Archer

I know it might offend you that life existed before Islam and such and such, but the Maurya empire was from 321 to 185 BCE. Semantically, yes we can quibble over the timelines or even the mahajanapadas.

And the subcontinent was practically united during that period. Note I am not bringing in Bharata here.



And other empires, including the Gupta ( 240 to 550 CE) covered pretty much a huge swathe of North India, and parts of present day Pak. similar to the Mughals did, bar Akbars time when the empire was at its Zenith.



And the poor Mughals or even the Delhi Sultanates, never really ruled over South India either (check the state at 1605 for instance), and the Marathas put paid to that, running the Mughal emperor as a puppet.



So one can even quibble over, whether bar the non Muslim Mauryas - any Muslim ruler ever managed to unite the subcontinent.

So old chap, whilst you are at "history", do correct the spelling of your nick as well. Its "Spartan". Not "Sparten".

Details, details- even I have to be pernickety here.

sparten

Ah, contradicting yourself. First you claim that



And then you bring up "proofs", which I shall deal with shortly
[QUOTEArcher]I know it might offend you that life existed before Islam and such and such[/quote]
Gee, I wonder why my Avatar, has a coin of Diodotus, King of the Bactrian Greeks.

Well as I and the good Captain both pointed out many times here and on other forums, India had rarely been united in its history, and even then for a few generations at best.

The Mayarun Empire was at its greatest extent during Ashokas time, it encompassed almost all of the Sub-Continent, (except parts of Balochistan and a bit of the FRontier). Yet by 200 AD the Greco-Indian kings, had removed the Mayans from most of Pakistan and eventually the extended to the Ganges plane.

Guptas, did not extend beyond the Indus, (except at one point). And was only N India. Gees all of the Sub Continent was taken?

And the Delhi sultanate did not extend much beyond (or even too) the Gujrat either, I never claimed that it did. Again, India; not united.

As for the Mughals.

Parts of Balocgistan missing.

And the British

Parts of the Frontier and balochistan missing again.


Explained that all ready.

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"Any relations in a social order will endure if there is infused into them some of that spirit of human sympathy, which qualifies life for immortality." ~ George William Russell

Archer

I already noted the same above: Semantically, yes we can quibble over the timelines and the definition of the term "sub-continent"- which to me, frankly, is the modern day Republic of India.

If we extend it to parts modern day Pak etc- then the Mauryan empire existed for over a hundred years. If we stick to modern day India proper, then the Marathas can be included as running a state that encompassed "most" if not all of modern day India.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...a1760_1905.jpg

Its all in the context.

"then you bring up".."deal with"- Sigh, the attitude speaks for itself..

Be rational. You asked me for my POV, albeit in a jeering tone, and I merely showed the resources. Yet you persist.

Your choice.

I think LT can speak for himself, and if you actually look at the above- what are you defining India as? The entire subcontinent? Or the area comprising the bulk of the modern day Republic of India?

I can say the same of the Mughals and the assorted Muslim empires. That they have never taken the whole of India, which is why it constantly amuses me when( not you) folks prattle on about "ruling India", when the fact is that these empires could not extend southward and even retain their hold (eg the Bahmanis).

Gee, perhaps you could read again.

And other empires, including the Gupta ( 240 to 550 CE) covered pretty much a huge swathe of North India, and parts of present day Pak.


You really need to read what the opposite guy says before you rush to reply.

And the poor Mughals or even the Delhi Sultanates, never really ruled over South India either (check the state at 1605 for instance), and the Marathas put paid to that, running the Mughal emperor as a puppet.


Forget "parts of" Balochistan. They couldnt take the whole of India. It says Vijayanagar right below.


Yup, thats modern day Pakistan. Read what I wrote in context. For instance, you will always find a few areas, "missing" here & there. But thats not the point- its a given that even the Islamic rulers could not really "rule" entire India.


But being as pernickety as you, I had to point it out.

And perhaps the next time before you rush to jeer, you can ask as well.

raj

i was reading one article by a retired aeronautical engineer in HAL, he was saying that at the time of independence, they were given orders to break all the fighter planes they had access to.
this shows the vile charcter of britishers, they never wanted INDIA to improve, what ever they did was for their own good. And guys do stop singing praises of british rule.

