The Subcontinent Is Invaded - 2
By Syed Osman Sher
Mississauga, Canada
In the middle of the first century AD we find an important epoch in the history of the Subcontinent as the Kushans or Yueh-chi race were able to establish another great empire after the Mauryas in northwestern India under Kujula Kadphises. Kujula's successor, Wema Kadphises, conquered the interior of India. They established their capital at Purushapura (modern Peshawar). With their ascendancy, the corridor of power shifted from Magadha (Bihar) to northwestern India.
Their most famous ruler was Kanishka (AD 78-101), who had embraced Buddhism. He convened the Fourth Buddhist Council to discuss matters pertaining to Buddhist theology and doctrine, and sent Buddhist missions to central Asia and China. Chinese and Tibetan accounts say that Kia-ni Ch’a (Kanishka) conquered Eastern India and demanded large indemnity, from the king of Pataliputra.
This period also saw the flourishing of art, literature, and religion. Kanishka built a very large Buddhist monastery at Peshawar. Finding the teachings of various schools of Buddhism contradictory and confusing, Kanishka convened the Grand Buddhist Council in Kashmir or in Jalandhar to have all the teachings and canons systematized and codified according to respective schools. Being a staunch Buddhist, Kanishka was also respectful toward other religions. This is amply demonstrated by his coins, which represent diverse deities: Greek, Sumerian, Persian and Indian.
At the end of the third century, the Huns, a descendant of the dreaded Hsing-Nu tribe from the eastern extremity of the Eurasian steppe had erupted in a massive migration in all directions. They ‘rode their horses awake and asleep’ and filled terror in the hearts of those who heard their fierce yells. With extreme ferocity and swiftness, the Huns had overwhelmed Europe and Asia and brought about the downfall of the mighty Roman Empire. During the closing years of the reign of Kumara Gupta I (415-455), the first wave of the Huns had attacked the kingdom in the plains of Punjab. Prince Skanda Gupta inflicted a crushing defeat on the Huns. When Skanda Gupta (455-467) came to the throne the Huns again started threatening India by pouring down through the Hindu Kush passes. They occupied Gandhara, and the region north of the Ganga and came very close to the capital, Pataliputra. Skanda Gupta dealt such a severe blow to them that the Huns never ventured again to look towards his kingdom during his lifetime. During the reign of Narasimha Gupta (c.496-515), they proved to be a grave menace under the strong leadership of Toramana and his son Mihirakula. Toramana, who had settled in Afghanistan, swooped over North-Western India, destroyed the weakened Kushan power, and captured East Malwa. Overrunning even the heartland of the empire, Bihar, he reached Bengal. The king became a vassal of Toramana and agreed to pay him tribute.
Toramana was succeeded by his son, Mihirakula, in 515. He annexed Kashmir and the western half of the Ganges basin. However, the royal troops ambushed him in a narrow pass of the Ganges near the capital. Narasimha Gupta intended to execute Mihirakula, but released him on the intercession of his mother. Mihirakula promised never to set foot again on Narasimha Gupta’s territory. Defeated by king Yashodharman of Malwa, Mihirakula withdrew to Kashmir, where he died in AD 542.
Though the Huns were not able to make a deep impact on Indian politics, yet they were able to leave their imprint on society. They caused massive migration of population from Rajhasthan, Gandhara, and Kashmir to the eastern parts of the country. They also generated a racial fusion when majority of them opted to stay back. They merged with the local population and eventually sprang up as new tribes of the Gurjaras of West India, the Rajputs of Rajasthan and the Jats of the Punjab and Uttar Pradesh.
The year 712 saw the Arabs making a serious attempt to enter into India. The Umayyad governor of Iraq, Hajjaj bin Yusuf, sent a mighty force under the command of Muhammad bin Qasim. After defeating the local ruler, Dahir, Sindh was annexed to the Islamic Caliphate. The Arabs did not take their entry into Sindh as a serious attempt for expansion. The Muslim dispersion in India had to wait another three hundred years or more. In this intervening period the Arabs had adjusted their tribal life to the Sindhi tribal pattern and adopted local customs and manners. This was the time when the Arabs gave Brahmanism the new name of ‘Hinduism’ - they called the local people, the worshippers of Vishnu and Šiva, as ‘Hindus’. During this time the heartland of India, however, remained uninformed of the happenings in Sindh and the presence of the Muslims. In the second half of the twelfth century another Turkish family of Ghur, which was also of Central Asian origin, captured Ghazni. Sultan Muizzuddin Muhammad (Shahabuddin) Ghuri (1173-1206) made his foray into India in 1175. Reaching Peshawar, he destroyed the old Ghaznavid garrison in 1179, and seized Lahore in 1186. He defeated the Hindu confederates under the command of Prithiviraj at the second battle of Tarain in 1192. After the victory the Sultan returned to Khorasan leaving the campaign and the new possessions in the hands of his trusted slave lieutenant Qutbuddin Aibek, who finally reached Delhi and occupied it in 1193. After Mahmud Ghuri was assassinated by an Isma’ili fanatic in 1206 near Lahore, Qutbuddin Aibak assumed the role of the sultan of Delhi. The Sultanate era lasted for more than three hundred years with the rule of five successive Turco-Afghan dynasties: Slaves, Khiljis, Tughlaqs, Syeds and Lodhis.
