What makes it different now?

How do we filter the many immigrant rulers of Indian history as invasive or assimilative? Is there a way?

What makes it different now?

Anamitro Biswas

In Peru, there are the ruins of the temple dedicated to a pre-Incan volcanic God, close to a crater that has been eruptive in recent (that counts in millenia) years. It is a characteristically Incan construction, with neatly arranged stone blocks sharply cut and fit together so as not to need cementing, yet leaving no gap even for a sharp pen knife to pass through adjacent blocks. The walls of the temple are the highest Incan construction, and there was even the prophetic (or rather, legislative) dictate of the new Incan regime that no building higher than that one would be build in the Incan empire. Before their own civil war incited by Spanish diplomacy and ultimate dispersion due to Spanish violence and co-immigrant European pathogens, the Incans had succeeded in securing a vast empire effectively assimilating with the existing people in the region; while distinctly bearing their own cultural signature they had managed to absorb and flaunt the heritage nevertheless beautifying Peruvian anthropology since the time of their old ancestors whom they believed to be keeping an eye on them in the form of the Andean mountains.

What appalls an enthusiast when immersing into the archaeological reconstruction of pre-colonial Latin America is the clear term of ‘invaders’ by which their Spanish forefathers are qualified even by Spanish-origin academics of Peru. There is not a shade of doubt in the minds of those people that the Spanish settlers indeed came like trouble, with neither religion and very little culture to justify their onslaught, and with a perverse gold lust in the obsessive digging of which they ruined settlement after settlement surrounding the assumed El Dorado; and with them brought European diseases to which the locals were not immuned earlier and caused huge devastation and permanent annihilation of many glorious days of native civilizations. They incited distrust and feuds among the locals, took parts from behind the curtain in the conflicts and finally backstabbed those whom they barely though of as humans. No doubt the Muslims would have done the same in India if they had been able to. Had there not born divine men like Vidyāraṇya, Gaṇēśa or Mahāprabhu, there is not a shred of doubt that a “Hindu” kingdom would have never revived; and Hindu faith, either on the pretext of threat or convenience, would have been completely wiped out. Like the Andean natives the Hindus would have had to retreat into the inaccessible forests to save whatever little they had left of identity and slowly lose that in due primitive struggle, as a people robbed of their confidence and wisdom, marginalized in the country which has been their rightful home. For example, none of the revered sun temples in what is today’s Afghanistan actually survive. These temples have been mentioned in a vast span of literary resources ranging from the Skanda Purāṇa to Xiuen Tsang's travelogues, and were subsequently mentioned to have been taken over by Muslims. Probably their ruins today are being smashed under plain constructions of some Afghan rural mosque. Yet, when I termed Babur as an ‘Uzbek invader’ in one of my recent paintings, there was much hesitation for many people to accept, some of whom conveyed that to me. ‘Why not simply call him Babur, or Babur the king? Why bring the invasion into question?’

But there is no denying the fact that invasion was in fact a matter of the most evident reality. I pondered over this: last year I met a friend and one of his friends (call him S) on a walk and we happenned to chat for some time. The date for inauguration of the Rama Temple in Ayodhya had shortly been annoounced. S questioned my near future plan of an Ayodhya trip (which I preferred to call a pilgrimage, and which, by the way, has not yet materialized till the middle of the following year) in an ultra-Communist tone. By that time I had my simple answer prepared, ‘When it’s between Rama and Babur, I opt to stand by the legacy of the Indian icon.’ S asked in an aggressive tone whether my reason not to consider Babur as an Indian is based on his religious affiliation. Now, this has an elaborate answer. Take for example, Kazi Nazrul. I strongly resent the fact that the Indian government allowed his family to permanently shift with him to the newly independent East Pakistan as a part of reconciliatory peace treaty, and Anndashankar Ray once commented that Nazrul had been overlooked during dissection of India and thus was the one person who has intactly remained Indian, active or not. Swami Vivekananda had once commented that MaxMuller was a reincarnation of the Vēda-compiler Sāyaṇa, and I personally am of the opinion that if so, then the Moghul prince Dara Siko had certainly been another. With them, we would insist one having them to represent what India stands for. But Babur was  born in what is now Uzbekistan, was a prince of Farganah, finally king of some Afghan province, attacked and secured an asset for his successors on Indian land, after which he decided to breathe his last and be buried in his ‘motherland’ which he certainly did not consider India. Babur was finally buried halfway to his hometown, in Kabul. He never assimilated with Indian culture, cuisine, language or religion and his missionary activities on sword-edge has set a precedent to much of Moghul atrocities towards indigneous religion of India. No, I cannot consider Babur an Indian.