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saw this in some site dont remember the name tough

Archer

Well given how they left India, such feelings are to be expected. There are Pakistani accounts testifying to similar better feelings at their end. Incidentally, some British officers also tried to shift as much equipment from India to Pak, as much as possible anyways, since some in the Foreign Office (UK) felt that Pak was valuable for continued British access to the Central Asian region.

Samudra

One Samudra Gupta marched right upto modern day Kanchipuram,capital of Pallavas - the rulers of S.India at that time.

There's a reason why I took 'Samudra' for my ID.

Jay

Samudra,
Still Kancheepuram is not Southern point per se I think Malik Kaffur was the lone ranger from the north who plundered till Madurai.

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A grain of wheat eclipsed the sun of Adam !!

Samudra

Jay,

Sinhalese king(Kithsirimevan?) accepted the suzerainty of Samudra.Sub-Continent ends with Ceylon in the South.And there Samudra was acknowledged as the ruler.

lemontree

Raj,
You are referring to the B-24 Liberator bombers. Now when you despise the "vile character" please read the reason as per the Indian Air Force. When you get half truths you develope hatred, but when you get the complete picture then you realise the reasons and look at issues pragmaticaly.

http://www.bharat-rakshak.com/IAF/Hi...Liberator.html
However, you can blame the British for the hinderance in permitting HAL then started by the famous industrialist and patriot Walchand (now known for Premier Motors Ltd of Fiat/ Padmini car fame). They did not let ous develop fighters and limited the work to non development tasks.

Attached Images

Liberator3.jpg (41.3 KB, 114 views)

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Cheers!...on the rocks!!

667medic

How about the Khiljis, the broken temples in South India are a testament to their rule....

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Seek Save Serve Medic

raj

it was not B-24 but a fighter planes that i think are sprit fires, which were numbered around 300 in RIAF.
if i am not right, it was by a WWII engineer, who was invited to russia by putin for the completion of WW2 (60 year celebration or some thing). i think i read it in outlook india or BR(not sure)

raj

just see any nandi idol in any old temple of Andhra Pardesh, one would see that the muslim invading army's have cut of the ears of the nandis, just to show their superiority

raj

still that does not lessen the vileness of britishers, may be a jalianwala bagh in lords stadium would help quench my thirst for revenge

Jay

Malik Kaffur was Khilji's General By birth Malik Kaffur was a hindu eunuch, the Emperor bought him for 1000 dinars after winning a war and he converted to Islam.

Ray

THE INVENTION OF COMMUNAL ILL WILL

Memories of conflict become long-term sectarian hatred only in very special circumstances, writes Tapan Raychaudhuri


Professor Muhammad Habib, in his brilliant essay on Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, concluded his statement as follows: “We owe him the bitterest drop in our cup, the poison of communalism.” A recent essay on the destruction of the Somnath temple suggests that there may be an element of the misreading of evidence in the statement. The essay fails to find in contemporary sources a great upsurge of Hindu revanchism generated by the happenings at Somnath. The event, it seems, did not instantly produce broods of Togadias asking for Ghazni’s blood. The destruction of temples and sacking of cities surely do not endear conquerors to the victims. But was temple destruction more hurtful than murder and rapine, which accompanied all military conflicts?

The great champions of Hindu glory according to one school of thought, the Marathas and the Rajputs, spent more time fighting one another than in defending the Holy Motherland against the vile Yavanas. Did that create any permanent sense of grievance in one clan of Rajputs or one branch of Marathas against their counterparts whom their ancestors had fought? If Togadia had read any history he would know that his beloved Gujarat had suffered more at the hands of the Marathas than through the lightning incursions of Ghazni. He has not suggested, so far, that all Marathas including Bal Thackeray should be hanged, a measure he has warmly recommended for the country’s Muslims — the Ghaznis, as he calls them.

I have raised these rhetorical issues to make two related points. Wars and invasions, which have long been integral to human experience, do not create permanent wounds in the psyche of a people. Oriyas do not hate the memory of Asoka, nor the Sri Lankans the memory of Prince Vijaya. The very painful experience of early Norman rule is not cited in English school textbooks as a reason why British children should grow up to hate Frenchmen. The English and the Germans, who have fought two bitter wars within a period of three decades are now close allies, as are the Japanese and the Americans, Hiroshima and Nagasaki notwithstanding. Memories of conflict become sources of long-term hatred only in very special circumstances and if, in the light of later developments, such hatred can be generated and sustained for some specific political ends.

