The idea, however, that the British have wrested the Empire from the Mohamadans is a mistake. The Mohamadans were beaten down — almost everywhere except in Bengal — before the British appeared upon the scene; Bengal they would not have been able to hold, and the name of the “Mahratta Ditch” of Calcutta shows how near even the British there were to extirpation by India’s new masters. Had the British not won the battles of Plassey and Buxar, the whole Empire would ere now have become the fighting ground of Sikhs, Rajputs, and Mahrattas and others.

Except the Nizam of the Deccan there was not a vigorous Musalman ruler in India after the firman of Farokhsiar in 1716; the Nizam owed his power to the British after the battle of Kurdla in 1795), and it was chiefly British support that maintained the feeble shadow of the Moghul Empire, from the death of Alamgir II. to the retirement of Mr. Hastings. Not only Haidarabad but all the other existing Musalman principalities of modern India owe their existence, directly, or indirectly, to the British intervention. British author, H.G.Keene

A myth that endures is often harmless – there are others that despite being utterly baseless serve to propagate the most absurd and extreme views of both history and towards their fellow man. One of these is the myth that British Imperialism saved the Hindus from Islamic rule and domination.

The myth is of almost breathtaking audacity given that the facts of history reveal very clearly the truth of the Islamic empires and kingdoms being destroyed by a steady wave of Hindu revolts and then attacks with their remnants rushing to the western powers for protection from their Hindu rivals.

By 1759 the Maratha flag fluttered over Peshawar – in the early 1800’s the Hindu Gurkhas contented with the Chinese Empire for control over Tibet a feat repeated by the Dogra Hindu warriors some decades later.

The warlord Mahadji Sindhia recovered the silver gates of Somnath from the hands of the Afghans in a symbolic gesture of the Hindu reconquest. And yet this myth endures – in fact endures to such an extent that the defeated believe that their visions of Muslim rule over the subcontinent was thwarted only by the advent of the British and the Hindus believing that they were saved from utter extinction by the Imperialist interventions.

The propagation of myths and half-truths served to prop the edifice of Imperialism during the British sojourn in India.

This edifice was supported in numerous forces and bodies that were propped up by their erstwhile colonial masters , and this the seeds of hatred and self-loathing that still afflict the subcontinent remains today.

With the fall of that once mighty edifice of the British Empire these very  forces were unleashed upon the subcontinent. These very groups weaned on the education system and myths propagated by colonialism were content to allow the same system and ideas dominate India. A new set of western educated elite preferred to maintain the myths of cultural superiority which allowed a narrow elite to lord over the vast toiling masses that comprised the majority of the nation.

The myths of Hindu defeat and slavery designed to destroy and dampen the morale of the majority population continued to be taught – the need by the imperialists to destroy the ardour and fighting spirit of the people was also grabbed upon eagerly by Islamic and other anti Hindu forces.

The myth that Hinduism was a dying and decayed body waiting to be preyed upon by its more aggressive competitors has become almost folklore to Islamists and other extremists.

To hide and cover the resistance of 800 years – the rolling back of the forces of Jihad which by the 18th century has ended in utter failure before the rise of the nascent Hindu forces leading to the climactic failure of arms by the remaining Muslim kingdoms in South Asia by the close of the 1700’s only brought to a sudden end by the entry of western powers.

The same ideology promoted the so called discredited martial race theory of certain communities being more ‘martial’ than others (once again flying in the face of historical evidence)   the same ideology allows cross border terrorism to be pushed from the Islamic republic of Pakistan  – that allowed it to engage four time in war with its Hindu neighbour each time resulting in humiliating defeat and yet continues to attempt to cause trouble for India.

And yet – despite the above-  the myth remained – and even stranger the myth remained propagated by the very forces that otherwise espouse Hindu revivalism – Thus you will find otherwise very earnest Hindus in organisations such as the RSS being weaned on the diet of Hindu passivity and non-aggression despite flying in the face of all known historical evidence and truths.

To the myth of the thousand year slavery being exposed in our previous article composed of two parts – the first being the attacks from the 11th century to the 16th century by various Islamic intruders. The second part being that of the period of colonialism – in this case the rise and establishment of the British Empire.

Having heard ad nausea the view that the British ruled over the Indian subcontinent for a two hundred year period (i.e. from 1757 to 1947) I decided that it was worthwhile into looking into the veracity of this view.

Apart from various small port colonies by the British and French living under the sufferance of local grandees it was the Portuguese who made a serious attempt to establish a lasting empire in the subcontinent. The foundation of Goa, Daman, Diu and other small settlements as part of their attempt to thwart their Ottoman enemies the Portuguese sought to dominate the trade routes to India.

Their own limited resources combined with the hostility aroused amongst both Hindus and Muslims due to their violence and religious oppression together with the fact of living within the shadows of powerful empires such as Vijayanagar, Bahmani and others created a cap on European expansion in the middle ages.

Thus over e long period of decline they were beaten into insignificance by the Marathas in the 1730’s under a vigorous set of campaigns by Chimnaji Appa.

The same period saw the dramatic decline of the Mughal Empire in India – the long period of relative stability based on a tenuous compromise between the Hindus and Muslims of the subcontinent was shattered by the violent and extreme policies of the Emperor Aurangzeb. Led by the strictures of Islamic law his jaundiced administration was faced by a tidal wave of revolts and risings from the Jats, the Satnamis, Bundelas, Ahoms, Rajputs and the Marathas under the famed king Shivaji.

The initial decades of the 18th century saw the Maratha power spread across the face of India, at first under their famed leader Baji Rao and then by his generals, Sindhia, Holkar, Gaekwad and Bhonsle each given his own special area of operation

Now British rule is said to have begun after their victory at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 over the Mughals and their subsequent triumph over them at the Battle of Buxar in 1764. Following this the right to govern, albeit in the name of the Mughals was granted to the British over Bengal and Bihar.

By way of background it is worth noting that Bengal, Bihar and Orrisa were governed by the same appointee from the court in Delhi – in the early 18th century with the Mughal Empire cracking under the repeated hammer blows from the Marathas this province under Alivardi Khan broke off to become for all intents and purposes an independent kingdom.

It was their ill fortune that at the same time the Maratha leaders had demarcated their own spheres of influence over all of India – This region was the hunting ground of the Bhonsle family under their war leader Raghuji Bhonsle.

From the 1730’s onwards in an ever expanding series of raids the regions of Orrisa, Bengal and to a lesser extent Bihar was subject to devastating attacks by the Marathas. The Nawab Alivardi Khan made determined and energetic efforts to defend his province to no avail. Each year he drive further back with the Maratha raiders covering what is modern day Bangladesh up to the Hindu kingdom of Assam.

The only defeat suffered by the Marathas was when the Maratha leader Balaji Baji Rao  chastised the Bhonsles and drove them back to their base in Nagpur – the following year they were back however and in utter failure the Nawab of Bengal agreed to cede in perpetuity parts of Bihar, Bengal and the whole of Orissa to the Marathas – This was further compounded by having to pay a yearly tribute to the Marathas (the chauth – or one fourth of their income) – As stated above some years later the British won a victory over the Mughals in 1757 at Plassey .

At the same time Maratha expansion was halted at the Battle of Panipat a thousand miles away in 1761 – this setback the Marathas for a decade – in the interim the British who after assuming governance over Bengal had continued to pay the tribute adroitly stopped paying.

The efforts of the Marathas were then directed at North India – mainly around Delhi to hammer home their final influence over the now fast decaying Mughals – In the interim the British buoyed by their successes in Bengal sought to expand their range of influence over the region of Awadh – the Nawab of the region which covers the northern part of modern-day Uttar Pradesh was best on all side by enemies – to one side the Hindu Jat tribes were seeking to expand their power over his holdings -to the south the warriors of Bundlekhand held sway – the martial Naga Sadhus marched with impunity through the land to protect the holy sites in ranks of thousands armed with matchlocks and artillery and from 1769 the Marathas were back at his borders when a large warband under Holkar attacked their province .

The weak and incompetent ruler – Shuja Ud Dualah fled under British protection in an attempt to preserve his kingdom against his Hindu enemies and thus the British were planted within striking distance of Delhi –

Their interference began to expand and with the establishment of armies in (what was then referred to as) Bombay, Calcutta and Madras the British sought to drive a necklace around the Marathas and thus led to the First Anglo-Maratha war – this was fought across the subcontinent over a period of 7 years – it saw the sensational defeat of British arms at the Battle of Wadgaon (leading to a humiliating British surrender) to the march of Captain Goddard across north India to the capture of Gwalior and the final stalemate at Sipri after which peace was sought and secured by all parties – the Marathas were led by their maverick minister Nana Fadnavis who managed to coordinate a series of alliances to push back the British threat and pushing the East Indian company to the brink of bankruptcy – coupled with the military genius of Mahadji Sindhia the Marathas resumed their march across India and by 1788 had defeated the remnants of the Mughal forces and stretched their sphere of influence to the Sutlej river in Punjab

In 1795 there remained only two Muslim kingdom in India – that of the Nizam of Hyderabad and Tipu Sultan of Mysore (whose infantry was predominantly Hindu)  – In 1795 the Marathas delivered a crushing defeat to the Nizam  – a defeat which destroyed his power so utterly that he clung in desperation to the British for succour which they gladly gave thus allowing the recovered British arms entry into the south of India – Tipu Sultan however resisted and alone amongst his coreligionists he refused to accept the British alliance and thus perished at the Battle of Seringapatnam in 1799.

The unemployed Muslim soldiery across India could only observe with horror as Hindu arms emerged triumphant over them on all fronts. Many joined the ranks of the Hindu armies others became votaries and supporters of Hindu groups with many even joining the dreaded Thugee cult of Northern Indian becoming devotees of the Goddess Kali.

By 1799 the two great Maratha leaders were dead – Nana Fadnavis and Mahadji Sindhia  – who had kept this rising tide of colonialism at bay – their untimely deaths however plunged the Maratha Confederacy into chaos and a civil war beginning in 1799 resulted in chaos and bloodletting across the face of the country – with Sindhia’s fighting the Holkars, battling with their leader the Peshwa and other warrior bands.

A climactic battle before the city of Poona in 1803 left the Maratha capital city in utter confusion and with a series of fast moving manoeuvres the British entered the fray to face a fractured Maratha Confederacy.

Rather than combine and fight on a common ground each component of the famed Maratha army faced the British separately – Led by Arthur Wellesley (Later the Duke of Wellington) and Lord Lake the British fought a series of blooding engagements  -the Battle of Assaye – the Battle of Assaye which delivered defeats to the Sindhias and Bhonsles Marathas – following this, when all seemed lost  Holkar under their maverick leader Jaswant Rao attacked the British – defeating them in Rajasthan under Col. Monson and then attacking them at Delhi itself – following a setback he took support from the Jats of Bharatpur who then faced the famed infantry and artillery of the British – four times the British tried to attack then walls each ending in utter failure with the loss of thousands of troops – Eventually the British made a peace with Holkar each agreeing not to disturb the other

But the effects of the above were not lost on anyone – the British had by 1805 cast their sphere of influence over the whole of India – although not ruling the majority of the country they had secured their position which was decisively contested once again by the Marathas in 1818 – In a last attempt to drive the British from their positions the Marathas were finally defeated in the Third Anglo-Maratha war and the true establishment of British rule can in some degree be said to commence – This has to be seen in light of the fact that they (like the Marathas before them) maintained the fiction of ruling in the name of the by now impotent Mughal Emperor issuing coins in his name and issuing order in the same vein .

Thus many of the inhabitants could maintain the happy fiction of being independent and free.

The Himalayan foothills had been conquered by the Hindu Gurkha clans who then clashed with the Imperialist powers in 1816 almost leading to a humiliating British defeat  – the only part yet outside of the British influence was the rising empire of Ranjit Singh and his allies in Jammu.

The death of the Maharaja in 1839 led to utter chaos and whilst the allies of the Sikh kingdom – the Dogra Rajputs of Jammu managed to expand the empire into Ladakh, Gilgit and Baltistan and even conducting a daring march in the heart of Tibet to fight the Chinese empire the machinations and violence that engulfed the kingdom allowed the British to deliver, despite hard fighting the destruction of the kingdom of Punjab and hits absorption into the British sphere of influence.

By now the reality of Empire was dawning on most of the inhabitants of the subcontinent – Increasing British interference in personal and religious matters as well as their obnoxious policy of wantonly grabbing the kingdoms of their supposed native allies burst into fury and violence in 1857 in a great rising that engulfed a huge portion of northern India – the fighting was bloody and intense and led by the mostly Hindu soldiers of the Bengal army – in a valiant attempt to unite the disparate factions the name of the Peshwa and the Mughal were invoked together with all of the symbolism of the old India that they sought to recover against the imperialist aggressor – After wading through an ocean of blood and violence the rising was finally suppressed in 1859 which led to the final and emphatic establishment of Imperial rule over India for the next 90 years until freedom came in 1947.

90 years – not quite 200 years as we have often been told – Even in regions where the British influence was felt the deepest and lasted the longest it was a slow and gradual process only really being deeply felt after the  end of the great rising in 1859 –

The student of history cannot help noticing that barring the battle of Tipu Sultan his co-religionists had failed to make a notable stand against the British  – indeed it can been said that they were amongst the first to flee to British protection from their Hindu Enemies – The major struggles of the Old India – from the three wars of the Marathas, the battle of the Jats, the Gurkhas – the Sanyasi rebellions in Bengal, wars of the Sikhs, the Nayar and poligar battles of the south were almost all by Hindus – This is further compounded by the great rising of 1857 which was led by the predominantly Brahmin and Rajput soldiers of the army

90 years of imperial rule were first contested by Vasudev Balwant Phadke in 1875 – these were then followed by the revolutionaries from Bengal, Maharashtra and Punjab which by the 1920’s had thrown British rule into chaos (almost all Hindus)  – in response the policies of divide and rule through religion, caste and region were played (ultimately unsuccessfully) by the British due to which the subcontinent still suffers today.

It is important to have an honest and open appraisal of history and not to succumb to failed ideas and slogans – we have found even otherwise well meaning people propagate some of the most absurd and baseless theories without a modicum of basis in truth – the History of colonialism and resistance to it has to be seen in light of the facts of history.

Also Read The Myth of “1000 Years of Hindu Slavery

(4520)

That audacious armada of the religion of Hijaz –
Whose insignia reached every corner of the world
Which learnt no obstruction from any fear
Which felt no hesitation in Persian Gulf or faltered in the Red Sea
Which valiantly crossed all the seven oceans
Oh, drowned was that armada (of Islam), when it reached the mouth of Ganga!

–  Mawlana Khwaja Altaf  Husain

It’s argued that if the Muslim conquerors had practised such systematic, extensive, and continued terror against Hindus and Hinduism as has been recorded by the Muslim historians of medieval India, Hindus could not have survived as an overwhelming majority at the end of the long spell of Muslim rule.

The logic here is purely deductive (formal). Suppose a person is subjected to a murderous assault, but he survives because he fights back. Deductively it can be concluded that the person never suffered a murderous assault because otherwise he could not have been alive! But this conclusion has little relevance to the facts of the case.

My question, therefore, is: Did Hindus survive as a majority in their own homeland because the Islamic invaders did not employ sufficient force to kill or convert them, or because, though defeated again and again by the superior military skill of the invaders, Hindu princes did not give up resistance and came back again and again to reconquer their lost kingdoms, to fight yet another battle, yet another day, till the barbarians were brought to book?

Before I answer this question, I should like to warn against a very widely prevalent though a very perverse version of Indian history. In this popular version, Indian history has been reduced to a history of foreign invaders who were able to enter India from time to time – the so-called Aryans, the Iranians, the Greeks, the Parthians, the Scythians, the Kushanas, the Hunas, the Arabs, the Turks, the Pathans, the Mughals, the Persians, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, and the British. The one impression which this version of Indian history leaves, is that India has always been a no-man’s land which any armed bandit could come and occupy at any time, and that Hindus have always been a ‘meek mob’ which has always bowed before every ‘superior’ race.

Muslims in India and elsewhere have been led to believe by the mullahs and Muslim historians that the conquest of India by Islam started with the invasion of Sindh by Muhammad bin Qasim in 712 AD, was resumed by Mahmud Ghaznavi in 1000 AD, and completed by Muhammad Ghuri when he defeated the Chauhans of Ajmer and the Gahadvads of Kanauj in the last decade of the 12th century. Muslims of India in particular have been persuaded to look back with pride on those six centuries, if not more, when India was ruled by Muslim emperors. In this make-belief, the British rulers are treated as temporary intruders who cheated Islam of its Indian empire for a hundred years. So also the ‘Hindu Banias’, who succeeded the British in 1947 AD. Muslims are harangued every day, in every mosque and madrasah, not to rest till they reconquer the rest of India which, they are told, rightfully belongs to Islam.

The academic historians also agree that India was ruled by Muslim monarchs from the last decade of the 12th century to the end of the 18th. The standard textbooks of history, therefore, narrate medieval Indian history in terms of a number of Muslim imperial dynasties ruling from Delhi – the Mamluks (Slaves), the Khaljis, the Tughlaqs, the Sayyids, the Lodis, the Surs, the Mughals. The provincial Muslim dynasties with their seats at Srinagar, Lahore, Multan, Thatta, Ahmedabad, Mandu, Burhanpur, Daulatabad, Gulbarga, Bidar, Golconda, Bijapur, Madurai, Gaur, Jaunpur, and Lucknow fill the gaps during periods of imperial decline.

It is natural that in this version of medieval Indian history the recurring Hindu resistance to Islamic invaders, imperial as well as provincial, looks like a series of sporadic revolts occasioned by some minor grievances of purely local character, or led by some petty upstarts for purely personal gain. The repeated Rajput resurgence in Rajasthan, Bundelkhand and the Ganga-Yamuna Doab; the renewed assertion of independence by Hindu princes at Devagiri, Warrangal, Dvarasamudra and Madurai; the rise of the Vijayanagara Empire; the farflung fight offered by the Marathas; and the mighty movement of the Sikhs in the Punjab – all these then get readily fitted into the framework of a farflung and enduring Muslim empire. And the Hindu heroes who led this resistance for several centuries get reduced to ridiculous rebels who disturbed public peace at intervals but who were always put down.

But this version of medieval Indian history is, at its best, only an interpretation based on preconceived premises and propped up by a highly selective summarisation, or even invention, of facts. There is ample room for another interpretation based on more adequate premises, and borne out by a far better systematisation of known facts.

What are the facts? Do they bear out the interpretation that India was fully and finally conquered by Islam, and that the Muslim empire in India was a finished fabric before the British stole it for themselves by fraudulent means?

