Getting history wrong is part of being a nationalist—but if you are making an attempt to define your nationalism on sectarian or communal-religious grounds, the chances are you will not simply get the history wrong, you will subvert history or may outrightly present a perverted version of your own history. It is often said that intellectuals, or intellectuals familiar with the subject of history, don’t make good nationalists, primarily because they seldom agree with the narratives nationalist forces construct to project the history of the imagined nations that came to dominate the social and political lives in the so-called omnipresent nation-states on the map of the world.
Religions in modern society are faced with unending divisions—into sects in the case of Pakistan or into castes and sects in the case of India. So the problem Muslim and Hindu nationalists faced in British India was how to define nationalism on the basis of religious precepts without alienating different sectarian and caste denominations. The cause of Muslim nationalism in British India was championed by Muslim modernists, who mostly advocated against sectarian loyalties. Indian nationalism under colonial rule, on the other hand, was championed by the secular-minded leadership of the Indian National Congress (INC)—part of which had sectarian and communal loyalties.
Indian commentators say that the process of consolidation of Hindu vote banks started under Congress rule in the 1980s. This process of flirtation with the idea of a Hindu vote bank led to a full-blown idea of presenting India as a Hindu nation. Hindu nationalist groups embraced an anti-caste system—they started to work on the project of mixing and intermingling of castes in their social gatherings. The reason was obvious: upper-caste Hindus were in the minority, and basing nationalism on upper-caste Hindus would have reduced them to a minority status in India. But the same nationalism pushed them on the path of aggressively portraying Muslims and Islam as outsiders to Indian civilisation.
The project to portray Islam and Muslims in India as outsiders was initially and primarily a colonial project. Modern historians of India reject the idea of dividing Indian history into Hindu, Muslim, and British periods. For centuries, historians of India have followed the colonial idea of writing Indian history as divided into compartments—wherein the history of the Hindu period is strictly written based on Sanskrit sources, the Muslim period’s history is written on the basis of sources in Persian and Arabic languages, and the British period’s history is written on the basis of sources drawn from English-language records.
Dividing Indian history into Hindu, Muslim, and British periods was a colonial construct. And this incorrect understanding of Indian history provided the basis for Hindu and Muslim revivalism. This understanding of Indian history is at the core of the idea of India as a Hindu nation. British colonial authorities wanted to project the Muslim period as the dark ages of Indian history and wanted Hindu communities to believe that the British came as saviors of the native population of India. This reading of the pre-Muslim period of Indian history was considered the Hindu “Golden Age,” which was replaced by an oppressive and anti-Enlightenment Muslim period. And finally, the British came as saviors.
Destruction of temples in the temple cities was a common practice even among Hindu rulers of India to strike at the roots of rival rulers
Hindu revivalist thinkers adopted this historical construct to build their case for advocating India as a Hindu nation that had faced oppression at the hands of Muslim invaders. Little did they realise that the categories of Hindu and Muslim communities as a subject of historical analysis were constructed in the process of colonial administrative exercises like the census, wherein the conception of majority and minority communities emerged in colonial India.
If you read historians like Romila Thapar, you come to know that the local population of India didn’t perceive invaders from the North on the basis of their religious identities. They either used to call them Turks or “lords of the horses”—as the horse was a rare animal in ancient India and used to be imported from Central Asia or Arab lands. In the ideology of India as a Hindu nation, Muhammad Ghaznavi is presented as an arch-villain, whose 17 invasions of India and whose destruction of the Somnatha Temple in Gujarat is presented as a source of persistent agony for the local Hindu population of India.
Historians often identify as a major problem the mistake of projecting present-day concerns and ideas back into history or historical events and personalities. Romila Thapar writes that Muhammad Ghaznavi had a large contingent of Hindu soldiers from India as part of his standing army stationed in his capital, Ghazni, in present-day Afghanistan. When Muhammad’s Muslim army in Ghazni revolted, it was his Hindu soldiers who mercilessly massacred the Muslim rebels. So the very notion of Ghaznavi as a symbol of Muslim nationalism in India is built on an incorrect understanding of history.
Just like other military commander-rulers of medieval history, Mehmud had a persistent legitimacy problem at hand. He had to justify his rule to the majority Sunni population of Khurasan and at the same time had to earn the right to rule from the Baghdad-based Sunni orthodox Caliph of the Banu Abbas lineage. Both his deep-rooted iconoclasm and anti-Shia tendency of his military expansionism were part of this. To declare him an iconoclast and staunch anti-Shia is to base the portrayal of his personality on Persian chronicles of his age and later ages, which presented his destruction of Somnatha Temple and his successive invasions of what is now called India in excessively hyperbolic colors and valor.
