Who’s Afraid of Hindu History?

Inconvenient Truths - the NCERT Textbook Row

India’s schoolbooks are finally lifting the veil on a past too long buried in euphemism and ideological amnesia. Our four-part series examines the roots of India’s textbook wars and the historiographical battles that have resulted in this distortion.

Part 2

Postcolonial and Marxist historians are uncomfortable with the idea of Hindu resistance to Islam. But denial has not brought reconciliation, only historical amnesia.

Shivaji Maharaj and Baji Prabhu at Pawan Khind by M.V. Dhurandhar

Last year, the eminent Princeton historian Michael Cook came out with a 1,000-page doorstopper ‘A History of the Muslim World’ - a veritable ocean of erudition spanning the Caliphate, Berber rebellions and Ottoman jurisprudence.

But in his chapter on India, where Islam met one of its most sustained and formidable challenges, the tone is curiously bloodless. Long centuries of Hindu resistance are reduced to a mere sampling, with absolutely no names of the individuals who fought to preserve their honour and sacred traditions before falling to the conquerors. Curiously, Cook only mentions a few revolts to well-entrenched Islamic rule, notably that of Raja Ganesha as a ‘rebel’ ruler in the fifteenth century (he was the first Hindu Sultan of the Bengal Sultanate) before skipping forward to Hemu and, finally, Shivaji.

For Chhatrapati Shivaji, Cook leans on the controversial and much-condemned account of James Laine – more an exercise in postmodern psychoanalysis than history that treats the great Maratha warrior-king more as regional upstart than a national icon.

The last stand of Rajputs against Muhammedans at Tarain, 1192 A.D. by Allan Stewart

Cook’s treatment is a throwback to the sanitized Marxist histories cultivated in the Nehruvian era. It echoes former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s own dismissal of Shivaji Maharaj as a mere ‘regional chieftain’ rather than a civilisational sentinel. It is also emblematic of a broader academic unease in ‘secular’ circles, both in India and abroad, about acknowledging Hindu resistance to the onrush of Islam in full-throated terms.

This is a story that has been largely been suppressed in the classroom, if not in the popular memory. The idea that India was simply trampled by wave after wave of Islamic conquerors is grossly misleading. The subcontinent did not fall as easily as Byzantium or Persia. If the Muslim world raced from Mecca to the Pyrenees in a century, India proved a far tougher conquest.

Edward Gibbon, in ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ (1776-88) describes in his inimitable style how the Islamic onrush was halted in 732 by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours.  In India, resistance to Islam was even more drawn out and more remarkable. From Bappa Rawal of Mewar, who repelled Arab armies in the 8th century to the Chalukyas who checked Turkish advances in the Deccan to Lalitaditya Muktapida of Kashmir, who led campaigns against Arab incursions in the northwest and down to the Sisodiyas of Mewar in the 16^th century, Hindu rulers mounted vigorous defences of their realms.

Unlike West Asia or North Africa, where the armies of the Prophet’s followers triumphed swiftly, in India the process dragged on for over five centuries. Between the 8th-century raids by Muhammad bin Qasim and the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in the early 13th century, Arab and Turkic invaders struggled to subdue the subcontinent’s interior. While Islam had succeeded in converting the heartlands of Persia within a few decades, in India, it had barely advanced beyond the frontier provinces of Multan, Kabul and Sindh even after half-a-millennium.

Strangely, while the trauma of this resistance and the contest for India’s soul has been vividly recorded, it has been rarely taught. From Al-Utbi’s Tarikh-i-Yamini, detailing the bloodletting of Mahmud of Ghazni to Ziyauddin Barani’s Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi and Fatawa-i-Jahandari, Islamic chroniclers left little to the imagination.

When Muhammad Ghori captured Ajmer after Prithviraj Chauhan’s defeat and death in 1192, his chronicler Hasan Nizami described a scene of apocalyptic destruction, wherein “a hundred thousand grovelling Hindus swiftly departed to the fire of hell,” and where temples were destroyed and mosques erected upon their ruins.