Having tried a naval invasion of India through Thana, Broach, and Debal from 634 to 637 AD, the Arabs tried the land route on the north-west during AD 650-711. But the Khyber Pass was blocked by the Hindu princes of Kabul and Zabul who inflicted many defeats on the Arabs, and forced them to sign treaties of non-aggression. The Bolan pass was blocked by the Jats of Kikan. AI Biladuri writes in his Futûh-ul-Buldãn: ‘At the end of 38 H. or the beginning of 39 H. (659 A.D.) in the Khilafat of Ali”Harras’ went with the sanction of the Khalif to the same frontier’ He and those who were with him, saving a few, were slain in the land of Kikan in the year 42 H. (662 A.D.). In the year 44 H. (664 A.D) and in the days of Khalif Muawiya, Muhallab made war on the same frontier’ The enemy opposed him and killed him and his followers’ Muawiya sent Abdullah’ to the frontier of Hind. He fought in Kikan and captured booty’ He stayed near the Khalif some time and then returned to Kikan, when the Turks (Hindus) called their forces together and slew him.,

Next, the Arabs tried the third land route, via Makran. Al Biladuri continues: ‘In the reign of the same Muawiya, Chief Ziyad appointed Sinan’ He proceeded to the frontier and having subdued Makran and its cities by force, he stayed there’ Ziyad then appointed Rashid’ He proceeded to Makran but he was slain fighting against the Meds (Hindus)’ Abbad, son of Ziyad then made war on the frontier of Hind by way of Seistan. He fought the inhabitants’ but many Musulmans perished’ Ziyad next appointed Al Manzar. Sinan had taken it but its inhabitants had been guilty of defection’ He (Al Manzar) died there’ When Hajjaj’ was governor of Iraq, Said’ was appointed to Makran and its frontiers. He was opposed and slain there. Hajjaj then appointed Mujja’ to the frontier’ Mujja died in Makran after being there a year’ Then Hajjaj sent Ubaidullah’ against Debal. Ubaidullah being killed, Hajjaj wrote to Budail’ directing him to proceed to Debal’ the enemy surrounded and killed him. Afterwards, Hajjaj during the Khilafat of Walid, appointed Mohammad, son of Qasim’ to command on the Sindhian frontier.’ That was in 712 AD.

Now compare this Arab record on the frontiers of India with their record elsewhere. Within eight years of the Prophet’s death, they had conquered Persia, Syria, and Egypt. By 650 AD, they had advanced upto the Oxus and the Hindu Kush. Between 640 and 709 AD they had reduced the whole of North Africa. They had conquered Spain in 711 AD. But it took them 70 long years to secure their first foothold on the soil of India. No historian worth his salt should have the cheek to say that the Hindus have always been an easy game for invaders.

Muhammad bin Qasim succeeded in occupying some cities of Sindh. His successors led some raids towards the Punjab, Rajasthan, and Saurashtra. But they were soon defeated, and driven back. The Arab historians admit that ‘a place of refuge to which the Muslims might flee was not to be found’. By the middle of the 8th century they controlled only the highly garrisoned cities of Multan and Mansurah. Their plight in Multan is described by AI Kazwin in Asr-ul-Bilãd in the following words: ‘The infidels have a large temple there, and a great idol’ The houses of the servants and devotees are around the temple, and there are no idol worshippers in Multan besides those who dwell in those precincts’ The ruler of Multan does not abolish this idol because he takes the large offerings which are brought to it’ When the Indians make an attack upon the town, the Muslims bring out the idol, and when the infidels see it about to be broken or burnt, they retire.’ (emphasis added). So much for Islamic monotheism of the Arabs and their military might. They, the world-conquerors, failed to accomplish anything in India except a short-lived raid.

It was some two hundred years later, in 963 AD, that Alptigin the Turk was successful in seizing Ghazni, the capital of Zabul. It was his successor Subuktigin who seized Kabul from the Hindu Shahiyas shortly before he died in 997 AD. His son, Mahmud Ghaznavi, led many expeditions into India between 1000 and 1027 AD. The details of his destructive frenzy are too well-known to be repeated. What concerns us here is the facile supposition made by historians in general that Mahmud was not so much interested in establishing an empire in India as in demolishing temples, plundering treasures, capturing slaves, and killing the kãfirs. This supposition does not square with his seizure of the Punjab west of the Ravi, and the whole of Sindh. The conclusion is unavoidable that though Mahmud went far into the heartland of Hindustan and won many victories, he had to beat a hasty retreat every time in the face of Hindu counterattacks. This point is proved by the peril in which he was placed by the Jats of the Punjab during his return from Somnath in 1026 AD.

The same Jats and the Gakkhars gave no end of trouble to the Muslim occupants of Sindh and the Punjab after Mahmud was dead. Another 150 years were to pass before another Islamic invader planned a conquest of India. This was Muhammad Ghuri. His first attempt towards Gujarat in 1178 AD met with disaster at the hands of the Chaulukyas, and he barely escaped with his life. And he was carried half-dead from the battlefield of Tarain in 1191 AD. It was only in 1192 AD that he won his first victory against Hindus by resorting to a mean stratagem which the chivalrous Rajputs failed to see through.

Muhammad Ghuri conquered the Punjab, Sindh, Delhi, and the Doab upto Kanauj. His general Qutbuddin Aibak extended the conquest to Ajmer and Ranthambhor in Rajasthan, Gwalior, Kalinjar, Mahoba and Khajuraho in Bundelkhand, and Katehar and Badaun beyond the Ganges. His raid into Gujarat was a failure in the final round though he succeeded in sacking and plundering Anahilwar Patan. Meanwhile, Bakhtyar Khalji had conquered Bihar and Bengal north and west of the Hooghly. He suffered a disastrous defeat when he tried to advance into Assam.

But by the time Muhammad Ghuri was assassinated by the Gakkhars in 1206 AD, and Aibak assumed power over the former’s domain in India, Kalinjar had been reconquered by the Chandellas, Ranthambhor had renounced vassalage to Delhi, Gwalior had been reoccupied by the Pratihars, the Doab was up in arms under the Gahadvad prince Harishchandra, and the Katehar Rajputs had reasserted their independence beyond the Ganges. The Yadavbhatti Rajputs around Alwar had cut off the imperial road to Ajmer. Aibak was not able to reconquer any of these areas before he died in 1210 AD.

Aibak’s successor, Iltutmish, succeeded in retaking Ranthambhor and Gwalior, and in widening his base around Ajmer. But he suffered several defeats at the hands of the Guhilots of Nagda, the Chauhans of Bundi, the Paramars of Malwa, and the Chandellas of Bundelkhand. Beyond the Ganges, the Katehar Rajputs had consolidated their hold which the Sultan could not shake. The Doab was still offering a very stiff resistance. His grip on Ajmer had also started slipping by the time he died in 1236 AD.

The Sultanate suffered a steep decline during the reigns of Razia, Bahrain, Masud, and Mahmud of the Shamsi dynasty founded by Iltutmish, though its dissolution was prevented by Balban who wielded effective power from 1246 AD onwards. The Muslim position in Bengal was seriously threatened by Hindu Orissa. Another Muslim invasion of Assam ended in yet another disaster in which the Muslim general lost his life and a whole Muslim army was annihilated, Hindu chieftains now started battering the Muslim garrison towns in Bihar. Near Delhi, the Chandellas advanced up to Mathura. The Rajputs from Alwar made raids as far as Hansi, and became a terror for Muslims even in the environs of Delhi. Balban’s successes against this rising tide of Hindu recovery were marginal. He suffered several setbacks. The Sultanate was once more reduced to rump around Delhi when Balban died in 1289 AD.

Dr. R.C. Majumdar has summed up the situation so far in the following words: ‘India south of the Vindhyas was under Hindu rule in the 13th century. Even in North India during the same century, there were powerful kingdoms not yet subjected to Muslim rule, or still fighting for their independence’ Even in that part of India which acknowledged the Muslim rule, there was continual defiance and heroic resistance by large or small bands of Hindus in many quarters, so that successive Muslim rulers had to send well-equipped military expeditions, again and again, against the same region’ As a matter of fact, the Muslim authority in Northern India, throughout the 13th century, was tantamount to a military occupation of a large number of important centres without any effective occupation, far less a systematic administration of the country at large.’

Jalaluddin Khalji failed to reconquer any land which had been lost by Muslims during the earlier reign. Alauddin was far more successful. His generals, Ulugh Khan and Nusrat Khan, were able to conquer Gujarat in 1298 AD. But they were beaten back from Ranthambhor which Alauddin could reduce only in 1301 AD. His conquest of Chittor in 1303 AD was short-lived as the Sisodias retook it soon after his death in 1316 AD. So was his conquest of Jalor in Rajasthan. His own as well Malik Kafur’s expeditions against Devagiri in Maharashtra, Warrangal in Andhra Pradesh, Dvarasamudra in Karnataka, and Madurai in Tamil Nadu, were nothing more than raids because Hindu princes reasserted their independence in all these capitals soon after the invaders left. And the Khalji empire collapsed as soon as Alauddin died in 1316 AD. Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq had to intervene in 1320 AD to save the remnants from being taken over by Hindus from Gujarat who had been nominally converted to Islam.

Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq was successful in conquering south and east Bengal.  But he could not completely subdue Tirhut in Bihar. His son Jauna Khan suffered defeat in 1321 AD when he tried to reconquer Warrangal, and had to mount another attack in 1323 AD before he could reduce it.  But by 1326 AD Prataparudra was back in power. In 1324 AD Jauna Khan had been beaten back from the borders of Orissa. He was more successful when he came to power as Muhammad Tughlaq. He consolidated his hold over Devagiri, conquered the small kingdom of Kampili on the Tungbhadra, and forced Dvarasamudra to pay tribute to the imperial authority of Delhi. Madurai also came to be included in his empire. He transferred his capital to Devagiri in order to keep a close watch on Hindu resurrection in the South, and for establishing another centre of Islamic power in India. But at the very start of his reign he had been defeated by Maharana Hammir of Mewar, taken prisoner, and released only after he ceded all claims to Ajmer, Ranthambhor and Nagaur, besides payment of 50 lakhs of rupees as indemnity. And his empire south of the Vindhyas was lost to Delhi in his own life-time, and Delhi’s hold over large areas even in the North disappeared soon after his death in 1351 AD.

Firuz Shah Tughlaq was able to keep together the rump for some time. His expedition to Orissa was nothing more than a successful raid. And he had to lead annual expeditions against the Katehar Rajputs north of the Ganges. Ms successors could not keep even the rump in the north. It broke down completely after Timur’s invasion in 1399 AD. Meanwhile, the great Vijayanagara Empire had consolidated Hindu power south of the Krishna. Rajasthan was ruled by defiant Rajput princes led by Mewar. Orissa had fully recovered from the devastation of Firuz Shah Tughlaq’s raid.

The Sayyids who succeeded the Tughlaqs were hardly an imperial dynasty when they started in 1414 AD. Their hold did not extend beyond Etawah (U.P.) in the east, and Mewat (Haryana) in the south. Khizr Khan tried to restore the empire in the north but without success. Mubarak Shah was able to recover the Punjab and Multan before the Sayyids were supplanted by the Lodis in 1451 AD.

Bahlol Lodi reduced the Muslim principality of Jaunpur in 1457 AD. But Sikandar Lodi failed to subdue Gwalior, Rajasthan, and Baghelkhand. He removed his capital to Agra in order to plan a conquest of Malwa and Rajasthan. But it bore no fruit. The Lodi ’empire’ more or less broke down under Ibrahim Lodi. By this time, Mewar under Rana Sanga had emerged as the strongest state in North India. Orissa stood its ground against Muslim Bengal to its north and the Bahmanis to its south. The power of Vijayanagara attained its acme under Krishnadevaraya (1505-1530 AD).

The situation during the 14th and the 15th centuries has been summed up by Dr. R.C. Majumdar in the following words: ‘The Khalji empire rose and fell during the brief period of twenty years (A.D 1300-1320). The empire of Muhammed bin Tughlaq’ broke up within a decade of his accession (A.D. 1325), and before another decade was over, the Turkish empire passed away for ever’ Thus barring two every short-lived empires under the Khaljis and Muhammad bin Tughlaq’ there was no Turkish empire in India. This state of things continued for nearly two centuries and a half till the Mughals established a stable and durable empire in the second half of the sixteenth century A.D.’

Babur won some renowned victories but hardly established an empire. Humayun lost to Sher Shah Sur, and failed to win back most of what Babur had won. Sher Shah added Ranthambhor and Ajmer to his empire in north India. But the fierce fight he faced in Marwar made him confess that he had almost lost an empire for a handful of millet. His rule lasted only for a brief span of five years (1540-1545 AD). The Sur ’empire’ became a shambles soon after, so much so that the Hindu general Himu was able to crown himself as Hemachandra Vikramaditya at Delhi in 1556 AD.

The Mughal empire founded by Akbar in 1556 AD proved more stable, and endured for 150 years. It also expanded in all directions till by the end of the 17th century it covered almost the whole of India except the extreme south. But the credit for Mughal success must go largely to Akbar’s recognition of power realities, and reconciliation with the Rajputs by suspension of several tenets of a typically Islamic state. It was the Rajput generals and soldiers who won many of the victories for which the Mughals took credit. The Rajput states in Rajasthan and Bundelkhand were vassals of the Mughal emperor only in name. For all practical purposes, they were allies of the Mughals who had to keep them in good humour. And Mewar kept aloft the flag of Hindu defiance throughout the period of effective Mughal rule.

The Mughal empire started breaking up very fast when Aurangzeb reversed Akbar’s policy of accommodating the Hindus, and tried to re-establish a truly Islamic state based on terror, and oppression of the ‘non-believers’. Rajasthan and Bundelkhand reasserted their independence during his life-time. So did the Jats around Bharatpur and Mathura. The Marathas dug Aurangzeb’s grave when they made imperial seats such as Ahmadnagar and Aurangabad unsafe in spite of large Mughal garrisons, and invaded imperial territory as far as Khandesh and Gujarat. This Hindu resurgence shattered the Mughal empire within two decades of Aurangzeb’s death in 1707 AD.

Amongst the provincial Muslim principalities established by rebels and adventurers after the break-up of the Tughlaq empire, those of Bengal, Malwa, Gujarat, and the Bahmanis were notable. Hindu Orissa battled against Bengal till both of them were taken over by the Mughals. The Sisodias of Mewar engaged Gujarat and Malwa, and almost overcame them in the reign of Rana Sanga. Gujarat recovered for a short time only to be taken over by the Mughals. The Vijayanagara Empire contained the Bahmanis from southward expansion in a fierce struggle spread over more than two centuries, in which fortunes on both sides waxed and waned. The destruction of the metropolis at Vijayanagara did not lead to the destruction of the Vijayanagara Empire. It barred the path of Bijapur for another seventy years. Meanwhile, the Marathas had come to control large parts of South India as nominal vassals of Ahmadnagar and Bijapur even before Shivaji appeared on the scene. And they were soon to deliver death blows to the remnants of the Bahmani empire which the Mughals hastened to incorporate in their own empire.

Reviewed as a whole, the period between the last decade of the 12th century and the first quarter of the 18th – the period which is supposed to be the period of Muslim empire in India – is nothing more than a period of long-drawn-out war between Hindu freedom fighters and the Muslim invaders. The Hindus lost many battles, and retreated again and again. But they recovered every time, and resumed the struggle so that eventually the enemy was worn out, defeated, and dispersed in the final round which started with the rise of Shivaji.

As we read the history of medieval India we find that only a few Hindu princes made an abject surrender before the proved superiority of Muslim arms. Muslim historians cite innumerable instances of how Hindus burnt or killed their womenfolk, and then died fighting to the last man. There were many instances of Muslims being defeated decisively by Hindu heroism. Many of the so-called Muslim conquests were mere raids which succeeded initially but the impact of which did not last for long. The account which Assam, Rajasthan, Bundelkhand, Orissa, Telingana, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and the Punjab gave of themselves in successive waves of resistance and recovery, has not many parallels in human history.

It is, therefore, a travesty of truth to say that Islam enjoyed an empire in India for six centuries. What happened really was that Islam struggled for six centuries to conquer India for good, but failed in the final round in the face of stiff and continued Hindu resistance. Hali was not at all wrong when he mourned that the invincible armada of Hijaz which had swept over so many seas and rivers met its watery grave in the Ganges. Iqbal also wrote his Shikwah in sorrowful remembrance of the same failure. In fact, there is no dearth of Muslim poets and politicians who weep over the defeat of Islam in India in the past, and who look forward to a reconquest of India in the future. Hindus have survived as a majority in their motherland not because Islam spared any effort to conquer and convert them but because Islamic brutality met more than its equal in Hindu tenacity for freedom.

Nor is it anywhere near the truth to say that the British empire in India replaced an earlier Muslim empire. The effective political power in India had already passed into the hands of the Marathas, the Jats, and the Sikhs when the British started playing their imperialist game. The Muslim principalities in Bengal, Avadh, South India, Sindh, and the Punjab were no match for the Hindu might that had resurged. The Mughal emperor at Delhi by that time presented a pitiful picture of utter helplessness. The custodians of Islam in India were repeatedly inviting Ahmad Shah Abdali from across the border to come and rescue Islam from the abyss into which it had fallen.

By Sita Ram Goel

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(8954)

Hindus largely perceived as weak, not great soldiers, and yet they had been involved in fighting wars for other than themselves. Among the first foreign forces were Hindus to fight for British on Western front.[2]

While the plans for centenary commemorations of the First World War undergo this week, today’s generation know virtually nothing about the sacrifices of those who laid their lives in the war.

At the onset of the war itself it was abundantly clear to allies that additional troops from India were necessary to fight in North Africa, Europe and the Middle East.[3]

Indian soldiers in First World War.

It was the war India had supported British by all means – Political, military and economic. At a time when majority of Indians were suffering from abject poverty, they gifted 100 million pounds for war. The support was in expectation of British’s sensitive hearing towards plea for Indian independence, which post war British were in no hurry to fulfil.[4]

Indian soldiers in First World War.

Indian army comprised men of diverse faiths. The role of Hindus in the First World War is by and large expunged from the history books.  Merely a cursory gaze at the figures reveals startling fact – In total 1,338, 620 Hindus participated in the war. This number exceeds the total number of army personnel from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa by 178,000[5].

