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

‘They (Hindus) totally differ from us in religion, as we believe in nothing in which they believe, and vice versa …,’ comments al-Biruni. ‘All their fanaticism is directed against those who do not belong to them — against all foreigners. They call them mleccha , i.e. impure, and forbid having any connection with them, be it by intermarriage or any other kind of relationship, or by sitting, eating, and drinking with them, because thereby, they think, they would be polluted … In all manners and usages they differ from us as to such a degree as to frighten their children with us … [They] declare us to be of the devil’s breed, and our doings as the very opposite of all that is good and proper.’

This view of al-Biruni, though factual, is one-sided. The irreconcilability between Hindu and Muslim civilisations was due as much to the attitudes and values of Muslims as of Hindus. In fact, the adamantine nature of Islam was in a way more responsible for this. Islam, even though it had a few rival sects in it, was essentially a rock-hard, monolithic religion, which did not have the malleability to modify itself under the influence of other religions and cultures. Indeed, according to one interpretation of Islamic cannon, if a Muslim became an apostate or adopted deviant religious practices, he could be executed by any Muslim without any legal formality.

In sharp contrast to Islam, Hinduism was an infinitely malleable, variegated, ever-changing religion. It had no inviolable core beliefs and practices, so it could companionably accommodate within it any number of contradictory beliefs and practices. It could be anything to anybody. Even though people of different sects and castes remained strictly segregated from each other in Hindu society, they all belonged to one religion. The rigidity of Hinduism was more of society than of religion. Indeed, Hinduism, left to itself, could have possibly accommodated Islamic beliefs and practices within itself, as it had done with innumerable Indian tribal cults, as well as with the cults of numerous migrants and invaders, all through its long history. Hinduism could do that without ceasing to be Hinduism. But Islam could not in any way accommodate Hinduism within its fold without altogether ceasing to be Islam.

The rigidity of Islamic civilisation was however only in religious beliefs and practices. In social and cultural matters Muslims were fairly open — Arabs, for instance, were greatly influenced by Greek civilisation; similarly Turks were greatly influenced by Persian civilisation. But Muslims were not quite so receptive to Hindu influence, partly because of the total contrariness of Hindu and Muslim civilisations, and also because the main preoccupation of the Turkish rulers in India was with their political survival, they being a tiny community precariously afloat in a vast and turbulent sea of aliens. Besides, Turks, as rulers, tended to scorn the culture of Hindus, their subjects.

Because of these fundamental differences, not only was there no synthesis of Hinduism and Islam, the two did not even have any major influence on each other, despite their several centuries long coexistence in India. They accommodated each other, but neither changed under the influence of the other.

Arabs had, in the early history of Islam, wiped out several local creeds as they swept from their homeland across the Eurasian continent and North Africa, and they had converted to Islam a large number of people in those lands, often by force. But they could not do that in India, because of the complexity and diversity of Indian society and religion, and the vastness of the Indian population. Islam could neither absorb nor exterminate Hinduism. Nor could Hinduism absorb or exterminate Islam. They had to coexist.

There were however a few kings and nobles in both these communities who were open to the cultural and religious influence of the other community. And there were a few Muslim scholars, such as al-Biruni and Amir Khusrav, who applied themselves earnestly and sympathetically to the study of the religion and culture of Hindus. Equally, there were a few Hindu scholars who studied the religion and culture of Muslims. At another level, many upper class Indians, particularly in North India, learned Persian and adopted the Persian dress and lifestyle, as the means for advancing their careers in the service of Muslim rulers. But these were all peripheral developments, and they did not lead to any notable change in either community.

STRANGELY, DESPITE THE total contrariness of Hinduism and Islam, there does not seem to have been any major communal clashes between the followers of the two religions in the medieval period. Presumably this was mainly because of the passive and accommodative nature of Hindu society and the general attitude of fatalism among Hindus; but partly it was also because Muslims mostly lived in towns, while Hindus mostly lived in villages. Though many temples were destroyed by the sultans during this period, and a large number of Hindus were slaughtered by them or were forcefully converted to Islam, these were mostly incidental to military campaigns, and were not very much different from what happened in the battles between Hindu kingdoms. For instance, during the wars between Cholas and Chalukyas in the eleventh century, Cholas, according to a Chalukya inscription, ‘plundered the entire country, slaughtered women, children and Brahmins,’ and carried away Brahmin girls and gave them in marriage to men of other castes.

Though the actions of Muslim armies were usually far more violent than that of Hindu armies — necessarily so, as they were in an alien country — they were not entirely dissimilar, and they do not seem to have had any serious adverse effect on the general Hindu-Muslim communal relationship. In normal times there was a fair amount of accommodativeness in the relationship between the two communities, and in the treatment that the rulers belonging to one religion meted out to their subjects of the other religion. ‘The king allows such freedom that every man may come and go and live according to his own creed, without suffering any annoyance … whether he is a Christian, Jew, Moor or Heathen,’ states Portuguese traveller Barbosa about what he observed in Vijayanagar in the sixteenth century. Hindus and Muslims mostly lived in peace with each other in medieval times. And they continued to do so with rare exceptions till the mid-twentieth century, when the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan on the eve of the departure of the British rulers from the region led to unprecedented communal bloodbath.

There is no indication that Indians at any level were unduly perturbed by the establishment of the Turkish rule in India. In the view of the Hindu ruling class, Turks were just another contender for political power in India, like the many other contenders for power in the subcontinent. They were not viewed as aliens. As for the Hindu common people, it did not at all trouble them to live under Muslim kings — for them, the change of their rulers was a far away event that had virtually no bearing on their lives. Nor was there much social interaction between the common people of the two communities, as they generally lived physically separated from each other, Muslims being mostly urbanites and Hindus mostly villagers.

The general attitude of Hindus towards Muslims was to treat them as just another element in the highly variegated Indian society. This was quite in character with the history of Hinduism, which had made very many similar adjustments over the millennia, right from the beginning of its history, the Aryan migration into India. Over the centuries, as Aryans spread out in India, they absorbed into their religion many of the diverse sects and deities of the indigenous people; similarly, they also absorbed into it the cults of the many invaders and migrants who later entered India. Hinduism thus became an incredibly complex religion over the centuries, and its pantheon became fantastically multifarious.