Indian History - 2

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Not sure whether they archive - ful article ---
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The Legacy of Jihad in India</b>
July 2nd, 2005
The phenomenon of modern Islamic terrorism has forged an inchoate strategic alliance between the Israeli and Indian governments, while heightening the awareness of a common threat—the institution of jihad—among the civilian populations of these nations.

Rarely understood, let alone acknowledged, however, is the history of brutal jihad conquest, Muslim colonization, and the imposition of dhimmitude shared by the Jews of historical Palestine, and the Hindus of the Indian subcontinent. Moreover, both peoples and nations also have in common, a subsequent, albeit much briefer British colonial legacy, which despite its own abuses, abrogated the system of dhimmitude (permanently for Israel and India, if not, sadly, for their contemporary Muslim neighboring states), and created the nascent institutions upon which thriving democratic societies have been constructed. Sir Jadunath Sarkar (d. 1958), the preeminent historian of Mughal India, wrote with admiration in 1950 of what the Jews of Palestine had accomplished once liberated from the yoke of dhimmitude. The implication was clear that he harbored similar hopes for his own people.

Palestine, the holy land of the Jews, Christians and Islamites, had been turned into a desert haunted by ignorant poor diseased vermin rather than by human beings, as the result of six centuries of Muslim rule. (See Kinglake's graphic description). Today Jewish rule has made this desert bloom into a garden, miles of sandy waste have been turned into smiling orchards of orange and citron, the chemical resources of the Dead Sea are being extracted and sold, and all the amenities of the modern civilised life have been made available in this little Oriental country. Wise Arabs are eager to go there from the countries ruled by the Shariat. This is the lesson for the living history. [1]

Earlier, I reviewed at length the legacy of Muslim jihad conquest and imposition of the Shari’a in historical Palestine. The current essay provides a schematic overview of the same phenomena in India, focusing on the major periods of Muslim conquest, colonization, and rule.

A Millennium of Jihad and Dhimmitude on the Indian Subcontinent

The 570 year period between the initial Arab Muslim razzias (ordered by Caliph Umar) to pillage Thana (on the West Indian coast near Maharashtra) in 636-637 C.E., and the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate (under Qutub-ud-din Aibak, a Turkish slave soldier), can be divided into four major epochs: (I) the conflict between the Arab invaders and the (primarily) Hindu resisters on the Western coast of India from 636-713 C.E.; (II) the Arab and Turkish Muslim onslaughts against the kingdom of Hindu Afghanistan during 636-870 C.E.; (III) repeated Turkish efforts to subdue the Punjab from 870 C.E. to 1030 C.E. C.E. highlighted by the devastating campaigns of Mahmud of Ghazni (from 1000- 1030 C.E.); and finally (IV) Muhammad Ghauri’s conquest of northwestern India and the Gangetic valley between 1175 and 1206 C.E. [2]

This summary chronology necessarily overlooks the very determined and successful resistance that was offered by the Hindus to both the Arab (in particular) and Turkish invaders, for almost four centuries. For example, despite the rapidity of Mahmud of Ghazni’s conquests—spurred by shock-tactics and the religious zealotry of Islamic jihad—his successors, for almost 150 years, could not extend their domain beyond the Punjab frontiers. Even after the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526), and the later Mughal Empire (1526-1707), Muslim rulers failed to Islamize large swaths of Indian territory, and most of the populace. [3] The first Mughal Emperor, Babur (1483-1530), made these relevant observations upon establishing his rule in India: [4]

[Hindustan] is a different world…once the water of Sindh is crossed, everything is in the Hindustan way- land, water, tree, rock, people, and horde, opinion and custom…Most of the inhabitants of Hindustan are pagans; they call a pagan a Hindu.

Buddhist civilization within India, in stark contrast, proved far less resilient. Vincent Smith has described the devastating impact of the late 12th century jihad razzias against the Buddhist communities of northern India, centered around Bihar, based on Muslim sources, exclusively: [5]

The Muhammadan historian, indifferent to distinctions among idolators, states that the majority of the inhabitants were “clean shaven Brahmans”, who were all put to the sword. He evidently means Buddhist monks, as he was informed that the whole city and fortress were considered to be a college, which the name Bihar signifies. A great library was scattered. When the victors desired to know what the books might be no man capable of explaining their contents had been left alive. No doubt everything was burnt. The multitude of images used in Medieval Buddhist worship always inflamed the fanaticism of Muslim warriors to such fury that no quarter was given to the idolators. The ashes of the Buddhist sanctuaries at Sarnath near Benares still bear witness to the rage of the image breakers. Many noble monuments of the ancient civilization of India were irretrievably wrecked in the course of the early Muhammadan invasions. Those invasions were fatal to the existence of Buddhism as an organized religion in northern India, where its strength resided chiefly in Bihar and certain adjoining territories. The monks who escaped massacre fled, and were scattered over Nepal, Tibet, and the south. After A.D. 1200 the traces of Buddhism in upper India are faint and obscure.

Three major waves of jihad campaigns (exclusive of the jihad conquest of Afghanistan) which succeeded, ultimately, in establishing a permanent Muslim dominion within India, i.e., the Delhi Sultanate, are summarized in the following discussion. The imposition of dhimmitude upon the vanquished Hindu populations is also characterized, in brief.

The Muslim chroniclers al-Baladhuri (in Kitab Futuh al-Buldan) and al-Kufi (in the Chachnama) include enough isolated details to establish the overall nature of the conquest of Sindh by Muhammad b. Qasim in 712 C.E. [6] These narratives, and the processes they describe, make clear that the Arab invaders intended from the outset to Islamize Sindh by conquest, colonization, and local conversion. Baladhuri, for example, records that following the capture of Debal, Muhammad b. Qasim earmarked a section of the city exclusively for Muslims, constructed a mosque, and established four thousand colonists there. [7] The conquest of Debal had been a brutal affair, as summarized from the Muslim sources by Majumdar. [8]

Despite appeals for mercy from the besieged Indians (who opened their gates after the Muslims scaled the fort walls), Muhammad b. Qasim declared that he had no orders (i.e., from his superior al-Hajjaj, the Governor of Iraq) to spare the inhabitants, and thus for three days a ruthless and indiscriminate slaughter ensued. In the aftermath, the local temple was defiled, and “700 beautiful females who had sought for shelter there, were all captured”. The capture of Raor was accompanied by a similar tragic outcome. [9]

Muhammad massacred 6000 fighting men who were found in the fort, and their followers and dependents, as well as their women and children were taken prisoners. Sixty thousand slaves, including 30 young ladies of royal blood, were sent to Hajjaj, along with the head of Dahar [the Hindu ruler]. We can now well understand why the capture of a fort by the Muslim forces was followed by the terrible jauhar ceremony (in which females threw themselves in fire kindled by themselves), the earliest recorded instance of which is found in the Chachnama. 

Practical, expedient considerations lead Muhammad to desist from carrying out the strict injunctions of Islamic Law [10] and the wishes of al-Hajjaj [11] by massacring the (pagan) infidel Hindus of Sindh. Instead, he imposed upon the vanquished Hindus the jizya and associated restrictive regulations of dhimmitude. As a result, the Chachnama records, “some [Hindus] resolved to live in their native land, but others took flight in order to maintain the faith of their ancestors, and their horses, domestics, and other property” [12] Thus a lasting pattern was set that would persist, as noted by Majumdar, until the Mughal Empire collapsed at the end of Aurangzeb’s reign (in 1707), [13]

…of Muslim policy towards the subject Hindus in subsequent ages. Something no doubt depended upon individual rulers; some of them adopted a more liberal, others a more cruel and intolerant attitude. But on the whole the framework remained intact, for it was based on the fundamental principle of Islamic theocracy. It recognized only one faith, one people, and one supreme authority, acting as the head of a religious trust. The Hindus, being infidels or non-believers, could not claim the full rights of citizens. At the very best, they could be tolerated as dhimmis, an insulting title which connoted political inferiority…The Islamic State regarded all non-Muslims as enemies, to curb whose growth in power was conceived to be its main interest. The ideal preached by even high officials was to exterminate them totally, but in actual practice they seem to have followed an alternative laid down in the Qur’an [i.e., Q9:29] which calls upon Muslims to fight the unbelievers till they pay the jizya with due humility. This was the tax the Hindus had to pay for permission to live in their ancestral homes under a Muslim ruler.

Mahmud of Ghazni, according to the British historian Sir Henry Elliot, launched some seventeen jihad campaigns into India between 1000 and his death in 1030 C.E. [14] Utbi, Mahmud’s court historian, viewed these expeditions to India as a jihad to propagate Islam and extirpate idolatry. [15]  K.S. Lal illustrates this religious zeal to Islamize by force, as manifested during a 23 year period between 1000 and 1023 C.E.: [16]

In his first attack of frontier towns in C.E. 1000 Mahmud appointed his own governors and converted some inhabitants. In his attack on Waihind (Peshawar) in 1001-3, Mahmud is reported to have captured the Hindu Shahiya King Jayapal and fifteen of his principal chiefs and relations some of whom like Sukhpal, were made Musalmans. At Bhera all the inhabitants, except those who embraced Islam, were put to the sword. At Multan too conversions took place in large numbers, for writing about the campaign against Nawasa Shah (converted Sukhpal), Utbi says that this and the previous victory (at Multan) were “witnesses to his exalted state of proselytism.” In his campaign in the Kashmir Valley (1015) Mahmud “converted many infidels to Muhammadanism, and having spread Islam in that country, returned to Ghazni.” In the later campaign in Mathura, Baran and Kanauj, again, many conversions took place. While describing “the conquest of Kanauj,” Utbi sums up the situation thus: “The Sultan levelled to the ground every fort… and the inhabitants of them either accepted Islam, or took up arms against him.” In short, those who submitted were also converted to Islam. In Baran (Bulandshahr) alone 10,000 persons were converted including the Raja. During his fourteenth invasion in 1023 C.E. Kirat, Nur, Lohkot and Lahore were attacked. The chief of Kirat accepted Islam, and many people followed his example.

