Sri Ram Sharma Quotes

The Jum’a Masjid at Irach (in Bundelkhand) is assigned to Aurangzeb’s reign. It is said to be built of materials taken from a Hindu temple. While passing through Udaipur in Bundelkhand (about 1681) Aurangzeb is said to have ordered the Saiva temple there to be demolished. The orders were however modified and the temple was converted into a mosque. The temples at Gayaspur near Bhilsa and the temple of Khaundai Rao in Gujarat were also destroyed.

Shah Jahan also stopped the prevailing practice of allowing the Hindus and the Christians to make converts to their religion.... In the case of the Hindus, however, it was otherwise. They had been actually absorbing a number of Muslims by conversion to Hinduism. In the sixth year of his reign when Shah Jahan was returning from Kashmir through Jammu, he discovered, as Jahangir had discovered before him, that the Hindus of Bhadauri and Bhimbar accepted daughters of. Muslim parents and converted them to their own faith. These women were cremated at their death according to Hindu rites. Jahangir had tried to stop this practice but to no avail. Shah Jahan not only issued order making such marriages unlawful henceforward, but ordered that these converted Muslim girls be taken away from their husbands, who in turn were to be fined. They could escape the fine if they accepted Islam. So widespread was this practice of converting Muslim girls to Hinduism that these orders discovered more than 4,000 such women.

Besides the measures Aurangzeb took for the purpose of reducing the number of the Hindus in the public services, many other restrictions were imposed on them. The pilgrimage tax was reimposed. Bernier tells us that at the time of an eclipse of the Sun three lakhs of rupees were paid to the state. Rupa Brahman offered to pay to the state Rs. 1 ,000 in a lump sum on behalf of the pilgrims visiting Pushkar (near Ajmer) in order to save them the indignity inflicted on them during the collection. This was accepted. The celebration of some religious festivals was stopped. The Holi ceased to be celebrated by imperial orders issued on 20 November, 1665. It was not a police order alone, promulgated for the purpose of keeping peace and order during the Holi days as Sir Jadu Nath Sarkar has suggested. Raja Bhim of Banera and Kishen Singh while serving in South India in 1692, made arrangements for the celebration of Holi. The censor tried to stop the celebration, but as Bhim and Kishen Singh were officers of high status, the censor’s attempts were of no use. He reported the matter to the emperor by whose order the celebrations were stopped. In 1704, 200 soldiers were placed at the disposal of the censor for the purpose of preventing the celebration of the Holi. Of course the emperor was not always able to stop the celebrations. In 1693 there was a riot in Agra during the celebrations and many persons were wounded. The celebration of Dipavali also was prohibited in 1665. In 1703 Hindus were not allowed to burn their dead on the banks of the river Sabarmati in Ahmedabad. An earlier order issued in 1696 had imposed similar restrictions with regard to the Jamuna in Delhi.

In a small village in the sarkar of Sirhind, a Sikh temple was demolished and converted into a mosque. An imam was appointed who was subsequently killed. Several other Sikh temples were also destroyed.

It is safe to hold, however, that Hindus were usually excluded from all high offices and were employed otherwise only when their employment was unavoidable.

About this time, on 14 April, 1692, orders were issued to the provincial governor and the district fojdar to demolish the temples at Rasulpur. In 1693, the Haitheswar temple at Bar Nagar in Gujarat was demolished.

In 1661 Aurangzeb in his zeal to uphold the law of Islam sent orders to his Viceroy of Bihar, Daud Khan, to conquer Palamau. In the military operations that followed many temples were destroyed signalizing the victories of the Mughal arms. Towards the end of the same year when Mir Jumla made a war on the Raja of Kuch Bihar, the Mughals destroyed many temples during the course of, their operations. Idols were broken and some temples were converted into mosques.

Aurangzeb contributed to the widening of this gulf between the Hindus and the Muslims further by ordering on 19 November, 1702 that “no Hindu in the army was to employ Muslim servants…“

Sankar, a messenger, was sent to demolish a temple near Sheogaon. He came back after pulling it down on 20 November, 1693. In. April, 1694, it was reported to the emperor that the imperial censor had tried to prevent public idol worship in Jaisinghpura near Aurangabad. The Vairagi priests of the temple were arrested but were soon rescued by the Rajputs.

But Aurangzeb did not confine his iconoclastic activities to the warring states alone. Orders were given to demolish Hindu temples in the friendly state of Jaipur as well. An imperial agent, Abu Tarab, was sent for this purpose and he set about his task with a thoroughness that soon produced a panic. Most of the temples he was able to destroy easily, but there was some opposition in one temple. Certain Rajputs assumed positions there wherefrom they could easily deal with the masons who were sent to demolish the temple. The imperial agents had soon to beat a retreat. The officer in charge of the party thereupon complained to the Raja’s officials- A fojdar was asked to accompany the imperial agent to insure that the imperial officials were not molested in their task of pulling down the temple. There was a skirmish between the soldiers accompanying the fojdar and the Rajputs in the temple. Not before all the Rajputs had been killed was it possible for the imperial agent to destroy the temple. Abu Tarab reached the court on 10 August, 1680, and reported that he had demolished as many as sixty-six temples in Amber.** A letter from one Bhagwan Das to Raja Ram Singh written probably about this time tells us of the destruction of Karor (?) temple in Amber by Dalair, an imperial messenger.

He stopped public worship at the Hindu temple of Dwarka.

The years that followed his defeat and reconciliation with Jahangir did not bring the father and the son much closer together. Shah Jahan did not, however, raise the standard of ‘Islam in danger' against his father, and when he succeeded him in 1627, he had no religious commitments. But unlike his father and grandfather, he married no Hindu princess, and thus that mellowing influence was lacking in his harem.

Another method of conversion to Hinduism was also stopped. Though Akbar had discontinued the practice of making slaves of prisoners of war, it seems to have been too deep-rooted to disappear so easily. It had now revived. These slaves were publicly sold to bidders or retained by the soldiers. Shsh Jahan now issued an order that Muslim prisoners of war were not to be sold to the Hindus as slaves. Hindu soldiers were also forbidden from enslaving Muslims.

Aurangzeb destroyed the temples at Mayapur (Hard war) and Ayodhya. ‘All of them are thronged ' with worshippers, even those that are destroyed are all venerated by the Hindus and visited by the offering of alms.

In short, Jahangir ordinarily continued Akbar’s toleration. He experimented in the simultaneous maintenance of several religions by the State. ... With all this, Jahangir sometimes acted as protector of the true faith rather than as the king of a vast majority of non-Muslims. Departures, however slight, from Akbar’s wide outlook had begun.