The Deliberately Erased History of Cooperation Between Muslims and Hindus in the Mughal Period
I’m about to read a book that will probably never be reviewed by a major Indian journal or newspaper. Or, if it is, it will doubtless be trashed by India’s Modi-loving running dogs of the RSS and its pack of Hindutva clowns who are making a mockery of their own venerable Sanatana Dharma.(You know--those same people who wish to prevent Indians from reading Wendy Doniger on Hinduism and who insist that Jeffrey Kripal doesn't know enough Bengali to comprehend Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. However, this woman is literate in both Sanskrit and Persian, the languages that are necessary to understand the phenomenon she is writing about.)
The book is entitled Culture of Encounters, Sanskrit at the Mughal Court, authored by Audrey Truschke, assistant professor of South Asian history at Rutgers University and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University. For a scholarly work, it seems to be rather coherent and literate, with barely a touch of “academese.” In any case, however, it won’t be for its literary style that it’ll probably be denounced by the academic sycophants of the BJP government, but because it puts the lie to their narrative of the continuous persecution by the Mughal padshahs of their Hindu subjects. The book posits, instead-and seeks to prove with copious details and examples-that most of the Rajputs, Brahmins and Sanskrit scholars of the 16th and 17th centuries in India were eager loyalists of the Mughals and did all that they could to help them to assimilate as rulers of Hindustan.
Here are three paragraphs from the book, the first from the preface, and the other two from the introduction:
“For roughly one hundred years the Mughal elite poured immense energy into drawing Sanskrit thinkers to their courts, adopting and adapting Sanskrit-based practices, translating dozens of Sanskrit texts into Persian , and composing Persian accounts of Indian philosophy. Both Persian- and Sanskrit-medium authors blazed new paths within their respective literary cultures in response to this imperial agenda. When all was said and done, Mughal-Sanskrit engagements constituted one of the most extensive cross-cultural encounters in pre-colonial world history, rivaled by the likes of the Abbasid engagement with Greek thought in the eighth to tenth centuries and Chinese translations of Buddhist Sanskrit materials during the first millennium C.E. Engaging with Sanskrit was not an obvious move for the Mughal dynasty. The Mughals came to India from Central Asia, were Muslims, and spoke Persian. India’s vast learned traditions, written largely in Sanskrit, were no doubt intriguing, but the Mughals had several learned traditions (e.g. those in Persian, Arabic and Turkish) that they could more seamlessly claim as their own. So why were the Mughals so interested in Sanskrit? I answer this question throughout the book. To put it succinctly, the Mughals understood power, in part, as an aesthetic practice, and they wanted to think about themselves as an Indian empire. They turned to Sanskrit to figure out what it meant for them to be sovereigns of the subcontinent. For their part, Sanskrit intellectuals did not merely assist the Mughals in their quest to learn about classical Indian knowledge systems, they also wrote about their imperial encounters and reimagined their literary and religious communities in light of Mughal rule…” Pp. ix-x
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“In this book I argue that the Mughal imperium, particularly its central court, was defined largely by repeated engagments with Sanskrit thinkers, texts and ideas. Select Indian communities that the Mughals ruled (primarily Brahmans and Jains) provided access to Sanskrit forms of knowledge and served as interlocutors for the imperial elite. However, these groups did not treat such encounters as a referendum on whether they were governed by a legitimate power. Indeed, Sanskrit thinkers seem to have had little interest in considering whether Mughal rule was legitimate or justified, which suggests that the contemporary focus on this question is anachronistic. Instead, Jains and Brahmans far more commonly viewed Sanskrit and Persian exchanges as an opportunity to participate in the imperial project and tried to adapt Mughal cross-cultural endeavors to the structures of their own literary, social and religious networks. This largely unknown history has much to tell us about the diverse Sanskrit-language communities in Mughal India. Equally important, the Mughals and their Brahman and Jain interlocutors offer a notably rich set of insights into the complex relationship between power and culture, a dynamic that defined the lives of many early modern Indians no less than it shapes our own.”