This period saw a special phase of Hindu-Muslim relationship for a new religious and ethnic element had been introduced in India. After the Sultanate, the long reign of the grand Mughals started on April 21, 1526, when “I placed my foot in the stirrup of resolution and my hands on the reins of confidence in God and marched against Sultan Ibrahim… The sun had mounted spear-high when the onset began, and the battle lasted till mid-day, when the enemy were completely broken, and routed” (Zahiruddin Babar, Babar Nama, translated by J. Leyden and W. Erskine).
The Muslim rule of India of more than a thousand years impacted India in the same way as the Aryan invasion had done. If the latter had inducted all the invaders, who had no strong religious code of their own, into the Vedic religion, the former were also able to attract the local people to their philosophy. The main reason for this was the sufi cult which had inspired the people with their noble character, simple life and preaching. Perhaps the most significant factor was the discrimination of Hinduism itself against its own co-religionists, which induced them to voluntarily accept other religions (Buddhism, Jainism, Islam, Sikhism, Christianity, etc.). In that way they could elevate their social status to the level of caste Hindus. The result was that reaching the twentieth century the Muslim population had swelled up to more than 25 per cent.
The trade interest of Europe in India was very old especially for commodities like spices and textiles. After the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Muslim Arabs, direct contact was lost, but trade continued to be carried indirectly thorough middlemen. During the Mughal rule, the crusading zeal against the Muslims and commercial zeal against spice monopolists became the motives which sent Vasco da Gama of Portugal to Calicut in 1498. Ultimately, the Portuguese captured Goa and other areas and made them part of their country. Initially, they satisfied their ambitions of infusing Christian culture and of making a permanent presence by inter-marrying and producing a hybrid community of Roman Catholic Portuguese Goans. This community, they thought, would be committed to the Portuguese settlements and provide a self-perpetuating garrison. Anyway, the number of converts, combined with offspring of intermarriages (Luso-Indians), made the population of Goa Catholic dominated so much so that Inquisition was introduced there in 1560. Commenting on their religious zeal and treatment of the local population on religious grounds Stanley Wolpert writes in A New History of India, Chapter 10, “Western Europeans learned long before the British arrived how best to exploit the communal conflicts and social divisions within India’s fragmented, pluralistic society”. Often they tended towards disorder and piracy. They acquired a reputation for cruelty and perfidy. At last, in December 1961 the independent India invaded Goa, Daman, and Diu that ended the 450-year Portuguese rule in India.
The weak Mughal rulers after Emperor Aurangzeb were unable to check the onslaught of the Europeans - the British, French and Dutch. They came in the guise of traders but their ultimate aim was to make the Subcontinent their colony. In this endeavor, however, the British gained success over the other two powers. In 1858, the British abolished the Mughal monarchy and annexed the Subcontinent in the British Empire. The British rulers undoubtedly gave the country good governance, much better than other colonial masters elsewhere in the world. When the British left in 1947, India, though was not an industrialized country, yet had its rural economy amply strengthened by its own machine industries. If not well fed and clothed, an average Indian had more amenities in the shape of general security, transport, and public health. During the British rule, however, the country experienced a unique type of intolerance; it was a calculated act of the rulers to create intolerance within the indigenous society with the political objective of ruling by division. The result was the appearance of a grave fissure in the harmonious Indian society. Differences and divisiveness on the basis of religion flared up, and for the first time the two major communities of Hindus and Muslim came to the throats of each other. While leaving the Subcontinent in 1947 the British also split the country apart into two through an Act passed by the Parliament in London
Attesting to the British efforts to create a divisive society, R.C. Majumdar writes in the History And Culture of the Indian People, Vol. V, Chapter XVII: "The advent of Islam constituted the first great rift in the solidarity of the Indian community since the incorporation of the aboriginal peoples into the Aryan society. Henceforth there were two communities in India—Hindus and Muslims—who formed two entirely separate entities.” It is true that the Muslims, though largely converts from Hinduism, felt more closeness to their Arab and Persian co-religionists in their spiritual and philosophical make-up, but the soil where they were born and the people with whom they had been living had more magnetism in their social life. The vast majority of them were of the same local stock, except that they had accepted Islam. Not to speak of the twentieth century, another historian Romila Thapar writes thus about the social and communal make-up of the early Sultanate period, "In the last fifty years many attempts have been made to prove that the Hindu and Islamic cultures at no time approached any kind of fusion, and that over the many centuries when they lived side by side Hindus and Muslims existed as two separate communities. This is a clear example of a case of historical ‘back projection’, where sanction is sought from the past to justify contemporary attitudes…From the pattern of society in the Sultanate period it is evident that a synthesis of the two cultures took place, although this synthesis did not occur at every level and with the same intensity. Furthermore, the pattern which emerged was to mature in the period subsequent to that of the Sultanate.” (A History of India, Vol. One, Ch 13).
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