, despite their several centuries long coexistence in India. In fact Muslims and Hindus mostly lived physically separated from each other — while most Muslims lived in towns (serving the government as soldiers and civil servants, or engaged in various occupations, as artisans, merchants, and so on) the vast majority of Hindus lived in villages (mostly as farmers and farm-labourers). And even in towns, where the two communities coexisted, they lived in different wards of towns, as an extension of the traditional Hindu practice of different castes living in different parts of towns and villages.

However, despite the sharp socio-religious segregation between Hindus and Muslims, there was some amount of interaction between the two communities in towns, and they did have some influence on each other. But these influences were mostly superficial, and were confined to a few small groups. The most obvious instance of this was that the Hindu political elite in North India gradually took to the Turkish mode of dress and adopted some Turkish social practices, and the Turks in turn adopted certain practices of the Hindu aristocracy. And in religion, the mystic movements in both religions did exert some influence on each other.

On the whole, Muslim rule did not make any notable difference in the lives of the vast majority of Indians, and hardly anything changed in Hindu society because of Muslim influence. Nor did anything change in Muslim society consequent of its interaction with Hindu society, except that the Hindu converts to Islam carried some of their traditional practices with them into Islamic society. For the most part, the two communities remained sharply divided and incompatible. They coexisted, but did not interact.

There were some curious internal paradoxes in both Hindu and Muslim socio-religious systems. Islam as a religion was adamantine in character and was generally impervious to external influences, but Islamic society was open and fluid, into which people of any race or clan or social background could enter on becoming Muslims, and play any role according to their interest and ability, without being restricted to any birth-determined roles. The values and practices of Hindu religion and society were the exact reverse of this. Hinduism was a fluid, diversified and ever-changing religion, open to various external influences, but Hindu society was adamantine in character, which had place only for those who were born as Hindus, and in which a person born into a particular caste could not ever change his caste and social status, and was bound to the occupation of that caste, whatever be his interest and ability.

There were however some exceptions in these matters, in Hindu as well as Muslim society. Thus, even though Muslim society in theory was an open and egalitarian society, which had no social divisions based on race or clan or birth, in practice it had divisions based on these factors. On the other hand, Hindu society, despite its seeming rigidity and imperviousness, was in fact a porous society, and it had over the centuries absorbed numerous foreign people and non-Aryan local tribes and their cults into it. This however was not done by performing any rite, as in the case of the conversions of outsiders into Islam or Christianity, but through a process of osmosis, by which outsiders and their cults inconspicuously, and without any formal process, seeped into Hindu society over several centuries.

But this was a process of community transition, not of individuals. Normally it was impossible for any outsider individual to enter Hindu society, for Hinduism has no conversion rites to admit non-Hindus into its fold. To be a Hindu one has to be born a Hindu. But in this too, as in nearly everything else in the ever-rigid-ever-flexible Hindu society, there were exceptions, though rare, by which elaborate rites were performed to induct non-Hindu rajas, chieftains and other important persons into Hindu society at appropriate social levels. This process involved the fabrication, through the connivance of colluding priests, of a myth that the conversion seeker belonged to a family that had originally been a Hindu, but had lost its religion and caste because of its deviant practices, and that he could be therefore restored to his family’s original religion and caste through certain purification ceremonies.

ISLAM AND HINDUISM were totally antipodal in religion and society. Nevertheless the attitude of the Muslim rulers in India towards their Hindu subjects was in most cases accommodative rather than suppressive. It necessarily had to be so, for pragmatic reasons. From the purely religious point of view, the sultans had to do what they could to fetter or eradicate Hinduism, and thus promote Islam, but from the practical point of view they needed to patronise Hindus, for they could not possibly govern their Indian kingdoms without the services of Hindus, as they did not have the requisite administrative organisation or personnel, or the local knowledge, to do that. The sultans therefore treated Hindus as zimmis, protected non-Muslims, by which Hindus were allowed, though with some restrictions, to maintain their social customs and observe their religious practices; they were even allowed to perform rites which were abominable to orthodox Muslims, such as sati, and animal and human sacrifices.

In the early history of Islam, the zimmi privilege was accorded only to Jews and Christians, while the followers of other religions were required to become Muslims or be exterminated. But when Islam expanded beyond Arabia, its homeland, the zimmi privilege was, for various practical reasons, extended to the people of other religions as well, including Hindus. In India, the sheer vastness of the non-Muslim population made it in any case physically impossible to extirpate them. Furthermore, Hindus were the primary economically productive people of the land, particularly in agriculture, so to massacre them, or even to oppress them beyond endurance, would have been counterproductive for the sultans, for that would have been to uproot the very plants that nourished them.

Hindus were treated as second class citizens in Muslim states, but as citizens nevertheless. They had their own rights. The discriminatory treatment that Hindus received at the hands of Muslim rulers would not have troubled them much, for most Indian communities were subject to worse discrimination in their own rigidly hierarchal caste society. For most Hindus, Muslims would have seemed like just another segment in their own labyrinthine society. Hindus and Muslims did live separately; but then so did the different Hindu castes. Even in the matter of jizya, not many Hindus would have felt it as a particularly discriminative tax, for Muslims also had to pay a community tax, zakat. Besides, jizya was usually imposed on individuals only in towns, while in villages it was imposed as a collective tax.

ON THE WHOLE the life of the vast majority of the common people under Muslim rule in India remained the same as what it was before the Muslim invasion. This was mainly because the impact of Muslim rule was largely confined to towns, while most Indians lived in villages where there were hardly any Muslims. Even in towns, where there was a fair amount of interaction between Hindus and Muslims, the treatment of Hindus by the sultans, even by the most bigoted of them, would not have been anywhere near as ruthless as described by Muslim chroniclers seeking to eulogise their kings. To most Indians, the sultans would not have seemed any more oppressive than their own rajas. Whether it was a raja or a sultan who ruled over them made little difference in the generally wretched life of the common people in India.