These continuous jihad campaigns were accompanied by great destruction and acts of wanton cruelty. Utbi describes the slaughter which transpired during the attacks on Thanesar and Sirsawa:

The chief of Thanesar was…obstinate in his infidelity and denial of Allah, so the Sultan marched against him with his valiant warriors for the purpose of planting the standards of Islam and extirpating idolatry… The blood of the infidels flowed so copiously that the stream was discoloured, and people were unable to drink it… Praise be to Allah… for the honour he bestows upon Islam and Musalmans. [17]

[at Sirsawa] The Sultan summoned the most religiously disposed of his followers, and ordered them to attack the enemy immediately. Many infidels were consequently slain or taken prisoners in this sudden attack, and the Musalmans paid no regard to the booty till they had satiated themselves with the slaughter of the infidels… The friends of Allah searched the bodies of the slain for three whole days, in order to obtain booty [18]

Mahmud’s final well-known expedition in Hindustan, to Somanath in 1025 C.E., was similarly brutal, and destructive:

Mahmud captured the place [Somanath] without much difficulty and ordered a general slaughter in which more than 50,000 persons are said to have perished. The idol of Somanath was broken to pieces which were sent to Ghazni, Mecca, and Medina and cast in streets and the staircases of chief mosques to be trodden by the Muslims going there for their prayers [19]

Over 900 years apart, remarkably concordant assessments of Mahmud’s devastating exploits have been written by the renowned 11th century Muslim scholar Alberuni (a counselor to Mahmud), and the contemporary Indian historian A.L. Srivastava. First Alberuni, from about 1030 C.E.: [20]

Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country…by which the Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions, and like a tale of old in the mouth of the people. Their scattered remains cherish of course the most inveterate aversion towards all Muslims. This is the reason too why Hindu sciences have retired far away from those parts of the country conquered by us, and have fled to places which our hand cannot yet reach, to Kashmir, Benares, and other places.

Srivastava in 1950, wrote: [21]

To the Indian world of his day Mahmud was a veritable devil incarnate- a daring bandit, an avaricious plunderer, and wanton destroyer of Art. He plundered many dozens of…flourishing cities; he razed to the ground great temples which were wonderful works of art; he carried thousands of innocent women and children into slavery; he indulged in wanton massacre practically everywhere he went; and…he forcibly converted hundred of…unwilling people to Islam. A conqueror who leaves behind desolate towns and villages and dead bodies of innocent human beings cannot be remembered by posterity by any other title.

K.S. Lal believes that by the late 12th century, Muhammad Ghauri was consummately prepared for the conquest and rule of India. Well-elaborated theological justifications for jihad, and comprehensive writings on India’s geography and sociopolitical culture were readily available to him, complementing his powerful army of Turks, Persians, and Afghans.

He now possessed Alberuni’s India and Burhanuddin’s Hidayah, works which were not available to his predecessor invader. Alberuni’s enecyclopedic work provided to the Islamic world in the eleventh century all that was militarily advantageous to know about India. Equally important was the Hidayah, the most authentic work on the laws of Islam compiled by Shaikh Burhanuddin Ali in the twelfth century. These and similar works, and the military manuals like the Siyasat Nama and Adab-ul-Harb, made the Ghauris and their successors better equipped for the conquest and governance of non-Muslim India. There need be no doubt that such works were made available, meticulously studied and constantly referred to by scholars attached to the courts of Muslim conquerors and kings. [22]

Muhammad Ghauri launched his first expeditions against Multan and Gujarat (in 1175 and 1178 C.E., respectively). By 1191-92 C.E., following Ghauri’s defeat of a Rajput confederation under Prithviraj Chauhan (and Prithviraj Chauhan’s death),

Sirsuti, Samana, Kuhram, and Hansi were captured in quick succession with ruthless slaughter and a general destruction of temples, and their replacement by mosques. The Sultan then proceeded to Ajmer which too witnessed similar scenes. In Delhi an army of occupation was stationed at Indraprastha under the command of Qutub-ud-din Aibak who was to act as Ghauri’s lieutenant in Hindustan. Later on Aibak became the first Sultan of Delhi  [23]

Qutub-ud-din Aibak’s accession in 1206 (consistent with Muhammad Ghauri’s desires and plans), marks the founding of the Delhi Sultanate.

Finally, the imposition of Islamic law upon the Hindu populations of India, i.e., their relegation to dhimmi status, beginning with the advent of Muslim rule in 8th century Sindh, had predictable consequences during both the Delhi Sultanate period (1206-1526 C.E.), and the Mughal Empire (1526-1707 C.E.). A.L. Srivastava highlights these germane features of Hindu status during the Delhi Sultanate: [24]

Throughout the period of the Sultanate of Delhi, Islam was the religion of the State. It was considered to be the duty of the Sultan and his government to defend and uphold the principles of this religion and to propagate them among the masses…even the most enlightened among them [the Sultans], like Muhammad bin Tughlaq, upheld the principles of their faith and refused permission to repair Hindu (or Buddhist) temples…Thus even during the reign of the so-called liberal-minded Sultans, the Hindus had no permission to build new temples or to repair old ones. Throughout the period, they were known as dhimmis, that is, people living under guarantee, and the guarantee was that they would enjoy restricted freedom in following their religion if they paid the jizya. The dhimmis were not to celebrate their religious rites openly…and never to do any propaganda on behalf of their religion. A number of disabilities were imposed upon them in matters of State employment and enjoyment of civic rights…It was a practice with the Sultans to destroy the Hindu temples and images therein. Firoz Tughlaq and Sikander Lodi prohibited Hindus from bathing at the ghats [river bank steps for ritual bathers] in the sacred rivers, and encouraged them in every possible way to embrace the Muslim religion. The converts were exempted from the jizya and given posts in the State service and even granted rewards in cash, or by grant of land. In short, there was not only no real freedom for the Hindus to follow their religion, but the state followed a policy of intolerance and persecution. The contemporary Muslim chronicles abound in detailed descriptions of desecration of images and destruction of temples and of the conversion of hundreds and thousands of the Hindus. [Hindu] religious buildings and places bear witness to the iconoclastic zeal of the Sultans and their followers. One has only to visit Ajmer, Mathura, Ayodhya, Banaras and other holy cities to see the half broken temples and images of those times with their heads, faces, hands and feet defaced and demolished.

Majumdar sees a continuum between the Delhi Sultanate and the subsequent Mughal Empire, regarding the status of the Hindus: [25]

So far as the Hindus were concerned, there was no improvement either in their material and moral conditions or in their relations with the Muslims. With the sole exception of Akbar, who sought to conciliate the Hindus by removing some of the glaring evils to which they were subjected, almost all other Mughal Emperors were notorious for their religious bigotry. The Muslim law which imposed many disabilities and indignities upon the Hindus…and thereby definitely gave them an inferior social and political status, as compared to the Muslims, was followed by these Mughal Emperors (and other Muslim rulers) with as much zeal as was displayed by their predecessors, the Sultans of Delhi. The climax was reached during the reign of Aurangzeb, who deliberately pursued the policy of destroying and desecrating Hindu temples and idols with a thoroughness unknown before or since.

Majumdar also makes this interesting juxtaposition of Hindu cultural advancement under the lengthy period of Muslim colonial rule, compared to the much shorter interval of British colonial rule: [26]

Judged by a similar standard, the patronage and cultivation of Hindu learning by the Muslims, or their contribution to the development of Hindu culture during their rule…pales into insignificance when compared with the achievements of the British rule…It is only by instituting such comparison that we can make an objective study of the condition of the Hindus under Muslim rule, and view it in its true perspective.

Andrew Bostom is an Associate Professor of Medicine, and the author of the forthcoming The Legacy of Jihad on Prometheus Books (2005).

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[ramana]

MA History syllabus for Nagarjuna Uty :MA History Syllabus

[acharya]

Scholars catalog ancient manuscripts to preserve 4,000-year history of India
Rama Lakshmi, Washington Post

New Delhi -- In the walled quarters of the old city, a Sanskrit language scholar walks purposefully along the packed, narrow and twisting alleyways, jostling past rows of jewelry shoppers, cycle rickshaws, bullock carts and beggars.

When he comes upon an old temple with an ornately carved doorway, he stops, sweating profusely in the sweltering sun.

"Do you have any ancient handwritten manuscripts here?" Dilipkumar Rana, the scholar, asks in a whisper. The stunned temple manager nods. "The government is doing a survey of old manuscripts," Rana says.

"But I have very few left now," temple manager Jaipal Jain says. "I threw many old manuscripts into the river last year."

"Why?" Rana asks anxiously.

"I had put them in the attic. Last year during the monsoon, the ceiling leaked. And the water destroyed many of the manuscripts," Jain says, sighing. "White ants attacked some others."

And so it goes, as India's 30,000 manuscript hunters fan out nationwide, seeking the nation's heritage in old temples, madrassas, mosques, monasteries, libraries and homes.

Launched two years ago, the National Mission for Manuscripts is a five- year project to catalog for the first time India's ancient documentary wealth and ensure that basic conservation practices are followed to halt their rapid decay. Officials say that India is the largest repository of manuscripts in the world, with an estimated 5 million texts in hundreds of languages.

Linguistic scholars and history students involved in this adventurous hunt for ancient volumes use not only expertise but also social skills, coaxing and cultural sensitivity to gain access to manuscripts.

After Rana takes off his shoes and washes his hands, he prays at the shrine. Then Jain leads him to the temple's dimly lighted manuscript room. He opens a creaky steel cupboard and reveals rows of old texts, bundled in yellow cotton cloth. Rana cautiously holds some pages up to the window light to examine the writing.

"It is in Prakrit language," he says, referring to a popular dialect of classical Sanskrit, no longer spoken. "The period is early 1600s. It prescribes a model code of living for Jain monks," a religious order that arose with Buddhism in the sixth century B.C.

The manuscript project's officials say the nationwide survey will open a window to India's ancient knowledge systems: religion, astronomy, astrology, art, architecture, science, literature, philosophy and mathematics.

