Why Chasing the Mirage of a Glorious Past Bulldozes Historical Reality

Attempts are being made to re-establish a glorious Hindu past that never existed and cannot be reclaimed.

Photo for representation. 

(Photo: Chetan Bhakuni/The Quint)

On 5 June, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath celebrated his 50th birthday in pomp. On the eve of it, an arati was organised at the Assi Ghat in Varanasi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s constituency, where a decorated bulldozer was kept in the honour of the man who now revels in being called “Bulldozer Baba,” the personification of retributive justice involving the indiscriminate use of demolition squads, which has become a hallmark of his regime.

While Adityanath has also used the bulldozer metaphorically on history by renaming places with Muslim-sounding names to Hindu ones, it is Prime Minister Narendra Modi who has used it literally to tear down vestiges of a more recent past in the Indian capital of Delhi with the Central Vista redevelopment project.

The politics of it apart, is there a historical precedent for all this? The answer is yes, and more than one.

An older generation of historians used to say this about Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan: he found cities in red sandstone but left them in marble. While this invariably pointed towards the emperor’s building prowess, it also emphasised his penchant for knocking down markers of antiquity – the architectural legacy of even his forefathers.

‘Shah Jahan Did It Too but Minus the Hate'

Thus, Shah Jahan razed many buildings within the Agra Fort that had been built during the time of his father Jahangir and grandfather Akbar and erected marble buildings in their place. Even marble palaces built by his father didn’t appeal to his senses and were demolished.

As a result, most of the buildings that we see today in this 16th century fort are of provenance not older than 1628-30. But Shah Jahan wasn’t content with razing new buildings in Agra, he did the same in the forts at Lahore and Kabul, and then built a whole new city of Shahjahanabad with a new citadel at its heart.

Shah Jahan’s appetite for construction was voracious and quite unmatched, a fact attested by his chronicler Muhammad Amin Qazvini who commented that “building activity has reached such a level that has neither been attained in any earlier time nor possible in the future.”

Shah Jahan was also outdoing his grandfather Akbar, who, after having ruled from his father’s old citadel of Dinpanah in Delhi for a few years initially, decided to move his capital to Agra where he built the grand fort as a symbol of his power and permanence of rule. What did he displace to do that?

Abu’l Fazl writes in the Akbarnama thus: “An order was then issued that the old fort which was built on the east bank of the Jamuna, and whose pillars had been shaken by the revolutions of time and the shocks of fortune, should be removed, and that an impregnable fort should be built of hewn stone. It was to be stable like the foundation of the dominion of the sublime family and permanent like the pillars of its fortunes.”

The wrecking ball must have fallen on the palaces left behind by the Lodhis, the dynasty Akbar’s grandfather Babur had supplanted in 1526. A serious student of history might find it curious as to why most of the Lodhi architecture that still stands today is either tombs or mosques.

Being sacred spaces, funerary architecture and places of worship were rarely touched.

That perhaps also explains why wall fragments of Sultan Alauddin Khilji’s citadel of Siri still survive, as do the mosques he built and his tomb, but not his famed Hazar-Sutun Palace (Palace of Thousand Pillars); and why Sultan Feroze Shah Tughlaq’s famed citadel of Ferozabad still exists but only the Jami Mosque, a baoli, and another building topped by the Ashokan pillar survive but not the palaces.

The buildings may have perished due to the onslaught of the elements over time, and many palaces made of perishable material like wood certainly didn’t stand the test of time.

Or, they were razed or stripped down when their patrons perished to make way for newer buildings. The concept of reuse of building material is quite well-known – the Quwwat ul-Islam Mosque at the Qutub Minar complex in Mehrauli is a shining example of it. Even early Mughal buildings were stripped down for later buildings, like the Safdarjung’s Tomb in Delhi reusing some material from Khan-i Khanan’s Tomb in nearby Nizamuddin.

But what we don’t often see in most of these examples is hate for a preceding dynasty that was supplanted. Even when the new Muslim rulers of Delhi erected the grand mosque within the precincts of the fort they conquered, they didn’t make any hateful pronouncement against the former Hindu rulers in the foundation text, merely recording that the mosque was built using material from 27 temples (butkhaneh), without specifying if these were demolished for the purpose (the Taj ul-Ma’asir of Hasan Nizami, however, does mention the razing of a temple and its material reused in the mosque).

Instead, historians have noted that the new building not only reflected Indic architectural elements and motifs – something seen in the Ghaznavid lands earlier, suggesting the westward flow of Indian art and architectural traditions but even its cost of construction was expressed in local currency (Deliwal) and not the dirham of the Ghurid homeland.

‘Invasions by Muslims Not a Violent Rupture With the Past'

This leads us to a more important conversation about continuity, which has been happening in academic spaces but not so much in the public sphere.

Surely the invasions by Muslims changed many things. But these didn’t lead to a violent rupture with the past, as colonial and some other historians of a previous generation assumed. Instead, the Ghaznavids, the Ghurids, the Mamluks – all of them had to negotiate their Islamic idiom of kingship with pre-Islamic ones.

