I am extremely grateful to the
organisers of the Punjab History Conference (founded by the late
lamented Sardar Ganda Singh whose affection I was fortunate enough
to get in the initial phase of my teaching career) for electing me
General President of its thirty-first session, even though my own
researches do not specifically relate to the history of the
Punjab. I treat this honour as an encouragement to one who is
interested in the broader issues of Indian history and is
concerned with the problem of integrating regional histories into
the history of India. I, therefore, propose to draw your attention
to some of the issues which have considerable bearing on efforts
to reconstruct the past of the Punjab as a cultural region and not
of the Punjab which was the product of the Radcliffs award. In
doing so I would like to argue that the north western part of the
subcontinent generally and the Punjab region particularly have
been the meeting ground of many faiths and have played a crucial
role in promoting religious syncretism, and communal harmony which
is the greatest need of our times.
Regional historiography cannot
overlook the achievements of the region. Therefore, when one talks
of the Punjab one naturally speaks of its ancient glory. Its
association with the first urban civilisation and subsequently
with the early Vedic Aryans give us an idea of its antiquity.
Panini, believed to have been born at Salatura near Lahore and
later described as bhagavan by his commentator Patanjali , tends
to strengthen Punjabs claim to have produced one of the most
respected intellectual luminaries--a claim further supported by
the prolonged efflorescence of Taksashila (Taxila) as one of the
most prestigious centres of learning in the ancient world and by
the strong possibility of Alberuni meeting erudite scholars in the
Punjab beyond which probably he did not go into the interior of
India. Reference to this region (Shripada Janapada) by Bana as the
kingdom of Indra gives it some kind of divine association just as
his somewhat detailed description of it portrays it as a land of
plenty and beauty. The sacrifices made by numerous heroes from
ancient to modern times can easily be woven into a tale of valour
and bravery. The peculiar geographical position of the Punjab made
it a zone of interaction among a number of peoples in ancient and
medieval times, and nurtured several mystic movements which were
conducive to the growth of a composite culture, so prominently
reflected in the teachings of Jagatguru Nanak who stood for an
egalitarian society. All this and many other developments give a
legitimate amour propre to the people of the Punjab and the north
western part of the subcontinent. But historians working on the
Punjab region may tend to go in a dangerous direction when they
glorify its past without adequate emphasis on the fact that the
cultural heritage of one region belongs equally to the other parts
of the country just as the past of other regions of India is
inextricably linked with the history of the Punjab. By laying an
undue emphasis on its achievements and by ignoring those of the
rest of the country regional historiography will weaken the nation
state which is already being considerably eroded by the almost
irreversible process of globalisation. It must be stressed that
historians have to reconstruct the past without regional
chauvinism and religious fanaticism so as to save the country from
fragmentation.
Chauvinism has its first cousin
in communalism. Its pernicious influence on the reconstruction of
Indian history, first seen in colonial historiography, has assumed
alarming dimensions in recent years. We are all familiar with the
shameful events at Ayodhya followed by macabre consequences, and
with the agenda of liberating Mathura and Kashi in Uttar Pradesh
and Bababudangiri in Karnataka. One should not be surprised if the
list of sites to be liberated is enlarged in the near future and
our past is distorted beyond recognition to provide legitimacy to
communal vandalism. In fact, for the Punjab region itself a
history with communal overtone is already being written. Some
archaeologists thus have been contesting the view that the Aryans
came to India from outside and think that they originally lived in
the valley of the river Sarasvati which finds frequent mention in
the Vedic texts. They also assert that the Aryans were the authors
of what is known as the Indus civilisation. For example, a VHP
protagonist and an archaeologist of sorts, has proclaimed that the
Harappan culture was the gift of both the Indus and the Sarasvati
and perhaps more of the latter. Since he habitually thinks in
terms of India vs Pakistan and Sarasvati vs Indus, he unduly
emphasises that there are 700 Harappan sites on the Sarasvati as
compared to 100 sites on the Indus and, on this basis, seeks to
rename the civilisation. The factitiousness of such a comparison,
however, becomes evident if one takes into account other aspects
of the problem. The Sarasvati is identified with Ghaggar in
Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan and with Hakra in Pakistan beyond
the Indian frontier and the Hakra-Ghaggar is a tributary of the
Indus. None of the major Harappan sites like Harappa, Mohenjodaro
and Dholavira is located on the Hakra or Ghaggar. According to R.C.
