History of Hinduism
|
Hinduism,
remains a vibrant, cultural and religious force in the world
today.
To understand Hinduism, it is necessary that we
examine its history and marvel at its sheer stamina to survive in
spite of repeated attacks across India's borders, time and again, by
Greeks, Shaks, Huns, Arabs, Pathans, Mongols, Portuguese,
etc.
India gave shelter, acceptance, and freedom to all. But, in
holy frenzy, millions of Hindus were slaughtered or proselytized.
Their cities were pillaged and burnt, temples were destroyed and
accumulated treasures of centuries carried off. Even under grievious
persecutions from the ruling foreigners, the basics of its
civilization remained undefiled and, as soon as the crises were over
Hindus returned to the same old ways of searching for the perfection
or the unknown. |
Two Chapters in India's history are most noted for
its atrocities against Hinduism:
1. Islamic Onslaught
2. European
Imperialism
1. Islamic Onslaught:
An event of
immense and lasting impact in Indian history was the advent of the Muslims in
the north-west. Lured by tales of the fertile plains of the Punjab and the
fabulous wealth of Hindu temples, Mahmud of Ghazni first attacked India in 1000
AD. Other raiders from Central Asia followed him. Hindus never forgot the
repeated destruction of the Somnath Temple, the massacre of Buddhists at
Nalanda, or the pogroms of the Mughals. Hindus gallantly resisted, knowing full
well that defeat would mean a choice of economic discrimination via the jaziya
tax on non-Muslims, forced conversion, or death. It is no wonder that the
residents of Chittor, and countless other people over the length and breadth of
Bharat, from present-day Afghanistan to present-day Bangladesh, thought it
better to die gloriously rather than face cold-blooded
slaughter.
Francois
Gautier in his book - Rewriting Indian History
"Let it be said right away: the massacres perpetrated by
Muslims in India are unparalleled in history, bigger than the holocaust of the
Jews by the Nazis; or the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks; more extensive
even than the slaughter of the South American native populations by the invading
Spanish and Portuguese."
Alain Danielou in "Histoire de la Inde
"
From the time Muslims started
arriving, around 632 AD, the history of India becomes a long, monotonous series
of murders, massacres, spoilations, destructions. It is, as usual, in the name
of 'a holy war' of their faith, of their sole God, that the barbarians have
destroyed civilizations, wiped out entire
races."
Will Durant, the well-known
American historian says in The Story of Civilization:
"...the Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest
story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that
civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex order and freedom can at
any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplying
from within." Almost all the Muslims of South Asia are descendants of
weaker elements of the population who had succumbed to forcible Islamic
conversion.
2. European era.
India's first major contact began when
Vasco de Gama landed with gunboat and priests. The newcomers were not only
merchants but also devout Christians. They had the Pope's mandate to convert
heathens in the lands they conquered. They found that the natives had a
flourishing religion of their own. They destroyed their temples. Within decades
of their occupation of small coastal parts, they had destroyed, according to
their own records, 601 temples in 131 villages -- all important Christian Orders
taking part in this pious work. Franciscan friars destroyed 300 Hindu temples in
Bardez, Jesuits 280 in Salsete. St. Francis Xavier, who participated in this
meritorious work, wrote back home:
"As soon as I arrived in
any heathen village, when all are baptized, I order all the temples of their
false gods to be destroyed and all the idols to be broken to pieces. I can give
you no idea of the joy I feel in seeing this done."
Hindus got some relief from this active
religious persecution when the British came. But they too had powerful
missionary lobby of their own whose aims were no different from the Portuguese
missions. Though the missions were not allowed to apply their usual strong arm
methods, they were free to propagate their religion. Their aim was conversion of
heathens to the true faith, and to that end they began to attack Hinduism in
different ways. They attacked it for having too many Gods while none of them was
the right Biblical one. They attacked it for being idolatrous. They attacked all
its leading ideas -- karma, incarnation, moksha, compassion for all beings,
etc.
The attack on the Hindu religion was
supported by attack on people and society. Hindu rites, customs, were all evil,
and their morals and manners even worse, if that were possible. They looked
forward to a Christian India in a not-too-distant future. In the beginning, it
was hard to preach their doctrines in India. Because India had a prosperous,
evolved civilization, complete with a vast recorded history, a comprehensive
system of philosophy, art, science, and healthcare, and humane methods for
disseminating knowledge.
Sir W.M. Williams, a Sanskritist with
great missionary sympathies, prophesied,
"When the walls of the
mighty fortress of Brahminism are encircled, undermined and finally stormed by
the soldiers of the Cross, the victory of Christianity must be signal and
complete."
The colonial administrator was not
unsympathetic to the missionary attack. He knew that Hinduism was India's
definition at its deepest and also its principle of unity and regeneration and
unless this principle was attacked, India could not be successfully ruled.
