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point I wish particularly to underscore is, however, different;
which is that when Hindus fought and lost, they did not throw up
prophets of woe and doom; they did not bemoan that their Gods had
let them down because they had been disloyal to them.
Hindus are perhaps unique in this respect. That is perhaps why the
well-known British historian Elliot wondered why Hindus had not left
any account which could enable us to gauge the traumatic impact
Muslim conquests and rule had on them. (Incidentally, one such
account entitled Kanhadade Prabandha by the Jain Muni Padmanabha
written in the fifteenth century regarding the fight for the Jalore
fort is available, and the muni-poet praises Muslim valour as he
praises Hindu valour. An English translation of this unique
document, with an introduction and annotation by V.S. Bhatnagar, has
recently been published.)2
A large number of Hindus, of course,
cooperated with Muslim rulers and millions even got converted to
Islam. It is important to know, even in retrospect, how Islam
spread. But, for one thing, the distinction that is often made
between conversion by force (sword), temptation (favours by the
court) and persuasion (influence of pious Sufis) is rather arbitrary
because all three factors operated in conjunction with one another;
and, for another, the more critical point for us is that by the time
the Mughal empire went into decline in the early eighteenth century,
a kind of stalemate had been reached, with neither the Hindus nor
the Muslims able to dominate India as a whole. It was in this
context that the British came to rule over India. |