"We are creating a manuscript map of India. The survey will present new facets to our intellectual heritage," says Sudha Gopalakrishnan, chief of the National Mission for Manuscripts. The project will not take the volumes from their owners but merely document what is available and help in conservation.

"The key abstracts of all the ancient knowledge found in our manuscripts will be available digitally for the world to see," Gopalakrishnan says.

Art historians are eagerly watching this massive cataloguing process, hoping for new clues to India's past.

"What we find will answer many nagging doubts about our knowledge tradition," says Lokesh Chandra, an art historian and manuscript scholar. "For example, we came very close to modern mathematics in the 8th century. But what happened after that? Why was there a hiatus in the evolution of ideas in India? How did we miss the bus to the future?"

In the 18th century, some European scholars began translating ancient Sanskrit and Buddhist manuscripts and made them accessible to the world. Many valuable manuscripts were taken out of the country and are now in European libraries and private collections.

Chandra says unearthing the manuscripts will also forge national pride for India's 4,000-year history and will "give us a psychological boost for future advances."

The oldest manuscripts that India possesses are a set of sixth century Buddhist texts that were found buried in the hills of Kashmir about 60 years ago. In the last two years, the surveyors have found rare ancient Sanskrit and Arabic treatises on such subjects as diabetes, astrophysics, interpretation of dreams, surgical instruments, concepts of time and the art of war. A 400-year- old handwritten Koran was found in a locket measuring 3 inches.

But Gopalakrishnan says manuscripts are being lost at an alarming rate because of neglect and ignorance. Most ancient manuscripts, found on paper, palm leaves, birch bark, cloth, wood and stone, are languishing because of improper care in this humid, tropical and dusty country.

"By the time we find them, they are moth-eaten, edges falling apart, attacked by fungus," says Ritu Jain, a conservator with the manuscript project. She recently discovered a yellowing and brittle 18th century Arabic manuscript on a traditional Islamic healing procedure in a dusty, cobweb- filled corner of a college library in New Delhi.

"I shudder in pain when I hold them," she says. "Some pages are so fragile that they just become powder in our hands."

The manuscript mission also trains librarians, private collectors and temple priests in conservation, advising them to keep the documents wrapped in starch-free cotton and in a space free of dust and moisture. Basic training is also given in chemical conservation. But few homes and temples handle the religious manuscripts with reverence and ritual purity. Some also follow indigenous methods of preservation such as using margosa leaves, clove and black pepper.

On a recent morning, an Arabic scholar at the mission office received a letter from a New Delhi resident, Afzal-ur-Rahman, who wanted his decaying ancestral collection of Arabic literature examined by experts.

Later, as a scholar leafed through the frayed, fungus-infected pages of a book about the nuances of Arabic grammar, Rahman, 61, spoke of his great- grandfather, whose literary work was honored by a Mughal king in the early 1800s.

"I am emotionally attached to these manuscripts," he says. "It is a family heirloom. I never let anyone touch it. But it contains knowledge that must be shared with the world."

[ramana]

From Deccan.com, 18 July 2005
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The First Partition
By Akhilesh Mithal

If a list were to be made of dread words, words to send a chill down the spine at their very mention, “partition” would figure at the very top. For the inhabitants of the subcontinent that was once “India” (Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Indians) few words pack the sinister power and punch carried by “partition.”  The Hindi “vibhaajan” is perhaps as heart rending as partition, although the Urdu “tuqseem” is less frightening because one of its meanings could be “sharing.” The effects of “partition” were first seen a hundred years ago. On July 19, 1905 the Partition of Bengal became a fact and sent Bengal into a paroxysm of anti-British feeling leading to terrorism.

Why did the British divide Bengal into two?
This province and its capital Calcutta had become a great stronghold of the Indian National Congress. Indians were, increasingly and with growing vehemence, demanding a greater say in the running of the land of their birth.

What perception Indians and their rulers, the British, had of each other may be seen from what Jawaharlal Nehru had to say of the ideology of the British government as embodied in the Viceroy and what George Nathaniel Curzon, the Viceroy, and perpetrator of the Partition of Bengal, had to say about Indians agitating for political space to live in the country of their birth with a modicum of self respect.

Jawaharlal writes: “Vice-roys who come to India direct from England have to fit in with and rely upon the Indian Civil Service structure. Belonging to the possessing and ruling class in England, they have no difficulty in accepting the ICS outlook, and their unique position of absolute authority unparalleled elsewhere, leads to subtle changes in their ways and methods of expression. Authority corrupts and absolute authority corrupts absolutely, and no man in the wide world today has had or has such absolute authority over such large numbers of people as the British Viceroy of India.

The Viceroy speaks in a manner such as no Prime Minister of England or President of the United States of America can adopt. The only possible parallel would be that of Hitler. And not the Viceroy only but the British members of his Council, the governors, and even the smaller fry who function as secretaries of departments or magistrates. They speak from a noble and unattainable height, secure in the conviction that what they say and do is right but that it will have to be accepted as right, whatever lesser mortals may imagine, for theirs is the power and glory.”

Curzon’s perception of Indians as recorded in a letter to London reads: “You can scarcely have any idea of the utter want of proportion, moderation or sanity that characterises native agitation in this country. Starting with some preposterous fiction or exaggeration, the Bengali after repeating it a few times, ends up firmly believing in its truth. He lashes himself with a fury over the most insignificant issues, and he revels in his own stage thunder in the happy conviction that owing to the circumstances of the case it can provoke no reply.

All these petty volcanoes screamed unendingly; constant repetition of such invective tended to sway the minds of the educated…” Calcutta was, he said, “the centre from which the Congress party is manipulated… Any measure in consequence that would divide the Bengali speaking population … or would weaken the influence of the lawyer class, who have the entire organisation in their hands, is intensely and hotly resented by them.”

The reaction to the Partition of Bengal was swift and all pervasive. The Swadeshi movement of boycotting English imports was popular with the masses while the elite of Bengal organised underground cells in which homemade bombs became the weapon of assertion of national dignity.

The Anushilan Samity, a terrorist group, was led by a barrister of the Calcutta High Court, Pramathnath Mitra. When the Special Branch of the Calcutta Police raided five residences in the most respectable areas of Calcutta they had to arrest 26 educated Bengali young men as they were found to be in possession of bomb making equipment. One was Aurobindo Ghosh.

Various statistics were given to make out that the move was purely administration oriented. The unwieldy size of Bengal was cited and the fact of its population being 30 million larger than the United Provinces and 40 million larger than Madras, mentioned. The object was “divide and rule” and a Muslim majority area was created as a counterpoise to the Congress dominated area with Calcutta as its centre.

In divided Bengal the numbers were:
* East Bengal area 196,540 sq miles housing 18 million Muslims and 12 million Hindus.

* (Old) Bengal area 141,580 sq miles housing 9 million Muslims and 42 million Hindus.

The Muslim League soon came into existence. The stage was set for fracturing India into Hindu and Muslim and the fulfilment came in 1947. The British success owed a great deal to the Hindutva of Savarkar and “Muslim heiyn humwatan heiyn” (being Muslims makes us compatriots) of Muhammad Iqbal. The Bengal Partition was annulled in 1911. Is there any hope for India, Pakistan and Bangladesh having an adult and mature relationship?

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[Guest]

<b>The World System in the Thirteenth Century: Dead-End or Precursor? </b>
JANET LIPPMAN ABU-LUGHOD

Most Western historians writing about the rise of the West have treated that development as if it were independent of the West's relations to other high cultures. At first, thinking about this, I attributed it to ethnocentrism, pure and simple. But then I was struck by something else: Virtually all Western scholars, and especially those who had taken a global perspective on the "modern" world, began their histories in about A. D. 1400-just when both East and West were at their low ebb and when the organizational system that had existed prior to this time had broken down. By selecting this particular point to start their narratives, they could not help but write a similar plot, one in which the West "rose," apparently out of nowhere.

What would happen to the narrative if one started a little earlier? <i>1</i> Even more important, what would happen to the theoretical assumption that the peculiar form of Western capitalism, as it developed in sixteenthcentury western Europe, was a necessary and (almost) sufficient cause of Western hegemony? What if one looked at the system before European hegemony and if one looked at the organization of capital accumulation, "industrial" production, trade and distribution in comparative perspective? If one found wide variation among earlier economic organizations, all of which had yielded economic vitality and dynamism, then it might not be legitimate to attribute Europe's newly gained hegemony to "capitalism" in the unique form it took in Europe. It might be necessary, instead, to test an alternative hypothesis: that Europe's rise was substantially assisted by what it learned from other, more advanced cultures--at least until Europe overtook and subdued them.

<b>A Global History of the Thirteenth Century </b>

It was to explore such questions that I began to study the economic organization of the world in the thirteenth century. At the start, I had no intention of writing a book, but only of satisfying my curiosity over this puzzle. In the course of my five years of research, however, I found no single book, or even several books combined, that gave me a "global" picture of how international trade was organized at that time. Interestingly enough the separate histories I did find all hinted, usually in passing, at the manifold connections each place maintained with trading partners much farther afield. I became preoccupied with reconstructing those connections. <i>2</i>

The basic conclusion I reached <i>3</i> was that there had existed, prior to the West's rise to preeminence in the sixteenth century, a complex and prosperous predecessor--a system of world trade and even "cultural" exchange that, at its peak toward the end of the thirteenth century, was integrating (if only at high points of an archipelago of towns) a very large number of advanced societies stretching between the extremes of northwestern Europe and China. Indeed, the century between A.D. 1250 and 1350 clearly seemed to constitute a crucial turning point in world history, a moment when the balance between East and West could have tipped in either direction. In terms of space, the Middle East heartland that linked the eastern Mediterranean with the Indian Ocean constituted a geographic fulcrum on which East and West were then roughly balanced.

Thus, at that time, one certainly could not have predicted the outcome of any contest between East and West. There seemed no historical necessity that shifted the system in favor of the West, nor was there any historical necessity that would have prevented cultures in the eastern regions from becoming progenitors of a "modern" world system. This thesis seemed at least as compelling to me as its opposite.