There is, indeed, a long record of temple destruction in India under rulers of Turkish or Turko-Afghan origin. This fact has been over-played in a certain type of historical writing and soft-pedalled in another. Very recently, an American historian, R.M. Eaton, has tried to analyse the nature and motivation of such acts in 80 cases. He shows that they were mainly centred round the shrines to presiding deities of the ruling dynasty and were meant to deprive the latter of legitimacy derived from divine protection. It is not certain that the acts provoked great popular resentment any more than the horrors accompanying conquest usually do. As evidence, I have pointed out elsewhere that 150 years after Aurangzeb’s death, Hindus and Muslims fought together to restore the iconoclast’s descendant to the imperial throne.

A second and more important question: how was the conqueror, the iconoclast, or the oppressor perceived? Did the Hindu subjects of Turkish or Afghan kings see them first and foremost as Muslims? The historical evidence suggests that the rulers certainly did not lay primary emphasis on this single dimension of their identity. The chroniclers emphasized the family or clan the rulers come from and the dynasts, of course, as happily fought other Muslims as they did the Hindu chieftains. And there is no evidence to suggest that the Hindu subjects, especially their vast majority the peasantry, saw their Muslim counterparts as rulers, especially oppressive rulers. If temple destruction and other forms of oppression did generate resentment, there is nothing to suggest that it was generally directed against the Muslim component of the civil population, visiting the sins of the dynasts on their co-religionists among the subjects.

Yet traces of mutual resentment are certainly there in the medieval record. I shall cite a few stray examples. The fundamentalist mullah was uncompromising in his emphasis on the need to suppress idolatry. When Alauddin Khalji stated his inability to concede Qazi Mughisuddin’s demand that all Hindus be converted or killed, the Qazi advised that Jaziyah be collected with appropriate humiliation; the kafir should be asked to open his mouth as he paid the tax and the Muslim collector should spit into it. Such extreme prescriptions were not implemented, but the attitude which informed these must have had their ramifications both among Muslims and Hindus. In short, there was a persistent tradition of fundamentalism which resented the toleration of idolatry. It is difficult to imagine that intolerance did not breed resentment. The chronicles often refer to the wars of conquest as jihad when directed against Hindu chieftains. In Bengal, the Muslim punthi literature is full of imaginary episodes of battles between Hindus and Muslims, though interestingly they inevitably end in tales of reconciliation. In Bengali Vaishnav literature, Chaitanya’s biographies all refer to tyrannical acts by Muslim rulers. The term used to describe them is Yavan and such tyranny is cited as one reason for the advent of Chaitanya as an incarnation.

A couple of centuries earlier, Vidyapati, in a well-known passage, described the oppression by Turkish soldiers, adding that the Sultan would have punished the miscreants if he had come to know of their misdeeds. This allusion provides a clue to our understanding of communal disharmony. The oppressor here is no remote tyrant, but a humble soldier not very distant in terms of social level from his victims. And one can see how the hatred of such petty tyrants, often settled as iqtadars among the local population, could turn into the hatred of a community. The notion of ‘Muslim tyranny’ probably derived from such experiences. Doctrinally, the medieval smritis bracketed Muslims with the Chandalas and other untouchables. This may simply express the Brahminical obsession with purity that prohibited all contact with people whose ways were ‘unclean’. Muslims certainly learned to live with this quaint barbarism, but it is not possible that the classification and the practice did not generate resentment. More than one medieval Bengali text refers to the oppression of Brahmins and Vaishnavs, their being forced to carry baskets of beef and the ritual markings on their foreheads being wiped out with spittle. No one has suggested that these were daily occurrences, but a single such incident can have widespread ramifications.

The realities of economic and social life begot a pattern of co-existence and co-operation, and both folk and high cultures were deeply enriched by the encounter between the two traditions. But occasional outbursts of tyranny at the grassroots level, probably created the hard core of communal hatred. The Dutch factor, Pelsaert, mentions that it was not safe for a Hindu to venture out during a Muharram procession. In a different context, we find the Vaishnav saint, Shyamananda, telling off the Malla Raja of Vishnupur for employing Muslim guards. They were duly dismissed. Bharatchandra, a highly Persianized scholar-poet, records the perceived differences between Hindus and Muslims in doctrine and practice, and describes with distaste Alivardi’s iconoclasm. In his writing, all such conflict ends in reconciliation and that almost certainly was the dominant reality. But the leitmotif of mutual ill will keeps surfacing over and over again.

