The effort of Hindu extremists to convert the Babri Mosque into a temple is a return to a mediaeval practice. Does New Delhi regard the Indian Muslims as a conquered people?
THE effort of the Hindu extremists to convert the Babri mosque into a temple, connived at by the present Indian government, is a return to the practice of the mediaeval times. The pre-monotheist religions did not proselytize neither did they convert others’ temples into their own. Their gods were strictly ‘national’ or racial, who had the same relationship with the gods of the other pantheons as did their races or ‘nations’. Therefore, when one people conquered another, it was assumed that they had done so because their gods were stronger.
However, the conquered people were not exterminated. For one, the primitive man lacked the technical aids for doing so effectively. Secondly, the low technology of the means of production meant that the labourer produced a very small surplus. Consequently, the conquered people were useful as source of coerced labour. So they were reduced to slavery or degraded socially in some other manner.
The conquerors and the conquered may live differently after the victory of one over the other, but they lived in the same society. Their pantheons were, therefore, united to reflect the new social mix. For example, after the Roman conquest of West Asia, Roman gods were put in the existing pantheon, which already had Persian and Greek gods. Apparently, the original hierarchy among gods, which was based upon the hierarchy among the various nations that owned them, was also changed. Persian gods ceased to be superior with time, while Roman and Greek gods tended to merge. Thus Aphrodite and Venus became interchangeable, one taking not only the other’s powers, but also assuming her sins and misdeeds.
The Aryans brought their own pantheon with them to India. It was not much diversified because they were a pastoral people. They annexed the Dravidian deities like Shiv and Kali, originally investing them with based practices. But, ultimately, Shiv joined the supreme triumvirate of the Aryan pantheon, while the Aryans’ own god, Indr, barely kept a foothold in the divine city.
Monotheism was a quantum leap in the evolution of human thought. It involved two extremely difficult acts: one, conceiving nothingness, since all deities had to be abolished before God could be affirmed; and, two, accepting a deity not accessible to the senses. The concept of the unity of mankind then flowed naturally from the concept of unity of the Creator.
“This sense of an immanent God helped Jews to see humanity as sacred.” (A History of God, Karen Armstrong, Heinenmann, London, 1993, p93). The Jews had been pagans. It was slavery and extreme oppression, from which their gods had been unable to free them, which finally liberated them from all associated deities and brought them to believe in Yahweh, the one God. Indeed, the man had to struggle long and hard to divest himself of the deities that could be seen or touched. And the tendency to associate other deities with Yahweh stayed long. In 869BC, Ahab, the king of Israel, married a pagan princess, Jezebel. She believed in Baal and succeeded in spreading the cult widely among the Jews. The cult was suppressed later violently and the Jews became intolerant monotheists.
There being no place for other deities in monotheism, the polytheist pantheon was gone. Whether destruction of others’ temples followed at that time, it is hard to say. Early Muslims did not destroy the temples of pagans or of the other monotheistic religions. Idols were removed from the Kaaba, because the struggle of the Prophet (PBUH) against the Meccan pagans was seen as a struggle not against deniers of God, but against associators. The idols had, thus, been expelled not from their pantheon, but from the House of God which they had, so to say, invaded.
The conversion of others’ places of worship into one’s own became a custom in the mediaeval times, when Islam and a resurgent Christianity confronted each other systematically from the Sea of Azov to the Straits of Gibralter. The Turks turned the churches of Istanbul into mosques, and the Christians converted the mosques in Spain and Sicily into churches. However, this was done only where the conquerors became a majority among the people. The Turks did not do so in Ukraine or the Balkans, or the Christians in the Muslim lands that they conquered in Asia and Africa.
The Christian treatment of the pagan temples in the New World was different. There, a handful of Europeans were trying to maintain its rule over a relatively numerous population. They not only used a lot of violence to do so, but also destroyed the local temples, using their material to build churches on those sites. This proved to the locals, according to them, that not only had their armies been defeated by the European armies, but their gods had been defeated by the Europeans’ god. This would break their will to resist.
The Muslim rule in India drew sustenance from Central Asia from time to time. But it was based locally. The Muslims were thus infinitesimal compared to the Hindus. Therefore, as Dr Mubarak Ali says, their conquest of the Hindus was not absolute. Their rule was rather tolerated. A factor which helped them, according to Dr Mubarak Ali, was that the Hindu lower castes preferred the rule of the Muslims to that of Hindu upper castes.
The fragility of their rule meant that they could not provoke the Hindus too much. They had to be restrained even in their oppression. True, some bigoted ruler may knock down a temple or more likely prevent the building of a new one. But generally, they did not interfere with the Hindus’ religious practices.