Hindu soldiers were involved in the lands as diverse as Palestine, France, Syria and Mesopotamia. A school of thought says it was the Hindu army which changed the course of the war by turning German soldiers at Marne.Thousands of Hindu soldiers lost their lives and no hero’s welcome awaited the survivors, such was their fate.

indian-infantry-digging-trenches-prepared-against-gas-attack

The war graves in France and Belgium are grim reminder of largely anonymous Hindu soldiers. One of them was Mir Dast, Victoria Cross holder, British highest award of gallantry. He was the officer of 57^th Rifles of the Indian Army, who came under vicious gas attack by Germans in April 1915. As he held his defence against the army, without a gas mask, he managed to save lives of eight officers.[6]

Lying in the hospital bed at Brighton, England, he wrote to his family that he was twice wounded, once in the hand and second from gas.

indian-infantry-digging-trenches

Traces of Hindu participation are fragmented by the fact that only a limited record of correspondence exist between Hindu soldiers and their families. The reason being most Hindu soldiers were illiterate. They would have one of the literate ones among them write the letter. The letter would then be read out to British officer as part of censorship procedure to restrict passing of militarily sensitive information to the enemy before being dispatched off to the recipient’s village.

These letters and diaries are the source of information on the anguish felt by the soldiers about the war. The soldiers talk about guns, poisonous gas, destruction, yearning of family. Hindu soldiers would often refer to great Hindu war epic Mahabharata and compare the war of good versus evil to the current one. One of the soldiers wrote that having witnessed the current war, end of the world seems near and all that was written in Mahabharata and Ramayana appears to be true to him.[7]

Extracts of these letters could be sourced from summaries prepared at the time of censoring of letters. The digital versions of the summaries are available at Europeana and British Library.

The war could also be remembered for the caste discrimination faced by Hindu soldiers. British insisted on maintaining the fault lines of caste system. Recruitment in the army was carried on the assumption that some races were martial races. Majority of army men were sourced from North and Northwest India.[8]

Indian soldier in the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, England. 1914-18

The caste system was practiced by British even in the hospitals where Hindu soldiers were treated.  Royal Pavilion Hospital in Brighton, where the wounded soldiers were treated, ensured the hospital wards were segregated on caste lines. The so called ‘untouchables’ were employed as support staffs.[9]

According to Richard Smith, lecturer at Goldsmith College, University of London, and author of Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War, discrimination faced by the volunteers in the army worked as catalyst for them to join the movements for independence in their respective countries.[10]

Chatri (which means Umbrella in English), is the only memorial of significance to honour the contribution of Hindu and Sikh soldiers. The monument is on the Downs, near Patcham in Brighton.  It was unveiled by the Prince of Wales on 21^st February 1921. [11] It is a cremation site for fifty three Hindus and Sikhs soldiers.

In 2010, their names were inscribed in stones on the site. It is truly disappointing is that it has taken over a century after their deaths that Commonwealth War Graves Commission to inscribe the names of the martyrs. [12]

The Chattri

Hindus sepoys were one of the highest numbers of volunteers as combatants and non-combatants. This is an aspect of history that cannot be disregarded anymore. Without them the freedom Europe enjoyed would not have been possible. It’s high time they are bestowed the honour they deserve for gallantly sacrificing their lives.

Courtesy Kushagra Bhatnagar

[1] http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/india_and_world_war_one.htm

[2] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/special-report-the-centenary-of-wwi–tommies-and-tariqs-fought-side-by-side-8669758.html

[3] http://www.black-history.org.uk/pavilionindian.asp

[4] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/World-War-I-the-India-story-retold/articleshow/30081903.cms

[5] http://www.hinduwisdom.info/European_Imperialism18.htm

[6] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/special-report-the-centenary-of-wwi–tommies-and-tariqs-fought-side-by-side-8669758.html

[7] http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/21/found-translation-indias-first-world-war

[8] http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/21/found-translation-indias-first-world-war

[9] http://www.sikhmuseum.com/brighton/doctor/pavilion/caste.html

[10] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/special-report-the-centenary-of-wwi–tommies-and-tariqs-fought-side-by-side-8669758.html

[11] http://www.chattri.org/

[12] http://www.historytoday.com/rosie-llewellyn-jones/memory-india%E2%80%99s-fallen

(2853)

The Christian missions, as we have seen, had never had it so good. Unchallenged ideologically, they broke out of the tight corner in which Mahatma Gandhi had put them and resumed the monologue which had characterised them in the pre-dialogue period. A number of mission strategies were dressed up as ‘theologies in the Indian context’. The core of the Christian dogma remained intact, namely, that Jesus Christ was the only saviour. The language of presenting the dogma, however, underwent what looked like a radical change to the unwary Hindus, particularly those in search of a ‘synthesis of all faiths’.

In the days of old, the missions had denounced Hinduism as devil-worship and made it their business to save the Hindus from the everlasting fire of hell. Now they abandoned that straight-forward stance. In the new language that was adopted, Hinduism was made a beneficiary of the Cosmic Revelation that had preceded Jehovah’s Covenant with Moses. Hinduism was also credited with an unceasing quest for the ‘True One God’. The business of the missions was to direct that quest towards Christ who was ‘hidden in Hinduism’ and thereby make them co-sharers in the final Covenant which Jesus had scaled with his blood. That was the Theology of Fulfilment. A number of learned treatises were turned out on the subject. The labour invested was perhaps praise-worthy. The purpose, however, was deliberately dishonest.

In the days of old, Hindu culture like Hindu religion was a creation of the devil. It had to be scrapped and the stage swept clean for the culture of Christianity to take over. In the new language, Hindu culture was credited with great creations in philosophy, literature, art, architecture, music, painting and the rest. There was reservation only at one point. This culture, it was said, had stopped short of reaching the crest because its spiritual perceptions were deficient, even defective. It could surge forward on its aborted journey only by becoming a willing vehicle for ‘Christian truths’.

That was the Theology of Inculturation or Indigenisation. It created another lot of literature. The missions, however, did not stop at the theoretical proposition. They demonstrated practically how Hindu culture should serve Jesus. Christ. A chain of Christian Ashrams sprang up all over the country. A number of Christian missionaries started masquerading as Hindu sannyasins, wearing the ochre robe, eating vegetarian food, sleeping on the floor and worshipping with the accoutrements of Hindu pUjA. The sacrifice they made of comforts in the mission stations and monasteries was perhaps admirable. The purpose of the exercise, however, was perfidious.

The controllers of the missions were not exactly happy when they found that Communism was proving more attractive than Christianity for some of the missionaries. Marxism was in the air and it was difficult to dissuade some theologians and field workers from seeing a social revolutionary in Jesus. So the controllers did what they thought to be the next best thing. They encouraged the hot-heads to hammer out another theology, complete with class struggle and the rest, and hurl it against the ‘oppressive social system sanctioned by Hinduism’.

It became the business of the Christian missions to help the ‘have-nots of Hindu society’ rise in revolt against their ‘oppressors’. Hindu society was found to be brimful of caste discrimination, class coercion, degradation of women, neglect of children, untouchability, bonded labour, and so on. That was the Theology of Liberation. It also produced some literature. Malcontents from among the Hindus were hired to lend their names as authors. Never mind if the pamphlets were poorly written and badly printed. The pretence that they came from the ‘deprived and the down-trodden section of Hindu society’ had to be maintained.

The Christian press presented the quibbles among these competing theologies as if momentous matters were being discussed. Hindus were left with the impression that the house of Christianity stood divided from within. The controllers of the missions, however, had everything under control. They were experimenting with various strategies in order to find out which was likely to yield the best results in the long run. In any case, different strategies could be employed simultaneously by different flanks of the missionary phalanx. Each Hindu who came in contact with them could be served with the theology which suited his or her taste.

What helped the Christian missions a good deal from the outside was the rise of Nehruvian Secularism as India’s state policy as well as a raging fashion among India’s intellectual elite. The knowledgeable among the missionaries were surprised and somewhat amused. They knew that Secularism had risen in the West as the deadliest enemy of Christian dogmas and that it had deprived the churches of their stranglehold on state power.

In India, however, Secularism was providing a smokescreen behind which Christianity could steal a march. Politicians of all parties including parties which passed as Hindu, leading journalists and academicians, and scribes of all sorts saw the spectre of ‘Hindu communalism’ whenever someone raised a voice, howsoever feeble and apologetic, about the foreign finances and subversive activities of the Christian missions.

An informed critique of Christianity invited angry snarls from the same quarters. The missions did not feel quite comfortable with the guardians of India’s Secularism; there were too many goddamned Communists, Royists, Socialists and Leftists of all sorts in that crowd. But that was a problem to be faced in the long run. In the short run, the deep hostility which Secularism in India entertained for Hinduism could be turned to Christianity’s advantage. At the same time, Hindus could be frightened into entering a ‘united front of all religions against the forces of Godless materialism’.

Mahatma Gandhi’s sarva-dharma-sambhAva was providing grist to the same mill. The old man had tried to cure Christianity of its exclusiveness and sense of superiority. That was the substance of his objection to proselytisation. He had advised Christians in general and Christian missionaries in particular to be busy with their own moral and spiritual improvement rather than with the salvation of Hindus.

In his own days, Christian theologians had resented his doctrine of sarva-dharma-samabhAva and repudiated it as destructive of the very basis of Christianity. But now that the doctrine had been turned into a mindless slogan by the Mahatma’s own disciples and handed over to the watchdogs of Nehruvian Secularism as another bark against Hinduism, it was safeguarding Christianity’s right to multiply its missions. The doubting Thomases among the Hindus could be told that Bapu stood for equality of all religions and their opportunity to flourish without let or hindrance.

This was the atmosphere in which Ram Swarup’s book, ‘The Word As Revelation: Names of Gods, ?, came out of the press. He had invested in it many years of meditation and reflection. Its subject was neither Christianity, nor its missions.

On the contrary, it was an attempt at understanding the spiritual consciousness which had manifested itself in a multiplicity of Gods, not only in India but in many other lands. Christianity came in for a brief examination when he evaluated Monotheism from the standpoint of the spiritual vision which has sustained religious pluralism among the Hindus down to the present day. But the premises from which he would subsequently develop his deeper critique of Christianity became clear in this book.

Before we take up Ram Swarup’s critique of Christianity in some detail, it would be helpful if we survey briefly the history of how Monotheism came to India and how it acquired the prestige it enjoys at present in the eyes of the dominant and vocal section of the Hindu intelligentsia. It is not rarely that one meets Hindu thinkers who regard Monotheism as a distinct and major contribution made to religious thought by Christianity and Islam.

Many Hindu thinkers disown as relics from a primitive past the multiplicity of Gods for which Hinduism is well known; they also denounce idol worship round which Hinduism has remained centred down the ages. Even those Hindu thinkers who do not disown the Hindu pantheon, consign it to an inferior status vis-a-vis the Great God who is ‘One without a second’; if they defend idol worship, they do so only as a device meant for the spiritually underdeveloped’ seekers who are supposed to be incapable of viewing God without the aid of visible forms.

Monotheism was unknown to Hinduism in ancient times, either as a religious doctrine or as a philosophical concept, not to speak of as a theology. The notion of the ‘True One God’ as opposed to ‘False Many Gods’ was unknown to the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Buddhist and Jain Shastras, the Epics and the Puranas, and the six systems of Hindu philosophy. “Indian spirituality,” writes Ram Swarup, ‘proclaimed that the true Godhead was beyond number and count; that it had many manifestations which did not exclude or repel each other but included each other, and went together in friendship; that it was approached in different ways and through many symbols; that it resided in the hearts of its devotees. Here there were no chosen people, no exclusive prophethoods, no privileged churches and fraternities and ummas. The message was subversive of all religions based on exclusive claims.” This spirituality was summed up in the Vedic mantra,

They hail It as Indra, as Mitra, as Varuna, as Agni, and as that divine and noble-winged GarutmAn. Truth (or Reality) is one; the wise ones speak of it in various ways, whether as Agni, or as Yama, or as MatarishvAn.

Monotheism came to this country for the first time as the war-cry of Islamic invaders who marched in with the Quran in one hand and the sword in the other. It proclaimed that there was no God but Allah and that Muhammad was the Prophet of Allah. It claimed that Allah had completed his Revelation in the Quran and that Muslims who possessed that Book were the Chosen People. It invoked a theology which called upon the believers to convert or kill the infidels, particularly the idolaters, capture their women and children and sell them into slavery and concubinage all over the world, slaughter their sages and saints and priests, break or at least desecrate their idols, destroy or convert into mosques their places of worship, plunder their properties, occupy their lands, and heap humiliations on such of them as cannot be converted or killed either due to their capacity for fighting back or the need of the conquerors for slave labour.

The enormities which the votaries of Islamic Monotheism practised on a vast scale and for a long time vis-a-vis Hindu religion, culture and society, were unheard of by Hindus in the whole of their hoary history. Muslim theologians, sufis and historians who witnessed or read or heard of these doings hailed the doers as soldiers of Allah and heroes of Islam.

They thanked Allah and the Prophet who had declared a permanent war on the infidels and bestowed their progeny and properties on the believers. They quoted chapter and verse from the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet in order to prove that what was being done to Hindus was fully in keeping with the highest teachings of Islam.

The mainstream of Hinduism drew the inescapable conclusion that Islam was not much more than glorified gangsterism, and closed its doors to any willing contact with the hated creed and its vicious votaries. There was, however, a somewhat different response from some marginal sections of Hindu society.

We need not go into the objective and subjective factors which facilitated this response. The result was the same in every case. The doings of Islam were divorced from its doctrine and viewed as aberrations due to human failing. Its Monotheism was abstracted and absorbed as the doctrine of One God as against Many Gods. Finally, Islam was presented as good a religion as Hinduism. The saints who performed this feat are now known as the pioneers of the ‘Nirguna school of Bhakti’. Most of them show symptoms of the deep inroad which Monotheism had made into their psyche.

In the prevalent lore of present-day Hindu scholarship, the Nirguna school of Bhakti has become a ‘progressive movement of social protest’ inspired by the message of human equality and brotherhood supposed to have been brought in by Islam. There are several other myths which, joined together, make this school sound like a radical, even a revolutionary departure from the mainstream of Hinduism. A study of the literature produced by this school, however, provides no evidence that its saints said anything which had not been said long ago and in a loftier language by the ancient sages of Sanatana Dharma, or which was not being said by the other and contemporary school of Bhakti.

By and large, the Nirguna school, like the other school of Bhakti, was wedded to Vaishnavism and drew upon the Epics and the Puranas, particularly the Bhagavata, for its devotional stories and songs. What made the Nirguna school sound different in its historical setting was the stress which most of its saints laid on the ‘True One God (sacchA sAhib)’and the contempt they poured on idol worship (pAthar-pUjA). The Shaktas who worshipped the Great Mother were subjected to virulent attacks in the literature of this school. Allah of the Quran who brooked no partners, particularly of the female gender, and permitted no idol worship, had won a victory without his victims knowing it.

Some Jain monks succumbed to Monotheism in their own way. Jainism had no God who could be made exclusive, nor Gods and Goddesses who could be spurned. But it had its Tirthankaras whose idols were worshipped in its temples. There is evidence that the Sthanakavasi sect of the Svetambara school of Jainism renounced idol worship and turned its back on temples under the influence of Islam.

Islamic invasion was defeated in due course and Muslim rule disappeared from the greater part of the Hindu homeland. But Monotheism retained the prestige it had acquired during the days of Muslim dominance. This happened largely because medieval Hindu thinkers had refused or failed to study and understand Islamic Monotheism in all its ramifications and from its own sources.

Many Hindu writers and poets of the medieval period have left for posterity some graphic accounts of the Muslim behaviour pattern with all its essential ingredients – sack of cities and villages and massacre of whole populations, capture of women and children, humiliation of Brahmanas, breaking of sacred threads, burning of scriptures, slaughter of cows, desecration of idols, destruction of temples or their conversion into mosques, plunder of properties, and so on. But what we miss altogether in the whole of medieval Hindu literature is an insight into the belief system which produced this behaviour pattern. There is not even the hint of a curiosity as to why Muslims were doing what they were doing. No Hindu acharya – there were quite a few of this class during this period – is known to have had a close look at Allah or the Prophet or the Quran or the theology which sanctioned these dismal deeds. Islamic Monotheism was thus allowed to remain unchallenged as a religious doctrine.

Ram Swarup observes, “Hindus fought Muslim invaders and locally established Muslim dynasties but neglected to study the religious and ideological motives of the invaders. Hindu learning or whatever remained of its earlier glory, followed the old grooves and its texts and speculations remained unmindful of the new phenomenon in their midst. For example, even as late as the fourteenth century, when Malik Kafur was attacking areas in the far South, in the vicinity of the seat of Sri Ramanujacharya, the scholarly dissertations of disciples of the great teacher show no awareness of the fact.”

He continues, “Hindus were masters of many spiritual disciplines; they had many Yogas and they had developed a science of inner exploration. There had been a continuing discussion whether the ultimate reality was dvaita or advaita.

It would have been very interesting and instructive to find out if any of these savants of Yoga ever met, on their inner journey, a Quranic being Allah (or its original, Jehovah of the Bible) who is jealous of other Gods, who claims sole sovereignty and yet whom no one knows except through a pet go-between, who uses the latter’s mouth to publish his decrees, who proclaims crusades and jihAd, who teaches to kill the unbelievers and destroy their temples and shrines and levy tribute on them and to convert them into hewers of wood and drawers of water.”

Monotheism which had survived the defeat of Islamic invasion was reinforced by Christianity which appeared on the Indian scene along with European Imperialism. Christian Monotheism was no different from that of Islam; both of them shared a common source in the Bible. Nor had Christian Monotheism lagged behind its Islamic variation in committing atrocities on a large scale, for a long time, and in many lands; in fact, Islam had followed in many respects the precedents set by Christianity.

But in the Indian context, Christian Monotheism had an advantage over that of Islam. Hindus had no opportunity to see the fierce face of Christianity except in the small Portuguese and French enclaves for a short time. By the time Christianity was active in India on any scale, it had suffered a steep decline in the estimation of the dominant Western elite; the rise of modern science, rationalism and secularism had knocked the bottom out of Christian theology and deprived it of its stranglehold on the state.

The British conquerors of India were not willing to back the Christian missions with state power to any great extent; the missions were not allowed to use their tried and tested methods for ‘saving the Hindus from hell’.

Most Hindus felt offended when Christian missionaries used foul language vis-a-vis Hindu religion, culture and society and started making conversions. But few of them were equipped intellectually to identify the doctrine from which the language sprang and the attempts at conversion emanated. Christian missionaries were presenting themselves as worshippers of the ‘True One God’ and denouncing Hinduism as idolatry wedded to many Gods and Goddesses. Some

Hindus defended their pantheon in the best manner they knew and continued to worship in their traditional temples. But others, particularly those who had benefited from English education, took the missionary accusation to heart and started ransacking their own scriptures in search of the ‘True One God’ who could stand shoulder to shoulder with the God of Christianity. They ended by disowning the multiplicity of Gods and denouncing idol worship. They gave out a call for purging Hinduism of its ‘polytheism’ so that Hinduism could be saved. That is how the Hindu reform movements started in the nineteenth century.