True, the "modern" world system that might have developed, had the East remained dominant, would probably have had different institutions and organization than the historically specific version that developed under European hegemony. But there is no reason to believe that, had the West not "risen," the world under different leadership would have remained stagnant.

Therefore, it seemed crucial to gain an understanding of the years between A.D. 1250 and 1350. <i>4</i> During that period, an international trade economy climaxed in the regions between northwestern Europe and China, yielding prosperity and artistic achievements in many of the places that were newly integrated.

This trading economy involved merchants and producers in an extensive (worldwide) if narrow network of exchange. Primary products, including but not confined to specialty agricultural items, mostly spices, constituted a significant proportion of all items traded, but over shorter distances in particular, manufactured goods were surprisingly central to the system. In fact, trade probably could not have been sustained over long distances without including manufactured goods such as textiles and weapons. The production of primary and manufactured goods was not only sufficient to meet local needs but, beyond that, the needs of export as well.

Moreover, long-distance trade involved a wide variety of merchant communities at various points along the routes, because distances, as measured by time, were calculated in weeks and months at best, and it took years to traverse the entire circuit. The merchants who handled successive transactions did not necessarily speak the same languages, nor were their local currencies the same. Yet goods were transferred, prices set, exchange rates agreed on, contracts entered into, credit extended, partnerships formed, and, obviously, records kept and agreements honored.

The scale of these exchanges was not very large, and the proportion of population and even production involved in international exchange constituted only a very small fraction of the total productivity of the societies. Relatively speaking, however, the scale of the system in the later Middle Ages was not substantially below that in the "early modern age" (i.e., after 1600), nor was the technology of production inferior to that of the later period. No great technological breakthroughs distinguish the late medieval from the early modern period.

The book that resulted from my research, Before European Hegemony, describes the system of world trade circa A.D. 1300, demonstrating how and to what extent the world was linked into this common commercial network of production and exchange. Since such production and exchange were relatively unimportant to the subsistence economies of all participating regions, I did not have to defend an unrealistic vision of a tightly entailed international system of interdependence. Clearly, this was not the case. But it was also true in the sixteenth century. Thus, if it is possible to argue that a world system began in that later century, it is equally plausible to acknowledge that it existed three hundred years earlier.

It is important to recognize that no system is fully global in the sense that all parts articulate evenly with one another, regardless of whether the role they play is central or peripheral. Even today, the world, more globally integrated than ever before in history, is broken up into important subspheres or subsystems--such as the Middle Eastern and North African system, the North Atlantic system, the Pacific Basin or Rim system, the eastern European bloc (functionally persisting, even though its socialist orientation has crumbled), and China, which is still a system unto itself. And within each of these blocs, certain major cities play key nodal roles, dominating the regions around them and often having more intense interactions with nodal centers in other systems than with their own peripheries.

In the thirteenth century, also, there were subsystems (defined by language, religion and empire, and measurable by relative transactions) dominated by imperial or core cities, as well as mediated by essentially hinterland-less trading enclaves. Their interactions with one another, although hardly as intense as today's, defined the contours of the larger system. Instead of airlines, these cities were bound together by sealanes, rivers, and great overland caravan routes, some of which had been in use since antiquity. Ports and oases served the same functions as do air terminals today, bringing diverse goods and people together from long distances.

Given the primitive technologies of transport that existed during the early period, however, few nodes located at opposite ends of the system could do business directly with one another. Journeys were broken down into much smaller geographic segments, with central places between flanking trading circuits serving as "break-in-bulk" exchanges for goods destined for more distant markets. Nor was the world the "global village" of today, sharing common consumer goals and assembly-line work in a vast international division of labor. The subsystems of the thirteenth century were much more self-sufficient than those of today and therefore less vitally dependent on one another for common survival. Nevertheless, what is remarkable is that, despite the hardships and handicaps that long-distance trade then entailed, so much of it went on.

An analysis of the movements of such trade leads us to distinguish, for analytical purposes, three very large circuits. The first was a western European one that dominated the Atlantic coast and many parts of the Mediterranean. The second was a Middle Eastern one that dominated both the land bridge along the Central Asian steppes and the sea bridge, with a short intervening overland route, between the eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. And finally, the third was the Far Eastern circuit of trade that connected the Indian subcontinent with Southeast Asia and China beyond. At that time, the strongest centers and circuits were located in the Middle East and Asia. In contrast, the European circuit was an upstart newcomer that for several early centuries was only tangentially and weakly linked to the core of the world system as it had developed between the eighth and eleventh centuries.

These three major circuits were, in turn, organized into some eight interlinked subsystems, within which smaller trading circuits and subcultural and political systems seemed to exist. Map 1 shows a rough delimitation of those eight subsystems. In the section that follows, we take up each of these circuits and subsystems in turn, but our emphasis is on how they connected with one another.

[To be continued....]

MAP 1. The eight circuits of the thirteenth-century world system. From Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350. Copyright © 1989 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission.

[acharya]

VIEW: Imperialism and India —V Krishna Ananth

If he found it proper to appreciate the British rule in India, it should warn anyone concerned about human rights. For those who appreciate the colonial regime today are also those who celebrate the system in the US and in the West that seeks to preserve itself through naked aggression

There is nothing unusual, even if it is undesirable, about the media attempting to create a controversy after picking up a remark by a senior political leader. One such storm is being built up around Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh’s remark in Oxford where he seemed to appreciate the sense of governance guiding those who administered India for several years before August 15, 1947. Let it be stated that Dr Singh did not say anything new. A whole generation of learned men, after all, believed that the British rule in India was going to do some good for the people.

Remember Raja Ram Mohun Roy. Unlike the sepoys who followed the local chieftains and fought a losing battle against the Raj in 1857, Ram Mohun Roy collaborated with Governor General William Bentinck to destroy an obnoxious custom that prevailed in those times. The result was legislation that rendered Sati a criminal offence and provided penal punishment to those who perpetrated it. Ishwar Chandra Vidya Sagar was also convinced that British rule in India would help liberate women from feudal clutches.

And sitting in London and based on some notes he had picked up from here and there, Karl Marx was of the view that the British in India were carrying out a war against the feudal order and that British rule in India was bound to transform the latter into a modern society. Marx was of the view that India was on the path to capitalism and that as had happened in England and other parts of Europe, the passage from feudalism to capitalism would have to be seen as progressive. He also stated that this transition, in its course would give birth to the inevitable: The making of the working class and in due course the revolution!

This is not to say that Ishwar Chandra Vidya Sagar and Ram Mohun Roy were Marxists. It will also be foolish to describe Dr Manmohan Singh as belonging to the Marxist tradition. And let me also stress that Marx himself did not apply his mind further on the Indian scene. From whatever he produced in the couple of decades before his death in 1883, it is clear that Karl Marx shifted from his 1857-58 position. In other words, Marx and Marxist thinkers after him matured significantly to treat the British rule in India or the French occupation in Africa or the Spanish and Portuguese rule in Latin America as colonialism and hence were in the forefront of the battles against such regimes.

In India, Dadabhai Naoroji, described by historians as the grand old man of Indian nationalism, and Romesh Chandra Dutt mustered evidence that the British rulers were preventing India’s transformation into a capitalist society. It was in order to prove a point that Dadabhai Naoroji went about submitting a charge-sheet against the colonial administration. His work, Poverty and the Un-British Rule of the British in India, was a verdict that India could build itself as a nation only after liberation. And, this grand old man of Indian nationalism was not a Marxist by any stretch of the imagination.

Naoroji’s agenda was to see India emerge as a nation on the same lines as the European nations. His agenda was no different from that of Ram Mohun Roy and Ishwar Chandra Vidya Sagar. But unlike them, Naoroji was convinced that India’s transition to modernity was possible only after liberation. The intelligentsia in Naoroji’s time was no longer under the illusion that the British rulers in India stuck to the principles of rule of law and free enterprise as did the governments in England.

Now, Dr Manmohan Singh’s remark in London were no different from those of well meaning progressive men like Ram Mohun Roy and Vidya Sagar more than 100 years ago and exactly 100 years after the concept of swadeshi was expressed through a mass movement. In 1905 the masses were mobilised in such manner that the British rulers began to show their true colours and the mask of liberalism and fair play fell aside. If 1905 was the beginning of naked oppression, in the decade after that, the British promulgated the infamous Rowlatt Act. The rest is history.

Dr Manmohan Singh certainly knows all these. He is, after all, an economist of repute and a scholar in social sciences. He must have read Dadabhai Naroji and Romesh Chandra Dutt, not once but many times over. And he must have also read RC Dutt’s works as well as the various theorists who have argued that colonialism perpetrated poverty in India, Africa and Latin America. Manmohan Singh must also have read Andre Gunter Frank, the greatest of the scholars in this genre who passed away in April 2005.

And yet, if he found it proper to appreciate the British rule in India, it should warn anyone concerned about human rights and human freedom. For those who appreciate the colonial regime today are also those who celebrate the system in the US and in the West that seeks to preserve itself through naked aggression. In other words, those who find virtues in the US aggression of Iraq and the second fiddle that the Tony Blair establishment plays to this act of uncivilised behaviour.

The Indian middle classes, the size of which has been estimated to be anywhere between 100 and 150 million who live under the illusion that the US is a democratic society and do not hesitate to surrender all that they have, including their own human dignity, in exchange for a US visa will not be offended by Manmohan’s remarks. But India contains more than one billion people; and the 150 million cannot determine the course of its politics. Dr Manmohan Singh, the man who initiated the Structural Adjustment Programme in July 1991, thinks of India only from the standpoint of this 100 to 150 million people. The same set of people for whom India is Shining.

His remarks in Oxford reflect this. And the response will have to be from this perspective rather than whipping up another wave of synthetic nationalism and emotional outcry.

