Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) completed 100 years this year in September.
Much is known about the RSS taking inspiration from fascist movements of pre-war Europe. MS Golwalkar, RSS ideologue, admired Nazi Germany for “it had shocked the world by her purging the country of its semitic races”, “to keep up the purity of the race and its culture”. RSS also adopted the military training forms and methods of the Italian fascists.
Not quite enough is known, though, about RSS’s and broader Hindu nationalism’s debt to British colonialism, specifically their enthusiastic embrace of British colonialist’s crafting of a history of India that had religion as its driving force, imagining Indian history as centred on Hindu – Muslim conflict alone. The system of knowledge about India, its history and identity that the British manufactured to serve their colonial interests, has remained more or less unchanged as ‘teachable wisdom’ in Indian academia and history books, as well as in popular literature and culture. This piece tries to map out how Western historiography of India continues to determine our distorted knowledge about her past, and directs Hindu nationalists’ majoritarian mobilisation of fear, hatred and self-pride, with grave consequences for India today. Without breaking free of this Orientalist shackle, challenging majoritarianism will be a bridge too far.
VD Savarkar, Hindu nationalism’s foremost ideologue, believed India was special for its Hindu thought, and it was Hindutva or Hinduness, that endowed India with a clear identity. The key markers of that identity, Savarkar argued, were its sacred territory: Aryavarta, as defined in Vedas; a race: the Hindus, descendants of Vedic fathers, inhabitants of Bharat since antiquity; and language: Sanskrit, the best of languages, and pillar of Hindu identity, along with Hindi. Hindu supremacy in India, Savarkar believed, was under threat because of the presence of non-Hindus.
Muslims, especially, who Savarkar believed, because of their Pan-Islamism, their aggressive disposition and their being better organised, could outmanoeuvre Hindus, who were “effete and divided into many castes and sects”. These foundational thoughts – about India, Muslims and Hindus, among others determine to this day Hindu nationalists’ politics and modus operandi.
In imagining India, and in constructing the discourse around minorities, especially Muslims, Hindu nationalist thinkers were merely following the path laid down by colonial historians, and the history of India they wrote, as they settled down to administering the vast colony.
The story of this history writing begins in the early years of colonial rule, with the establishment of factories in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. Alongside the acquisition of territory by the British East India Company was the capture of text and knowledge throughout the 18th Century, with colonial figures acquiring, digesting and reproducing knowledge about India, with an eye to providing a legitimising discourse for their rule.
Among the earliest figures in this story is Alexander Dow, officer of the Bengal Infantry, who wrote the History of Hindustan (1768), with a sequel sub-titled ‘Dissertation on the origins and nature of despotism in Hindustan’. William Jones, the Calcutta Supreme Court judge and founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1784), created the chronology of India of “five thousand years”, and the discourse of the Golden Age of India, of non-violence and tolerance, before the Muslim conquest and the ‘decay’ that followed, also postulating the common ancestry of Sanskrit, Latin and Greek. Later, James Mill, in his ‘History of British India (1817), cemented the tripartite division of Indian history into pre-Muslim and Muslim India, the former being ancient, native and the Golden age of Hindus, the latter, foreign and dark, Muslim.
This laid the ground for the advent of the third phase, of liberal British India, of modernity. Later, Henry Elliot, Secretary to the Government of India in the Foreign Office, established the archival study of “Mohammedan India” (1853) as the dark age, epitomising the colonial understanding of Muslims as foreign invaders, represented by Mahmud of Ghazni and the motif of his 17 raids into India.
Modern historiography is deconstructing this history today. The historian Manan Asifdemonstrates how, in these accounts by administrator-scholars, several key arguments were made, laying the foundation of knowledge about India: that the true history of India was five thousand years long; that against the natural chronology of the ancient Hindu Kings, and Sanskrit language of the Golden Age, was set the chronology of foreign invaders of the Medieval era, and their depredations, including conquests by Mahmud bin Qasim (712 AD), Mahmud Ghazni (990 AD) and Babur (1526 AD).
This constellation of ideas established that Muslims in India were foreigners, whose only relationship to the native inhabitants was one of despotism. “Forced conversion and temple destruction were the markers, in these accounts, of Muslim foreignness to Hindustan – the outsider best represented by the Mughal rulers, who were fanatic, lecherous and violent, while the Hindu populace had long suffered under their rule”, explains Asif. By proffering this narrative of India, colonialists were laying the ground for legitimising British rule, as an emancipatory project, to save India from the Muslim foreign yoke.
In writing this history, colonial historians drew on prejudices that already existed about Islam and Muslims in the European imagination, with Muslim condemned as a “wicked race”, in the words of Pope Urban II when calling for the First Crusades (1095 CE), and Muslim history understood as one of violence and conquests, epitomised in the motif of the Sword of Islam.