The psychology that was at work in the reform movements is illustrated best by the rise of Raja Ram Mohun Roy to name and fame in a short time. He owed his fascination for Monotheism to his study of Islam. Hindus of Calcutta did not take to him kindly when he started denouncing polytheism and idol worship. It was only when he criticised the Christian doctrine of Trinity and the crude methods of Christian missionaries that the English educated gentry of Calcutta warmed up to him. He was hailed as a Hindu leader by this gentry when he discovered the ‘True One God’ in the Brahma of the Vedas and the Upanishads. The Brahmo Samaj he founded took the message to Madras, Malabar, Maharashtra. The North Western Provinces (now U.P.) and the Punjab.

The Arya Samaj, founded by Maharshi Dayananda, spread Monotheism over a larger area and among those sections of Hindu society which had never known it earlier. As a result, Hindu society seemed to acquire self-confidence. But the logic of what had been set in motion was remorseless.

The wheel turned full circle in the Punjab where Neo-Sikhism forced the lives and sayings of the Gurus into the framework of Monotheism borrowed bodily and wholesale from Islam and Christianity. Nothing could have been more distorted and dishonest. But the exercise succeeded because by this time the dominant and vocal section of Hindu intelligentsia had become votaries of Monotheism.

This section applauded when the Akalis drove out the Brahmana priests from the gurudwaras after accusing them of having installed idols of many Gods and Goddesses in places meant for the worship of the ‘True One God’. Hindus who had retained their reverence for the idols had to collect and install them elsewhere when they were thrown out of the gurudwaras. Mahatma Gandhi protested in vain when a temple inside the Harimandir at Amritsar was demolished; he was told that Sikhism did not permit idol worship in its holy places.

The Hindu reform movements had started with the best of intentions. They aspired to save Hindu society from the onslaught of Islam and Christianity. They also succeeded in stopping conversions. But in as much as they were rooted in reaction against Islam and Christianity rather than in a resurgence of the Hindu spiritual vision, they misfired in the long run. Instead of forging their own weapon of defence, they borrowed it from the adversary’s armoury. Small wonder that it boomranged and turned out to the disadvantage of the cause they had espoused.

In disowning the multiplicity of Hindu Gods, the Hindu reform movements tended to disown the rich heritage of Hindu art, architecture, sculpture, music, dance and literature which had developed round these divinities and had no other raison d’etre. It was not long before they forgot the very purpose, namely defence of Hinduism, for which they had placed themselves in the vanguard of Hindu society.

Worse still, the reform movements created an elite which looked down upon its own people and became progressively alienated from them in most of its perceptions. The wide gulf that yawns at present between the two sections of Hindu society is illustrated best by their respective response to the remains of Hindu temples destroyed by the Islamic invaders.

It is not unoften that Hindus in the countryside chance upon remains of temples which lie scattered on some site and which have escaped the notice of the Archaeological Survey of India. Invariably, they collect these remains, cleanse them, install them under a tree or in an improvised temple, and start worshipping them. Experts from the Archaeological Survey who receive the report and visit the spot feel amused at the simplicity of these people. Sometimes the ‘heap’ consists entirely of the outer and decorative portions of a temple and does not contain a single figure of a God or Goddess, either in relief or in the round. But that does not make any difference to the worshippers. All they know and care for is that the remains came from a temple where their ancestors had worshipped at one time but which was subsequently destroyed by Muslims.

The story becomes entirely different when one visits the drawing rooms of the Hindu elite. One sees there an array of sculptures selected with care from the same ruins and installed on tasteful stands. But they draw no reverence from those who possess them. They are only antiques meant for interior decoration. One is expected to contemplate them for their lines and forms and place them properly in the history of Indian art.

Woe betide the visitor who becomes curious as to how these idols which were once housed in some temple or temples have landed in a modern drawing room, and how they got mutilated or defaced or deprived of limbs. That sort of curiosity is most likely to be met with stunned silence or derisive smiles. One has exhibited one’s utter lack of the aesthetic sense. This irrelevant digging into a dead past is simply not done in polished society. Or, worse still, one has betrayed one’s inclination towards ‘Hindu communalism’, a dangerous disease in a society dedicated to Secularism.

It was not that voices in defence of Gods and their worship as idols were not raised while the Hindu reform movements surged forward. Some of these voices came from the tallest figures in the saga of India’s re-awakening to her ancient heritage. Swami Vivekananda had said that if idol worship could produce a spiritual master like Sri Ramakrishna, all honour to it.

Sri Aurobindo had expounded at length how the concrete images to which Vedic rishis addressed their hymns had emerged out of the deepest intuitions of spiritual consciousness. Mahatma Gandhi had avowed his reverence for idols and temples in unmistakable terms. But the voices, it seems, failed to impress the followers of these great men. The Ramakrishna Mission installed life-like statues of Sri Ramakrishna in the temples it built. Sri Aurobindo Ashram raised their own guru to the same status. Mahatma Gandhi has so far been spared that ‘honour’. His followers, however, are not known for their fondness for Hindu idols or temples.

What was worse, the Ramakrishna Mission and the Sri Aurobindo Ashram imbibed the theology of Monotheism in another respect, namely, the cult of the latest and the best which will not be bettered. in the eyes of the Mission, Sri Ramakrishna is no more a saint who sought and verified in his own experience the truths of Sanatana Dharma; he has become a ‘synthesis of all faiths’ including Islam and Christianity such as has never been seen in the past and will not be witnessed again in future! The Ashram hails Sri Aurobindo not as a great yogin and sage who explored and explained to the modern world the deepest insights of the Hindu spiritual tradition, but as the highest manifestation of the Divine in human history! Shades of Christ and Muhammad.

The stalwarts of India’s re-awakening never claimed to be founders of new religions. Nor were they interested in Hinduism because it carried some exclusive message made known to mankind by some Hindu at some point in time. For them, Hinduism was Sanatana Dharma, that is, a spiritual vision valid at all times, in all places and for all people, and directly accessible to all seekers without the help of an historical intermediary. To the Buddha, a new way was suspect. He described his own way as that on which the Buddhas of the past had walked and the Buddhas of the future will walk. And that is Ram Swarup’s starting point in his book. He seeks the “higher meanings” of the Hindu pantheon not only because “it will add to our understanding of Hinduism, one of the most ancient and still one of the major world-religions” but also because, “it will throw light on the ancient Gods of many Asian and European countries, Gods by now so completely forgotten that we cannot study them directly.

“The Hindu pantheon,” observes Ram Swarup, “has changed to some extent but the old Gods are still active and are still understood though under modified names. Hindu India has a continuity with its past which other nations, which changed their religions at some stage, lack. It is known that the Hindu religion preserves many old layers and forms. Therefore, its study may link us not only with its own past forms but also with the religious consciousness, intuitions and forms that prevailed in the past in Europe, in Greece, in Rome, in many Scandinavian and Baltic countries, amongst the German and the Slavic peoples, and also in several countries of the Middle East. In short, the study may reveal a fundamental form of spiritual consciousness which is wider than its Hindu expression.” This emergence of similar spiritual insights and forms over a vast area was not an accident.

The earliest Hindu expression of that spiritual consciousness is found in the Vedas, “humanity’s oldest extant scripture.”Three things “stand out prominently” when we study the Vedic pantheon. Firstly, there is “a very large use of concrete images… many important Gods like Surya, Agni, Marut take their names after natural objects.” Secondly, “the spiritual consciousness of the race is expressed in terms of a plurality of Gods.” Thirdly, “all Gods have multiple names.” These are also features shared by the pantheons of many other peoples.

Ram Swarup starts with the Names of Gods which, in turn, lead him to an inquiry into the nature of language and the higher meanings of words. Taking up concrete images in the Vedic pantheon, he observes, “We have already seen that the physical and the intellectual are not opposed to one another. The names of physical objects become names of ideas, names of psychic truths, names of Gods; sensuous truths become intellectual truths, become spiritual truths… In fact, this is the only way in which the sense-bound mind understands something of the higher knowledge… This reverberating, echoing and imaging takes place up and down the whole corridor of the mind at all levels of abstraction. Here, as we traverse the path, we meet physical-forms, sound-forms, vision-forms, thought-forms, universal-forms, all echoes of each other.

We meet mantras and yantras and icons of various efficacies and psychic qualities. In one sense, they are not the light above but they are its important formations. They invoke the celestial and raise up the terrestrial…12 There is another reason why images in the Vedas and the Upanishads are concrete. When the fever of the soul subsides, when the mind becomes calm, when the spiritual consciousness opens, things are no longer lifeless.

In this state, things which have hitherto been regarded as ordinary are full of life, light and consciousness. In this state, ‘the earth meditates as it were; water meditates as it were; mountains meditate as it were.’ In this state, no need is felt to separate the abstract from the concrete because both are eloquent with the same message, because both image one another. In this state, everything expresses the divine; everything is the seat of the divine; everything is That; mountains, rivers and the great earth are but the TathAgata, as a Chinese teacher, Hsu Yun, proclaimed after his spiritual awakning.”

How did the Vedic sages see Gods in Nature’s mighty phenomena like the earth, the sky, the sun and the stars? “They saw in them sources and springs of their own lives; they saw that these things were part of one Great Life; that they were meeting points of great spiritual truths; that they revealed what was concealed; that they prefigured a mighty design; that they were kith and kin, friends and lovers. But in order to yield their deeper meanings, they demanded continued fellowship. This the old sages gave ungrudgingly and joyfully. They filled their hearts and the fullness of their hearts broke out in songs of praise.”

Coming to the plurality of the Vedic Gods and their names, he comments, “The names of Gods are not names of external beings. These are the names of the truths of man’s own higher self. So the knowledge of the epithets of Gods is a form of self-knowledge. Gods and their names embody truths of the deeper Spirit and meditation on them in turn invokes those truths. But those truths are many and, therefore Gods and their names too are many, though they are all held together in the unity of a spiritual consciousness.”

Equipped with this perspective on the nature of spiritual consciousness and its inevitable expressions, Ram Swarup proceeds to examine Monotheism and Polytheism. He finds merit in both of them so long as they remain spiritual ideas and do not become intellectual concepts.

“The Spirit,” he observes, “is a unity. It also worships nothing less than the Supreme. Monotheism expresses, though inadequately, this intuition of man for unity and for the Supreme… When the urge for unity is spiritual, the theology of One God is no bar and the seeker reaches a position no different from Advaita, from ekam sat. He realizes that God alone is, and not that there is only One God. But if the motive for unity is merely intellectual, it helps little spiritually speaking. God remains an outward being and does not become the truth of the Spirit.

It does not even help to reduce the number of Gods; instead it multiplies the number of Devils – if Christianity is any guide in the matter. We know Medieval Christianity was chockful of them. In fact, they occupied the centre of attention of the Church for many centuries to the exclusion of everything else. During these centuries it was difficult to say whether the Church worshipped God or these devils… The Church also abounded in Gods though they were not as plentiful as the devils. But these were not recognised as such because they appeared in the guise of angels, cherubims and seraphims.”

Coming to Polytheism, he comments, “If monotheism represents man’s intuition for unity, polytheism represents his urge for differentiation. Spiritual life is one but it is vast and rich in expression.

The human mind also conceives it differently. If the human mind was uniform, without depths, heights and levels of subtlety or if all men had the same mind, the same imagination, the same needs; in short, if all men were the same, then perhaps One God would do. But a man’s mind is not a fixed quantity and men and their powers and needs are different. So only some form of polytheism alone can do justice to this variety and richness. Besides this variety of human needs and human minds, the spiritual reality itself is so vast, immense and inscrutable that man’s reason fails and his imagination and fancy stagger.

Therefore this reality cannot be indicated by one name or formula or description. It has to be expressed in glimpses from many angles. No single idea or system of ideas could convey it adequately. This too points to the need for some form of polytheism.”

“The Vedic approach,” concludes Ram Swarup, “is perhaps the best. It gives unity without sacrificing diversity. In fact, it gives a deeper unity and a deeper diversity beyond the power of ordinary monotheism and polytheism. It is one with the yogic and the mystic approach20… In this deeper approach, the distinction is not between a true One God and false Many Gods; it is between a true way of worship and a false way of worship.

Wherever there is sincerity, truth and self-giving in worship, that worship goes to the true altar by whatever name we may designate it and in whatever way we may conceive it. But if it is not desireless, if it has ego, falsehood, conceit and deceit in it, then it is unavailing though
it may be offered to the most true God, theologically speaking.

Summing up, Ram Swarup says, “The truth is that the problem of One or Many Gods is born of a theological and not of a mystic consciousness. In the Atharvaveda, the sage Vena says that he ‘sees That in that secret station of the heart in which the manifoldness of the world becomes one-form’… But in another station of man, where not his soul but his mind rules, there is opposition between the One and the Many, between God and Matter, between God and Gods.

On the other hand, when the soul awakens, Gods are born in its depths which proclaim and glorify one another. Gods are bound to appear when the spiritual consciousness awakens; though in another sense they also fall away, God as well as Gods, with all their outward, anthropomorphic forms, and along with all our conceptions of them, however sublime and. exalted. Yes, even God falls away. For there is a spiritual consciousness which can do without God. Buddhism, Jainism, SAMkhya, Taoism and Zen confirm the truth of this observation. In fact, in Buddhism and Jainism, though Gods are plentiful, there is very little of One God. Yet in spiritual perception, insight and attainment, these religions are not less than those where One God rules the roost and is the sole cock of the walk.”

Monotheism as known to history is not born of spiritual seeking. Ram Swarup says, “Monotheism was not always a spiritual idea. In many cases it was an ideology. It was consolidated in wars and in turn it led to further wars… there was a larger association to create, an empire to consolidate, or other nations and tribes to conquer, and the idea of a ‘One True God’ was handy in the pursuit of this object. The diplomacy, the sword, systematic vandalism, all played their part in making a particular god supreme. From very early days, the One God of Christianity was bound up with the imperial needs of Rome. In more recent times, the Biblical God has tried to consolidate what the European arms and trade have conquered…

In the cultural history of the world, the replacement of Many Gods by One God was accompanied by a good deal of conflict, vandalism, bigotry, persecution and crusading. These conflicts were very much like the ‘wars of liberation’ of today, hot and cold, openly aggressive or cunningly subversive. Success in such wars played no mean role in making a local deity, say Allah of certain Arab tribes, win a wider status and assume a larger monarchical role… This point needs stressing. For in the past, the controversy between One God and Many Gods or between My True God and Your False God led to many rolling of heads and much spilled blood, and even today there is no dearth of hot heads and the discussion still tends to polemics, bad blood, and frayed tempers. There are still organised churches and missions out to make war on the false Gods of the heathens.

On the other hand, Polytheism “bred a spirit of religious tolerance and freedom” wherever it prevailed. “Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt – all polytheistic cultures – were relatively free from religious wars… Rome, Alexandria and Athens were open places where different religions met and discussed freely. When St. Paul visited Athens, he was invited by the Athenians to speak about his doctrine.

He did not avail himself of the opportunity but it is obvious that he did not feel at home in this atmosphere of free enquiry… St. Paul represented not the spirit’s impatience with what is only cerebral but a passionate attachment to a fixed idea which is closed to wider viewpoints and larger truths of life. In polytheistic Rome too, men of different religious persuasions and sects met and built their temples and worshipped in their own way. But this freedom disappeared when Christianity, the religion of One True God, took over.”

Ram Swarup, therefore, calls upon the people of various countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and America to return to their ancient Gods which have been replaced by the semitic Gods in the recent past. “It would, therefore, be difficult,” he writes, “to hold that the present Gods of semitic origin are superior to the now defunct pagan Gods. There was a time when the old pagan Gods were pretty fulfilling and they inspired the best of men and women to acts of greatness, love, nobility, sacrifice and heroism. It is, therefore, a good thing to return to them in thought and pay them our homage. We know pilgrimage, as ordinarily understood, as wayfaring to visit a shrine or a holy place. But there can also be a pilgrimage in time and we can journey back and make our offerings of the heart to those Names and Forms and Forces which once incarnated and expressed man’s higher life. They are holy Names and Symbols.”

Restoration of old Gods will restore among the people concerned a respect for their past. It will also fill the gap in their cultural history. “The present generations of many countries tend to regard their past as a benighted period of their history. A more understanding approach towards their Gods of old will work for a less severe judgement about their past and their ancestors. It will also fill the generation gap, not the one we talk about the most these days but a still wider one, the general rootlessness of a whole nation. Gods provide an invisible link between the past and the present of a nation; when they go, the link also snaps. The peoples of Egypt, Persia, Greece, Germany and the Scandinavian countries are no less ancient than the people of India; but they lost their Gods, and therefore they lost their sense of historical continuity and identity.”

Such a restoration is particularly relevant for the peoples of Africa and South America. “The countries of these continents have recently gained political freedom of a sort, but it has done little to help them and to give them a spiritual identity. If they wish to rise in a deeper sense, they must recover their soul, their Gods, their roots in their own psyche; there has to be a spiritual reassertion, a resurrection of their Gods. If they need any change, and there is no doubt they do, it must come from within themselves as a part of their own experience. If they do enough self-churning, then their own Gods will put forth new meanings in response to their new needs. They have to make the best of their own psychic and spiritual gifts and discover their own Gods within themselves. No people can import their Gods ready-made and rise spiritually under the aegis of imported deities, saviours and prophets.”

The old Gods are not dead; they have only withdrawn themselves. “If there is sufficient aspiration, invoking, and soliciting, there is no doubt that even Gods apparently lost could come back again. They are there all the time. For nothing that has any truth in it can be destroyed. It merely goes out of manifestation; but it could reappear under propitious circumstances. So could the old Gods come to life again in response to new summons.”

It was quite apt that a review of Ram Swarup’s book which appeared in The Times of India dated March 29, 1981 described it as a call for “The Return of the Gods”. The reviewer was the noted scholar from Santiniketan, Dr. Sisir Kumar Ghose. He was well-known as an exponent of Sri Aurobindo’s thought.

Five years later, Ram Swarup examined Monotheism more concretely, that is, its unfoldment in the form of Islam and Christianity. “The spiritual equipage of Islam and Christianity,” he wrote, “is similar; their spiritual contents, both in quality and quantum, are about the same. The central piece of the two creeds is ‘One True God’ of masculine gender who makes himself known to his believers through an equally favoured individual. The theory of mediumistic communication has not only a psychology; it has also a theology laid down long ago in the oldest part of the Bible in the Deuteronomy (18.19-20).

The Biblical God says that he will speak to his chosen people through his chosen prophet: ‘I will tell him what to say, and he will tell the people everything I command. I will punish anyone who refuses to obey him’ (Good News Bible). The whole prophetic spirituality, whether found in the Bible or in the Quran, is mediumistic in essence. Here everything takes place through a proxy, through an intermediary. Here man knows God through a proxy; and probably God too knows man through the same proxy. The proxy is the favoured individual, a privileged mediator. ‘No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him,’ says the Bible (Matt.XI. 27). The Quran makes no very different claim. ‘This day I have perfected your religion,’ says the Allah of the Quran through his last prophet (5.3).”