In pre-British days, these were exclusively urban, localized and of very short duration. They were rooted in social friction — familiar issues of cow slaughter, music before mosque or the red powder of Holi applied to unwilling beards. These riots were marked by a degree of ferocity. These were little flames of hatred which, with the aid of a favourable wind, could develop into a forest fire.

Under British rule, such ill winds emerged as a dominant fact of life. The ill will underwent a change in character and assumed unprecedented dimensions. One factor contributing to this negative development was a radical shift in the country’s political culture. Social identities, especially the sense of community, had neither any political connotation nor any pan-Indian referent, in pre-British days. Two very different influences altered the character of social and cultural identities. Western education and the new print-culture made people aware of the possibility and attraction of nationalism and sub-nationalisms. People became aware, for the first time in their history, that there was honour and pride in being a sovereign nation. That other levels of identity — religion-based community, linguistic groups, caste, sect and so on — could also be matters of pride and bases for solidarity and, as such, for joint action to enhance one’s status and/or securing one’s rights became a part of the new social consciousness. Hence we have a plethora of organizations celebrating the glories of being Indian, Hindu, Muslim or Bengali, Vaishnav, Kayastha and so on.

Of these multiple levels of identity and identity-assertion, the two that proved most potent were the national and the communal. We have emerging associations of all Indians, and we have great movements for the cultural self-assertion of Hindus and Muslims respectively. The Hindu lamentation over fall from Aryan grace, unfortunately, marked the beginning of myths of alleged Hindu slavery from the days of the Turkish conquest. That conquest was always referred to as the ‘Muslim conquest’, and the long centuries when Turkish or Afghan kings ruled the greater part of India as ‘Muslim rule’.

The phrase, ‘Muslim rule’, is a misnomer. Unlike the British at a later date, the Muslims as a people or community never ruled India. But the notion projected by British historians became a part of India’s cultural baggage. Hindu patriots lamented the centuries of alleged Muslim tyranny. Muslim intellectuals shed tears over their community’s loss of power and glory, tracing back the fall from grace beyond India’s frontiers and comparing the current moral degeneration with the utopia under the orthodox Caliphs. These two mutually exclusive myths nurtured the seeds of conflict which were always there.

Exclusive identity for Muslims became an object of aspiration at two levels. Movements for cultural revival, like the one initiated by Shah Waliullah, traced the source of Muslim fall from power to the incursion of un-Islamic ways. This implied a direct assault on the elements of syncretism in Indo-Islamic culture: bida or departure from strict observance of the sharia, had to be given up. At another level, especially in Eastern India, ideologically similar movements, the Wahhabis and Faraizis, rooted in agrarian grievances, emphasized the need for a Muslim way of life unpolluted by Hindu influences. Since this emphasis was fed by exploitation in the hands of the Hindu zamindars and moneylenders, the movements acquired a sharp edge of aggression. Some fierce communal riots were among their products.

British policy did take advantage of such growing tensions justifying the thesis that ‘divide and rule’ was a fact of life. But the real contribution of the raj to the mutual alienation of Hindus and Muslims derived from a different dimension of imperial strategies. In the constitutional structure they adopted for India and their executive actions in distributing shares of power and resources, they recognized Hindus and Muslims as separate constituencies. Perforce the two began to compete for larger shares qua communities. Separate electorates clinched the division opening the road to Pakistan.

This political competition mobilized the elements of mutual ill will: the nationalist message of the need for unity transcending the barriers of community lost out. From the mid-Twenties, the underprivileged, especially in urban areas, were mobilized to fight on the streets in support of what were essentially elite causes. Current post-modernist analysis questions such theses and emphasizes the autonomous agency of the underprivileged. But the vicious communal riots, mid-1920 onwards, can be shown to be anything but spontaneous outbursts. Much of the horrendous killing during the partition riots were carefully orchestrated. Such studies as we do have of this violence do not unfold any pattern of spontaneity.
TO BE CONCLUDED
The author is former professor of modern Indian history at the University of Oxford
http://www.telegraphindia.com/archives/archive.html

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"Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

HAKUNA MATATA