This is a peculiar existential crisis exclusively suffered by educated Indian Hindus. I have seen Muslim persons more confidently vocal about their ideas of ethics and convictions, often taking a more active interest in the affairs concerning Indian history and future. K. K. Muhammad of the Archaelogical Survey of India repeatedly gave interviews regarding his findings of a Hindu basement architecture of the Babri Masjid, thereby insisting its legitimate claim to be transferred to the Rama-worshippers. I was very impressed by an interview of the Hindi film actor Feroz Arjun Khan, who rose to prominence playing Arjuna in a Hindi TV serial based on the Mahabharata in the 1980s. He says, ‘I am a Muslim and I might not believe a cow to be as sacred as my mother. But this is {\enit{Hindu-sthan}} though we all try to live in heartiest brotherhood here, as friends. If your friend points at a woman and says, ‘She is my mother,’ do you ever tell anything bad about her, or misbehave with her? Why do you resort to such violent ego here when you should retaliate with friendly committment?’ However, a Hindu Brahmin pop musician of Bengal had expressed his ardent wish to cook beef on Daśamī on a television reality show, on a year our family completely refrained from eating any red meat including mutton and limited egg intake of 5 a week due to extreme heat that year till November. Hassan Ali of the Pakistan Cricket Team has expressed his concern on social media regarding the communalism-driven terrorist activities targetting Hindu pilgrims in Kashmir while the Indian intellectual elite has found it more convenient not to break their sang froid over such matters as might label them unfavourable to Islam. Instead, the Indian elite is more concerned with the unprofessional attitude of an airport security staff towards a BJP Member of Parliament or the fate of a sedition-charged separatist self-proclaimed writer who has actively supported terrorist and genocidist activities in the past. In short, the Indian Hindu forgets to distinguish between a community and its rotten apples. Either that gives more support to the rotten apple population or shows the entire community in bad light, in whichever case the remaning apples of the community itself are either harmed or infected by being pushed in with the rotten apples. For example, I don’t doubt that the Rajiv Gandhi government’s hesitation with the Sayara Bano case has been seen with tremendous distress by many (more so, if educated) young Muslim women, repressed under the worst aspects of their community’s shackles.

It is in itself an audacity to expect when non-Muslims are not allowed in a 3km-radius of Mecca and certainly cannot freely or privately practise their religion in majority of countries where the population or government is predominantly Islamic, that the most important pilgrimage site for at least 40 million Indian people should be occupied by a Mosque. Had Babur’s Masjid been an improvisation of the erstwhile temple, commemorating the persona of Rama who was born in that very plot of land and is certainly one of the most enigmatic and dominant figures in Indian history (if not Moghul or Islamic history), then I guess the situation would have been different. When the pagan Turkic Kuṣaṇas made statues of traditionally abstract Buddhist deities in their own Greco-Gandhara style, the huge orthodox population of India didn’t oppose in any way though it took a wild card entry in their formalized decorum, because the entry was respectful and attired in the best of intentions. An attempt of assimilation and contribution. The temple of Bodh Gaya is primarily Buddhist and its recent constructions have a Zen inclination, so I’ve heard; but that doesn’t stop so many Hindus of India to actively participate in the proceedings of the religious activites there. Rama is revered spiritually by both who are now called Hindus and Buddhists, and consecration of a Hindu temple in that complex won’t pose any problem for the Buddhist devotees. If, like the Incan example cited in the very beginning of this essay, Babur had implemented his Semetic vision and his Persianized architectural aesthetics, be that good or bad, the Indian population would have surely welcomed the involvement of even a foreigner who would take an active interest in the Rama cult. But that was not to be.