He thought that the time had come for Hindus to evaluate Christianity and Islam in terms of Hindu spirituality. “Hitherto we have looked on Hinduism through the eyes of Islam and Christianity. Let us now learn to look at these ideologies from the vantage point of Hindu spirituality – they are no more than ideologies, lacking as they are in the integrality and inwardness of true religion and spirituality. Such an exercise would also throw light on the self-destructiveness of modern ideologies of Communism and Imperialism, inheritors of the prophetic mission or ‘burden’ in its secularised version of Christianity and Islam. The perspective gained will be a great corrective and will add a new liberating dimension; it will help not only India and Hinduism but the whole world.”

Respect for Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism, and revolt against closed theologies was already growing in the world. “Dogmas are under a cloud; claims on behalf of Last Prophethood and Only Sonship, hitherto enforced through great intellectual conditioning, browbeating and the big stick, are becoming unacceptable. Religions of proxy are in retreat.

More and more men now seek authentic experience. Men and women are ceasing to be obedient believers and are becoming seekers. They no longer want to be anybody’s sheep, now that they know they can be their own shepherds. An external authority, even when it is called God in certain scriptures, threatening and promising alternately, is increasingly making less and less impression; people now realize that Godhead is their own true, secret status and they seek it in the depths of their own being. All this is in keeping with the wisdom of the East.

Ram Swarup completed his evaluation of the semitic creeds by locating them in their proper place on the map of the Samkhya-Yoga philosophy and psychology which are shared in common by all schools of Sanatana Dharma. He pointed out that the traditional commentators on Yoga had concentrated on the yogic or ekAgra samAdhi and neglected treatment of non-yogic samAdhis. It was, however, the non-yogic samAdhis which held the key to an understanding of the psychic phenomena which do not have their source in the yogic samAdhi. We shall quote him at some length:

Considering that the two kinds of samAdhis are not unoften confused with each other, it would have served the cause of clarity if both were discussed and their differences pointed out. After all, the Gita does it; in its last two chapters, it discusses various spiritual truths like austerity, faith, duty, knowledge in their triple expression and sharply distinguishes their sAttvika from their rAjasika and tAmasika imitations.

The elucidation of non-yogic samAdhis or ecstasies has also its positive value and peculiar concern. It could help to explain quasi-religious phenomena which, sadly, have been only too numerous and too important in the spiritual history of man. Many creeds seemingly religious sail under false labels and spread confusion. As products of a fitful mind, they could ‘not but make only a temporary impression and their life could not but be brief. But as projections of a mind in some kind of samAdhi, they acquire unusual intensity, a strength of conviction and tenacity of purpose (mUDhagraha) which they could not otherwise have.

We may say that even the lower bhUmis (kAma-bhUmis) have their characteristic trances or samAdhis, their own Revelations, Prophets and Deities. They project ego-gods and desire-gods and give birth to dvesha-dharmas and moha-dharmas, hate religions and delusive ideologies. All these projections have qualities very different from the qualities of the projections of the yogic bhUmi.

For example, the God of the yoga-bhUmi of PAtaNjala Yoga is free, actually and potentially, from all limiting qualities like desire, aversion, hankering, ego and nescience; free from all actions, their consequences, present or future, active or latent. Or in the language of PAtaNjala Yoga, he is untouched by klesha-karma-vipAka-Ashaya. But the god of the ecstasies of non-yogic bhUmi or kAma-bhUmi is very different. He has strong likes and dislikes and has cruel preferences. He has his favorite people, churches and ummas and his implacable enemies. He is also very egoistic and self-regarding; he can brook no other god or gods. He insists that all gods other than himself are false and should not be worshipped.

He is a ‘jealous god’, as he describes himself in the Bible. And he ‘whose name is jealous’ is also full of ‘fierce anger’ (aph) and cruelty. He commands his chosen people that when he has brought them to the promised land and delivered its people into their hands, ‘thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them… ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves… For thou art an holy people unto the Lord…’ (Deut. 7. I-6

The Allah of the Quran exhibits about the same qualities. He is a god of wrath (ghazb); on those who do not believe in him and his prophets, he wreaks a terrible punishment (azAb al-azeem). In the same vein, he is also a mighty avenger (azeez-ul-intiqAm). He is also a god of ‘plenteous spoils’ (mUghanim kasIr, 4.94).

He tells the -believers how he repulsed their opponents and caused them to inherit the land, the houses and the wealth of the disbelievers (33.27). He closely follows the spirit of Jehovah who promised his chosen people that he would give them ‘great and goodly cities they builded not, and wells which they digged not, vineyards and olive trees they planted not’ (Deut. 6.10-11).

No wonder this kind of god inspired serious doubts and questions, among thinking people. Some of his followers like Philo and Origen allegorized him to make him more acceptable. Some early Christian gnostics simply rejected him. They said that he was an imperfect being presiding over an imperfect moral order; some even went further and regarded him as the principle of Evil. Some gnostic thinkers called him ‘Samael’, a blind God or the God of the blind; others called him ‘Ialda baoth’, the son of Chaos.

He continues to offend the moral sense of our rational age too. Thomas Jefferson thinks that the ‘Bible God is a being of terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust.’ Thomas Paine (1737-1809) says of the Bible that ‘it would be more consistent that we call it the work of a demon than the word of God.’

Hindus will buy any outrages if they are sold as Gods, Saints, or Prophets. They have also a great weakness for what they describe as ‘synthesis’. In that name, they will lump together most discordant things without any sense of their propriety and congruity, intellectual or spiritual. However, a few names like Bankim Chandra, Swami Dayananda, Vivekananda, Aurobindo and Gandhi are exceptions to the rule.

To Bankim, the God of the Bible is ‘a despot’ and Jesus’s doctrine of ‘eternal punishment’ in the ‘everlasting Fire’ (Matt. 25. 41) is ‘devilish’. Swami Dayananda remembering -how the Biblical ‘Lord sent a pestilence… and there fell seventy thousand men of Israel’ (I Chr. 21.14), His Chosen people, observes that even ‘the favour of a capricious God so quick in His pleasure is full of danger’, as the Jews know it only too well. Similarly, the Swami argues, in his usual unsparing way, that the Allah and Shaitan of the Quran, according to its own showing, are about the same.

But to reject is not to explain. Why should a god have to have such qualities? And why should a being who has such qualities be called a god? And why should he have so much hold? Indian Yoga provides an answer. It says that though not a truly spiritual being, he is thrown up by a deeper source in the mind. He is some sort of a psychic formation and carries the strength and attraction of such a formation. He also derives his qualities and dynamism from the chitta-bhUmi in which he originates.

It will explain that the Biblical God is not peculiar and he is not a historical oddity. He has his source in man’s psyche and he derives his validity and power from there; therefore he comes up again and again and is found in cultures widely separated. This god has his own ancestry, his own sources from which he is fed, his own tradition and principle of continuity, self-renewal and self validation.

Not many know that a similar God, Il Tengiri, presided also over the life of Chingiz Khan and bestowed on him Revelations. Minhajus Siraj, the mid-thirteenth century historian, tells us in his TabqAt-i-NAsiri, that ‘after every few days, he (Chingiz Khan) would have a fit and during his unconsciousness he would say all sorts of things… Some one would write down all he said, put (the papers) in a bag and sealed them. When Chingiz recovered consciousness, everything was read out to him and he acted accordingly. Generally, in fact always, his designs were successful.’

In this, one can see unmistakable resemblance with the revelations or wahi of the semitic tradition. In actual life, one seldom meets truths of the kAma-bhUmi unalloyed. Often they are mixtures and touched by intrusions from the truths of the yoga-bhUmi above.

This however makes them still more virulent; it puts a religious rationalization on them. It degrades the higher without uplifting the lower. The theories of jihAd, crusades, conversions and da‘wa become spiritual tasks, Commandments of God, religious obligations, vocations and duties of a Chosen People. ‘See my zeal for the Lord’, says Jehu, an army captain anointed as king at the command of Jehovah. Bound to follow His will, he called all the prophets, servants, priests and worshippers of rival Baal on the pretext of organising his service and when they were gathered, his guards and captains ‘smote them with the edge of the sword’ and ‘they brake down the image of Baal, and brake down the house of Baal, and made it a draught house (latrine) unto this day’ (2 Kings 10. 25, 27).

This characterisation of the Semitic creeds, their gods, their scriptures and their prophets was bound to bring about a radical change in the Hindu assessment of Christianity. More and more Hindu thinkers and scholars are going to primary sources rather than remain satisfied with the professions of the Christian missionaries.

By By Sita Ram Goel

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This program shows how the academic racism of the period helped to spread imperialist policies across the globe. Sifting through the “science” of eugenics and its link to social Darwinism, the film juxtaposes the racial hygiene theories of Robert Knox, Francis Galton, and Eugen Fischer with racial warfare in Tasmania, Victorian apathy in famine-wracked India, and—prefacing the Holocaust—horrific German colonization tactics in Namibia. Expert commentary comes from author David Dabydeen, Dr. Maria Misra of Oxford University, and Professor Catherine Hall of University College London. Contains graphic footage from concentration camps.

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400 years ago British merchants landed on the coast of India and founded a trading post to export goods to London. Over the next 200 years, their tiny business grew into a commercial titan. Using the letters and diaries of the men and women who were there, this documentary tells the story of the East India Company, which revolutionised the British lifestyle, sparked a new age of speculation and profit and by accident created one of the most powerful empires in history.

Yet inexorable rise ended in ignominy. Dogged by allegations of greed, corruption and corporate excess, by the 1770s the company’s reputation was in tatters. Blamed for turning its back as millions died in the Bengal famine, and thrown into crisis by a credit crunch in Britain, the world’s most powerful company had run out of cash, sparking a government intervention.

Courtesy BBC

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Imagine an India where after hundreds of years of dogged resistance the Hindus fail to rise again. Imagine the end of the fourteenth century – a Delhi laid waste by the invasions of Timur and the horrors that lay in his wake. Imagine no renaissance of the warrior clans in Rajasthan under Rana Kumbha and the raising of the tower of victory. Imagine no resurgence in the south under the inspirational leadership of the Sangama brothers to create the golden empire of Vijaynagar. Imagine no hosts of fearless Sadhus and Saints traversing the subcontinent spreading the message of dharma and bhakti.

Imagine there was no empire of the Gajapati kings in Orrisa or the Ahoms in Assam giving the Mughals a resounding defeat in 1671. Imagine a land beaten down by the forces of Islamic Imperialism after centuries of struggle and bloodshed eventually falling by the 1400’s to the Crescent banner of the Arabs and Turks. Is it so hard to imagine ?

 Then look back upon history and see the rise of the Sassanian Empire in Persia – the inheritors of the Parthians who faced the might of the Roman Empire at its peak defeating the legions under Marcus Crassus – the same Sassans under their Emperor Shapur who defeated the Roman Emperor Valerian at the Battle of Edessa in 260 CE and after capturing him  used him as a footstool for the remainder of his captivity.

The Sassans who faced the Byzantines in perpetual conflict and turned Zoarasterism into a state religion.The rise of the Arabic Islamic Caliphate put an end to the once mighty Sassanids – from 633 CE to the final elimination of their remnants by the Ninth Century – the imposition of the Jizya, the submission of the majority non Muslims to dhimmi status led the eventual collapse of the ancient religion of Zoroaster with their scattered remnants fleeing from persecution to India.

Further west, the once all encompassing Hellenic culture which produced Socrates, Aristotle, Democritus, Plato and many others fell to the missionary zeal of early Christianity. The Byzantines became the vanguard of the Eastern Church and soon the great library of Alexandria fell together with the Oracle of Delphi and the destruction of the Sybylline books. the ancient lands of Egypt, West Asia and Greece were Christianised by the fifth century of the Common Era and the banning of the practice of ‘Pagan’ religions and the smashing of their temples led to an almost total Christianisation of the region by the early sixth century CE.

Their great rivalry with the Sassanids of Persian was partly predicated upon religious rivalry between the church and advocates of the fire temples of Zoaraster. Both were however eclipsed by the rise the Islamic Caliphate. With remarkable energy and speed the once glorious Sassanids fell into oblivion and the Imperial cult of Zoarasterianism was reduced within generations to the a few scattered remnants far from the scenes of their once exalted status.

Within a few hundred years and the decline of the Byzantines in the face of determined Arab followed by Turk incursions the majority of the region converted to Islam and in a few generations became amongst the most fanatical votaries of their new faith.

In the vast open regions of Central Asia lay the fabled Silk Route. Mighty Empires rose and fell and the wild horse borne archers of the steppes were feared for the skill and ruthlessness. Over all ruled the benign image of the Buddha – the quintessential image of peace and serenity created a curious dichotomy between the  nomadic tribesmen and the practitioners of non violence.

The great statues of Bamiyan, the organised and missionary activities of the Sangha led to whole masses of the population becoming Buddhists under the tutelage of the monks vestiges of which we can still see in the societies of Burma, Sri Lanka and Tibet. The grant empire of the Kushans which lay straddled across the Silk route saw the Emperors venerating the Buddha and facilitating his message acorss the face of the known world.

In 634 the Battle of Talas heralded the defeat of the Chinese empire by the Arabs and gradual Arab penetration and Islamisation of the region. Within a few centuries the Buddhists were fleeing eastward and towards India – those that remained saw the graven images of ‘But’ being flung to the ground and trampled underfoot as the advocates of the desert faith called the faithful to prayer. Today hardly an echo of the ancient faith of Buddhism remains in the region which can be most clearly seen in the once Buddhist stronghold of Afghanistan.

An Arab invasion stormed into Sindh in 666 CE before a determined Hindu coalition under the legendary Bappa Rawal defeated them in the Battle of Rajasthan in 738 CE bringing to an end the eastward expansion of the Caliphate, much like the westward expansion being stopped at the Battle of Tours by Charles Martel in 732 CE.

The aforesaid conversion of Central Asia led the incursions of the Turk tribes westward to fight the Crusaders and further to the east towards the fabled land of India. Centuries of resistance were eventually overcome and the kings of the frontiers known as the Hindu Shahis fell.A veritable tide of bloodshed that had few parallels in history followed. Into this cauldron of bloodletting the multi ethnic and multi religious region of South Asia was subjected to an orgy of violence and hatred that beggars few comparisons in history. Echoes of this carnage can be seen in the endless wanderings and sufferings of the ‘Gypsies’ around the world as they fled fleeing from India to escape the horrors.

The ancient seats of learning of Nalanda and Taxila were razed to the ground and the monks massacred in the sacred premises where students from across three continents would come to learn. Stupas, Temples and Holy sites were leveled to the ground or converted into mosques. Swathes of people bereft of their political and spiritual leadership were converted to the faith of the invaders.

The Buddhists seemed to be particularity susceptible in this case with their population bereft of guidance following the destruction of the stupas and the slaying of the monks. The once widespread religion of the Jains were whittled down to a handful of secretive and hidden trading clans where it remains today. It is thought that the obliteration of the materialist and atheistic Carvakas is dated from this time.

The Hindus ensured however – the resistance following the Battle of Tarain in 1192 confounded the invader. The genocidal forces of monotheistic fervour was confronted with implacable resistance – the resistance continued from the towns, to the deserts, to the forests and far into the mountains. And so amidst the raging wars and the collapse of the medieval Indian civilisation the Turkic forces suffered terrible losses.

And so Muhammed Ghori was slain by Hindu rebels in Punjab, and so Raziya Sultan was killed in revenge by the Hindus in Mewat and so tens and thousand gave their lives in a furious attempt to resist forced conversion, enslavement and submission  – And so just decades after the Battle of Tarain the nascent Sultanate in Delhi was close to collapse – According to the historian, Firishta it was the constant immigration of Muslims into India that kept their momentum up – the endless cycle of war and resistance claimed the lives of so many Arab, Turk and Persian warriors that a constant flow of migration was required to maintain the forces of Jihad in the land of the Pagans. And just as Rome and Greece fell to Christianity in the early part of the millennium and the Near East , Persia and Central Asia went under the banner of Islam it was expected that India too would inevitably fall.

But the reality defied the lessons of history – by the 1500’s the majority of the subcontinent was under the rule of the resurgent Hindus – the teachings of the wandering Saints combined with the fervour of an undefeated dharma was only brought to a tenuous compromise by the Mughal emperor Akbar with his rejection of formal Islam.

This compromise was shattered by the return of fanaticism under the iconoclastic rule of Aurangzeb and amidst the shattered remains of the Mughals rose again the Rajputs of western India, the Gurkhas in the far northern hill, the Ahoms in the jungles and forests of the east, the Jaats in the plains of Hindustan and above all the rise of the Maratha Empire from Shivaji the Great to the conquests of Baji Rao from 1720-1740.

E Keane characterised the finality of this resurgence culminating in the rise of the Maratha warlord Mahadji Sindhia as the Hindu reconquest of India – This reconquest was only stopped by the entry of the colonial powers and after a desperate struggle culminating in the bloody rising of 1857 British control was established over the subcontinent. Since independence 90 nears thereafter has seen the creation of a fast rising economic and military power of modern day India adjoining a militarised state of Pakistan veering on the edge of a collapse into medieval theocracy.

Now imagine once again the alternative – Imagine an India where Islam had emerged triumphant – imagine 1.2 billion more adherents to Islam in a single stroke increasing the worlds population of Islam to almost 40% of the total – Imagine how history would have changed – how fanatical hordes pouring from the shores and borders of South Asia into China – into South East Asia, across the shores into Africa. Imagine a war on terror with no end.

Imagine also a world with no yoga, with no spirituality, with no selfless teachers reaching out across the globe, with no Ayurveda, with no Mahatma Gandhi, no Swami Vivekananda , with no link to the ancient past which has all but been obliterated from the majority of the globe.

Think then of the sacrifices made for the sake of Dharma- think of the millions who gave their lives over the blood soaked centuries  think of the determined and relentless resistance provided generation after generation rising with arms and faith again and again – think of how the history of the world would have changed had the Hindus failed.

Charles Martel is called the saviour of Europe following the Battle of Tours but how many today remember the Battle of Rajasthan, Raja Bhoja, Shivaji, Baji Rao and countless others – Remember the struggle that has convulsed South Asia and the Hindus for a thousand years and the rise once again into the modern world of an ancient civilisation undefeated and undaunted.