After the 1857 Mutiny, with the British blaming Muslims mostly, these biases became further entrenched, with colonial historians often expressing naked Islamophobia, as this extract from Alfred Lyall, ICS officer and Lieutenant Governor of North West Provinces, shows:
Mohemmedans with their tenets distinctly aggressive and spirituality despotic, must always be a source of disquietude to us, so long as their theological notion are still in that uncompromising and intolerant stage, that they first duty is to prevail, and if need be, to persecute.
It was this history of India that was imbibed by the new class of Indians, products of British rule and English education, and who internalised the key messages there. Alex Padamsee, scholar of postcolonial literature, shows how British history writing helped educate succeeding Indian generations “in a binary mindset increasingly susceptible to the logic of religio-ethnic partition”, exemplified in 19th century Bengali historical novels, by Romesh Chander Dutt (Banga Vijeta) and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (Anand Math), among others, that reaffirmed colonial historians’ claims of Muslim foreignness and despotism.
Similar trends in the development of the Hindi literature in Uttar Pradesh around the time, helped enable the fabrication of a Hindu-Hindustani past, besides the success of the cynical project of colonial legitimisation, as historian Sudhir Chandra shows, citing Hindi essayistRadhacharan Goswami (Bharat Mein Yavan Raj, Muslim rule in India), who had Vamdev (Hindu sage) thank the Englishman:
Victory to Huzoor! Huzoor has saved us Hindustanis from the jaws of death. The Muslims have for some centuries not permitted us any respite. Today the uprooting of their Raj has given us great happiness. May God ever perpetuate your Raj.
The partition of the subcontinent in 1947 was based on anti-colonial politicians and intellectuals – among Hindus as well as Muslims – internalising this colonial narrative, based on, as Asif says, an explicit understanding of difference as destiny.
Post-colonial historians are demonstrating today that the sources and archives that colonial historians used to craft their version of Indian history, in Hindu-Muslims terms, by reorganising and compartmentalising them, actually provided a different version of India, one that did not classify divisions, nor prioritise political power.
The principal text here is Tarikh-i-Firishta, the “first total comprehensive history” of Hindustan written by the 17th-century Deccan historian Mohammad Firishta, and the source of seminal colonial texts on India. Manan Asif informs us that Farishta’s history of India was actually very different: drew on Hindu and Islamic histories and heroes, including Krishna and Rustam; began its history of India with the Mahabharata; established a chronology of India based on Brahmin time, instead of Quranic; noted the great variety of beliefs in Hindustan, and provided a genealogy of places in India “that were neither Hindu nor Muslim, but contrapuntally intertwined”.
Sayyid Ahmad Khan – better known for founding the Aligarh Muslim University – wrote his history of Delhi that offered a similar intertwined account of the imperial city. Besides detailed catalogue of its vast repertoire of monuments, Asar us Sanadid, 1852, recounted a lived history of contemporary Delhi, including recording of religious and social practices at historic sites, such as the festival of ‘Phool waalon ki sair’, patronised by Mughals, and that revolved around the shrine of Sufi Bakhtiyar Kaki as well as the adjoining Jog Maya temple. In contrast to his contemporary, Alexander Cunningham, the first director of the Archaeological Survey of India, who catalogued (1863) Delhi’s historical sites arranged by regimes, Khan provided a rich account of the past two hundred years, incorporating the idea of Delhi within the framework of the Mahabharata, using the chronology of the Kings of Delhi from Yudhishtra.
It was this intertwined history of India that colonialists erased, as they crafted a bifurcated Indian history informed by their own orientalist biases and tailored to serve their colonial objectives. Hindu nationalists, as the major “intellectual inheritors” of British colonialism, embraced and are weaponising this derivative history of India to serve their own contemporary power games.
Former Prime Minister and life-long member of RSS, AB Vajpayee’s reference – in his speech to BJP members after Gujarat pogroms of 2002 – to the despotism of Muslim “terror and threats”, and his insistence that “wherever Muslims live, they don’t like to live in co-existence with others”, echoes ICS officers like Lyall. Current RSS and BJP leaders regularly weaponise similar colonial discourse of the thousand-year conflict between Muslim “invaders” and Hindu Indians; of forced conversions and wanton temple destruction; and an “effete” and “divided” Hindu society, that must unite and invigorate, to seek vengeance and regain the Golden Hindu age, as they mobilise fear, hatred and resurgent self-pride, towards retaining political power.
This authority of colonial knowledge about India – that not only helped sustain colonial rule, but endures today, impacting the political trajectory of post-Independence India – must be challenged, if we are to save the soul of India. ‘Decolonial’ history, an established trend in academia, must become part of the popular conversation for it to make much headway. The fact that Indian history is being rewritten today, to further elide and obfuscate, makes this mission all the more urgent.
Sajjad Hassan is a human rights researcher and practitioner.
Photo source: The San Diego Museum of Art Collection