Hinduism also upheld India and its political struggle. A people who had lost
pride in themselves, and were demoralized, were welcome to him.
Colonial
scholars reinforced the missionary attack by their own from another angle. They
taught that India was not one country, that it was a miscellany of people, that
it had never known independence, that it had always been under the rule of
foreign invaders.This is where the Aryan Invasion Theory came into existence.
Their future native pupils learned their lesson well and even outdid their
teachers. They were to find in these invaders the main principle of their
country's renewal and civilization. To account for the common origin of
Indo-European languages, several nineteenth-century European scholars
hypothesized that in ancient times an invasion of India from Europe, by a people
who spoke the original Indo-European language -- an "Aryan" invasion
-- must have occurred.
In typical Eurocentric arrogance, they
assumed, without any evidence, that the Aryans came from outside India.
Principal among these "scholars" were Max Muller and Monier-Williams,
both committed to denigrating India's cultural heritage in order to persuade
Indians to convert to Christianity.
In picking a date for the supposed Aryan
invasion of India by a supposed race of people, Rajaram writes: "Muller was
strongly influenced by a current Christian belief that the creation of the world
had taken place at 9:00 a.m. on 23 October 4004 BC. Assuming the date of 4004 BC
for the creation of the world, as Muller did, leads to 2448 BC for the biblical
Flood. If another thousand years is allowed for the waters to subside and for
the soil to get dry enough for the Aryans to begin their invasion of India, we
are left at around 1400 BC. Adding another two hundred years before they could
begin composing the Rig Veda brings us right to Muller's date of 1200 BC... he
used a ghost story from Somadeva's Kathasaritasagara to support this
date."
In a letter to his wife, Max Muller
wrote:
"This edition of mine and
the translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent... the fate of
India, and on the growth of millions of souls in that country. It is the root of
their religion, and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, the only way of
uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3000
years."
Muller's purpose was to uproot Hinduism. I would
simply like to note that a lot of ideas have become fixed because Max Mueller
was a devout Christian, who believed existence started in 3760 BC or so, as all
devout Christians of his time (and ours, too) did and do. When you have an
authority who is so constrained by virtue of his dogma, assertions upon dating
of pre-historical matters become questionable.
The rulers had a clear
motive, a clear goal. They wanted an India which had no identity, no vision of
its own, no native class of people respected for their leadership. They were to
be replaced as far as it lay in their power by a new class of intellectuals.
Meanwhile, the concerted attacks succeeded. They were internalized, and we made
them our own. There came a crop of "reformers" who wanted India to
change to the satisfaction of its critics. Above all, there appeared a class of
Hindu-hating Hindus who knew all the "bad things" about Hinduism.
Earlier invaders ruled through the sword. The British ruled through
Indology.
Prior to
the nineteenth century, it was piously believed in western civilization that the
earth was created in seven days around 5,000 years ago. These ethnocentric
blinders that some western thinkers unconsciously wear before venturing into the
past have resulted in the tunnel vision view of history as we know it today. The
western tradition of writing history may be traced to the Judeo-Christian
scriptures wherein one group of people writes about the people outside that
group. The Hindus do not think of time in linear terms with a beginning and an
end. Rather, they think in terms of great cycles of thousands and millions of
years.
In conclusion, it can be said that ( the 19th century European scholars)
their work often reflects the bias of their times; the imperialism, materialism
and Christian missionary spirit, the tendency to look down upon Asia and its
culture as inferior, to even blame the spiritual traditions of Hinduism and
Buddhism for the political decline of these cultures.
Atrocities committed in the name of Religion by the Christian
Missionaries in Goa.
Paul Williams Robert says in his book "Empire of the
Soul": The Spread of Christianity in
Goa:
"In the wake of the warriors
came the priests. First, the Franciscans, then the Jesuits, then the Dominicans,
and lastly the Augustinians. It must have made their holy blood boil to find
their old foes, the Muslims and Jews openly and brazenly practicing their
religions. The men of God set about clearing what the Dominican termed this
"jungle of unbelief" with the ardor of Amazon lumber barons. Just like
the mullahs who had marched into Goa two hundred years before with the Bahamani
sultans, these Catholic clergy were prepared to go to any lengths to spread
their faiths. Initially they pestered the Portuguese king for special powers,
then they pestered the Pope to pester the king on their behalf.
The first
of these special powers arrived in 1540 when the viceroy received authority to
"destroy all Hindu temples, not leaving a single one in any islands, and to
confiscate the estates of these temples for the maintenance of the churches
which are to be erected in their places. Five years later, the Italian cleric
Father Nicolau Lancilotto reported that "not a single temple to be seen on
the island."