These engagements were complex and happened at many levels. That’s why Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, projected as a great iconoclast in Indo-Persian historiography, and uncritically accepted as such in Hindu nationalist circles, issued coins with Sanskrit legends in which he described himself as “nripati” (king) and Prophet Muhammad as the “avatar” of God (avyaktam ekam avatarah Muhammadah nripati Mahmudah).

The new populations that came under Muslim rule had to be given a feeling of continuity and a sense of the faith of the new rulers in a language they could understand.

Ghurid Sultan Muizuddin Muhammad bin Sam, who defeated Prithviraj Chauhan, adopted his style of coinage and started issuing specie with Hindu iconography in which the old language of Hindu rulers was used. He was called in them Sri Mahamada bini Sama or Srimad Hammira – Hammira being the Sankrit for the Arabic Aamir.

But in his Afghan homeland and the former Ghaznavid territories he seized, he continued to be the al-Sultan al-Muazzam (The Great Sultan) in his coinage and inscriptions.

Even Iltutmish – whose chroniclers like Hasan Nizami deployed the rhetoric of orthodoxy to burnish his credentials as the rightful heir not just to Qutbuddin Aybeg’s throne but also to the legacy of Sultan Muizuddin –included the pre-Islamic Iron Pillar in the expanded mosque in Delhi as a grand statement to the permanence of his rule.

Over a century later, Sultan Feroze Shah Tughlaq did something similar when he translocated two Ashokan pillars to Delhi from Meerut and Topra and erected one of them on top of a palace in his new city of Ferozabad (or Feroze Shah Kotla in Delhi).

The palimpsest nature of the pillar is remarkable, for it contains an inscription in Prakrit by Buddhist emperor Ashoka on top, followed by another in Sanskrit by Hindu Chauhan king Vigraharaja IV below it that declared his victory over the mlecchhas (read Muslims) and was brought and re-erected with great care in his capital by the Farsi-speaking Muslim sultan of Delhi.

‘This Is a Political Choice Informed by a Reductionist View of the Past'

Ritual practices of Hindu kings were continued too. Just like the armies of Rajendra Chola had brought waters of the Ganga in pots to the Cholan capital after their successful conquest of the eastern Gangetic plains in 1022 CE, so did Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlaq when he relocated the capital of his vast empire to Daulatabad in the Deccan from Delhi in 1327.

Ganga’s sacred position in the Indic idea of sovereignty continued even afterwards as the sultans of Bengal made it a point to bathe with Ganga water on their coronation, and the Mughals from Akbar onwards made a clear preference for Ganga water for everyday personal use.

Even when Jaipur king Sawai Madho Singh II travelled to England in the early 20th century, he took Ganga water with him in huge silver jars (that are still on display at the City Palace in Jaipur) imitating, albeit on a much more modest scale, what Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlaq or Rajendra Chola had done centuries earlier.

Why then must our popular spaces be dominated by polarising conversations about temple desecrations and “Islamic invasions” and a “wounded Hindu civilisation”? This is a political choice informed by a reductionist view of the past and not some profound historical scholarship.

But a previous generation of leaders in India had made a different kind of political choice, combining scholarship with a political vision for the country. Jawaharlal Nehru was its leading light.

Most modern historians agree, with some reservations about its colonial teleology of modernity, that Nehru’s The Discovery of India is an exceptional specimen of nationalist historiography.

In it, Nehru set the ideological framework of the nation-state of India: one that privileged multiculturalism as a national ideal and inspired succeeding generations of authors, political thinkers, historians, poets, and other intellectuals to nurture and celebrate it.

In describing India and her journey from antiquity to modernity, Nehru showed his felicity with evocative prose that very few historians have been able to match:

“She (India) was like some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously.”

This understanding is what endears Nehru to many modern historians. But he wasn’t alone or even the first to articulate this thought; in 1910, Rabindranath Tagore had, in his poem Bharat-tirtha (The Indian Pilgrimage), talked about how various migrating populations, whether as rulers or the ruled, merged in the body of India.

Of all conquerors, he chose a few prominent ones: the Scythians (Sakas), the Hunas, the Pathans, and the Mughals. Tagore was quite sceptical about nationalism and understood its propensity to turn religious, having seen first-hand how the Swadeshi (or Boycott) Movement of 1905 had adversely affected minorities in Bengal.

When he wrote “eke dehe holo leen” (merged in a single body) about the “Saka Huna dal Pathan Mughal,” he was trying to show how it’s futile to find the Other as vast waves of humanity all merged into the “great sea” that was “Bharata’s” humanity.

This understanding, sadly, is now missing from our popular discourses of history, especially the Hindu nationalist one where the past is an unending culture war between Hindus and Muslims, and the present is all about righting the wrongs of history. That has led to movements in recent years to reclaim Muslim sacred spaces for Hindus and re-establish a glorious Hindu past – a past that never existed and, therefore, can never be reclaimed.

(Manimugdha S Sharma is pursuing PhD in History at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, and is a fellow at the Institute of Asian Research, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. He is the author of the book, Allahu Akbar: Understanding the Great Mughal in Today’s India. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)