Romila Thapar shows that the Sanskrit inscriptions unearthed as part of archaeology are completely silent on Mehmud’s raid on Somnatha and the destruction it caused in the temple or its vicinity. What does it mean? Does it mean Mehmud’s destruction of the temple was a figment of Persian historians’ imagination? Does it mean the raid, in fact, never took place? Romila Thapar doesn’t agree with the notion that Mehmud’s destruction of the temple didn’t take place. It did. But she thinks that the notion that the Hindu population of the area suffered persistent and continuous trauma since those times is a figment of the imagination of the Hindu nationalists.
In fact, the portrayal of Somnatha’s destruction in the context of animosity between Muslim and Hindu communities was a colonial construct. The British colonial project of presenting themselves as saviors of Hindus was at the basis of the colonial construction of the idea of Hindu sufferings and Muslim aggression to represent the incident of the destruction of the temple at the hands of Mehmud Ghaznavi. The truth is, destruction of temples in the temple cities was a common practice even among Hindu rulers of India to strike at the roots of rival rulers. All this, however, does not justify the loot and plunder that Mehmud indulged in.
Most of the revivalist movements originated after Indian society started its interaction with modern Western education and philosophy
The fact that Sanskrit inscriptions of the time do not mention Mehmud’s raid or destruction of the temple makes it clear the event itself was not very widely noticed in the local community. And the invaders, although they were hated figures among the locals, were not perceived on the basis of their religious identity—primarily because the Hindu-Muslim dichotomy hadn’t yet emerged in their society.
Hindu nationalist understanding of Indian history is based on their familiarity with the colonial construction of dividing Indian history into Muslim, Hindu, and British periods. In this periodisation of Indian history, Muslims are the oppressors, bigots, and backward; Hindus are native to India; while the British appeared on the historical horizon as saviors. Ironically, the British construction of this periodisation is itself an outcome of their overreliance on Persian court chronicles as a source of history—the same Persian court chronicles which boast about the religious identity of Muslim rulers and the religious fervor of their armies.
Romila Thapar doesn’t consider Persian chronicles as a reliable source for understanding the role of Muslim rulers in Indian history. These incorrect interpretations of Indian history would have remained issues on the fringes of national life in Pakistan and India if the two states had divested themselves of the baggage of history. In the case of Pakistan and India, the two post-colonial states started their careers—or were later entrants—in the business of projecting religious hatred and communal confrontation as state policies.
There are millions in Pakistan who consider Mehmud Ghaznavi as their hero—without realising for a moment that they don’t share any cultural or lifestyle traits with him. Many Pakistanis would abhor the way he used to display and indulge in sectarian violence in the lands and areas he captured. And yet he and his rule are portrayed as the “Islamic Golden Age” in school textbooks in Pakistan. We have even named a ballistic missile system after him.
Mehmud is a good historical role model for a militant form of nation, but he would be a problematic hero for Indian Muslims who already carry the stigma of being outsiders in Indian society. Mehmud, however, is an unlikely candidate for tracing the origins of the Muslim community in Indian society. There are Indian historians who reject the notion that the spread of Islam was the handiwork of Muslim rulers or military commanders in Indian history. They sometimes cite in their support the fact that Muslim-majority provinces in India were located away from the centers of Muslim military and political power in the subcontinent.
Both Punjab and Bengal—where, according to the first census under British rule, Muslims were found to be in the majority—were located away from the centers of Muslim political and military power—Delhi and the Deccan. Both these centers of Muslim political and military power were found to be Muslim-minority provinces under the first British census results. The origins of the Muslim community in India should be traced back to a myriad of factors, and Mehmud and other invaders like him appear last in the list of these factors.
Modern forms of fundamentalism in our region are often dubbed as products of interaction between traditional forms of religion and Western modernity. The same is true of religious revivalism in British India—most of the revivalist movements originated after Indian society started its interaction with modern Western education and philosophy. It was, in fact, a quest to present their respective religious traditions as systems that led to the initiation of revivalist movements.
Muslim revivalism, in particular, started after the collapse of the Mughal Empire in India when Muslim intellectuals and Ulema were confronted with the question of how to organise Muslim society in the absence of political power, which had lapsed in the wake of the advent of the British colonial government.
Mughal India had a very rich tradition of history writing, and millions (no exaggeration) of manuscripts in local languages were purchased and smuggled to Britain by colonial agents in the 18th and 19th centuries. These manuscripts became the basis of colonial historiography. The irony is that the intellectuals in Hindu and Muslim communities didn’t continue with history writing as a local tradition. They followed colonial historiography that had an axe to grind.