VK Ananth, a former affiliate of The Hindu, is now a freelance writer. His email is krishna_ananth@hotmail.com

[Bharatvarsh]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Demeaning Shivaji, denigrating dharma
Author: Sandhya Jain
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: January 27, 2004

Having purchased and read James Laine's Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India only after it was officially withdrawn by the publishers, I cannot view the events at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI) as totally unjustified. Certainly, attacks on centres of learning have no place in Hindu ethos and must not recur. Yet, having gone through 105 pages of shoddy polemics posing as historical research, I am constrained to state that Oxford University Press needs to re-examine its commissioning policy if it hopes to retain credibility as a publishing house.

Moreover, the BORI scholars acknowledged by Laine must honestly inform the nation of the extent to which they are responsible for the unwarranted assertions - we cannot call them conclusions, as no evidence has been adduced or offered - in the impugned book. Far from being a meticulous scholar who has uncovered unpalatable truths about a revered historical figure, Laine is an anti-Hindu hypocrite determined to de-legitimize India's ancient civilizational ethos and its grand rejuvenation by Shivaji in the adverse circumstances of the seventeenth century. BORI is not generally associated with substandard scholarship, and should explicitly declare its position on the actual contents of the book.

Laine exposes his agenda when he foists the unnatural concept of South Asia upon the geographical and cultural boundaries of India; this is awkward because his discussion is India-centric and specific to the Maharashtra region. He is also unable to disguise his discomfort at the fact that Shivaji withstood the most bigoted Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, and established political agency for the embattled Hindu community, amidst a sea of Islamic sultanates. This has so unnerved Laine that he repeatedly makes inane remarks about Hindus employed under Muslim rulers and vice versa, to claim that the two communities lacked a modern sense of identity, and could not be viewed as opposing entities. What he means, of course, is that Hindus of the era cannot be ceded to have had a sense of 'Hindu' identity.

Reading the book, I was struck by the fact that it did not once mention Shivaji's famed ambition to establish a Hindu Pad Padshahi. This is a strange omission in a work claiming to study how contemporary authors viewed Shivaji's historic role, and the assessment of his legacy by subsequent native and colonial writers. The most notable omission is of the poet Bhushan, who wrote: "Kasihki Kala Gayee, Mathura Masid Bhaee; Gar Shivaji Na Hoto, To Sunati Hot Sabaki!" [Kashi has lost its splendour, Mathura has become a mosque; If Shivaji had not been, All would have been circumcised (converted)].

Bhushan's verse has immense historical value because the Kashi Vishwanath temple was razed in 1669 and thus lost its splendour, and the Krishna Janmabhoomi temple was destroyed and converted into a mosque in 1670. Bhushan came to Shivaji's kingdom from the Mughal capital in 1671, and within two years composed Shiv Bhooshan, a biography of Shivaji. It clearly states that Shivaji wanted to set up a Hindu Pad Padshahi.

Hence the view that Shivaji had no ideological quarrel with Aurangzeb and was only an adventurer in search of power and resources is juvenile. Laine obviously subscribes to the secularist school of historiography that decrees that Hindus must forget the evil done to them, a phenomenon Dr. Koenraad Elst calls negationism. But history is about truth, and Hindu society's long and painful experience of Islamic invasions and the subsequent Islamic polity has been so well documented in standard works like Cambridge History of India, that it is amazing a modern historian should claim there was no tension between Muslim rulers and their Hindu subjects.

Shivaji strove consciously for political power as an instrument for the resurrection of dharma (righteousness), a quest he termed as "Hindavi Swarajya," a word having both geographical and spiritual-cultural connotations. When still in his teens in 1645 CE, Shivaji began administering his father's estate under a personalized seal of authority in Sanskrit, an indication that he envisaged independence and respected the Hindu tradition. A 1646 CE letter to Dadaji Naras Prabhu refers to an oath that Shivaji, Prabhu, and others took in the presence of the deity at Rayareshwar, to establish "Hindavi Swarajya."

Shivaji was aware of the economic ruin and cultural annihilation of Hindus under the various sultanates. He desired to end this suffering, but was personally free from bigotry, as attested by contemporary Muslim chroniclers, notably Khafi Khan. It is therefore galling when Laine smugly proclaims: "I have no intention of showing that he was unchivalrous, was a religious bigot, or oppressed the peasants." A.S. Altekar (Position of Women in Ancient India) has recorded how Shivaji, in stark contrast to Muslim kings and generals of his era, ensured that Muslim women in forts captured by him were not molested and were escorted to safety. It is inconceivable that Shivaji would not know that Hindu women similarly situated would have to commit jauhar. It is therefore incumbent upon Laine and BORI to explain what "unchivalrous" and "bigot" mean.

The insinuation about "bigot" is especially objectionable in view of Laine's insistence that Shivaji had no particular interest in Hindu civilization and no proven relationship with the revered Samarth Ramdas or sant Tukaram. A Maharashtrian friend suggests that Laine has probably not read the references cited in his book! What the reader needs to understand is that Ramdas' historical significance lies in the fact that he openly exhorted the people to rise against oppression and hinted in Dasbodh that Shivaji was an avatar who had come to restore dharma. By denying that he was Shivaji's spiritual mentor, Laine seeks to disprove that the great Maratha wanted to establish a Hindu Pad Padshahi.

Ramdas, a devotee of Rama (Vaishnava sampradaya), visited the Khandoba temple at Jejuri, Pune; apologized to the god (Shiva) for boycotting the temple due to the practice of animal sacrifice there; and built a Hanuman temple at its entrance. I mention this to debunk Laine's pathetic insistence that devotion to a personal god divides Hindu society. This is alien to our thinking; we see no conflict between Ramdas and the Bhavani-worshipping Shivaji.

Then, there is Laine's tasteless allegation that Shivaji may possibly (whatever that means) be illegitimate, simply because Jijabai, who bore many children while living with her husband in the south, gave birth to Shivaji on her husband's estate near Pune and continued to live there. Maharashtrians point out that Shahaji had to send his pregnant wife to safety in Shivneri due to political instability. Shahaji was on the run with the boy king Murtaza Nizamshah, in whose name he controlled the Nizamshahi. After its fall in 1636, service in the Adilshahi took him to Bangalore (his remarriage produced the distinguished Thanjavur-Bhonsle dynasty); he administered his Pune lands through Dadaji Konddev.

My response to Laine's profound Freudian analysis is that he has thanked his wife and children and dedicated his book to his mother; I couldn't but notice the absence of a father. Is one to deduce something from the omission? Laine can relax: since the Vedas, Hindus have placed only proportionate emphasis on biological bloodlines; there is no shame if a man cannot mention his father; a true b@st@rd is one who does not know the name of his mother.

http://www.hvk.org/articles/0104/159.html<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->No happy ending to this couple's love story

Express News Service
Posted online: Saturday, October 01, 2005 at 1044 hours IST

Mumbai, October 1: It’s a love story spanning two countries, but, on Friday, it ended with the couple being arrested and sent to police lock-up.

The Crime Branch arrested Hidayath Hussain Sarwat Khan (28) and Benawi Aiyes Thawab Al Subai (24) from Nerul on the charge of using fake documents to make passports. The police were alerted after they received a letter from the Royal Consulate of Saudi Arabia, Mumbai, which stated that Subai, a Saudi national, had gone missing and could possibly be in Mumbai.

Police investigations revealed that Khan, an Indian, used to work in a shopping mall in Saudi Arabia between 1993 and 2001 when he allegedly met Subai and fell in love with her.

According to the police, Subai’s family protested and forced Khan to leave the country. Khan returned to India, but was still in touch with Subai. After Subai agreed to come to India to marry Khan, the couple roped in their friend Noorul Ameen Habibullah, allegedly to make Subai’s passport.

The police said Habibullah used a fake passport in the name of Noor Amin Habibullah Shaikh and travelled to Saudi in 2004.

There, Subai and Habibullah allegedly convinced the Indian Consulate in Jeddah to issue an emergency certificate—a temporary travel document issued by the Indian Consulate if an Indian national loses his/her passport.

Habibullah claimed Subai was his sister Abida Habibullah Shaikh and got her a passport. On March 22, Subai and Habibullah landed in India and in April, Subai and Khan got married in Kolkata.

‘‘The passport says she’s a Latur resident staying in Borivali,’’ said Senior Police Inspector Dilip Patil. ‘‘It was all for love. The court will decide if Subai will be sent back.’’ The police are on the lookout for Habibullah.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

THIS SHOWS THAT SERIOUS DISCRIMINATION EXISTS IN ISLAM. INDIAN MUSLIMS ARE CONSIDERED MUCH LOWER THAN SAUDIS. STILL INDIAN MUSLIMS CONSIDER THEMSELVES MUSLIM FIRST. THEY HAVE BEEN SO MUCH BRAIN WASHED BY ISLAM THAT THEY ARE WILLING TO BE A 3RD GRADE MUSLIMS IN THE EYES OF SAUDIS BUT NOT AN EQUAL CITIZEN OF INDIAN BY GIVING UP SHARIA.

[Guest]

http://www.shaktimarg.com
http://www.shaktimarg.com/warriors/shivaji.html

Shivaji: The Greatest Hindu Warrior

Shivaji stands out in the long line of Hindu warriors as one of the greatest. Though his life is an emblem of courage, virtue and inspiration to fight against oppression and religious persecution, many Hindus have not even heard of him.

Shivaji was born in 1627 in a turbulent period when the Hindu people were being oppressed and religiously persecuted by foreign invaders in their own homeland. The carnage included massacres of Hindus, the mass rape of Hindu women, Hindu children taken into slavery, the imposition of heavy discriminatory taxes on Hindus (the Jiziya tax) and the destruction of Hindu temples. Indeed, it seemed like Hinduism was in danger of dying out.

However, his mother, Jijabai raised Shivaji with high ideals of spirituality, heroism and chivalry by inspiring him with the great Hindu epics and heroes of the past ages. With his desire to rise to the defence of the Hindu civilisation and freedom now evoked, he was ready to live up to the seal he prepared for himself at the age of 12 inscribed with the words: "Although the first moon is small, men see that it shall gradually grow. This seal befits Shivaji, the son of Shahaji."