Pp. 2-3
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“Foregrounding religious identities is an old habit in Indological scholarship, but it has arguably done more harm than good. The religion-based dichotomy of Hindus and Muslims assumes conflict and difference where there was often cooperation and similarity. In addition, the Hindu-Muslim division anachronistically projects two separate and broadly coherent , faith-based communities. In short, talking about Hindus and Muslims is largely a modern preoccupation that does not capture early modern religious diversity as well as other, more central configurations of identities. “Hindu” can be convenient shorthand for indicating the general cultural and religious background of a given individual, and I occasionally use the term thus, but we have too often clumsily labeled as either Hindu or Muslims individuals who elected to describe themselves and another according to other geographic, religious and ethnic classifications. It should no longer surprise scholars that speaking about “religion” at all outside the modern Western world is a tricky business that, if done blithely, frequently obscures rather than elucidates cultural dynamics.” Pp. 5-6
One of those individuals whom Indian scholarship seems to have conveniently forgotten-most likely because he cannot be classified according to the rigid Hindu-Muslim dichotomy that right-wing revisionist scholars of medieval Indian history are seeking to impose upon their country’s story-is the Shahzedah of Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal Padshah, a Sufi mystic who entered into dialogue with all of the religious communities of his father’s empire, in an effort not only to reconcile political differences but also actually to uncover and bring to light the traditional and vital sources of spiritual knowledge in all the teachings of Indian avatars, prophets and gurus.
Although the educational commissars of the Modi government would be loathe to admit it, they are proving to be emulators of a figure in Indian history whom they excoriate, Arungzebh, his father’s usurper and the sixth Padshah of the Empire, who persecuted Hindus and sought to eradicate the syncretist and liberalizing influence of his brother, Darah Shikoh, the Sufi prince of whom I speak, and murdered him. Like Arungzebh, they, too, seek to draw attention away from the accomplishments in the area of religious dialogue and respect of peace-makers like Arungzebh’s brother, and would ignore his example in order to induce forgetfulness of such significant historical examples of Muslim-Hindu cooperation and affirmation as Prince Darah’s rescue of the Upanishads from the obscurity into which they had fallen among the educated elite by having them translated into Persian, and thereby enabling their later dissemination to the world by the scholars in the British Raj. Not only did he do that, but he also advanced the notion that those same Upanishads had been earlier predicted by his own Prophet Muhammed as the “hidden” or “occult” book of original Revelations of the One God in Surah 56, ll. 77-80 of the Koran.
Another book that I’ve been reading recently, a historical novel entitled Ocean of Cobras and authored by one Murad Ali Baigh, dramatizes in one of its last chapters the trial of Darah Shikoh for heresy, and the novel very clearly and succinctly depicts the attitudes of the Muslim fundamentalists of the dawning Arungzebh era toward the Sufi strain of religious thinking in Mughal India that had been promoted by Darah Shikoh’s great-grandfather Padshah Akbar, and sustained by a succession of Mughal emperors up until the declining days of Shah Jahan, and which had fostered and encouraged the brilliant era of cooperation amongst Muslim and Hindu writers, authors and scholars. Please tell me, if you dare, that this exchange below doesn’t resemble in tone the one presently occurring between the anti-intellectual Hindutva educational apparatchiks of the Modi government and the true scholars of Indian cultural, religious and political history. In this exchange, Darah Shikoh is the revealer of the kind of Truth that makes men free and noble and the mullahs are propagators of fear and exclusion, servants of brutal and unjust power.
Here is a very much historically accurate account of Darah Shikoh’s responses, during his trial, to the fanatic mullahs commissioned by his brother Arungzebh to try him for “heresy” (from Ocean of Cobras, by Murad Ali Baig, Delhi: India Research Press, 2015):
Here is a detailed account of Shahzedah Darah Shikoh's religious scholarship in quest of spiritual unity between Muslims and Hindus:
“Dara established close and cordial relations with mystics from various backgrounds. Among these were several jogis and sadhus, about some of whom Dara also wrote. One such sadhu was Baba Lal, follower of the renowned Sufi-Bhakti saint Kabir and founder of a small monotheistic order named after him as the Baba Lalis. Many of the teachings of this sect can be traced to a distinct Sufi influence. A summary of these teachings is to be found in Dara's Makalama Baba Lal wa Dara Shikoh, which consists of seven long conversations between the Baba and Dara held in Lahore in 1653 C.E.. These seven discourses were composed originally in Hindawi, and were later translated into Persian by Dara's chief secretary, Rai Chandar Bhan. As in the case of Dara's translation of the Yoga Vasishta, this text focuses particularly on certain similarities in the teachings of Hindu and Muslim mystics.
