Questions of Othering in the Indian Historiography as I see it!

Nations and nationalisms are established defining boundaries. However when we talk about nations, there emerges notions of minorities, marginal communities, the fuzzy edges and grey areas around which the question communalism arises among the most visible strands of the political ideology of India, it is the growth and acceptance of ‘communal ideology’. 

‘Communal’, in the Indian context, perceives Indian society as constituted of several religious communities. Communalism is thus a consciousness which draws on a supposed religious identity allegiance and loyalties to a religious community. Such identity irons out diversity and insists on conformity, for its the only through a uniform acceptance of the religion that it can be best used for political ends. Presence of communalism is crucial in the mechanical view of democracy.

In the multiplicity of communalism prevalent in India, the major one is Hindu communalism since it involves the largest numbers and asserts itself as a dominant group. The germ of the idea of the Hindu community begins when people start referring to themselves as Hindus and marginalise and sideline the minorities as ‘others’.

Today, Indian Hindus and Muslims see themselves as distinct religious communities, essentially two separate nations occupying the same living space. Hindu nationalist historians have projected this vision of separateness into the past, stating that Indian Muslims of the middle ages were a  community different from,  and implacably opposed to,  the  Hindu majority on religious grounds. Moreover,  Indian  Muslims are defined as a social group that is not indigenous but of foreign/alien. This implies that Muslims do not belong in India and have no real rights there. Secular Indian historians have described this interpretation as a misrepresentation, a reading of the past that modem communal biases distort.

Since most Indian Muslims have descended from converts and not from immigrants, how can they be cast as an alien group? However, it has been emphasised colonialism’s impact on identity formation. Because large-scale conflicts between Hindus and Muslims began under colonial rule, the ultimate ‘religious consciousness’ was a gift of the Colonial era. Communal violence was itself a British construct in some analyses because many other kinds of social strife were labelled as religious due to the Orientalist assumption that religion was the fundamental division in Indian society.

So the question whether a Hindu or Muslim identity existed before the nineteenth century in any meaningful sense. Most scholars of the colonial period feel that pre-colonial society was fragmented too. The primacy attributed to colonialism informing contemporary Indian identities reflects the central role of modernity in current theories of nationalism and the emergence of nation-states. The work of Benedict Anderson, with its stress on the role of print-capitalism, has been particularly influential in promoting the belief that identities uniting large numbers of people could arise only after a certain technological level had been attained.?

No one would deny that modernisation has led to the sharper distinction of identities and led to the creation of "imagined" and "invented" to a large extent. For, as Sheldon Pollock states about the present Indian situation, "the symbolic meaning system of a political culture is constructed, and perhaps knowing  the  processes  of  construction  is  a  way  to  control  it."

Particularly critical is the recognition that Hindu and Muslim identities were not formed in isolation. The reflexive impact of the ‘Other’s' presence moulded the self-definition of both groups-indeed, Hindu consciousness came up as a reaction to the presence of Muslims in India. For instance, the threat felt by Hindu society in the face of superior Muslim force during these initial centuries of interaction led to the political valorisation of the ancient Ramayana epic.

Countering the rhetoric that communalism is a colonial or modern idea I would like to present some instances of early ancient India which prove the presence of Hindu animosity or separateness related to Muslims even in pre-modern times. According to Sheldon Pollock, unlike earlier conquerors or immigrants who had been gradually absorbed into Indian civilization, Indo-Muslims retained the distinctive religious and linguistic practices derived from the high culture of Islamic civilisation. Because they were "largely unassimilating," 

Muslims were the other par excellence, and their presence heightened Indian society's sense of self. Inscriptions from Andhra provide little support for Pollock's thesis The most negative representations of Muslims in Andhra records appear in the immediate aftermath of the cataclysmic events of 1323 C.E. when armed forces of the Delhi Sultanate swept through the Andhra region and caused the collapse of the indigenous Kakatiya royal dynasty. The derogatory representation of Muslims include proofs of the wicked character of Muslim rule, Brahmins were forced to abandon their sacrificial rites, Hindu temple images were overturned and broken, tax-exempt Brahmin villages confiscated, and cultivators deprived of their produce. Moreover, the vile Muslims were incessant in drinking wine, eating beef, and slaying Brahmins. 

And so, "tortured in this way by the demon-like Yavana soldiers, the land of Tilinga [Andhra] suffered terribly without hope of relief, as if it were a forest engulfed by a rampaging fire.”8 The historical accounts display the anxieties of the brahmin composers. During this period the brahminical privileges were threatened. The misrepresented infamous image of Muslims mentioned is directly related to the inconvenience caused to the Brahmin segment. 

Moreover, In the Sanskrit literature of ancient and medieval India, Muslims were frequently described as mleccha. The best English translation of mleccha is barbarian, for the word connotes a lack of culture and civilization. As Romila Thapar has pointed out, mleccha was hence primarily "a signal of social and cultural difference."It was a generic category into which all social groups lacking adherence to Brahmanical norms were thrust.

The names Yavana and Shaka were revived in medieval India to designate Muslims, along with the characterization of barbarian Assimilating Muslims to the mythological category of demons and substituting the names of various other foreign groups for them erased the distinctiveness of Muslims. All that matters in this perspective is their Otherness. Anthony D. Smith, who believe that there are shared elements which unify members of an ethnic group and that the attribution of alienation derives from a pre-existing sense of shared experience.

REFERENCES -

-Gyanendra Pandey, Can A Muslim Be An Indian?

-Romila Thapar, Imagined Religious Communities?

-R. C. Majumdar, "Hindu Muslim Relations"

-Romila Thapar, Harbans Mukhia, and Bipan Chandra, Communalism and the Writing of Indian History

-Cynthia Talbot, Hindu-Muslim Identities in Pre-Colonial India

-Sheldon Pollock, "Ramayana and Political Imagination in India

-Cynthia Talbot, Hindu-Muslim Identities in Pre-Colonial India