Sri Ram Sharma Quotes

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…“

He valiantly tried to replace Hindu public servants by Muslims wherever he could. [Newsletter dated July 27, 1703 records] “Twenty Hindu musketeers of the royal guards were dismissed to give place to Muslims on…“

Thus Aurangzeb deliberately worsened the position of the Hindus in the public services. Higher offices were closed to them ; the Muslims were openly preferred. A wholesale dismissal of the Hindus from the revenue department was attempted without much success.

Aurangzeb seemed to have followed a threefold policy with regard to the high Hindu mansabdars. There was a general reduction in the number of Hindus holding high mansabs. Hindus were not appointed to high executive office, nor called upon to discharge responsible military duties. Usually the heads of various hereditary houses were not given the same status as had been held by their predecessors. The petty officials could expect to fare no better. Various orders were passed to break the monopoly of the Hindus in the routine jobs in the revenue department and in the clerical establishment. There is a general order in the Kalimat-i-Ta'yyibat forbidding the employment of the Hindus, Then there is the order preserved in the Maasir-i-'Alamgiri and Muntakhih-id-Luhah forbidding the employment of the Hindus in the revenue department and as personal assistants to various executive heads. An attempt was made to enforce these orders.

When Sarmad, a famous Sufi, came to Delhi from Hyderabad towards the end of Shah Jahan’s reign, DSra Shikoh had sought his company and paid him many marks of respect. But when Aurangzeb came to the throne, the things took a different turn. Sarmad cried out ‘whoever gained the knowledge of His secret became able to annihilate distance. The Mulla says that the Prophet ascended to the heavens, Sarmad declares that the heavens came down to the Prophet’. The Mullas now found their opportunity. But Sarmad did not deny the ascension of the Prophet. Aurangzeb sent the chief Qazi to Sarmad to question him about his nudity. Sarmad explained it by declaring that the devil had the upper hand. His answer was so worded as to offend the theo- logian by a pun on his name. But this in itself was not enough. Sarmad was summoned to the royal court and asked to repeat the whole of the Muslim creed . Sarmad went so far as to declare that there is no God. When asked to repeat the rest he said his realization went no further. He could now be easily condemned . When the executioner brought forth his axe for his hateful task, Sarmad welcomed it crying ‘I know You in whatever form You care to come’ and embraced death like a martyr. His contemporaries associated many miracles with his death and his tomb is still venerated as that of a great saint

It is not wholly true to say that Shah Jahan’s reign was a prelude to what followed under Aurangzeb. Much of what his successor did constituted a vote of censure on Shah Jahan for failing to do, in its entirety, what the Muslim law and tradition demanded of a Muslim king. It is true that the five years from the sixth to the tenth of his reign gave the Hindus a foretaste of what might happen if the Mughal throne happened to be filled by an orthodox king who insisted on following in their entirety the contemporary Muslim practices. Shah Jahan — despite the praises showered on him by his court poets and annalists — was never consistently or for long a persecutor. Towards the end of his reign, we actually find him restraining the religious zeal of Aurangzeb and overriding him in many important matters. It must, however, be admitted that Akbar’s ideal of a comprehensive state’, was gradually being lost sight of, although only partially.

To sum up, Shah Jahan was a more orthodox king than his two predecessors. During the sixth to tenth years of his reign he embarked upon the active career of a persecuting king. Several orders were issued during these years for the purpose of achieving his end. New temples were destroyed, conversions were stopped, several Hindus were persecuted for religious reasons, and probably the pilgrimage tax was reimposed. Soon however his religious zeal seems to have spent itself. Shah Jahan’s ardour as a great proselytizing king cooled down when he discovered in the heir-apparent, and his deputy in many state affairs, a religious toleration equalling that of his grandfather Akbar. Of course the discontinuance of certain court ceremonies which smacked of Hindu practices was permanent.

