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

Muslim courtier chroniclers, most of whom were hyper-orthodox, generally tended to gloatingly exaggerate the severity of the persecution of Hindus by sultans, which they considered as a most praiseworthy act. Thus Barani, while lauding the slaughter of Hindus by Mahmud Ghazni, wished that the sultan had campaigned in India once more, and had ‘brought under his sword all the Brahmins of Hind who … are the cause of the continuance of the laws of infidelity and the strength of idolaters … [and had] cut off the heads of two hundred or three hundred thousand Hindu chiefs.’ Similarly, Barani exaggeratedly lauded Ala-ud-din for his oppression of Hindus, stating ‘that by the last decade of his reign the submission and obedience of the Hindus had become an established fact. Such a submission on the part of the Hindus has neither been seen before nor will be witnessed hereafter.’ Reality, though harsh, was not quite so harsh.

Curiously, while the Muslim intelligentsia was generally aggressive in its attitude towards Hinduism, the Hindu intelligentsia was entirely passive in its response to the establishment of the Muslim rule in India. There is hardly any mention of the Turkish conquest of India in the Sanskrit works of the early middle ages. This was perhaps because the preoccupation of the Hindu intelligentsia was with transcendental matters. The general attitude of fatalism among Indians — that whatever happens is fated to happen — also no doubt contributed to the apathetic attitude of Indians to the circumstances of their life. And this was one of the major factors that enabled a small group of Turko-Afghans to rule over an infinitely larger number of Indians for several centuries without any major resistance.

The general attitude of Muslims, the masters, towards Hindus, the subjects, was of scorn. And there was, inevitably, a good amount of persecution of Hindus by the sultans, though it was nothing comparable to what it could have been, given the totally antithetical nature of the two socio-religious systems. Very many Hindu temples were demolished by the sultans, and their idols smashed or defiled. Ostentatious Hindu religious celebrations were forbidden in Muslim states. And there were several instances of the general massacre of Hindus by the sultans. Some of these acts were revoltingly savage, such as the mass slaughter of Hindu men, women and children by a mid-fourteenth century sultan of Madurai, which was excoriated even by Ibn Battuta, a fellow Muslim. ‘This,’ commented Battuta, ‘was a hideous thing such as I have never seen being indulged in by any king.’ But such acts of savagery were random, not systematic, and they seem to have been motivated more by the need to terrorise a conquered people into servility, than by religious fervour, though religious fervour was also undeniably present.

FORTUNATELY, THE ANTI-HINDU venom was more on the tongues of Muslim clerics and chroniclers than on the swords of the sultans. Except in a few rare instances, Hindus were not oppressed beyond endurance in Muslim kingdoms. This is evident from the fact that a very large number of Hindus served in the government and the army of Muslim states. Most of the service providers in Muslim states — merchants, craftsmen, moneylenders, and so on — were also no doubt Hindus. And nearly all the farmers in India were Hindus.

Hindus generally had no compunction about serving under sultans in any capacity, even as soldiers and captains in the battles of the sultans against rajas. Many of the top officers of even the hyper-orthodox Mughal emperor Aurangzeb were Hindus. Equally, many Muslims served in the army and administration of Hindu kingdoms. In that freewheeling political environment rajas often allied with sultans, even in the battles of sultans against fellow rajas, and sultans often allied with rajas, even the battles of rajas against fellow sultans.

In the personal life of the sultans also there were some curious intercultural and interreligious influences and practices. The sultans, despite their professed orthodoxy, sometimes even sought the counsels of Hindu and Jain sages. According to Jain sources, Ala-ud-din Khalji used to hold discussions with Jain sages, and he is said to have once specially summoned Jain sage Acharya Mahasena from Karnataka to Delhi for consultations. Muhammad Tughluq is also known to have had Jain counsellors; and he, according to Battuta, used to consort with Hindu yogis. Some of the sultans were exceptionally liberal in their treatment of Hindus — Ala-ud-din Husain Shah, the early sixteenth century sultan of Bengal, for instance, is said to have been so benevolent in his treatment of all his subjects, irrespective of their religion, that local Hindu poets eulogised him as Arjuna or Krishna, Hindu mythical heroes.

SUCH LIBERAL TREATMENT of Hindus by sultans was odious to orthodox Muslims, for Islam was traditionally an aggressively proselytising religion, which had little tolerance for the people of other religions, and had in its early history forcefully converted a large number of people into the religion. But such conversions were rare in India. The practice however varied from sultan to sultan. The Tughluqs, Muhammad and Firuz, are known to have coerced the families of some defeated rajas to become Muslims. But the primary concern of most sultans was to preserve and expand their power, and they had hardly any inclination to work as missionaries.

There were however a good number of voluntary converts to Islam from low caste and outcaste Hindu communities, and this went on all through the medieval period. It was a great advantage for this class of Hindus to become Muslims, for conversion opened up unprecedented career and social advancement opportunities for them, which they would never have had in Hindu society. As Muslims they could occupy any position that they merited by their abilities, and thus move up in society, free from the caste bond that confined them to a particular social niche and profession. Not surprisingly, many of the underclass conversions to Islam were mass conversions, following community or clan decisions.

Apart from low caste and outcaste Hindus, many traders, craftsmen and other service providers also found it to be a temporal advantage for them to become Muslims, as that widened their business opportunities, as most of their affluent customers were now Muslims. A few upper class Hindus also voluntarily became Muslims, thereby to gain various socio-political and material advantages. There are said to have been even a few instances of men becoming Muslims because of their conviction of the superiority of Islam over Hinduism as a religion

Despite all this, even at the close of the eighteenth century, after six centuries of dominant Muslim rule in India, the region around Delhi, the core area of Muslim power in India, had only around 14 per cent Muslims in its population. However, in some other regions of the subcontinent, particularly in the western and eastern flanks of the Indo-Gangetic Plain — the regions that in the twentieth century became Pakistan and Bangladesh — Muslims constituted a much larger part of the local population, presumably because of the mass conversion to Islam of tribal people in those mountainous regions. The proportion of Muslim population in the subcontinent increased over the next century and half, because of the higher birth-rate in the community, so that by the end of the British rule in 1947 they formed about a quarter of the subcontinent’s population.

INDIA IN MEDIEVAL times was already a densely populated land, compared to the other regions of the world. ‘This country is so well-populated that it is impossible in a reasonable space to convey an idea of it,’ notes Razzak. Moreover, the population profile of India was highly complex, because of the racial, linguistic, social, cultural, religious and sectarian diversity of Indians, resulting from the socio-cultural-religious developments within the country, as well as from the migration of very many different races into India over the millennia.