Thakran, who has conducted extensive surveys in Haryana and the
neighbouring areas, there is no evidence of Harappan culture in
Ambala and Sirsa districts where the Ghaggar is an important
river. Similar exercise undertaken by M. Rafique Mughal attests to
the existence of much larger number of mature Harappan sites and
strikingly smaller number of late/ or post-Harappan sites in the
Cholistan desert (Bahawalpur) in Pakistan. Thus far more urban
sites appear on the Pakistani Sarasvati than on the Indian
Sarasvati. But the effort to rename the civilisation of the Indus
valley after the lost and elusive Vedic Sarasvati is going on
unabated so as to establish the superiority of the Sarasvati over
the Indus and is thus adding a communal dimension to the Harappan
and Vedic studies as also to the history of the Punjab. All this,
of course, has the blessings of B.B. Lal, who is responsible for
giving a distinctly right-wing shift to Indian archaeology. The
situation unmistakably reminds us of the political abuse of
archaeology in Nazi Germany where Hitler and his National
Socialist Partys ideologue Alfred Rosenberg drew much inspiration
from the archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna who laid the foundations of
an ethnocentric German prehistory.
An extremely ugly face of
communalism is also seen in the ongoing unsavoury controversy
centring round what has been described as forced mass religious
conversions. The Hindutva forces, in their bid to aggravate
religious conflicts in the country, argue that Hindus were
forcibly converted to Islam and Christianity in the past and
therefore they have to be reconverted so as to take them back into
the Hindu fold. But such an assertion has no basis in our history.
There is, for example, hardly any evidence to suggest that the
early Aryans who came to the north western India and subsequently
moved eastwards forcibly imposed Vedic religious practices on the
autochthonous elements even though they fought intertribal and
intratribal wars. On the contrary there are indications in the
Rigveda that the Aryan and the pre/ non- Aryan groups in the Land
of the Seven Rivers were gradually absorbed by the Vedic people
often through the process of assimilation and not confrontation.
Divodasa, and his son Sudasa, who was the chief of the Bharata
tribe, seem to have had a non-Aryan origin as their name-endings
suggest. The garbled version of the origin of Vasishtha and
Agastya, the founders of two of the earliest brahmana gotras,
points to their non-Aryan background. Some Dasa chiefs (e.g.,
Balbhuta and Taruksha) made generous gifts to priests and earned
their unstinted praise and there is nothing to show that the Vedic
religious practices were forcibly imposed on them. Contrary to
common belief, not all dasas were subjugated by force and won over
to the Vedic socio-religious fold. Even the evolution of Krishna
(= black, and therefore different from the fairskinned Aryans)
from one of the Rigvedic seers to the dark Hindu god and an
incarnation of Vishnu, is a clear example of religious syncretism
and not of any conflict of faiths and forced transmogrification of
a non- Aryan into a god. Buddhism and Jainism, a reaction to Vedic
ritualism, initially drew a large number of merchants and traders
into their fold not because of the use of force but mainly on
account of their relevance to the changing social milieu --- it
would indeed be outrageous to argue that the Buddhist missionaries
resorted to violence in their propagation of the principle of
non-violence in the country and outside. Several rulers of
non-Indian origin embraced Indian religions voluntarily and, it
would be puerile to suggest, even by implication, that they did so
under duress. The Indo-Greek king Menander (=Milinda), who had his
capital at Shakala (modern Sialkot in Lahore division) became a
Buddhist after a dialogue with Nagasena. Kanishka, who controlled
most parts of north and north western India (including the Punjab
region) adopted the religion of the Buddha and one of his
successors Vasudeva took to Vaishnavism, not to mention the case
of the Greek ambassador Heliodorus who set up a pillar at Vidisa
in Madhya Pradesh. The Huna king Toramana had Vashnavite
association but was converted to Jainism and his tyrant son
Mihirakula, ruling from Sialkot (which still houses many shrines
including that of Guru Nanak), was a devout Shaiva who founded the
temple of Mihireshvara. He persecuted the Buddhists as was later
done by Shashanka, a fanatic ruler of Bengal. But there is nothing
to show that in their use of force they were motivated by any
enthusiasm for mass religious conversion. In fact, early Indian
history provides ample evidence of the spread of religious ideas
through peaceful interaction. The exponents of the brahmanical and
non- brahmanical sects certainly propagated their own religious
ideas and practices in the areas where they were given donations
of land and villages but, at the same time, appropriated the
tribal cults and deities resulting in a demographic explosion in
the world of divinity during early medieval times. It is well
known that the Tantric religion, with its conspicuous tribal
background, had a pervasive influence on brahmanical religions as
well as various other strands of Indian religious thought such as
Buddhism which had a substantial following in the north western
part of the subcontinent. An analysis of religious developments in
India will show that Hinduism has always been an aggregate of
diverse sects, beliefs and religious practices --- a fact which is
also largely true of other Indian religions like Buddhism and
Jainism both of which split into several sects in course of time.
But vigorous effort has been and is being made to project Hinduism
as a monolithic religion which amounts to its syndicalisation and
to bringing it into direct confrontation with Islam and
Christianity. That is why conversions to these religions in the
past have been very often viewed by communalists as carried out
under force thus giving rise to the erroneous view that Muslims
came to India with sword in one hand and the Quran in the other.
The idea that the Muslims were
destroyers of Hindu temples and that they converted Hindus to
Islam by force is extremely tendentious and is largely unfounded.
Several scholars have drawn our attention to the substantial
literary and epigraphic evidence of the presence of the followers
of Islam in India from soon after the time of the Prophet and we
have reasons to believe that there was peaceful Muslim presence in
different parts of the country including Kashmir and the Punjab
from the beginning of the Islamic history. Legend has it that Abur-
Rida Ratan, a Hindu convert who died in 1243 and was buried in
Bhatinda, "claimed shortly after 1200 that he had heard of
the Prophet at the age of sixteen, had gone to Medina, fought
together with him, and was granted longevity by his blessings so
that he now, after 600 years, was able to transmit authentic
hadith". Historically speaking, however, the advent of Islam
began in India with the conquest of Sind in 711-12 by Muhammad ibn
al- Qasim who came to the Indus region to avenge some Muslim women
fallen into the hands of pirates. The Chachanama, which provides a
detailed account of the conquest, gives the impression that the
largely Buddhist indigenous population, being dissatisfied with
the local brahmana ruler Dahir, facilitated his defeat and
embraced Islam. The use of force in this conversion was neither
necessary nor possible as is evident from the account of Alberuni.