As Shah Jahan made apostasy criminal, he took similar measures to enforce the Muslim penal code in connexion with other religious crimes as well. Blasphemy was once again made a criminal offence. A Hindu who was alleged to have behaved disrespectfully towards the Quran was executed. Ghhaila, a Brahman and provincial qSnungo of Berar, lost his head because he was similarly accused of disrespectful language towards the Prophet. While Aurangzeb was Viceroy of Gujarat, Raju, a Sayyid holding heretic views, was first expelled from Ahmedabad and subsequently killed on his opposing the imperial officers sent in order to accomplish and hasten his departure.

But under Shah Jahan, apostasy from Islam had again become a capital crime. His order made conversions from among the Hindus easier and gave the state full power for keeping Muslims true to their faith. It is no wonder that this led to forcible conversion in times of war. When Shuja was appointed governor of Kabul, his assumption of office was accompanied by a ruthless war in the Hindu territory beyond the Indus. Shankar was the ruler of these tribes. During the war, sixteen sons and dependants of Hath were converted by force. The sword of Islam further yielded a crop of 5,000 new converts. Hindu temples were converted into mosques. Anyone showing signs of reverting to the faith of his forefathers was executed. The rebellion of JuJuhSr Singh yielded a rich crop of Muslim converts, mostly minors. His young son Durga and his grandson Durjan Sal were both converted to become Imam Qpli and ‘Ali Quli. Udai Bhan, his eldest son, when captured preferred death to Islam. Another son who was a minor was however converted. Most of the women had burnt themselves to death but such as were captured — probably slave girls or maids — were converted and distributed among Muslim mansabdars. When Pratap Ujjainya rebelled in the tenth year, one of his women was captured, converted to Islam and married to a grandson of Firoz Jang. The conquest of Beglana was followed by the conversion of Naharji’s son and successor who now became Daulatmand. Nasrat Jang converted a Brahman boy to Islam who, however, seemed to have resented it and killed his ‘benefactor’ while he lay asleep.

When, the Sikh Guru, Hargobind, took up his residence at Kiratpur in the Punjab, he succeeded in converting a large number of Muslims some time before 1645. In the words of Dabistana-Maznhib, not a Muslim was left between the hills near Kiratpur and the frontiers of Tibet and Khotan. The Mughals conquered Kiratpur in 1645 and it is possible they might have made some efforts at reconverting the people. But the Muslim chroniclers are silent about the fate of any such attempt.

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.

In his tenth year Shah Jahan discovered that his orders had not completely stopped this source of conversion to Hinduism. Dalpat, a Hindu of Sirhind, had converted a Muslim girl, Zinab, given her the Hindu name, Ganga, and brought up their children as Hindus. He had also converted one Muslim boy and six Muslim girls (his own) to Hinduism. The emperor was now exasperated by this persistence and defiance of his orders. To put a stop to this practice and warn all future transgressors of the law, Dalpat’s wife and children were taken away from him. He was sentenced to death by dismemberment with the option that he could save himself by becoming a Muslim. Dalpat, however, was made of the stuff of which martyrs are made and he flatly refused the offer. He was cruelly done to death.

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.

Shah Jahan thus reverted to the practice of systematically desecrating the religious shrines of rebel chiefs and enemies. He also tried to enforce the Muslim injunction against new place of worship being built by non-believers. But it seems that his fury did not last long. Though in general terms some of the chroniclers of the reign remember the emperor as the destroyer of temples, no more specific cases find mention in the later part of his reign. Probably due to Dara’s increasing influence we find Shah Jahan reversing this policy. The prince presented a stone railing to the temple of Kesho Rai at Mathura. A letter written during the year a.d. 1643-44 (1053 a.h.) to Jai Singh, Raja of Jaipur, conceded to him full liberty to appoint the presiding priest at the temple of Brindaban built by Man Singh. Man Singh’s mother had died in Bengal and by a letter dated August, 1639, Shah Jahan granted two hundred digkas of land to be attached to her mausoleum in order to ensure its upkeep. The restoration of their temples to the Hindus of Gujarat, however, took place after 1647.