Also Read : The Myth of “1000 Years of Hindu Slavery”

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The post-World War 2 era of world history saw the dramatic end of colonialism all around the world. The first and most devastating blow to colonialism was the freedom of India, in which over night 1/5^th of humanity were freed. Despite the sad events that accompanied Independence (i.e. the partition of India and the accompanying massacres), Independence Day is a happy event, celebrated by over a billion people every year. India was the first country to free herself, and her freedom gave impetus and hope to the freedom movements of so many other countries spread out over. Asia and Africa. This section is dedicated to the sacrifice of all of the freedom fighters who struggled against European colonialism.

Many of the most prominent freedom fighters were inspired by the Bhagavad Gita. Many even went to the gallows and were executed with the Gita in their hands. The Swadeshi movement of Bengal in 1905 began with a gathering of 50,000 people on the streets on the streets of Calcutta, each with the Gita in their hands. The crowds proceeded to the Kali Temple where they vowed to boycott British goods and drive the British from their lands. The following are very brief biographies about some of the many great leaders and freedom fighters that drew inspiration from the Gita:

Lokmanya Tilak (1856-1920) was known as the “Father of Indian Unrest”. He was the very first person to demand full independence from Britain in the Congress sessions. He explained: “The most practical teaching of the Gita, and one for which it is of abiding interest and value to the men of the world with whom life is a series of struggles, is not to give way to any morbid sentimentality when duty demands sternness and the boldness to face terrible things.” And “It is my firm conviction that it is of utmost importance that every man, woman and child of India understands the message of the Gita.” He write a commentary on the Gita called “Gita Rahasya”, which even today is one of the best books written on the Gita

Bankim Chandra Chatterji (1858-1930) – Bankim Chandra was not a freedom fighter, but through his writings he sparked of an intense freedom struggle and breathed a new passion and life into the nation, particularly his native region of Bengal, which became kindled with religious, nationalistic and artistic fervour after being infused with the powerful visions contained in his writings. Virtually all of you will have heard the famous slogan “Vande Mataram” (I bow to the Mother). The poem and song by this name was first written by him in his famous novel “Anandamath”. The Anandamath story is set in 18^th century India, when a group of warrior sannyasis mounted a guerilla war against Muslim rule (based on a true historical attempt by sannyasis to do precisely this). It was a riveting story line with amazing characters and meaningful dialogues. Yet more importantly, hundreds of thousands of Indians took the story as a metaphor for their own present day situation, understanding it as a call to arms to drive the new tyrants (the British) away from the sacred soil. “Vande Mararam” became the slogan of the freedom struggle. Bankim Chandra drew deep inspiration from the Gita. He wrote a commentary on the Gita, which was only three quarters complete when he died, and an inspiring life sketch of Krishna based on historical and literary research, titled Sri Krishna Charitra.

Mahatma Gandhi’s (1869-1948)  role in the freedom movement of India needs no explanation. His very name invokes images of India’s Independence. He was a kshatriya who fought his battle with unique weapons. He drew great inspiration and courage from the Gita, “I find a solace in the Bhagavad-Gita that I miss even in the Sermon on the Mount [Gandhi felt that the Sermon was the most deep and meaningful dialogue in the Christian teachings]. When disappointment stares me in the face and all alone I see not one ray of light, I go back to the Bhagavad-Gita. I find a verse here and a verse there , and I immediately begin to smile in the midst of overwhelming tragedies — and my life has been full of external tragedies — and if they have left no visible or indelible scar on me, I owe it all to the teaching of Bhagavad-Gita.”

Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950) was one of the greatest revolutionaries in the early phase of the Indian freedom struggle, and is recognised throughout the world as a great mystic, intellectual and visionary. He felt that India’s weakness had been due to a weak-minded and cowardly group of leaders, who did not have the nerves to face hardship and take risks for the better of the nation. He emphasised the necessity of the Gita in uplifting India as well as liberating humanity from the bondage of our lower nature into the bliss of divinity. He wrote a beautiful selection of essays on the Gita and its secrets. “A certain class of minds shrink from aggressiveness as if it were a sin.          It is an error, we repeat, to think that spirituality is a thing divorced from life…. It is an error to think that the heights of religion are above the struggles of this world. The recurrent cry of Sri Krishna to Arjuna insists on the struggle; “Fight and overthrow thy opponents!”, “Remember me and fight!”, “Give up all thy works to me with a heart full of spirituality, and free from craving, free from selfish claims, fight! Let the fever of thy soul pass from thee.”

Damodarpanth Chapekar (executed 1898) – In the late 1890’s, in the Maharashtra province of India, there was a devastating plague, which killed many people. The British colonial government was very unhelpful about relief for the suffering people. Indeed, the British agricultural policies (enforcing production of cotton rather than traditional food crops) seriously compounded the problem. The celebrations of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee (50 year’s of rule) were held in the Poona city of Maharashtra. The celebration was carried out with such immense pomp and splendour, in a region where innumerable people were suffering. This sent a wave of resentment amongst the Indian populace, against the colonial government. It was at this time that the erstwhile limited freedom struggle against the British gained support and momentum. As a mark of the people’s resentment against the British administration, an important incident occurred which was to breath a hitherto unknown fire into the revolutionary freedom movement. Outraged by the countless miseries of the famine and plague stricken masses and the excesses committed by the British soldiers, Damodarpant Chapekar shot dead the British plague commissioner, Mr Rand, and the British officer Mr Ayerst on June 22, 1897, in Poona (the city which has been a cradle of heroes throughout history). He was later betrayed by two friends, and was sentenced to death. He embraced the gallows with the Bhagavad Gita in his hands on April 18^th 1898.

Madanlal Dhingra (1887-1909) was the assassin of Sir Cyrzon Wyllie, in London in 1909. He was executed in London on 17 August 1909. Bhagat Singh acknowledged Dhingra as his predecessor. A colourful and brave personality throughout his short life, he died with the Gita in his hands.

Khudiram Bose (1889-1906) was a young revolutionary from Bengal. He was brought up with a deep knowledge of the Hindu heritage, and he was constantly pained that a country which had once achieved so much was now bankrupt and under foreign yoke. He was arrested and hung at the young age of 17 for his part in an attack on British targets. He had the words “Vande Mataram” on his lips and the Bhagavad Gita in his hands when he died.

Hemu Kalani (1923-1943) was a freedom fighter from Sindh, who participated in all aspects of the freedom struggle, from the boycott of British goods, to Gandhi’s campaigns and revolutionary activities. He was caught in a plot to steal British munitions and supply it to Indians. While marching to the gallows, he consoled his distressed mother by quoting verses from the Gita regarding the indestructibility of soul. This shows the bravery and coolness that the Gita can inspire, even in the face of calamity. He said as he was about to be executed that he would like to be born again to finish the job of liberating India. He embraced the gallows with the Bhagavad Gita in his hands on April 18^th 1898.

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Vivekananda himself symbolised an irony of that system of education which had been deliberately designed to demolish Hinduism and promote Christianity.  He was himself a product of that very education, but he turned against Christianity and in defence of Hinduism the knowledge and intellectual discipline which he had acquired as a student in a missionary college.

The renewal of East India Company’s Charter in 1813 had opened the Company’s dominions to Christian missionaries.  It had also advised “introduction of useful knowledge and religious and moral improvement.” A controversy had been going on ever since regarding the system of education suitable for India.  The Orientalists among the British rulers advocated retention of the traditional Indian system.  They were afraid that imparting of Western knowledge to natives would encourage them to claim equality with white men and demand democratisation of the administration.  The Anglicists, on the other hand, were convinced that knowledge of Western literature, philosophy and science would wean Hindus away from their “ancestral superstitions” and draw them closer to the religion and culture of the ruling race.

Christian missionaries were, by and large, with the Anglicists.  One of them had written in 1822 that, through Western education, Hindus “now engaged in the degrading and polluting worship of idols shall be brought to the knowledge of true God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent.” Missionaries felt immensely strengthened when Alexander Duff, an ardent advocate of Western education, reached Calcutta in 1830.

Alexander Duff was convinced that “of all the systems of false religion ever fabricated by the perverse ingenuity of fallen men, Hinduism is surely the most stupendous and that India was “the chief seat of Satan’s earthly dominion.”

He studied for some time the effect which Western education was having on Hindu young men attending the Hindu College and similar institutions which had come up in Calcutta and elsewhere in Bengal since more than a decade before his arrival.  He came to the definite conclusion that Western education would make the Hindus “perfect unbelievers in their own system” and “perfect believers in Christianity.” In an address delivered in 1835 to a General Church Assembly he proclaimed that knowledge of Western literature and science would “demolish the huge and hideous fabric of Hinduism” brick by brick till “the whole will be found to have crumbled into fragments.”

A Committee of Public Instruction had been set up by the Government for recommending a suitable system of education.  Alexander Duff had been made a member of the Committee in 1834.  Next year, T. B. Macaulay, a member of the Governor General’s Council, was appointed to preside over the Committee.  He wrote a Minute on February 2, 1835, advocating Western education.  There was a tie between the Anglicists and the Orientalists when the Minute came before the Committee on March 7. Macaulay used his casting vote and forced a decision.  The Western system of education was adopted.  In a letter written to his father in 1836, Macaulay predicated,

“It is my firm belief that if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolator among the respectable classes of Bengal thirty years” hence.

The missionaries were trying hard to turn the dream into a reality.  “And in what country,” Louis Rousslet, a French traveller to India, wrote in 1876,

“could such a spectacle be witnessed as that which met my eyes that day in this square of Benares?

There, at ten paces from all that the Hindoo holds to be most sacred in religion, between the Source of wisdom and the idol of Siva, a Protestant missionary had taken his stand beneath a tree.Mounted on a chair, he was preaching in the Hindostani language, on the Christian religion and the errors of paganism.

I heard his shrill voice, issuing from the depths of a formidable shirt-collar, eject these words at the crowd, which respectfully and attentively surrounded him You are idolaters; that block of stone which you worship has been taken from a quarry, it is no better than the stone of my house.  The reproaches called forth no murmur; the missionary was listened to immovably, but his dissertation was attended to, for every now and then one of the audience would put a question, to which the brave apostle replied as best as he could.

Perhaps we should be disposed to admire the courage of the missionary if the well-known toleration of the Hindoos did not defraud him of all his merit; and it is this tolerance that most disheartens the missionary one of whom said to me – our labours are in vain; you can never convert a man who has sufficient conviction in his own religion to listen, without moving a muscle, to all the attacks you can make against it.”

The fond hope that Hinduism will die out before long was expressed by Richard Temple before a Christian audience in England in 1883.  “India is like a mighty bastion,” he wrote, “which is being battered by heavy artillery.  We have given blow after blow, and thud after thud, and the effect is not at first very remarkable; but at last with a crash the mighty structure will come toppling down, and it is our hope that some day the heathen religions of India will in like manner succumb.”

At the same time, he felt sure that Christianity had a very bright future in India.

“But we are not chasing a shadow,” he continued, “we are not rolling a Sisyphean stone, we are not ascending an inaccessible hill; or, if we are going up hill, it is that sort of ascent which soon leads to a summit, from which we shall survey the promised land. And when we reach the top what prospect shall we see? We shall see churches in India raising up their spires towards heaven, Christian villages extending over whole tracts of country, churches crowded with dusky congregations and dusky communicants at the altar tables.

We shall hear the native girls singing hymns in the vernacular, and see boys trooping to school or studying for the universities under missionary auspices.  Those things, and many others, I have seen, and would to God I could fix them on the minds of my audience as they are fixed upon my own.”

Vivekananda shattered the hope and the dream in the next decade.

Narendranath Datta, who was to become Swami Vivekananda, was born in 1863, the year when Alexander Duff left India well satisfied that Hinduism was on its way out and Christianity on its way in, at least in Bengal.  Macaulay’s prediction appeared to be coming true as there had been a spate of conversions to Christianity.

In 1832 Alexander Duff had converted Krishnamohan Banerji, a student of the Hindu College.  Banerji, in turn, converted fifty-nine young men in the next few years.  He became a minister of the Christ Church and was “instrumental in converting several hundred Hindus in Krishnanagar in 1839.” The other important converts made by Duff were K. C. Banerji and M. L. Basak in 1839 and Lal Behari De and Madhusudan Dutta in 1843.

Leaders of the Brahmo Samaj were perturbed and tried to arrest the trend.  A meeting held in Calcutta in May 1845 and attended by a thousand Hindus, gave a call that Hindus should not send their boys to missionary schools and colleges.  Some funds were collected for promoting Hindu educational and humanitarian institutions.  But their efforts did not make much headway.

The missionaries commanded much larger resources and official patronage.  There was a craze for Western education which was thought best when imparted in missionary institutions.  Moreover, the coming of Keshub Chunder Sen to the top in the Brahmo Samaj gave a further blow to Hinduism.  He was infatuated with Jesus and the Bible and made hysterical outbursts in praise of both.

The only resolute defender of Hinduism in this intellectually hostile atmosphere was Bankim Chandra Chatterji.  He was well-versed in Western literature and philosophy and his knowledge of Hindu Shastras and history was deep as well as discerning.  He had come to the definite conclusion that Hindus had nothing to learn from Christianity.  For him, Jesus was “an incomplete man”, the Christian God “a despot” and the Christian doctrine of everlasting punishment “devilish”.  He repudiated the missionary accusation that Hinduism was responsible for corruptions that had crept into Hindu society in the course of history.  “If the principles of Christianity,” he wrote, “are not responsible for the slaughter of the crusades, the butcheries of Alva, the massacre of St. Bartholomew or the flames of the Inquisition… If the principles of Christianity are not responsible for the civil disabilities of Roman Catholics and Jews which till recently disgraced the English Statute Book, I do not understand how the principles of Hinduism are to be held responsible for the civil disabilities of the sudras under the Brahmanic regime.

The critics of Hinduism have one measure for their own religion and another for Hinduism.” For him, Sri Krishna was the highest ideal, both human and divine.  His novels and essays were creating a consciousness of pride in the Hindu heritage in that large section of Hindu society which had not yet passed under the spell of Jesus.

Narendranath was a student in Alexander Duffs General Assembly’s Institution which later on became the Scottish Church College.  He had made a wide study of Western literature, history and philosophy, had joined the Brahmo Samaj and come to share Keshub Chunder Sen’s admiration for Jesus.

But a turning point came in his life when he met Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa in November 1880.  For the first time, he was face to face with a powerful expression of Hindu spirituality and that, too, in a simple man who had not been even to a primary school.  His travels all over India after Sri Ramakrishna’s death gave him further glimpses of how Hindu spirituality had percolated effortlessly to the lowest levels of Hindu society.  He was thus in a position to process Christianity from the vantage point of a new vision.  In the end, he frustrated Alexanders Duff’s hope and falsified Macaulay’s and Temple’s prediction.

Sri Ramakrishna had never heard of Jesus till Jesus was thrust under his nose by those disciples who had come to him from the fold of Keshub Chunder Sen. Mahendra Nath Gupta, whose record of the talks of Sri Ramakrishna was to become famous as The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna had an infantile fascination for Jesus and never missed an opportunity to compare the sayings and doings of Jesus with those of the Paramahamsa.

But to the last, Jesus remained for Sri Ramakrishna only a figure which people belonging to a foreign religion worshipped as God.  He did not have even a remote knowledge of the dogmas of Christianity.  The only dogma, that of the original sin, which was presented to him by some disciples, he repudiated with repugnance.  “Once someone gave me,” he said on October 27, 1882, “a book of the Christians. I asked him to read it to me.  It talked about nothing but sin.” Turning to Keshub Chunder Sen, who was present, he continued, “Sin is the only thing one hears at your Brahmo Samaj too… He who says day and night, ‘I am a sinner, I am a sinner’, verily becomes a sinner…

Why should one only talk about sin and hell, and such things?” Thus he knocked the bottom out of Christianity.  Without sin, there was no need for the atoning death of a historical saviour.

Vivekananda carried forward the same idea.  “The greatest error,” he said, “is to call a man a weak and miserable sinner.  Every time a person thinks in this mistaken manner, he rivets one more link in the chain of avidyA that binds him, adds one more layer to the “self-hypnotism” that lies heavy over his mind.” He compared the Hindu and Christian concepts of the soul.  “One of the chief distinctions,” he said, “between the Vedic and the Christian religion is that the Christian religion teaches that each human soul had its beginning at its birth into this world, whereas the Vedic religion asserts that the spirit of man is an emanation of the Eternal Being and has no more a beginning than God Himself.” He hailed humans as Children of Immortal Bliss – amritasya putrAH – in the language of the Upanishads.  “Ye are the children of God,” he proclaimed while addressing the Parliament of Religions, “the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings.  Ye divinities on earth – sinners!  It is a sin to call man so; it is a standing libel on human nature.  Come up, lions! and shake off the delusion that you are sheep; you are souls immortal, spirits free, blest and eternal.”

Vivekananda repudiated the idea of vicarious saving also.  He proclaimed the Hindu doctrine that everyone has to work out his own salvation.  “The Christians believe,” he said, “that Jesus Christ died to save man.  With you it is belief in a doctrine, and this belief constitutes your salvation.  With us doctrine has nothing whatever to do with salvation. 

Each one may believe in whatever doctrine he likes; or in no doctrine.  What difference does it make to you whether Jesus Christ lived at a certain time or not?  What has it to do with you that Moses saw God in the burning bush?  The fact that Moses saw God in the burning bush does not constitute your seeing him, does it?… Records of great spiritual men in the past do us no good whatever except that they urge us onward to do the same, to experience religion ourselves.  Whatever Christ or Moses or anybody else did, does not help us in the least, except to urge us on.”

He was aware that the historicity of Christ had become highly controversial among scholars of the subject.  “There is a great dispute,” he wrote, “as to whether there ever was born a man with the name of Jesus.  Of the four books comprising the New Testament, the Book of St. John has been rejected by some as spurious.  As to the remaining three, the verdict is that they have been copied from ancient books; and that, too, long after the date ascribed to Jesus Christ.

Moreover, about the time that Jesus is believed to have been born, among the Jews themselves there were born two historians, Josephus and Philo.  They have mentioned even petty sects among the Jews but not made the least reference to Jesus or the Christians or that the Roman judge sentenced him to death on the cross. Josephus’ book had a single line about it, which has now been proved to be an interpolation. The Romans used to rule over the Jews at that time, and the Greeks taught them all arts and Sciences.

They have all written a good many things about the Jews but made no mention of either Jesus or the Christians.” He also knew that doubts had been raised whether Jesus had himself said what was attributed to him in the gospels. “Another difficulty,” he continued, “is that the sayings, precepts, or doctrines which the New Testament preaches were already in existence among the Jews before the Christian era, having come from different quarters, and were being preached by Rabbis like Hillel and others.”