From the age of 16, Shivaji began to undertake battles to liberate lands that were under enemy control. His mind was made up by this early age – he wasn’t going to wait around or pray for a champion to be born to renew the rule of dharma. In one of his early victories he and a small group of friends captured a fort and renamed it Rajgad. With this and subsequent victories Shivaji became powerful and his army grew to thousands, giving him enough confidence to attack and liberate Mughal occupied territories (the Mughals were the most powerful dynasty in India and had most of North India under its control at that time). Shivaji fought with determination and strategic brilliance. He used guerrilla warfare to devastating effect, and made great advances against the much larger and heavily armed Mughal forces. At times Shivaji would enter into a strategic truce, giving him the opportunity to strengthen his positions in other areas, while planning his next offensive.

Shivaji understood that it is better to use cunning strategies and break a truce against an enemy that molested Hindu women and children and destroyed Hindu temples, than to abide by an honourable code of conduct towards the dishonourable enemy and risk losing the urgent cause he stood for. But while Shivaji was brutal against those who oppressed Hindus, he did not permit attacks against their women and children or places of worship. Shivaji stood for dharma; he used might as a tool to establish justice not oppression.

Shivaji died on 4 April 1680, from failing health, thought to be due to his vigorous and continuous struggle. His contribution to our history cannot be overstated. The poet Bhushan, who lived at the same time as Shivaji wrote: “Kasihki Kala Gayee, Mathura Masid Bhaee; Gar Shivaji Na Hoto, To Sunati Hot Sabaki!” [Kashi has lost its splendour, Mathura has become a mosque; If Shivaji had not been, All would have been circumcised (converted)].

After the untimely death, Aurangzeb the Mughal Emperor and his armies descended upon the kingdom to crush it, thinking that after Shivaji’s death his warriors would be disheartened. However, Shivaji had inspired his followers to such an extent that not only did they weather this storm and saw Aurangzeb’s death but went from strength to strength with Peshwa Baji Rao the First at the realm, and went on to unleash the final death blow to the Mughal Empire.

Shivaji’s legacy can be seen alive to this day. For example, the profound benefits of Hindu spirituality, philosophy, Yoga, mediation, Ayurveda and art resonate not only in India but all over the world. But these practices and knowledge would only be found as partial relics in the museums and libraries like all other ancient civilisations had it not been for great Hindu warriors like Shivaji.


info@shaktimarg.com
shaktimarg@yahoo.com

[Guest]

Article on guerrilla warfare by Mr. Airavat Singh...I've not read it completely so judge for yourself.

http://www.airavat.com/Guerrilla%20Warfare.pdf

On his website it says: "Singh has also written a series on guerrilla warfare in Indian History---beginning from the Sikh resistance to Ahmad Shah Abdali and going back to the Rajput resistance to Ala-ud-din Khalji. The further back in Indian History we go, the fewer literary sources of events are available. Hence instances of guerrilla warfare in the early medieval and ancient period have not been covered in this series---yet. The articles have been combined in a single PDF file available on this website.

note: there are no restrictions on printing the PDF files"

[Bharatvarsh]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Peshwa Baji Rao I

After the death of the Hindu Warrior Shivaji the real revival of Hindu power came from Baji Rao I (1700-1740).  The death of Shivaji's wayward but brave son Sambhaji (d. 1689) had accelerated internal disintegration of the Marathas which was set in motion by the death of Shivaji (d. 1680). Rajaram, Shivaji's second son gave the reigns of control to a figure known as the Peshwa (prime minister). Maratha nobles of high standing refused to acknowledge authority of the Peshwa.  The old brigade opposed Baji Rao I to the very end. But he had a genius for spotting talent and groomed peasants and servants into generals of considerable repute.  These - Holkars, Shindes and Pawars - were to become the mainstay of the Peshwa's forces.

He was an ambitious and far seeking man, and conceived the bold plan of turning the tables upon the declining Moghul Empire and invading Hindustan.  "Now is the time," he exclaimed, "to drive the strangers from the land of the Hindus!  Let us strike at the trunk of the withering tree, and the branches will fall off themselves.  By directing our efforts to Hindustan, the Maratha flag shall fly from Krishna to Attock."  From that day the faces of Marathas turned northwards.  Every Maratha fort has its 'Delhi Gate'.

Baji Rao, aided ably by brother Chimaji Appa, fought 36 battles in all and never tasted a defeat.  A simple, down to earth man, he mixed freely with his soldiers and set the trend of giving land to his men as 'Vatan' to ensure that the territory won stayed won.  In the hindsight though, this had the effect of sowing seeds of the process of decentralisation as opposed to the centralised power which Shivaji sought to establish.  The expansion of Maratha Raj under him was spectacular.  In 1737, he arrived within the vicinity of Delhi in a surprise attack and split the joint force of Nizam and the Moghuls to defeat them both.  The Moghuls surrendered and the Marathas were established as the supreme power in India.  Nizam-Ul-Mulk, the string holder of Moghuls, refused to take protection of the Maratha army for obvious reasons.  Baji Rao stayed in Delhi for a few days and retreated to the South to subdue the Portuguese.  The decision backfired on the Moghuls as Nader Shah invaded and defiled Delhi in 1739.  Nizam later moved over to Hyderabad to establish a dynasty of his own.  Shortly afterwards, the stress of relentless campaigns claimed Baji Rao.  Aged 40, he left this life in a tent among his bravest men in Ravarkhed on a campaign.  His Muslim mistress Mastani committed suicide upon learning of his death.

Thanks to Baji Rao we found after seven hundred years the tide of Islamic invasion turned back to the very gates of Afghanistan and the saffron banner of Hindu victory range from the Himalayas to the South. 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Jadunath Sarkar says in his forward to "Peshwa Baji Rao I and Maratha Expansion":
"Baji Rao was a heaven born cavalry leader.  In the long and distinguished galaxy of Peshwas, Baji Rao Ballal was unequalled for the daring and originality of his genius and the volume and value of his achievements.  He was truly a carlylean Hero as king- or rather as `Man of action.'  If Sir Robert Walpole created the unchallengeable position of the Prime Minister in the unwritten constitution of England, Baji Rao created the same institution in the Maratha Raj at exactly the same time."

J. Grant Duff says in "History of the Marathas":
"Bred a soldier as well as a statesman, Baji Rao united the enterprise, vigour, and hardihood of a Maratha chief with the polished manners, the sagacity, and address which frequently distinguish the Brahmins of the Concan.  Fully acquainted with the financial schemes of his father, he selected that part of the plan calculated to direct the predatory hordes of Maharashtra in a common effort.  In this respect, the genius of Baji Rao enlarged the schemes which his father devised; and unlike most Brahmins of him, it may be truly said- he had both- the head to plan and the hand to execute."

Sir R. Temple says in "Oriental Experiences":
"Baji Rao was hardly to be surpassed as a rider and was ever forward in action, eager to expose himself under fire if the affair was arduous.  He was inured to fatigue and prided himself on enduring the same hardships as his soldiers and sharing their scanty fare.  He was moved by an ardour for success in national undertakings by a patriotic confidence in the Hindu cause as against its old enemies, the Muhammadans and its new rivals, the Europeans then rising above the political horizon.  He lived to see the Maratha spread over the Indian continent from the Arabian sea to the Bay of Bengal.  He died as he lived in camp under canvas among his men and he is remembered among the Marathas as the fighting Peshwa, as the incarnation of Hindu energy."

http://groups.msn.com/hindu-history/rawarc...443692305751743<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

For those who claim that the Marathas had no Hindu conciousness and were only seeking power the following should refute this propaganda:

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->But Peshwa Balaji Bajirao's eagerness to acquire Ayodhya is reflected in one of his letters dated 23th February, 1759 to Dattaji Scindia, his General in the North wherein the Peshwa reminds Scindia that 'Mansur Ali's son (i.e., Shujauddaula} had promised to Dada (i.e. Raghoba} to cede Benares and Ayodhya" and instructs him to take hold to those places alongwith Prayag. (Cf. Sarkar J.N. Fall of the Moghul Empire, Vol. II, Calcutta, 1934 ff231-233)."

http://www.vhp.org/englishsite/e.Special_M...eatevidence.htm<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Bharatvarsh]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The early life

Gokula or Gokul Singh was a Jat chieftain of village Sinsini near
Mathura in Uttar Pradesh, India. His father's name was Madu. Madu
had four sons namely, Sindhuraj, Ola, Jhaman and Saman. The second
son Ola later became famous as Gokula. More details about the birth
of Gokula are not available.

Left Sinsini

In year 1650-51 Madu and his uncle Singha had fight with Mirza Raja
Jaysingh in which Sindhuraj died and second son of Madu Ola became
the successor. After this war Singha along with other Jat families
in the fortress 'Girsa' moved to Mahavan beyond River Yamuna. Ola
(Gokula) also moved with Singha to this place.

Rise of Gokula

Gokula came on scene when the fanatic Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (1658-
1707) attempted to convert Dar-ul-Hurb (Hindustan) to Dar-ul-Islam
forcibly through persecution and dogmatic policies.

In early 1969 Aurangzeb appointed a strong follower of Islam
Abdunnabi as Faujdar of Mathura to curb the Hindus of this area.
Abdunnabi established a cantonment near Gokulsingh and conducted all
his operations from there. Gokula organized the farmers not to give
taxes to the Mughals. The Mughal soldiers started atrocities on the
farmers. This was the starting point of struggle of farmers.
Meanwhile Aurangzeb issued orders on April 9, 1669 to abolish the
temples of Hindus. As a result large number of Hindu temples and
ancient heritages of the period of Kushans were damaged. During
month of May, 1969 the faujdar Abdunnabi seized village Sihora.
Gokula was there and there was a fight in which Abdunnabi was
killed. Gokula and his fellow farmers moved further, attacked and
destroyed Sadabad cantonment. Sadullakhan had founded Sadabad during
the period of Shahjahan. This incidence inspired the depressed
Hindus to fight against atrocities of the Mughal rulers. The fights
continued for five months.

