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

Ala-ud-din’s anti-Hindu policy was primarily motivated by political and military considerations, not by religious considerations, and there is evidence that, despite his anti-Hindu professions, Hindus enjoyed greater security and prosperity under him than under many other sultans. In contrast, the primary motive of the anti-Hindu policy of Firuz Tughluq, which was quite oppressive, was to enforce orthodox Muslim religious prescriptions, than to gain political advantage. And, although he was on the whole a humane and cultured ruler, some of his actions against Hindus and Muslim heretics were horrendous. Thus when he was told that an old Brahmin in Delhi was ‘publicly performing the worship of idols in his house, and that the people of the city, both Muslims and Hindus, were resorting to his house to worship the idol,’ Firuz had the Brahmin brought to him and ordered him to become a Muslim, and when he refused, had him thrown alive into a burning pyre built in front of the durbar hall.

There were several other such incidents during the reign of Firuz, and he himself reports on some of them in his autobiography. ‘There was a set of heretics … [who] met by night at an appointed time and place, both friends and strangers,’ he writes about what was obviously the rite of a Hindu Tantric sect. ‘Wine was served, and they said that this was their religious worship. They brought their wives, mothers, and daughters to these meetings. The men threw themselves on the ground as if in worship, and each man had intercourse with the woman whose garment he caught. I cut off the heads of the elders of this sect, and imprisoned and banished the rest, so that their abominable practices were put an end to.’ Similarly, ‘there was a sect which wore the garments of atheism, and having thrown off all restraint, led men astray. The name of their chief was Ahmad Bahari … His followers called him a god.’ Firuz had the ‘god’ chained and imprisoned, and his followers banished from the city.

Firuz also sought, in conformity with orthodox Muslim prescriptions, to strictly enforce the collection of jizya from all non-Muslims, including Brahmins, who were till then exempt from it. When this policy was announced, the Brahmins of Delhi and its environs gathered in front of the royal palace and threatened to immolate themselves or starve themselves to death if the sultan did not revoke the order. But Firuz remained unrelenting, and eventually the Brahmins had to withdraw their agitation, after pleading with the sultan to at least reduce the quantum of the tax on them, to which he agreed.

OUR ONLY SOURCES of information on the persecution of Hindus by the sultans are the accounts given by Muslim chroniclers, who invariably embellished their reports with exaggerations in order to glorify their royal patrons, as the slaughter of Hindus and the destruction of their temples were, in their view, highly commendable acts. ‘The blood of infidels flowed copiously and apostasy was often their only way of survival,’ writes al-Utbi, a medieval Arab chronicler, about the plight of Hindus in the Delhi Sultanate. Adds Amir Khusrav: ‘The land had been saturated with the water of the sword and the vapours of infidelity had been dispersed.’

These are hyperbolic statements. Though there is no doubt that severe persecution of Hindus were carried out by the Turko-Afghans, and that a large number of Hindus were slaughtered by them, the incidents were in all probability nowhere near of the scale described by Muslim chroniclers. Many of the sultans in fact treated Hindus quite fairly and employed a good number of them in crucial offices. Even Mahmud Ghazni, the reportedly ruthless iconoclast and exterminator of Hindus, had a large contingent of Hindu soldiers in his army. And so had his son and successor Masud, who even warned his Muslim officers to take care not to offend the religious sentiments of their Hindu colleagues. And there were several instances, even in the very early phase of the Delhi Sultanate history, of sultans employing Hindu captains and soldiers in their army, and of allying themselves with rajas, to wage war against rival Muslim rulers or chieftains. Zaynu’l-Abidin, a fifteenth century sultan of Kashmir, was particularly conciliatory towards Hindus; he employed several of them in high positions in government, even rebuilt some of their temples destroyed by his predecessors, and allowed Hindus who had been forced to become Muslims to revert to their ancestral faith, even though apostasy was a capital crime in Muslim society. And in Delhi, some of the Muslim nobles, even some members of the royal family, now came to be known by Hindu nicknames, a minor but culturally noteworthy development. It is significant that one of the reasons (or pretexts) for Timur’s invasion of India was that he felt that the Delhi sultans were too lenient in their treatment of Hindus.

The accommodative policy of some sultans towards Hindus was in part an expression of their liberal and humane sentiments, but it was primarily dictated by political prudence, for the sultans could not have governed their Indian empire without the service of Hindus, who held very many crucial though subordinate positions in the civil and military wings of the government, and it was the productivity of the Hindu population that provided the material resources to the sultans to maintain their rule.

ONE OF THE most fascinating religious developments in India in the early medieval period was the rise of several mystical religious movements, in Islam as well as in Hinduism. These movements were inevitably confined to a small number of spiritually sensitive people, who scorned conventional religious practices as impediments — rather than as the means — to spiritual attainment. Typically, Bauls, a cult of Bengali mystic minstrels, asserted that ‘the path to god is blocked by the temple and the mosque,’ and that god dwelled within each man, so no one had to go to temple or mosque to worship god. ‘The man of my heart dwells inside me,’ declared a Baul poet. ‘Everywhere I look, he is there … He is in the very sparkle of light.’

The Indian mystic sages of the middle ages were usually syncretic in their religious views, and had no hesitation to freely incorporate elements of different faiths in their teachings. ‘There is only one god, though Hindus and Muslims call him by different names,’ states sage Haridasa. ‘This one god is the highest meaning of both the Puranas and the Koran.’ This was the common credo of all mystic sects. There was in fact hardly any fundamental difference between the various mystic sects of medieval India. Their common view was that all gods (and goddesses) are manifestations of The One, though man, because of the limitations of his understanding, sees them as many. And, as the mystics did not discriminate between gods, they did not discriminate between men either, and they rejected or ignored caste and communal divisions. Another common characteristic of these mystic sects was that they generally were intensely emotion-charged movements.

One of the most prominent mystic saint-poets of medieval India was Kabir, who lived and preached in Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh. The details of his background and early life are uncertain. He probably lived around the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, and was evidently born a Muslim, as his name indicates. There is a legend that he was the illegitimate son of a Brahmin widow, who abandoned him on birth, and that he was then brought up by a humble Muslim family of weavers. Kabir’s family profession is reflected in the many similes drawn from weaving in his verses. We do not know what education he had, if any at all. His poems were all oral compositions, which were later written down by his disciples, so there is quite probably some amount of interpolations in them.

Kabir was probably inclined to mysticism from an early age, but the transformative event of his life was his adoption by Ramananda — the great Vaishnava saint-reformer of Varanasi — as his disciple. As Kabir set out on his spiritual journey he was quite confident of what he would achieve in life, and what his achievement would mean to others, as he states in one of his poems: