Conversions In History

 Nalini Taneja

IN these ten years since the destruction of the Babri Masjid, the sangh parivar has been reiterating with renewed force the lies that form part of its armoury in its battle against the secular state. Conversions is one such theme. The sangh parivar has attempted to create an identity between Muslim kings and conversions to Islam, and of colonialism with the spread of Christianity. As a result of their relentless propaganda the image of Muslim rulers and British officials as sword bearers on behalf of their religions has today become part of ‘common sense’, and is the dominant image most people have of Muslim kings. And if the same is not true of British rule to the same extent, it is because a whole generation still lives that has seen the fight for national liberation and have connotations of freedom and swadeshi that have no connection with what the sangh parivar says today.

PARIVAR'S MANUFACTURED MYTHS

 The sangh parivar’s manufactured myths are perhaps best epitomised in the story that appears in various forms in most Vidya Bharti school texts, and is directed at innocent children. It needs to be quoted: “On witnessing Guru Teg Bahadur’s staunch defense of his faith the Emperor Aurangzeb grew red with anger. This was the same Aurangzeb who had Matidas cut through with a saw, Bhai Dayaldas thrown into a vessel of boiling hot oil, and Satidas wrapped in cotton and burnt alive…Even in the last moments of his supreme sacrifice his pride in being a Hindu shone clearly on his face”. (Sanskar Saurabh, Part 2, meant for Class 4). Children are then led to believe what most other texts also claim “the Muslims came to India with the sword in one hand and the Quran in the other”… “Numberless Hindus were forcibly converted to Islam on the point of the sword”, and so on. 

Millions of children have been brought up on such staple “intellectual” diet since Independence, and it is truly the privileged that have escaped part of this vast multitude. The Parivar seeks to convert them as well through the overhaul of the entire educational set up, and through its political campaigns today personified in the rabid anti-minority speeches of the likes of Modi, Togadia and Singhal. These speeches play on these myths ad nauseum to render the political climate violent, and while the majority of the Indian people may not be willing participants in any envisaged fascist take over, on the other hand many democratic and secular people carry the myth of forcible conversions in the innermost recesses of their minds, and are not able to counter this malicious propaganda.

TRUTH ABOUT PRE-MODERN CONVERSIONS 

In truth, religious conversions have simply not been characterised by the violence that sangh parivar attributes to the matter. The first Muslims who came to this sub continent were in fact Arabs, and they came not as invaders or conquerors but as traders, and much earlier than many migrants and invaders who later went on to constitute “Hindu” dynasties in North India. Unfortunately even secular textbooks have little to say on them, with the result that Mahmud of Ghazni’s army remains the symbol of Muslim entry into India and, through the sangh parivar propaganda, has become a metaphor for what the Muslims did to this country on their entry.

As Richard Eaton has shown in his work (The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier 1204-1760), those who propose the theory of conversions through violence cannot explain how force was applied, or how exactly someone could be ‘converted’ by force. He also points out that the region around Delhi and Agra saw a great deal of warfare conducted by Muslim dynasties; but here the Muslims have been fewer in number (as a proportion to the total population of that area) than in west Punjab, east Bengal, etc. He says that we get to know about numbers from the time the British government began to take censuses of the Indian population. The first census with reliable results dates to 1872. Then there was one in 1901. In these, we find that less than 15 per cent of the total population around Delhi and Agra were Muslims.  But in some rural districts of Bengal, the Muslim population was as much as 70 or 80 per cent.  Other regions with high Muslim populations were Baluchistan, NWFP, and west Punjab. On the basis of the historical evidence—mainly the accounts of European travellers and missionaries—he also points out that in Bengal there was a large Muslim population in the countryside by Mughal times  (say, 1574 to 1707).

Surprising for many, even the secular argument that most conversions were due to the egalitarian ideals that Islam represented in relation to caste-ridden Hinduism is only partially true for the pre-modern times. It holds truer of the modern period than the pre-modern when identities were fuzzy at the popular level, and contestations were within communities—as represented by bhakti and Sufism which sought to transcend specific religious boundaries rather than change them. There are evidences of complex processes of cult figures, bhakts and sufi sants and pirs, under whose influence inclusions of practices across the board created numerous practices that cannot be identified with the dominant traditions of Islam or the Hinduism of the Vedas. In fact, the conflicts between vaishnavism and shaivism, or earlier between Brahmanical Hinduism and Buddhism and Jainism is characterised by far greater violence if one is to measure the quantum, though this is not to deny conflict altogether between the efforts by Brahmanical Hinduism and the orthodox Islam to gain hegemony over popular traditions that were a threat to creation of well defined and separate religious identities.

Further, as Sumit Sarkar has pointed out, conflicts in pre-modern times would have been considerably reduced, further, by the slow, phased nature of the transition, and pre-colonial 'conversion' was probably not so much a matter of individual and one-shot choice, as of slow changes involving an entire group, family or kinship network, or local community – which would once again reduce the potentials for conflict. One may add, it included as many elements of inclusion as exclusion, a factor that gives a special flavour to Indian Islam as well as popular Hinduism as evident in many shared forms and places of worship through out the country.

For many reasons awareness of separate identities took a leap and further conversions became an issue of contention when the early Hindutva forces decided to exploit the efforts and results of British census surveys and drawing up of separate personal laws for different religious communities to strengthen their arguments for Hindus and Muslims as two separate and conflicting civilisational identities, and the identity of Indian culture with Brahmanical Hinduism. They made religious identity a strong element in the interplay of other multiple identities of gender, class, linguistic, caste etc. They even managed to pose an alternative ‘national’ identity that in fact threatened to divide the national movement against colonialism.

  SYMBOL OF MASS PROTEST

Modernity and participation in popular movements during the freedom struggle also brought with it the concept of ‘individual rights’ and questionings of inequalities in a qualitatively different language. It is this that resulted in conversions from Hinduism on the basis of an egalitarian ideal, and perhaps the mass conversion by Ambedkar and thousands of dalits to Buddhism is a symbol of this mass protest and claims to equality on secular grounds. In short, conversions from Hinduism in the modern age have in essence been motivated by secular concerns and motivations rather than religious propaganda, even when there has been religious preaching, and there is a need to assert this today in the face of sangh parivar’s propaganda of conspiracies against ‘Hindus’. As discussed in an earlier issue of People's Democracy, the sangh parivar is extremely agitated over the emergence of the dalit identity cutting across religious affiliations, and hence its emphasis on conversions in its political propaganda.

Finally, the sangh parivar has created the myth that ‘conversion’ is a ‘sin’ that Brahmanical Hinduism has not indulged in, that somehow Hinduism is unique in that one is born a Hindu (and in a caste?) and it is the only non proselytizing religion in existence. One uncritically accepts that tribals have become integrated into Hinduism only through self-processes of ‘sanskritisation’ and ‘cultural integration’--as if only adoption of ‘Hindu’ practices amounts to integration. One also forgets the vicious shuddhi (purification, or reconversion to the so called  ‘original’ faith of Hinduism) movement of early twentieth century. We also know what the VHP is doing today in the tribal areas. It is committing incalculable violence against a way of life of millions of people and trying to make them participants in its diabolical agenda through first of all converting them.