To modern sensibilities, such language is abhorrent. Even many contemporary Muslim scholars squirm at Ziyauddin Barani’s invective. But for all their venom, these writers were not fringe polemicists. Barani was a disciple of Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya. Amir Khusrau, poet laureate and a contemporary, shared his milieu.

Yet none of this finds expression in textbooks or indeed, in much of mainstream historiography. While the monumental and scrupulously honest works by early historians like Sir Jadunath Sarkar, Radha Kumud Mukherjee, R.C. Majumdar, A.S. Altekar and countless others are disparaged as ‘outdated’ or ‘bigoted’, those by the Marxist historians who thrived and dominated academia in the Nehruvian era and beyond like Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, D.N. Jha and their acolytes continue to be feted.

The works of this Indian Marxist clique conveniently reduces centuries of ideological and religious conflict to class struggle and economic opportunism.

The consequence is a historical narrative that cannot explain its own absences. Why, for example, is the 500-year Rajput resistance, arguably one of the most sustained martial defences against Islamic rule, so lightly touched upon? Why is there a reluctance to acknowledge that many Hindu rulers who capitulated often did so after brutal wars, forced conversions or massacres?

The ‘jauhar kunds’ (immolation pits) at mighty forts like Gagron, Chanderi, Gwalior, Ranthambore, and Chittor - where Rajput women chose death by fire over dishonour at the hands of invading Islamic armies - still give off the faint, acrid memory of sacrifice, a reminder of a civilisation that preferred annihilation to submission.

In the Deccan, the Vijayanagara Empire stood as a bulwark against the Bahmani Sultanate and its successors for nearly 300 years. The 1565 Battle of Talikota that led to the fall of Vijayanagara is sometimes cited as its terminal decline. But this obscures the fact that the empire’s resistance lasted far longer than most kingdoms in Europe or West Asia of the same period. In the northeast, the Ahoms defeated several Mughal expeditions (Saraighat being just one of them) and remained independent well into the 19th century.

Chhatrapati Shivaji’s revolt was not an isolated insurrection but the start of a pan-Indian resistance that would outlive the Mughal Empire. By the 18th century, Maratha power extended from Peshawar in the northwest to Thanjavur in the south. Even the British feared their guerrilla tactics, mobile cavalry, and administrative acumen. (Wellington regarded the 1803 Battle of Assaye as being even tougher than Waterloo)

There certainly have been enough instances where recalling historical atrocities have stoke deep sectarianism, even genocide. Take the Balkan wars of the 1990s, where militant Serbs invoked the 1389 Battle of Kosovo to justify the massacre of Bosnian Muslims. The implication is that history is best left buried.

But this argument is both patronising and ahistorical. It assumes that truth is too volatile for robust democratic societies to handle. In reality, it is the suppression of truth, not its exposure, that leads to lingering bitterness and revisionism.

Post-war Germany desperately longed to forget its Nazi past, with Konrad Adenauer’s West Germany eager to rebuild and move on. The Holocaust, though acknowledged in diplomatic circles, was absent from public discourse. It was not until the Auschwitz trials of the 1960s driven by Jewish prosecutor Fritz Bauer that German society was forced to confront the moral abyss of its recent past. The trials were painful and controversial. But they were necessary. They marked the beginning of what would become Germany’s most admirable postwar achievement: not its economic miracle, but its moral self-awareness. Today, the memory of the Holocaust is not a source of shame but the foundation of German democracy’s ethical spine.

India has never undergone such a catharsis. There has been no formal reckoning with the centuries of conquest, temple destruction or coerced conversions. This whitewashing has not fostered harmony. It has robbed India’s youth - Muslim and Hindu alike - of a moral vocabulary to understand their shared past. Had young Indian Muslims been taught, honestly, about the full arc of India’s medieval period, they might have found cause not for guilt, but for reflection. Like Germany’s youth, they could have said: “Never again.” Instead, forced secularism has produced historical illiteracy.

None of this should be argument for communal triumphalism. India’s history is too vast, too complex and too filled with cross-cultural exchange. But history must begin with honesty, and a healthy democracy should not fear pride rooted in truth.