The battle of Tilpat

The Jat peasants of Tilpat (Mathura) had the audacity to challenge
the Imperial power under the leadership of Gokula. Jats were thus
first to unsheath their swords and to wield these against the mighty
Mughals.

Emperor Aurangzeb had to march himself on November 28, 1669 from
Delhi to curb the Jat menace. The Mughals under Hasan Alikhan and
Brahmdev Sisodia attacked Gokula Jat. Gokula and his uncle Uday
Singh with 20000 Jats, Ahirs and Gujars fought with superb courage
and tenacity, the battle at Tilpat, but their grit and bravery had
no answer to the Mughal artillery. After three days of grim fight
Tilpat fell. Losses on both sides were very heavy. 4000 Mughal and
3000 Jat soldiers were killed.

Gokula hacked to death

Gokula and Uday Singh were imprisoned. Jat women committed Jauhar.
Gokula offered pardon if he accepted Islam. To tease the Emperor,
Gokula demanded his daughter in return. Gokula and Uday Singh were
hacked to death piece by piece at Agra Kotwali on January 1, 1670.

References

*Thakur Deshraj: Jat Itihas (Hindi), Delhi, 1934
*Narendra Singh Verma: Virvar Amar Jyoti Gokul Singh (Hindi),
Sankalp Prakashan, Agra, 1986
-----
Laxman Burdak

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/JatHistory/message/2530<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Anyone here have the book "The Jats: Their Role in the Mughal Empire"
by Girish Chandra Dwivedi where he is supposed to have dealt with the
1669 rebellion in the 1st chapter in detail and does it have any more
info on Gokul Singh and the causes of the rebellion.

[Bharatvarsh]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->I thought to bring this to your attention. The following is the Wikipedia (an important online encyclopedia, which I think is quite influential) article on Prithviraj Chauhan, which I reproduce below in full. Please pay close attention to the second paragraph in bold.

**********************************************
Prithviraj III (1165?-1192) was a king of the Rajput Chauhan (Chahamana) dynasty. He succeeded to the throne of Ajmer c. 1179, while still a minor, and his elopement with the daughter of Jai Chandra, the Gahadvala king of Kannauj, is a popular romantic tale. The Chauhan succession had been rather confused since the death of Vigraha-raja in 1165; Prithviraj reconsolidated control of the Chauhan kingdom, which included much of Rajasthan and Haryana, and unified the Rajputs against the Muslim invasions. He defeated the Afghan ruler, Muhammad of Ghor, in 1191, at the First Battle of Tarain. Prithviraj was defeated by Muhammad of Ghor (Ghauri) at the Second Battle of Tarain in 1192.

It is believed that this war was caused due to rising concern of Prithviraj's constant persecution of Muslims who were converting from Hinduism at a high rate which alarmed his kingdom officials greatly. Muhammad of Ghor seized the opportunity and waged a Jihad against him to end the persecution of his co religionists and eventually defeated Prithviraj.

He is regarded by many as a brave Rajput to this day. This Indian biographical article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prithviraj_III

********************************************

Now here is what we need to do. The way wikipedia works is by numbers. It seems there are some muslim editors. Here are is one deleted post by some editor DUK who is asking for relief for kasmir earth quake victims (obiviously some puki sulla).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Und...hviraj_III

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Duk

We should go and edit this page empteen times in our way.

Also complain to wikipedia about this puki editor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contact_us<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Everyone start contacting them and register there and start editing the article and blast the bast*rd who wrote the article, this is how things will get done.

[Bharatvarsh]

The senile idiot who wrote it gave a reply in the discussions section after some Hindus tried to edit it but once again he shows no proof for his nonsense, people get registered at wikipidea and make them scrap this garbage and what he says does not even make sense, how does Hindus attending chisti or other ajmer dargahs show that Prithviraj persecuted muslims.

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->I have removed the biased opinions stated originally i.e. he was blinded and tortured as there is no substantive proof anywhere that this occurred and is usually promoted by anti propogandists such as the Hindutva movement in India. I have replaced it with the reasons behind the final war. It is widely acknowledged even by the residents of Ajmer, his Kingdom, that he persecuted many Muslim Derwishs and refused to allow them even water to drink. The fact that centuries later even the Hindus attend the Shrines of those Derwishes, showing their loyalty to a Saint believed to have come to help them against Prthviraj, proves this very fact.

I have also removed the last point about Muhammad of Ghor being killed by a Khokkar Jatt. It is a well known fact that the true killers of Muhammad of Ghor were never captured and they never revealed themselves during that age. It was thus never proven who did it, although the matter was theorised by many.

The other point is that Khokkars were actually Iranian Sassanids by descent. They are not a Jatt clan. This is further proved by the Ghakkar/Khokkar federation of Rawalpindi who have family records stretching up to the Sassanid Dynasty. Jatts are a Punjabi agricultural group mainly in Punjab.

The problem here is that Prithviraj has always been used by the far right wing groups to grow sympathy and anger from against all invaders and their faith which has reared it's head manily in the last century. Therefore we must remain objective and keep this article free of bias and negative propoganda.

Given time I will further expand this article. --Raja 11:36, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Prithviraj_III<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Guest]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Prithviraj_III

[right][snapback]40136[/snapback][/right]
[/quote]

The writer Raja is incorrect.

The Khokkars are Jats and spread right through Punjab East and West, Haryana, Rajastan, and UP.

There is a book on Jat history written by Dr. Atal Singh Khokgar. He is the author of " Jaton ki Utpathi evam Vistar", publishedby Jaipal Agencies, 31-A Subhashpuram, Agra 282007, U.P.

Khokkar and Gakkar are used interchangeably.

The muslim mansucripts are quite clear, that it was the "Khokkar dogs who performed this evil deed " See Elliot and Dowson.

He does not claim descent from the Sassanids , but is as vedic as they come.

In Pakistan the Khokkar Jats, mostly, accepted Islam, a result mainly of the Sufi influences. Some became Sikh.

Search for Khokkar on the Yahoo Jathistory group.

When Ghori was returning from India, after defeating Prithviraj Chauhan, he was attacked relentlessly by the Jats. 25,000 Khokkars under their General Anirudh attacked his army, defeated them and cut off Ghori's head, in 1206 AD.

For other Jat reactions around the time see

On Prithviraj Chauhan, the Jat versions also tell a different story

Sadly these do not make our history textbooks. Let us try and change this. see:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/JatHistory/message/2230

for other versions of the Prithviraj story see; messages 2231, 32, 33

From the records of the Sarv Khap Panchayat, book " Sarv Khap ka Ithihaas' by Nihal Singh Arya
Shahbudin Ghauri (Ghori) and the Jats

1191 CE or Samvat 1248

In the aftermath of the loot of Mahmud of Ghazni, the people had lost their faith in temples, mutts and the Panda priests. The Gurus and sadhus were still revered. The petty kingdoms were fighting among themselves.

The petty rajas would spend their time in fighting over women and marriages. Eight months of the year would be spent like this. They were indolent and their time was spent in lustful activities. The Charan Bhats would spend their time making up false stories to please their masters, and cause their masters to quarrel and fight with each other. The country was divided into petty kingdoms. Only around Delhi the Republic of the Sarv Khap of Haryana was stable, and free from these lowly conditions.

Afghanistan was the seat of the Gaur /Ghaur Clan. They were quite powerful. With the advance of the Arab Jihad, they lost and converted to Islam. Mahmud Ghazni had seized their kingdom by treachery. Allaudin mounted an attack on Ghazni, seized it and destroyed it. Ghazni at time was one of the more beautiful cities in the world. Allaudin spared the tomb of Ghazni and put the rest of the city to fire, the inhabitants of the city were enslaved. In 1213 Vikram Samvat Allaudin died.

Gyasuddin became King after Safudin and Vahiudin. His younger brother Shahbudin followed him.

Chitrarekha Nag, was a beautiful Indian dancing girl, who had been brought from India by Husain the son of Shahbudin's paternal Uncle. (Chacha). Shahbudin also passionately desired this dancer. Mir Hussein took this dancer and ran way to Ajmer, where he took shelter with Prithviraj Chauhan. Prithviraj Chauhan also became infatuated with this dancing girl.

At that time the Chauhans were to be found in Ajmer. Vigraraj was the earlier the ruler. In Delhi, Prithviraj Chauhan was ruling. He was son of the daughter of the Tanwar (Tomar) Anandpal. In Kannauj Jaichand Gahadwala, was in power. In Bengal Luxman Sen. in Bundelkhand Parmal Chandela had his capital at Mahobeh. In Malwa, Bhoj of the Parmar clan was ruling. In Gujarat in Anhilwara Bhimdev Solanki was in power. Anhilwara was a famous city in India and the Chauhans were afraid of the Anhilwara might.

Shahbudin took the excuse of Chitrarekha and mounted a siege on Ajmer, in 1191 CE but lost.

The Sarv Khap Panchayat supported Prithviraj Chauhan with 22,000 Mulls or warriors. The leader was a Rajput ,Udaybhan and the deputy commander were Hriday, of the Brahmin caste. The left wing of Ghauri's army was annihilated by the Sarv Khap army.

In the next battle between Shahbudin Ghauri at Khanderao, the Sarv Khap sent 18,000 Mulls. They pushed Ghauri troops back 25 miles.

The Head of the Sarv Khap Panchayat, at the time was Dunghar Jat. The Deputy head was Harish Chandra Taga (Tyagi). Sheoram Das, Kayasth and Shyam Prasad Bania were the Treasurers. Ram Dayal Bhat was the incharge of diplomatic communications. He was a learned man. He would always give sound advice. He would teach the Mulls (warriors) well, ad keep a sharp eye on them. The Panchayati heroes never let bad or depraved habits enter their company. Where the rajas were sunk in depravation, the Panchayati republic was the abode of the Gods themselves.