The island in question was Teeswadi, the main field of
operations for the two priestly orders then on the scene. A glance at the absurd
profusion of churches standing cheek by jowl in Old Goa still conveys some idea
of the spiritual excesses indulged in by these competing orders of the
day.
This Olympiad of
Christianization scared the hell out of the locals, and thousands of family fled
across the river. To them, the harshness of the Moghuls still governing the
adjacent territories must have been preferable to the rabid monomania of papist
clerics. A saying still exist in Konkani, the language of Goa:
"Hanv polthandi
vaitam" ( I'm leaving for the other bank ), one half of its double
meaning implying to this day that a person is rejecting
Christianity.
Although their temples had been razed. The Hindus who remained
continued to practice their religion in secret. More extreme methods were
therefore instituted to bring the heathen into the church's loving embrace.
Hindu festivities were forbidden; Hindu priests were forbidden from entering
Goa; makers of idols were severely punished; public jobs were given only to
Christians. Soon it was announced that anyone practicing in private was declared
a crime. The penalty was confiscation of property. Also Hindus, dying without a
male heir could pass their estates only to relative who had embraced
Christianity.
Death was no easier than life for Hindus in mid-sixteenth-century
Goa. To them, the cruelest piece of legislation passed by the Portuguese
prohibited cremation of the dead - an inviolably sacred part of Hindu faith. As a
result, death had to be kept a secret; the wailing grief of the women had to be
smothered; family members had to go about their business as if nothing had
happened; children were sent out to play, washing was done, work was performed -
all as usual. In the dead of the night, a boat would be loaded with firewood
down on the riverbank, then the dead body would be placed on it, covered by more
wood. The pyre would be set alight and the boat pushed out to drift on the
river's currents as the funeral party ran back into the safety of shadows. The
missionaries simply could not grasp that another people's faith could be as
dearly cherished as deeply embedded as their own. The missionaries obviously had
no idea how resilient Hinduism could be, and indeed is. It had survived Islam's
scimitar, and it would survive the sword that so much resembled the cross in
whose service it was now employed. Total of 200 temples had been
demolished.
Says Andre Corsalli to Giuliano de Medici Jan 6,
1516
"In a small island near this,
called Divari, the Portuguese, in order to build the city, have destroyed an
ancient temple... which was built with marvelous art and
with ancient figures wrought to the greatest perfection, in a certain black
stone, some of which remain standing, ruined and shattered, because these
Portuguese care nothing about them. If I can come by one of these shattered
images, I will send it to your Lordship, that you may perceive how much in old
times sculpture was esteemed in every part of the
world."
To the non-Christians, there are many aspects
of Christianity that are perplexing and, in some instances, downright bizarre.
The Church decided the best way of resolving these problems would be to start a
reign of terror to frighten the savages into submission. It set up a kind of
tribunal. The palace in which these holy terrorists ensconced thmeselves
was locally known as the Vodlem gor - The Big House. It became the symbol of
fear. Ceremonies were conducted behind closed doors. People in the street often
heard screams of agony piercing the night. Here are some gruesome
details:
"Children were flogged and
slowly dismembered in front of their parents, whose eyelids had been sliced off
to make sure they missed nothing. Extremities were amputated carefully, so that
a person could remain conscious even when all that reamined was torso and head.
Male genitals were removed and burned in front of wives, breasts hacked off and
vaginas penetrated by swords while husbands were forced to
watch."
So notorious was the
Inquisition in Portuguese India that word of its horrors even reached
home.
To conclude, while
the non-Europeans, in holy frenzy, slaughtered millions of Hindus and
proselytized a large number in the then India from Baluchistan to Bengal and
carried their accumulated treasures of centuries and the women population for
sale, the European with their subtle and crafty ways just conquered the whole of
India by sucking out more wealth than all their predecessors had done together
by brute force.
Lamenting this bloodiest story in history,
Will Durant advises peace living people never to trust the barbarians again and
be always prepared to pay the price of
civilization.
Did You
Know?
Law of Gravity:
In the Surya Siddhanta,
dated 400-500 A.D. the ancient Hindu astronomer Bhaskaracharya states,
"Objects fall on the Earth due to a force of attraction by the earth.
Therefore, the earth, planets, constellation, moon, and sun are held in orbit
due to this force." Approximately 1200 years later Isaac Newton
rediscovered this phenomenon and called it the Law of
Gravity!
The World's first university
was established in Takshila in 700 BC. More than
10,500 students from all over the world studied more than 60 subjects. The
University of Nalanda built in the 4th century CE was one of the greatest
achievements of ancient India in the field of education. Buddha visited Nalanda
several times during his lifetime. The Chinese scholar and traveller Hiuen Tsang
stayed here in the 7th century, and has left an elaborate description of the
excellence, and purity of monastic life practised here. About 2,000 teachers and
10,000 students from all over the Buddhist world, lived and studied in this
international university.
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