The great interest that Dara had in exploring monotheistic strands in Hindu philosophy led him, finally, to translate fifty-two Upanishads into Persian. The text that he prepared, the Sirr ul-Akbar ('The Great Secret') was completed in 1067 A.H. / 1657 C.E.. Here, he opines that the 'great secret' of the Upanishads is the monotheistic message, which is identical to that on which the Qur'an is based. The text begins with praises to Allah and the Prophet Muhammad thus:
Praised be the Being, that among whose eternal secrets is the dot in the 'b' of the Bismillah [the first word in the Qur'an] in all the Heavenly Books, and glorified be the Mother of Books. In the Holy Qur'an is the token of His glorious name; and the angels and the heavenly books and the prophets and the saints are all comprehended in this name. And the blessings of the Almighty Allah be upon the best of His creatures, the Holy Prophet Muhammad and upon all his family and upon all his Companions!.
Dara then proceeds to detail the purpose behind translating the Upanishads. He writes that in the year 1050 A.H. he visited Kashmir, and there he met Hazrat Mullah Shah, whom he describes as 'the flower of the Gnostics, the tutor of the tutors, the sage of the sages, the guide of the guides, the Unitarians accomplished in the Truth'. Thereafter, he says, he was filled with a longing to 'behold the Gnostics of every sect and to hear the lofty expressions of monotheism'. Hence, he says, he began his search for monotheism in other scriptures as well, including the Torah of the Jews (Taurat), the Gospels of Jesus (Injil) the Psalms of David (Zabur), and, in addition, the books of the ancient Hindus. He notes with approval the fact that certain Hindu 'theologians and mystics' ('ulama-i zahiri wa batini) actually believe in One God, but laments that 'the ignoramuses of the present age', who claim to be authorities in matters of religion, have completely distorted this fundamental truth. His search for traces of monotheism in the religious systems of the Hindus stems, he says, from his faith in the Qur'an, which states that God has, from time to time, sent prophets to all peoples to preach the worship of the One. Thus, he goes on to add:
“And it can also be ascertained from the Holy Qur'an that there is no nation without a prophet and without a revealed scripture, for it has been said: 'Nor do We chastise until We raise an apostle' [Qur'an: XVII, 15]. And in another verse: 'And there is not a people but a warner has gone among them' [Qur'an: XXXV, 24]. And at another place: 'Certainly we sent our apostles with clear arguments, and sent down with them the Book and the Measure' “[Qur'an: LVII, 25].
Accordingly, says Dara, he travelled to Benaras in 1067 A.H., where he assembled several leading Sanskrit Pandits to translate the Upanishads, in an effort to draw out from the scriptures of the Hindus the hidden teachings on monotheism which are, he says, 'in conformity with the Holy Qur'an'. Having explored the teachings of the Upanishads, he writes that they are 'a treasure of monotheism', although, he notes, 'very few are conversant with this, even among the Hindus'. Hence, he says, there is an urgent need to bring to light this 'Great Secret' so that the Hindus can learn the truth about monotheism as contained in their own scriptures and, in addition, Muslims, too, can be made aware of the spiritual treasures that the Upanishads contain. He goes so far as to accord the Upanishads, in their original forms, the status of divinely revealed scriptures, claiming that the Qur'anic verse which speaks about a 'protected book', which 'none shall touch but the purified ones' [Qur'an: LVI, 77-80] literally applies to them, because some of the verses of the Qur'an are to be found in their Sanskrit form therein.
http://apnaorg.com/test/new/article_details.php?art_id=127
Darah Shikoh’s background:
https://tradingposts.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/569/
FACT India’s attempt to educate Indians, in words and pictures, about the TRUE history of Muslim-Hindu syncretism and collaboration during the reigns of Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan-a narrative that stands in stark contrast to the distortions of the Hndutva/RSS sectarians who support the communalist Modi government:
Darah remembering his great-grandfather's religious universalism at Fatepuhr Sikri:
Darah endowing Hindu mandirs and Arungzebh pulling them down:
Darah dialogueing with yogis and Arungzebh persecuting them:
Darah dialoguing with sadhus and yogis:
Darah discussing creeds with Christian monks:
Darah beheaded by his brother, Arunghzebh:
Shah Jahan presented with his beloved son's head by Arungzebh's courier:
An account of the naked ascetic whom this great Shahzadeh loved and honored. (Be so good as to compare it to the contempt in which the Hindu bourgeoisie of Westernized “babus,” with their minds colonized by the vulgar prurience of Victorian Protestantism, hold their own holy men. Mind you, a PRINCE of what was then the most powerful nation-state on earth broke bread with a renunciant so holy that he was willing to sacrifice “respectability” for spiritual knowledge):
http://hhshribholanathjimemories.blogspot.com.eg/2012/12/sarmad.html
The Hindutva fanatics will even go the length of trying to prove that the Taj Mahal is a temple to Lord Shiva:
http://www.krishnapath.org/photographic-evidence-taj-mahal-a-vedic-temple/