As to Babar, as the Indian historian Harbans Mukhia says, “his fame does not rest on religious fanaticism or idol smashing. He was a man of culture who liked good things of life, like music, flowers, women and, of course, a cup of wine. He had no taste for pulling down temples and putting up mosques instead”. (The quarterly Tareekh, October, 2000, p135).
The Babri mosque was constructed under Babar’s orders. But Mukhia, in his article on the subject quoted above, pointed out: “There is absolutely no indication from the inscription on the mosque’s walls or the tablets in it that there was a building previously on the site where the mosque was constructed.” (p131).
Neither does Babar mention in his memoir the existence of any mandir at the place, nor have Abdul Fazl or Aurganzeb mentioned it. Not even Tulsi Das, who wrote his Ramayan within fifty years of the construction of the mosque, and, who being a devotee of Ram, would, according to Mukhia, “have denounced the act violently if it had taken place”. (p133).
The allegation of the mosque being at a site holy to the Hindus was first made by one Hafeezullah in a court in Faizabad in 1822. He said that the Babri mosque had been built at the site of Ram’s birth place, but did not say that there had been a temple there. Later, a collector of Faizabad, Carnegie, said in the 1860s without giving any source, that a temple had been knocked down to build the mosque. The translator of Babar’s memoirs, Mrs Beveridge, repeated the allegation, again without any supporting evidence. These allegations made after 1857 were part of the British policy of creating differences between Hindus and Muslims.
There is a high extended mound running along the Ghaghra River and adjoining the modern town of Ajodhya. Such mounds on the flat Gangetic Plain indicate the ruins of a fortress or of a town. The mound is generally assumed to be the remnants of the pre-historic Ajodhya. Hindi prose translation of Valmiki’s Ramayan, done by Anand Kumar, (Anand Paperbacks, Delhi, 1964), begins with the phrase, “the prosperous Ajodhya was an ancient city by the name of Kosal by the Sarju River. It was full of men and wealth”.
Valmiki was, of course, a poet, who cannot be cited as a historical source, that too for a prehistorical event. But we can assume that the place where the pre-historic Aryan hero, Ram, was said to be from was under this mud mound by the Ghaghra (also called Sarju). Various spots on it had been designated by the believers as holy sites. For instance, “the birth place of Ram”, “Sita’s kitchen” etc. A third place almost by the river, was called Hanuman Garhi. This was where Ram is said to have enthroned Hanuman in recognition of his aid in the Lanka campaign. This spot became the centre of a crisis in 1855, an year before the annexation of Awadh by the British.
Hakim Najmul Ghani, drawing on a number of historians of Lucknow, has given its full story in his five-volume History of Awadh. (Nafees Academy, Karachi 1983). He says that Babar had three temples — those at Ram’s birthplace, his court and house — pulled down, and built a mosque at the site of the birthplace. The temple at Sita’s kitchen was, however, left standing beside the mosque (Vol. V, p184). Some Muslim nobles also built mosques at other spots on the mound, but the Hindus destroyed them over a period. (none of these historians quoted by Najmul Ghani quotes any source).
Earlier, Safdar Jang, the second Nawab Wazir of Awadh (mid-eighteenth century), had recovered from an illness as a result of the prayers by a Hindu priest, Abhay Ram. In return, the latter had sought permission to build a temple at Hanuman Garhi. Safdar Jang gave permission and some financial aid for the construction.
After that, for about a century, Muslims built mosques at the place and the Hindus either destroyed them or made the access of the Muslims to them difficult. Things came to a head in 1855, when some extremist Muslims, led by one Maulvi Amir Ali, started from Lucknow, intending to pull down the Hanuman Mandir and build a mosque there, instead.
Wajid Ali Shah sent many religious scholars and others to dissuade them, arguing that there had been a temple there before the mosque. But they kept going. The Awadh government used force as they got to Rudauli, only twenty-five miles from Ajodhya. The extremists, numbering about six hundred, were surrounded by the army and killed to the last man.
But even at such a point of high tension, no one raised the question of the Babri mosque. The fact is that this dispute was created de toute piece by the British to serve their imperial interests and has been revived by the Hindu extremists a century later in order to gain Hindu votes.
As mentioned earlier, conversion of others’ places of worship into ones’ own was a mediaeval practice. And it was used only against a conquered people. Does the BJP want to revive a mediaeval practice? And does it regard the Indian Muslims as a conquered people?
The effort of Hindu extremists to convert the Babri Mosque into a temple is a return to a mediaeval practice. Does New Delhi regard the Indian Muslims as a conquered people? 