The miracles of Christ also failed to impress Vivekananda. In fact, they repelled him strongly. “What were the great powers of Christ,” he asked, “in miracles and healing, in one of his characters? They were low, vulgar things because he was among vulgar beings… Any fool could do those things. Fools heal others, devils can heal others. I have seen horrible demoniacal men do wonderful miracles. They seem to manufacture fruits out of the earth. I have known fools and diabolical men tell the past, present and future. I have seen fools heal at a glance, by the will, the most horrible diseases. These are powers, truly, but often demoniacal powers.” And he was not at all interested in the historical Jesus. “One gets sick at heart,” he said, “at the different accounts of the life of the Christ that Western people give. One would make him a great politician; another, perhaps, would make of him a great military general, another a great patriotic Jew; and so on.”

What interested him was Jesus the spiritual teacher. He saw several points of strength in the life and teachings of Jesus, particularly the purity of heart and renunciation of worldly pursuits. “If you want to be Christian,” he said, “it is not necessary to know whether Christ was born in Jerusalem or Bethlehem or just the exact date on which he pronounced the Sermon on the Mount; you only require to feel the Sermon on the Mount. It is not necessary to read 2000 words on when it was delivered. All that is for the enjoyment of the learned. Let them have it; say amen to that. Let us eat the mango.”

 Christians were welcome to seek salvation through Christ. According to Hinduism, everyone has the right to choose his own ishTadeva. “It is absolutely necessary,” he said, “to worship God as man, and blessed are those races which have such a ‘God-man’ in Christ; therefore, cling close to Christ; never give up Christ.

That is the natural way to see God in man. All our ideas of God are concentrated there.” Christians go wrong only when they insist that Christ is the only saviour. “The great limitation Christians have,” he continued, “is that they do not heed other manifestations of God besides Christ.

He was a manifestation of God; so was Buddha, so were some others, and there will be hundreds of others. Do not limit God anywhere.”Delivering a lecture on ‘Christ, the Messenger’, he quoted Sri Krishna, “Wherever thou findest a great soul of immense power and purity struggling to raise humanity, know that he is born of My splendour, that I am working there through him.” And he advised the Christians, “Let us, therefore, find God not only in Jesus of Nazareth but in all the great ones that have preceded him, in all that came after him, and all that are yet to come. Our worship is unbounded. They are all manifestations of the same infinite God.”

Yet it was Christ that Vivekananda found missing from Christianity. He wondered which Church, if any, represented Christ. All churches were equally intolerant, each threatening to kill those who did not believe as it did. The person of Christ rather than his teaching had become more important for Christianity. He had been turned into the “only begotten son of God.”Christian baptism remained external and did not touch the inner man. It aimed at instilling some mental beliefs and not at transforming human behaviour.

Most men remained the same after baptism as they were before it. What was worse, the mere sprinkling of water over them and muttering of formulas by a priest made them believe that they were better than other people. He quoted the Kenopanishad in this context

: “Ever steeped in the darkness of ignorance, yet considering themselves wise and learned, the fools go round and round, staggering to and fro like the blind led by the blind.”

The Eucharist was nothing more than the survival of a savage custom.

“They sometimes killed their great chiefs,” said Vivekananda, “and ate their flesh in order to obtain in themselves the qualities which made their leaders great.” Human sacrifice was a Jewish idea which was borrowed by Christianity “in the form of atonement.” This seeking for a “scapegoat” had made Christianity “develop a spirit of persecution and bloodshed.”

Christian missionaries were attacking the Puranas for containing passages which they considered somewhat obscene. Vivekananda had studied the Bible and knew that it contained a lot which was downright pornography. But he had his own method of exposing the Bible. “The Chinese,” he wrote, “are the disciples of Confucius, are the disciples of Buddha, and their morality is quite strict and refined. Obscene language, obscene books, pictures, any conduct the least obscene – and the offender is punished then and there.

The Christian missionaries translated the Bible into Chinese tongue. Now in the Bible there are some passages so obscene as to put to shame some of the Puranas of the Hindus. Reading those indecorous passages, the Chinamen were so exasperated against Christianity that they made a point of never allowing the Bible to be circulated in their country… The simpleminded Chinese were disgusted, and raised a cry, saying: Oh, horror! This religion has come to us to ruin our young boys, by giving them this Bible to read… This is why the Chinese are very indignant with Christianity. Otherwise the Chinese are very tolerant towards other religions. I hear that the missionaries have printed an edition, leaving out the objectionable parts; but this step has made the Chinese more suspicious than before.”

 The history of Christianity in Europe and elsewhere had simply horrified Vivekananda, as it does any person with any moral sensibility. Besides being blood-soaked, Christianity has been inimical to all free enquiry. “The ancient Greeks,” wrote Vivekananda, “who were the first teachers of European civilisation attained the zenith of their culture long before the Christians.

Ever since they became Christians, all their learning and culture was extinguished.” When he was passing by Egypt on his way to Europe, a missionary mentioned to him the miracles which, according to the Bible, Moses had performed in that country. But Vivekananda had read history. He knew the record of Christianity in Egypt.

“Here was the city of Alexandria,” he said, “famous all over the world for its university, its library, and its literati – that Alexandria which, falling into the hands of illiterate, bigoted and vulgar Christians suffered destruction, with its library burnt to ashes and learning stamped out. Finally, the Christians killed the lady savant, Hypatia, subjected her dead body to all sorts of abominable insult, and dragged it through the streets, till every bit of flesh was removed from her bones.”

Christianity had spread with the help of the sword since the days of Constantine and tried to suppress science and philosophy. “What support,” asked Vivekananda,

“has Christianity ever lent to the spread of civilisation, either spiritual or secular? What reward did the Christian religion offer to the European Pandit who sought to prove for the first time that the Earth is a revolving planet? What scientist has ever been hailed with approval and enthusiasm by the Christian Church?”

Coming to modem times, Vivekananda found Christianity very vindictive: “The great thinkers of Europe Voltaire, Darwin, Buchner, Flammarion, Victor Hugo and a host of others like him – are in the present time denounced by Christianity and are victims of vituperative tongues of its orthodox community.”

Christian missionaries in India were crediting to Christianity the rise and progress of modern Europe. This was a great falsehood. “Whatever heights of progress Europe has attained,” continued Vivekananda, “every one of them has been gained by its revolt against Christianity – by its rising against the Gospel. If Christianity had its old paramount sway in Europe today, it would have lighted the fire of the Inquisition against such modern scientists as Pasteur and Koch, and burnt Darwin and others of his school at the stake.

 In modern Europe Christianity and civilization are two different things. Civilization has now girded up her loins to destroy her old enemy, Christianity, to overthrow the clergy and to wring educational and charitable institutions from their hands. But for the ignorance-ridden rustic masses, Christianity would never have been able for a moment to support its present despised existence, and would have been pulled out by its roots; for the urban poor are, even now, enemies of the Christian Church!”

Christian missionaries were citing the prosperity of the modern West as an example of the superiority of Christianity. Much of that prosperity, however, was derived from the plunder of other peoples. “We who have come from the East,” he said in an interview to a U.S. newspaper on September 29, 1893, “have sat here day after day and have been told to accept Christianity because Christian nations are the most prosperous. We look about us and see England, the most prosperous Christian nation in the world, with her foot on the neck of 250,000,000 Asiatics.

We look back into history and see that the prosperity of Christian Europe began with Spain. Spain’s prosperity began with the invasion of Mexico. Christianity wins its prosperity by cutting the throats of its fellow men. At such a price the Hindu will not have prosperity. I have sat here and heard the height of intolerance. I have heard the creed of Moslems applauded, when the Moslem sword is carrying destruction into India. Blood and sword are not for the Hindu, whose religion is based on the laws of love.”

The newspaper described it as a “savage attack on Christian nations.” Vivekananda had a lot to say on Western colonialism and the massacre of natives in America, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. But that is not the subject at present.

What really amazed him was the utter lack of logic in Christian propaganda. “On metaphysical lines,” he wrote on his return to India in 1897, “no nation on earth can hold a candle to the Hindus; and curiously all the fellows that come over here from Christian lands have that one antiquated foolishness of an argument that because the Christians are powerful and rich and Hindus are not, so Christianity must be better than Hinduism. To which the Hindus very aptly retort that, that is the very reason why Hinduism is a religion and Christianity is not; because in this beastly world, it is blackguardism and that alone which prospers, virtue always suffers.”

Hindus have nothing to gain from Christianity as it is only a system of superstitions. Hindus should not get frightened when the missionaries threaten them with hell; in fact, hell is better than the company of a Christian missionary. “There came a Christian to me once,” recalled Vivekananda, “and said, ‘You are a terrible sinner.’ I said, ‘Yes, I am. Go on.’ He was a Christian missionary.

That man would not give me any rest. When I see him I fly. He said, ‘I have very good things for you. You are a sinner and you will go to hell.’ I said, ‘Very good, what else?’ I asked him, ‘Where are you going?’ ‘I am going to heaven,’ he answered. I said, ‘I will go to hell.’ “That day he gave me up.” If Christ could help people become good, why has he failed in the Christian countries where he has been worshipped for so long? “Here comes a Christian man,” continued Vivekananda, “and he says, ‘You are all doomed; but if you believe in this doctrine, Christ will help you out.’ If this were true – but of course it is nothing but superstition – there would be no wickedness in Christian countries. Let us believe in it – belief costs nothing – but why is there no result? If I ask, ‘Why is it that there are so many wicked people?’ They say, ‘We have to work more.’ Trust in God but keep your power dry!”

Criticism of Christianity, however, was not the primary task which Vivekananda had set for himself. He was first and foremost an exponent of Hinduism. He had to speak out about Christianity because the missionaries forced it upon him by their unceasing sallies against Hinduism. This is not the occasion even for a summary of his voluminous writings and speeches on various aspects of the subject he loved above all. We shall only touch a few points which he upheld against missionary attack.

The missionaries were highly critical of the Vedas which Hindus have always held in the highest esteem. Vivekananda upheld the Vedas as depositories of divine wisdom. For him, scriptures like the Bible and the Quran were paurusheya, that is, revelations accessible only to particular persons whose experience could not be verified by other people. The Vedas, on the other hand, were apaurusheya, that is, statements of spiritual truths which any seeker could verify by spiritual practice. “Although we find,” he said, “many names, and many speakers, and many teachers in the Upanishads, not one of them stands as an authority of the Upanishads, not one verse is based upon the life of any one of them.

These are simple figures like shadows moving in the background, unfelt, unseen, unrealised, but the real force is in the marvellous, the brilliant, the effulgent texts of the Upanishads, perfectly impersonal. If twenty Yajnavalkyas came and lived and died, it does not matter; the texts are there. And yet it is against no personality: it is broad and expansive enough to embrace all the personalities that the world has yet produced, and all that are yet to come. It has nothing to say against the worship of persons, or Avataras, or sages.

On the other hand, it is always upholding it. At the same time, it is perfectly impersonal.”Rather than processing the Vedas in terms of the Bible, as the Brahmos had started doing, the Bible should be weighed on the Vedic scale and prove its worth. “So far as the Bible,” he observed, “and the scriptures of other nations agree with the Vedas, they are perfectly good, but when they do not agree, they are no more to be accepted.”

On another occasion he said, “It is in the Vedas that we have to study our religion. With the exception of the Vedas every book must change. The authority of the Vedas is for all time to come; the authority of every one of our other books is for the time being. For instance, one Smriti is powerful for one age, another for another age.”

Brahmanas were the next target of missionary attack. Vivekananda stood by these custodians of Hinduism. “The ideal man of our ancestors,” he said, “was the Brahmin. In all our books stands out prominently this ideal of the Brahmin. In Europe there is my Lord the Cardinal, who is struggling hard and spending thousands of pounds to prove the nobility of his ancestors and he will not be satisfied until he has traced his ancestry to some dreadful tyrant who lived on a hill and watched the people passing by, and whenever he had the opportunity, sprang out and robbed them...

In India, on the other hand, the greatest princes seek to trace their descent to .some ancient sage who dressed in a bit of loin cloth, lived in a forest, eating roots and studying the Vedas… You are of the high caste when you can trace your ancestry to a Rishi, and not otherwise… Our ideal is the Brahmin of spiritual culture and renunciation.”

Another practice of Hinduism which the missionaries never missed pillorying was idolatry. “It has become a trite saying,” said Vivekananda, “that idolatry is wrong and every man swallows it without questioning. I once thought so, and to pay the penalty of that I had to learn my lesson sitting at the feet of a man who realised everything through idols. I allude to Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. If such Ramakrishna Paramahamsas are produced by idol-worship, what will you have – the reformer’s creed or any number of idols? I want an answer.

Take a thousand idols more if you can produce Ramakrishna Paramahamsas through idol-worship, and may God speed you! Produce such noble natures by any means you can. Yet idolatry is condemned! Why? Nobody knows. Because some hundreds of years ago some man of Jewish blood happened to condemn it? That is, he happened to condemn everybody else’s idols except his own.

If God is represented in any beautiful form or any symbolic form, said the Jew, it is awfully bad; it is sin. But if He is represented in the form of a chest, with two angels sitting on each side, and a cloud hanging over it, it is the holy of holies. If God comes in the form of a dove, it is holy. But if He comes in the form of a cow, it is heathen superstition; condemn it! That is how the world goes.

That is why the poet says, ‘what fools we mortals be!’… Boys, moustached babies, who never went out of Madras, standing up and wanting to dictate laws to three hundred millions of people who have thousands of traditions at their back!”

 Lastly, he defended the caste system, the bete noire of all missionaries and reformers inspired by them. “Caste is a very good thing,” he said. “Caste is the plan we want to follow… There is no country in the world without caste. In India, from caste we reach the point where there is no caste. Caste is based throughout on that principle. The plan in India is to make everybody a Brahmin, the Brahmin being the ideal of humanity. If you read the history of India you will find that attempts have always been made to raise the lower classes. Many are the classes that have been raised. Many more will follow till the whole will become Brahmin. That is the plan.

 We have to raise them without bringing down anybody… Indian caste is better than the caste which prevails in Europe or America. I do not say it is absolutely good. Where would you be if there were no caste? Where would be your learning and other things, if there were no caste? There would be nothing left for Europeans to study if caste had never existed. The Mohammedans would have smashed everything to pieces.” Caste was never a stationary institution. “Caste is continually changing,” said Vivekananda, “rituals are continually changing. it is the substance, the principle that does not change… Caste should not go; but should only he readjusted occasionally. Within the old structure is to be found life enough for the building of two hundred thousand new ones. It is sheer nonsense to desire the abolition of caste. The new method is – evolution of the old.”

The great strength of Hinduism is that it does not lay down one dogma for everybody as is the case with Christianity and Islam. “The fault with all religions like Christianity,” said Vivekananda, “is that they have one set of rules for all. But Hindu religion is suited to all grades of religious aspiration and progress. It contains all the ideas in their perfect form.” A universality which does not preserve individuality is false. “Individuality in universality,” he continued, “is the plan of creation...

Man is individual and at the same time .universal. It is while raising the individual that we realise even our national and universal nature.” It is because of this spirit of universality that Hinduism has never been a persecuting religion: “You know that the Hindu religion never persecutes. It is the land where all sects may live in peace and unity. The Mohammedans brought murder and slaughter in their train, but until their arrival peace prevailed.”

The hour had come for Hinduism to carry its message abroad once more: “India was once a great missionary power. Hundreds of years before England was converted to Christianity, Buddha sent out missionaries to convert the world of Asia to his doctrine.” Vivekananda had himself given the lead. “I have planted the seed,” he wrote from America to the Raja of Khetri, “in this country; it is already a plant, and I expect it to be a tree very soon. The more the Christian priests oppose me, the more I am determined to leave a permanent mark on their country.”

It was natural that Christian missionaries should notice Vivekananda the moment he spoke at the Parliament of Religions. They had never heard of the man before. They went into action in both the U.S.A. and India and were joined by some Brahmos of Keshub’s school.

“They joined,” reported Vivekananda in a speech at Madras soon after his return, “the other opposition – the Christian missionaries. There is not one black lie imaginable that these latter did not invent against me. They blackened my character from city to city, poor and friendless though I was in a foreign country. They tried to oust me from every house and make every man who became my friend my enemy. They tried to starve me out.”

At the same time he hit out at the Brahmo leaders who saw salvation of India through Christianity. “I am sorry to say,” added Vivekananda, “that one of my own countrymen took part against me in this. He is the leader of a reform party in India. This gentleman is declaring every day, ‘Christ has come to India.’ Is this the way Christ is to come to India?… Is that the lesson that he had learnt after sitting twenty years at the feet of Christ? Our great reformers declare that Christianity and Christian power are going to uplift the Indian people. Is that the way to do it? Surely, if that gentleman is an illustration, it does not look very hopeful.”

J. Murray Mitchell who was working as a missionary in India at that time reacted adversely to reports about Vivekananda’s popularity in the U.S.A. “We fear men from the East,” he wrote, “mistook politeness with which they were received as guests for sympathy with their opinions. Very singular at all events, have been the accounts that have been transmitted to Asia regarding the effect of their exposition of the Oriental creeds.

They had carried the war into the enemy’s country, and were everywhere victorious.” He selected P. C. Mozumdar as the real representative of “advanced and intelligent Hindus” at the Parliament of Religions. Mozumdar had said, “Representatives of all religions, may all your religions merge in the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, so that Christ’s prophecy may be fulfilled and mankind become one Kingdom under God as our Father.” Mr. Mitchell regretted that Mozumdar did not draw the applause he deserved because of his admiration for Christianity. “But Mr. Protap Chunder Mozumdar,” he said, “seems to have made much less impression than a young man who has assumed the honorofic title of Swami a step which Mr. [Keshub Chunder] Sen never ventured to take. Mr. Mozumdar appeared in plain Western dress, the Swami stood arrayed in all the colours of the rainbow. The ladies clustered around him in admiration.”

What had hurt Mr. Mitchell the most was Vivekananda’s denunciation of the doctrine of sin. “We need not dwell,” he mourned, “on the Swami’s teaching. Let one specimen suffice.” He quoted verbatim what Vivekananda had said when he hailed people at the Parliament as “sharers of bliss” and “divinities on earth.” Vivekananda had hit Christianity in its solar plexus. How could Christianity thrive without selling sin? “We are truly sorry for the man,” concluded Mr. Mitchell, “who can thus trifle with his hearers with deeply solemn questions.”

Vivekananda was rather mild in his criticism of missionaries when he spoke in the Parliament of Religions on September 29, 1893. “You Christians, who are so fond of sending out missionaries to save the soul of the heathen why do you not try to save their bodies from starvation?… You erect Churches all through India but-the crying evil in the East is not religion – they have religion enough – but it is bread that the suffering millions of burning India cry out for with parched throats… It is an insult to a starving people to offer them religion; it is an insult to a starving man to teach him metaphysics.”