A Bhat ( Bard) Hariprakash painted an accurate picture of the depraved conditions of the monarchial courts. The rajas had become characterless. They would fight over women. Only the Sardars (leaders) of Mohabah were immune. They did not succumb to the high low casteism. Prithviraj lost many of his leaders in these blood sport fights over women. Prithviraj had become a fallen person, and was found drunk day and night in his harem of prostitutes. The court was full of women talk. Heroism had rusted. Prostitutes would dance daily in the courts. The eyes were closed to the Islamic Jihad.

The Chauhan, Rahtors, and Chandelas were being destroyed by in fighting. Prithviraj went to war with Jaichand over a woman. He brought many women to his harem in this manner. On his taking and then leaving a woman of a Rawa clan, the Sarv Khap broke off relations with him.

Seeing these conditions, Shahbudin Ghauri once more attacked Delhi in 1193 CE. Prithviraj had lost many of his commanders in these petty bloodsport fights. Chandra Bhan Bhat somehow got Prithviraj out of his Harem. A 50,000 strong army was collected. The son in law of Prithviraj, Samar Singh, brought 12,000 troops from the Raja of Chittor. The Sarv Khap contributed 18,000 troops, and in this manner the army's strength was raised to 80,000. The army was very strong, but a traitor rajput, Vijay Singh joined the army of Ghauri.

This battle was fought near Thaneswar (modern Haryana near Karnal). Rana Samar Singh and the Sarv Khap army fought for three days. The enemy could not advance one inch. A great warrior Sagar Singh Rohrd led the Panchayat army. The assistant commanders were three Jats, 5 Gujars, four Ahirs, three rajputs, two Sainis, four Brahmins. Hardhan, Mardhan, Jungam, Bugli were four warriors of the Jat Dahiya clan. When these 30,000 warriors had been sacrificed, then the 50,000 strong army of Prithviraj Chauhan advanced.

The seasoned warriors of this army had already been lost, sacrificed to the blood sports of Prithviraj. The army was consisting of new green recruits. They were brought up in a life of ease, women and drink. In an hour they ran away, and the battle was over. Prithviraj was captured, and Shahbudin hoisted his flag of victory over Delhi.

In 1194(1251 Vikram S), Jaichand was defeated.

When Shahbudin Ghauri was going back to Afghanistan, the Khokkar Jats attacked him on the banks of the Sindhu River. The General of the Khokkars, Anirudh, cut off Ghauri's head in Vikram Samvat 1262 ( 1205 CE).

His slave commander Kutubudin Aibak succeeded Ghauri, and the Panchayat fought many battles with him

Prithviraj Chauhan was taken to Afghanistan where he was blinded and tortured to death,

The Jat reaction:
1. THE HISSAR PANCHAYAT ( 1251 Vikram Samvat, 1194 AD)

The SarvKhap called a Panchayat at Hissar (now in modern Haryana) in VS 1251 (1194 AD). It was a very large and well-attended panchayat. While the Panchayat was in progress, Kutub U Din 's army attacked them. The SarvKhap army fought hard with the enemy. A fierce battle took place. Many soldiers were killed on both sides. The enemy Muslim soldiers could not stand up to the brave SarvKhap soldiers, and were defeated and ran away. They were killed in great numbers. The SarvKhap army was victorious in this battle. (The history of the Panchayat of the 18 Khaps- Author Ramsingh Sahityaratan).

2. THE PANCHAYAT OF BHAJU AND BHANERA, (1251 VS (1194 AD), Jyesta, Sudhi Teej.

(Held under the stewardship the Khap Baliyan, (who were the ministers of the Sarv Khap at Shoron, district Muzzafarnagar.)?

In the jungles of Bhanu Banera a great panchayat was held. People from all jatis (castes) participated. There were 30,000 attendees of whom there were 15, 000 Mulls (Warriors). Most the participants were Jats

The chairman of the panchayat was chosen to be Chaudhry Vijay Rao, who was of the Baliyan Khap, and a resident of Sisauli.

The Jat Gogarmull was chosen as the chief general of the Mulls (Warriors).

This panchayat was called to discuss and deliberate upon the defeat of the Chauhans and the Rathores (Prithviraj Chauhan and Jai Chand Rathor) by Mohamad Ghauri.

The chairman of the Panchayat gave a resounding speech, some extracts of which are as below:

Explaining the reasons of the defeat of the Chauhans the Chairman said:

" His (Prithviraj's) character had fallen. He was drunk day and night, and spent his time in the harems. His focus had strayed from looking after the well being of the population, maintenance of military skills, teaching his soldiers military skills, and protection of the nation. His Senapati (general) and his soldiers also became drunks and developed bad habits and behavior. Jaichand Rathore betrayed the nation by going against him. At the end he (Jaichand) too received the reward of death."
[ source; Sarv Khap Panchayat, Shoron, records]

[Guest]

http://www.shaktimarg.com
http://www.shaktimarg.com/warriors/shivaji.html

<b>Shivaji: The Greatest Hindu Warrior</b>

Shivaji stands out in the long line of Hindu warriors as one of the greatest. Though his life is an emblem of courage, virtue and inspiration to fight against oppression and religious persecution, many Hindus have not even heard of him.

Shivaji was born in 1627 in a turbulent period when the Hindu people were being oppressed and religiously persecuted by foreign invaders in their own homeland. The carnage included massacres of Hindus, the mass rape of Hindu women, Hindu children taken into slavery, the imposition of heavy discriminatory taxes on Hindus (the Jiziya tax) and the destruction of Hindu temples. Indeed, it seemed like Hinduism was in danger of dying out.

However, his mother, Jijabai raised Shivaji with high ideals of spirituality, heroism and chivalry by inspiring him with the great Hindu epics and heroes of the past ages. With his desire to rise to the defence of the Hindu civilisation and freedom now evoked, he was ready to live up to the seal he prepared for himself at the age of 12 inscribed with the words: "Although the first moon is small, men see that it shall gradually grow. This seal befits Shivaji, the son of Shahaji."

From the age of 16, Shivaji began to undertake battles to liberate lands that were under enemy control. His mind was made up by this early age – he wasn’t going to wait around or pray for a champion to be born to renew the rule of dharma. In one of his early victories he and a small group of friends captured a fort and renamed it Rajgad. With this and subsequent victories Shivaji became powerful and his army grew to thousands, giving him enough confidence to attack and liberate Mughal occupied territories (the Mughals were the most powerful dynasty in India and had most of North India under its control at that time). Shivaji fought with determination and strategic brilliance. He used guerrilla warfare to devastating effect, and made great advances against the much larger and heavily armed Mughal forces. At times Shivaji would enter into a strategic truce, giving him the opportunity to strengthen his positions in other areas, while planning his next offensive.

Shivaji understood that it is better to use cunning strategies and break a truce against an enemy that molested Hindu women and children and destroyed Hindu temples, than to abide by an honourable code of conduct towards the dishonourable enemy and risk losing the urgent cause he stood for. But while Shivaji was brutal against those who oppressed Hindus, he did not permit attacks against their women and children or places of worship. Shivaji stood for dharma; he used might as a tool to establish justice not oppression.

Shivaji died on 4 April 1680, from failing health, thought to be due to his vigorous and continuous struggle. <b>His contribution to our history cannot be overstated. The poet Bhushan, who lived at the same time as Shivaji wrote: “Kasihki Kala Gayee, Mathura Masid Bhaee; Gar Shivaji Na Hoto, To Sunati Hot Sabaki!” [Kashi has lost its splendour, Mathura has become a mosque; If Shivaji had not been, All would have been circumcised (converted)].</b>

After the untimely death, Aurangzeb the Mughal Emperor and his armies descended upon the kingdom to crush it, thinking that after Shivaji’s death his warriors would be disheartened. However, Shivaji had inspired his followers to such an extent that not only did they weather this storm and saw Aurangzeb’s death but went from strength to strength with Peshwa Baji Rao the First at the realm, and went on to unleash the final death blow to the Mughal Empire.

Shivaji’s legacy can be seen alive to this day. For example, the profound benefits of Hindu spirituality, philosophy, Yoga, mediation, Ayurveda and art resonate not only in India but all over the world. But these practices and knowledge would only be found as partial relics in the museums and libraries like all other ancient civilisations had it not been for great Hindu warriors like Shivaji.

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Kasihki Kala Gayee, Mathura Masid Bhaee; Gar Shivaji Na Hoto, To Sunati Hot Sabaki!<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Is this marathi ??

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The writer Raja is incorrect.

The Khokkars are Jats and spread right through Punjab East and West, Haryana, Rajastan, and UP.

There is a book on Jat history written by Dr. Atal Singh Khokgar. He is the author of " Jaton ki Utpathi evam Vistar", publishedby Jaipal Agencies, 31-A Subhashpuram, Agra 282007, U.P.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Why we should trust Dr. Atal Singh version and not Raja? Jats can handle Raja facts in a tea cup.

[Guest]

Bharatvarsh:

Wiki's own site states the timeframe of Chisti and Privithviraj as Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti (1141 - 1230 AD) and Prithviraj III (1165?-1192)
When was the darga for Chisti built?

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->It is widely acknowledged even by the residents of Ajmer, his Kingdom, that he persecuted many Muslim Derwishs and refused to allow them even water to drink
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The guys who are quoting this have their facts mixed up. Yes there is a story pertaining to refusing water to Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti and not muslims in general. And the king in question is not Prithviraj Chauhan but someone else (I'll dig this up for you). The story goes that Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti arrived at this town with his band of followers and he requested temporary water/food/shelter from the local king/sartap. He request was refused. Chisti cursed that the kings camels wouldn't get up from their place of resting and that's what happened. This local king was awestruck, gave Chisti and his band everything he wished and curse was lifted. This king then converted to Islam. Again don't remember the name - can look it up if you wish.
Source of this tale: M J Akbar's Shade of Swords

I believe M J Akbar has a blog these days, one can even try requesting him for the source.
Or if you wish, I'll scan the relevant pages of his book and post it for you.

[Bharatvarsh]

Viren thanks for pointing that out, anyway the morons article got edited, well i dont knw wen chisti dargah was built but i knw it was built on demolished mandirs and that chisti was a hardcore jihadi who masqueraded as a saint in order to convert Hindus.