The possibility of a forced mass conversion is, in fact,
contradicted by Muhammad ibn Qasim himself who, according to
Baladhuri, is believed to have said: "The temples shall be
unto us like the churches of the Christians, the synagogues of the
Jews, and the fire temples of the Magians." It would appear,
therefore, that the mass conversion of the indigenous Indian
population in the Punjab, Sind and other parts of north western
India, as also elsewhere in the subcontinent, owes perhaps very
little to the use of force. On the contrary it owes a great deal
to the preachings of the mystic and Sufi saints like al-Hallaj
(who visited Sind in 905) , Shaikh Muhammad Ismail al- Bukhari al-
Lahori (who reached Lahore before the Ghaznawid conquest) , Baba
Farid and so on. In Kashmir, the Sufi mystics like Nuruddin, whose
order, interestingly, came to be called by the Sanskritic name
Rishi silsila, played a very important role in the dissemination
of Islamic beliefs and practices. The Sufi mystics not only
preached their ideas among the people but often showed utmost
respect for the various pre-existing religious beliefs, and in the
Punjab, we are told, at least four of the major Sufi orders (Chisti,
Suhrawardi, Qadiri and the Naqshbandi) "reached the meridian
of their glory" , evidently not on account of the use of
force but mainly because of their ability to adjust to the local
environment and accommodate the religious ideas of the people with
whom they interacted. The continuation of the tradition of
peaceful interaction and religious syncretism in the Punjab is
supported by the widely accepted early Sikh tradition that Mian
Mir of Lahore was associated with the foundation of the Harmandir
Sahib at the request of Guru Arjun as well as by the fact that the
compositions of Baba Farid, Trilochana, Namdev, Sadhna, Beni,
Ramananda, Kabir, Dhanna, Suradas and so on were enshrined in the
Guru Granth Sahib. The Muslim mystics, like the bhakti saints,
contributed substantially to the contemporary popular literature,
and, at least in Bengal, more than a hundred Muslim saints are
known to have composed Vaishnava devotional songs. Their success
in converting people to Islam on a large scale in the Punjab and
the neighbouring areas as well in other regions like eastern
Bengal also owed much to the weaknesses of the caste-ridden
brahmanical society which denied all privileges to the
untouchables, artisans and other weaker sections of society ,
though the extent to which the socio-economic position of the
converts improved after embracing Islam remains largely a matter
of speculation.
The process of conversion to
Islam was a long drawn process of interaction between it and other
Indian religions --- a view stressed by scholars long ago. This is
also largely true of Christianity which, despite the derogatory
Evangelical references to Indian religions, has been practised on
considerable scale in India for nearly two thousand years. The
first convert to Christianity on the Indian subcontinent was the
Indo- Parthian king Gondophernes who, according to an inscription
at Takht-i-Bhai (near Peshawar), ruled for at least twenty-six
years (AD 19-45) over Arachosia, Kabul and Gandhara (modern
Afghanistan and Pakistan). His association with Saint Thomas, who
founded the Syrian Christian church in Malabar and later met his
martyrdom under the king of Mylapore (Chennai), is well known. The
good work done by the Christian missionaries from the sixteenth
century onwards in the field of education and health care has
influenced substantial number of educated Indians, though the
followers of Christianity in contemporary India are mainly from
the Dalits and the tribal people and form about 2.5 per cent of
the total Indian population. The assimilation of Christian ideas
by Indian religions cannot be ruled out; for certain Vaishnava
legends, especially those relating to the infant Krishna, are
believed by some to bear resemblance to those of Christianity.
Many prominent Indians (e.g., Mahatma Gandhi) have been influenced
by Christian ethical ideas particularly the Sermon on the Mount.
The Christian impact on contemporary Indian urban life is most
conspicuous in the joie de vivre noticeable on the days of
Christmas and St. Valentine. Obviously, all this is not indicative
of the use of force in spreading Christian beliefs and practices.
Needless to say then that whether it is the question of Islam or
of Christianity, the process of conversion to both the religions
has to be studied by serious historians as part of the
socio-cultural history of the different regions of the country
without, of course, joining the dubious communalist call for the
national debate on conversions/ reconversions ---- a debate which
is only intended to implement the VHPs Hindu agenda and camouflage
the real problems facing the vast masses of the country. Religious
history of India or any of its regions like the Punjab can be most
meaningfully and fruitfully studied within the framework of the
historical process of social change and its material underpinnings
and not within the paradigm of rigid religious dichotomies which
are most certainly detrimental to the integrity of the nation. But
such an exercise is possible only if professional historians not
only jettison the communal historiographical baggage moronically
carried by the obscurantist elements but also set their own agenda
for rational and scientific enquiry giving priority to such
problems as the emergence of state societies in the north-west,
social role of religion, influence of ecology on historical
developments and the interaction of the plains with the hilly
areas in different spheres of life, etc. In this context scholars
working on the history of Punjab and the neighbouring states have
a special responsibility to discharge because the formation and
development of Indian tradition and culture owes a great deal to
this region.