He knew that missionaries were not preaching purely out of religious zeal; they had chosen the mission as a career and were paid for it. “In India,” he said, “a priest who preached for money would lose caste and be spat upon by the people.”He spoke in the same Vein when he addressed the Parliament of Religions on October 11, 1893. “Christian missionaries,” he said, “come to offer life but only on condition that the Hindus became Christians, abandoning the faith of their fathers and forefathers. Is it right?… If you wish to illustrate the meaning of ‘brotherhood’, treat Hindus more kindly even though he be a Hindu and is faithful to his religion. Send missionaries to teach them how better to earn a piece of bread, and not teach them metaphysical nonsense.”

But when he noticed that even his mild comments on missionary activities were received with great resentment in Christian circles, his tone became sharp. The Detroit Free Press dated February 21, 1894 reported a lecture which he had delivered on ‘Hindus and Christians’. Coming to Christian missionaries he said, “You train and educate and pay men to do what? To come over to my country to curse and abuse all my forefathers, my religion, and everything.

 They walk near a temple and say, ‘You idolators, you will go to hell.’ But they dare not do that to the Mohammedans of India; the sword would be out. But the Hindu is too mild… And then you who train men to abuse and criticise, if I just touch you with the least bit of criticism, with the kindest purpose, you shrink and cry: ‘Don’t touch us; we are Americans. We criticise all the people in the world, curse them and abuse them, say anything, but do not touch us, we are sensitive plants?’…  And whenever your ministers criticise us let them remember this:

If all India stands up and takes all the mud that is at the bottom of the Indian ocean and throws it up against the Western countries, it will not be doing an infinitesimal part of that which you are doing to us. And what for? Did we ever send one missionary to convert anybody in the world? We say to you: ‘Welcome to your religion, but allow me to have mine?’… With all your brags and boastings, where has Christianity succeeded without the sword? Show me one place in the whole world. One I say, throughout the history of the Christian religion – one; I do not want two. I know how your forefathers were converted. They had to be converted or killed; that was all. What can you do better than Mohammedanism, with all your bragging?”

As he heard the malicious propaganda against Hinduism which missionaries were mounting in America and saw ‘their methods of raising money’, he hit them hard. “What is meant,” he asked, “by those pictures in the school-books for children where the Hindu mother is painted as throwing her children to the crocodiles in the Ganga? The mother is black but the baby is painted white to arouse more sympathy, and get more money. What is meant by those pictures which paint a man burning his wife at a stake with his own hands, so that she becomes a ghost and torments the husband’s enemy?

What is meant by the pictures of huge cars crushing over human beings? The other day a book was published for children in this country, where one of these gentlemen tells a narrative of his visit to Calcutta. He says he saw a car running over fanatics in the streets of Calcutta. I have heard one gentleman preach in Memphis that in every village of India there is a pond full of the bones of little children. What have the Hindus done to these disciples of Christ that every Christian child is taught to call the Hindus vile, and ‘wretches’ and the most horrible devils on earth? Part of the Sunday School education for children here consists in teaching them to hate everybody who is not a Christian, and the Hindu especially, so that from their very childhood they may subscribe their pennies to the missions.”

Vivekananda warned the missionaries about the effect which their propaganda was having on the moral and mental health of people who listened to them. “If not for the sake of truth,” he said, “for the sake of the morality of their own children, the Christian missionaries ought not to allow such things going on. Is it any wonder that such children grow up to be ruthless and cruel men and women?… A servant-girl in the employ of a friend of mine had to be sent to a lunatic asylum as a result of her attending what they call here a revivalist-preaching. The dose of hell-fire and brimstone was too much for her.”

He saw how various missions were competing for collecting money and pouring calumny on each other. “Those to whom religion is a trade,” he observed, “are forced to become narrow and mischievous by their introduction into religion of the competitive, fighting and selfish methods of the world.”

Having witnessed their ways, many educated Americans were losing respect for the missionaries. On the other hand, they were eager to listen to exponents of other cultures. “I have more friends,” he wrote in a letter to India in 1895, “than enemies, and only a small number of the educated care about the missionaries. Again, the very fact of the missionaries being against anything makes the educated like it. They are less of a power here now, and are becoming less so every day.”

While Vivekananda caused a stir among the intellectual elite of America as was obvious from reports in the American press, the missionary circles were infuriated. “The Christian missionaries,” wrote The Indian Mirror on June 23, 1897, “rage and fume over the success of Swami Vivekananda’s mission in America. In its impotent fury, the Missionary Review of the World says that ‘Swami Vivekananda is simply a specimen of the elation and inflation of a weak man over the adulation of some silly people. If America ever gives up Christ, it will be for the devil, not Buddha or Brahma or Confucius. It will be lapse into utter apostasy, unbelief and infidelity.’ The writer, when penning these lines, was evidently under a fit of insanity brought on by the unlooked for spectacle of a Hindu preacher making disciples among American members of the Christian Church.”

The Christian Literature Society which had its headquarters in London and a branch in Madras published a book, Swami Vivekananda and his Guru with letters from prominent Americans on the alleged programme of Vedantism in United States, in 1897.

The book was reviewed by The Indian Mirror which wrote, “The object of the first part of this book is to show that, on account of his Shudra birth and for his want of knowledge as well as on the part of his Guru, Vivekananda is not qualified for teaching the Vedanta; that he, in consequence of his doings, is not entitled to be called a ‘Swami’; that Schopenhuer, the admirer of the Upanishads, was a bad man, and that Professor Max Muller (in connection with his opinion of Vedantic books) is a ‘man having two voices’.”

Rev. Dr. W. W. White, Secretary to the College Young Men’s Christian Association of Calcutta, had written to “a number of ladies and gentlemen of America, mostly belonging to missions and educational institutions” in order to find out if there was any “likelihood of America abandoning Christianity and adopting… Hinduism… in its stead.” The replies he had received were reproduced in the second part of the above-mentioned book. “Some of the writers say,” continued The Indian Mirror, “that the Swami made no impression on the people, while some others asserted that the Swami may have made a few converts, but such converts were vaccilators and seekers of novelty. All of them consoled the enquirers with the assurance that Christianity had made a firm footing in America and there was no fear of its being Supplanted by any other religion.”

Vivekananda had said again and again that he was not out to make any converts to Hinduism and that what he aimed at was the deepening and purification of Christianity which had been vulgarised by theologians and debased by missionaries. But the missionaries had their fears and wanted to be reassured that their citadel was not in danger of imminent collapse.

There was a corollary to Vivekananda’s defence of Hinduism and critique of Christianity, particularly of the Christian missions. He called upon Hindu society to open its doors and take back its members who had been alienated from it by foreign invaders. Christian as well as Islamic missionaries were taking advantage of Hindu orthodoxy which was reluctant to receive those who had been forced or lured away from the Hindu fold but who were now ready to return to the faith of their forefathers. Vivekananda viewed this orthodoxy as nothing but a blind prejudice induced by the Hindus’ deep distrust of imported creeds.

The distrust he regarded as well founded but the prejudice against victims of force or fraud as unjustified. His thoughts on the subject were expressed in an interview he gave to the representative of the Prabuddha Bharata, a monthly magazine started by his disciples in Madras. The interview, published in the April 1899 issue of the monthly, deserves to be reproduced at some length:

“I want to see you, Swami,” I began, “on this matter of receiving back into Hinduism those who have been converted from it. Is it your opinion that they should be received?”

“Certainly,” said the Swami, “they can and ought to be taken.” He sat gravely for a moment, thinking, and then resumed. “Besides,” he said, “we shall otherwise decrease in numbers. When the Mohammedans first came, we are said – I think on the authority of Ferishta, oldest Mohammedan historian – to have been six hundred millions of Hindus. Now we are about two hundred millions. And then every man going out of the Hindu pale is not only a man less, but an enemy the more.

“Again, the vast majority of Hindu converts to Islam and Christianity are converts by the sword, or the descendants of these. It would be obviously unfair to subject these to disabilities of any kind. As to the case of born aliens, did you say? Why, born aliens have been converted in the past by crowds, and the process is still going on.

“In my own opinion, this statement not only applies to aboriginal tribes, to outlying nations, and to almost all our conquerors before the Mohammedan conquest, but also to all those castes who find a special origin in the Puranas. I hold that they have been aliens thus adopted.

“Ceremonies of expiation are no doubt suitable in the case of willing converts returning to their Mother-Church, as it were; but on those who were alienated by conquest – as in Kashmir and Nepal – or on strangers wishing to join us, no penance should be imposed.”

“But of what caste would these people be, Swamiji?” I ventured to ask. “They must have some, or they can never be assimilated into the great body of Hindus. Where shall we look for their rightful place?”“Returning converts,” said the Swami quietly, “will gain their own castes, of course. And new people will make theirs. You will remember,” he added, “that this has already been done in the case of Vaishnavism. Converts from different castes and aliens were all able to combine under that flag and form a caste by themselves,-and a very respectful one too.

From Ramanuja down to Chaitanya of Bengal, all great Vaishnava teachers have done the same.”

“And where should these new people expect to marry?” I asked. “Amongst themselves as they do now,” said the Swami quietly.

“Then as to names,” I enquired, “I suppose aliens and converts who have adopted non-Hindu names should be named newly. Would you give them caste-names, or what?” “Certainly,” said the Swami, thoughtfully, “there is a great deal in a name” and on this question he would say no more.

“But my next enquiry drew blood. ‘Would you leave these newcomers, Swamiji, to choose their own forms of religious belief out of many visaged Hinduism, or would chalk out a religion for them?’ “Can you ask that?” he said. “They will choose for themselves. For unless a man chooses for himself, the very spirit of Hinduism is destroyed. The essence of our Faith consists simply in this freedom of the Ishta.”

Vivekananda paid a second visit to the West from June 1899 to December 1900. During his stay in California in February-May 1900, he received a gift of 160 acres from one of his American admirers. The society which he had founded during his first visit for the propagation of Vedanta, had now a home in America. It was named the Shanti Ashram.

This is not the place to tell the story of how the precedent set by Vivekananda was followed in years to come by many other Hindu missionaries.

It should suffice to say that today no country in the West is without Hindu presence in some form or the other.
Seekers in the West have become increasingly aware of the major schools of Sanatana Dharma – Yoga and Vedanta, Buddhism and Jainism, Shaivism and Vaishnavism, Shaktism and Tantra. The impact of Vivekananda in his own country was far more momentous.

He had taken over from where Bankim Chandra had left. Among the writers and thinkers of modern India, Bankim Chandra had fascinated him the most. During his lecture tour in East Bengal in 1901 he is reported to have advised Bengal’s young men to “read Bankim, and Bankim, and Bankim again.” Small wonder that Bankim’s AnandamaTha inspired revolutionary organisations fighting for India’s freedom and his Vande MAtaram became the national song par excellence when the awakening brought about by Vivekananda burst forth in a political movement soon after his death in 1902.

by Sita Ram Goel

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First of all, the extent of the Harappan civilization. An important number of cities lie outside Pakistan, from the Afghan colony of Shortugai to a large number is Gujarat, including the port of Lothal, and another large number in India, including the metropolis of Rakhigarhi. Many of these cities are near the bed of the Saraswati in Haryana, which is why Indian archeologists are entitled to speak of “Sindhu-Saraswati civilization”. The emphasis on the Indus is the result of the first discoveries, viz. of Mohenjo Daro on and Harappa near the Indus, but is now dated. Note that this civilization was much larger than the contemporary Mesopotamian civilization. If we don’t look too closely on the map, with a Martian’s glance, we might say that its borders very roughly coincide with those of Pakistan.

Sufyan’s thesis is that Pakistan “was an outcome of thousands of years of historical, geographical and genetic distinction between the peoples of Indus Valley Civilization and those occupying the Gangetic plains”. Here we see a logical implication of the doctrine behind the Partition, stemming from the Indian Muslims’ immediate interests assuming a continuation of the Westminster democracy in which numbers are important: they could achieve safety and power only in a state where they would form the majority. That state would then, like other states, have to endow itself with a proper history, justifying the state’s continued existence.

This conflicts with the orthodox Islamic calculation, upheld at the time of Partition by Maulana Azad, that (1) democracy is un-Islamic so that, like for the medieval Muslim invaders, power can just as well be obtained by a strong-headed minority, and that (2) in the longer run, the Muslims would obtain the majority in united India anyway, by means of conversions and a higher demographic growth. From the Islamic viewpoint, the history of Pakistan is not important because Pakistan is not important: it can only be a temporary tactic (and not even the best) on the way to the ultimate goal, viz. the Islamization of India. But in a confrontation with the infidels, anything un-Islamic becomes Islamic by being useful in the confrontation.

Thus, suicide is strictly un-Islamic, but before silly secularist or Western commentators say that therefore suicide-bombing must be un-Islamic, let us realize that before an Islamic court, any would-be (or failed) suicide-bomber can successfully plead that in this case, his suicide was the way to inflict terror on the infidels, hence Islamically correct. Pakistan, therefore, is the fruit of a hybrid ideology, mainly consisting of Islam but adding un-Islamic elements from modern majority rule and nationalism because these were deemed necessary for the Indian Muslims in the then-prevailing circumstances. In particular, the attempt to streamline a country’s history in the service of the present state’s continued existence is not Islamic but nationalist; however, it is Islamic in so far as the state of Pakistan is a useful instrument in the Islamization of the whole of South Asia.

As a real Pakistani patriot, Sufyan lists Harappan cities found in the four provinces of his country. Nothing against that, but we repeat that he could also have listed cities from Afghanistan, Gujarat, East Panjab and Haryana. Here is his main argument: “The South Asian subcontinent is principally divided into two major geographical regions; the Indus Valley and its westerly inclined tributaries, and the Ganges Valley with its easterly inclined tributaries. In his book, The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakistan, Aitzaz Ahsan identifies the geographical divide between these two regions as the Gurdaspur-Kathiawar salient, a watershed which is southwesterly inclined down to the Arabian Sea. This watershed also depicted the dividing line between the peoples of Indus Valley Civilization and those of Gangetic plains and also corresponds almost exactly with the current day Pakistan-India border. Historically, only the Mauryas, Muslims and the British amalgamated these two regions as a unified state. For most of the remaining history, when one empire did not rule both the regions as a unified state, the Indus Valley Civilizational domain was always governed as one separate political entity.”

As a historical claim, his thesis is largely untrue. For instance, the Gupta and Sikh empires clearly saddled this border, and one looks in vain for a historical kingdom coinciding with the Indus territory or with modern-day Pakistan. But the geological claim is of better quality. East Panjab and Kashmir constitute Indian parts of the Indus region (or is this a veiled Pakistani claim to these regions?), but further downstream, the border does roughly coincide with the watershed defining the Indus area. But is this watershed of political or civilizational relevance? The Aegean Sea separated Greece from Ionia, the Greek area of coastal Anatolia, yet the two areas were one in language and culture. Jinnah also didn’t base his Pakistan on this watershed: he would gladly have included the Nizam’s Hyderabad and did include East Bengal, part of the supposedly un-Pakistani Ganga plain.

Sufyan has the usual swearwords for the Indian archeologists, whom he accuses off-hand of “distorting” and “manipulating” their findings, and even of “forging” a straight line between Harappan and later Hindu civilization. He bases himself predictably on the Aryan invasion chronology, which puts the Vedic age after the Harappan age: “However, the later identification of emergence of Vedic Hindu cultural traditions between 1500 – 600 BC, discounted such linkages.” In reality, the low Western chronology of the Vedas is anything but proven.

He is, however, right to identify the southern Pakistani province of Sindh with the Sumerian-attested name Meluhha. That this name is the origin of the word Mleccha indicates that its people were not embraced or held in high esteem in Vedic circles. And here we run into a phenomenon that Sufyan doesn’t realize yet, but that would certainly serve him well: the areas now constituting Pakistan and Afghanistan were considered inauspicious by the Vedic people. In his book The Rigveda and the Avesta (Delhi 2009), Shrikant Talageri describes how the Northwest was held in suspicion and taken to be the home of people who brought misfortune. In the Ramayana, exile and misery are visited upon Rama and Sita by the hand of Rama’s father’s second wife Kaikeyi, who hailed from the Northwest. In the Mahabharata, the war between the Pandava and Kaurava branches of the Bharata lineage is triggered by Pandu’s death, caused by his being enamoured of Madri, again a wife of Northwestern provenance. Talageri testifies how his own Brahmin family fasted by refraining from consuming Gangetic rice, while Panjab-grown grain was not deemed real food and hence was permitted. This information would marvelously fit in with Sufyan’s project.

So, let us assume that the Vedic people did indeed frown upon the areas now constituting Pakistan. Unfortunately, the quarrel between the Vedic people and the Mlecchas or Dasas from the Northwest has nothing to do with the present state of Pakistan. Both parties were perhaps ethnically or culturally a bit different, but both were Pagans, unwelcome in today’s Pakistan.

It is against the Pagans of Sindh (formerly Meluhha) that Mohammed bin Qasim, revered as the ultimate founder of Pakistan, waged the first successful Jihad on South-Asian soil. Come 1947, it was the West-Panjabi Hindus and Sikhs, straight descendants of the Harappans, who were driven out of West Panjab to make way for the new state of Pakistan. This Islamic state usurps the territory of the Harappans but otherwise wants to have nothing to do with them.

The contrast between Harappa and Pakistan, or the fundamental Hinduness of the Harappans, is perhaps best illustrated with the three most famous artifacts from the Harappan civilization. The “priest-king” was probably a practitioner of the stellar cult suggested on many Harappan seal. The Quran emphatically forbids the Pagan worship of sun, moon and stars. At any rate, he was not a Muslim but a propagator of Paganism, the same kind against whom Mohammed made war. So, according to Islam, the state religion of Pakistan, the priest-king has been burning in hell for four thousand years. As for the “dancing-girl”, she exudes self-confidence and is stark naked. In today’s Pakistan, there would be no room for her. In fact, she would be stoned to death. Finally, the “Pashupati seal” may or may not depict Shiva as Lord of the Animals, but the character depicted would certainly feel more at home in a Hindu temple than in a mosque. A figure in a yoga posture clearly belongs in India more than in Pakistan. There is nothing Islamic and therefore nothing Pakistani about these three faces of the Indus civilization.

Most Pakistanis are biological descendants of the Harappans, as are many Indians. So what? Is Khan Sufyan sneakingly revalorizing the un-Islamic notion of ancestry? The Pagan Arabs of Mohammed’s time were his own relatives, yet he chose to fight them. He located his own mother in hell because she was a Pagan. Similarly, the state religion of Pakistan situates the Harappans in hell, eventhough they are the ancestors of today’s Pakistanis. So, the state of Pakistan is estranged from its Harappan heritage, while the Hindus have a far more profound claim on the Sindhu-Saraswati civilization. However, every Pakistani can do something about this. Yes, he can turn Pakistan into the successor-state of Harappa. To do this, he must only do one thing: renounce Islam and reconvert to Harappan Paganism. Paki, come home!

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