Our predilection for digging only the brighter pages of history to highlight the most striking and prettiest parts of an event and for formulating a fictitious sense of national pride is a trend precarious enough to stifle our moorings beyond imagination. It blocks our vision to proceed straight in life; kills out initiative to conquer challenges: constricts our conspectus to think positive and squeezes out onward march to an immeasurable extant.
It is equally dangerous to stick religiously to the darker side of a story and twist an event for nurturing communal, class or sectarian bias or for demonstrating emphatically the negative aspects of a historical period with a view to settle the scores and hurt the feelings of the community that has politically dominated in history. Such behaviour incarcerates us, beyond any doubt, pushes us towards a great dilemma; thereby, bewildering our perception of truth and legitimacy beyond proportion.
To illustrate this it is worthwhile to discern what underwent in history to paint Emperor Aurangzeb in shabby colours- an iconoclast, a proselytizer and anti-Hindu – and why and how facts were distorted to save from harm the interests of a particular class of people and guard their grungy and tattered character against public censure.
The Emperor was on a royal sojourn. Escorted by his Hindu rajas and their spouse, the ranis, the imperial entourage reached Banaras where the explicit desire and request of the womenfolk to pay their homage at the most revered temple of the holy city was cheerfully conceded to by the Emperor. However, on their return it was found that one woman had mysteriously disappeared from the temple white paying obeisance. This incident caused a great commotion in the regal retinue. Consequently, for her safe and speedy recovery the Emperor ordered a thorough search of the temple which did not, however, yield any positive result. Annoyed at this the Emperor himself lead a special squad to trace the rani who, it was subsequently learnt, had been forcibly pushed into a deep, spacious pit beneath the huge pedestal of the chief deity of the temple and callously dishonoured and repeatedly raped there; the main culprit being the head priest.
Too sacrilegious an act, as it was, it infuriated the Emperor so hugely that he instantaneously shifted the idol to some other place. Though the intention was to restore its sanctity and put a stop to such occurrences, this gesture of Emperor’s respect for Hinduism was not at all taken well by the all pervasive and powerful lobby of the Brahmans. They dreaded that the episode would expose the immorality of the Purohits and provoke tremendous public fury which might adversely affect the prospects of their livelihood. Thus, to protect their own vested interest and secure their survival they lost no time to misinterpret the episode and counter the noble move of royal benevolence by altering its circumference. They fabricated a story that the Emperor was fanatically determined to dishonour the idol by removing it from its original sacred location.
Apparently it was an insignificant Brahmanical mischief. But it played its ruse in history; sowing the seeds of ill-will between Hindus and Muslims and paving the way for laying a concrete base of two nation concept ultimately. Even today after an elapse of several centuries this communal chasm raises its ugly head every now and then not only to spill out immeasurable human blood but also to motivate contemporary wrıters to widen it further by cross fire of ideological shells.The magnitude of harm it causes to the delicate fabric of secular polity of modern times is plausibly huge.
Likewise attributing the carving of a long Bund stretching over an elongated patch of the lake waters and piercing through the heart of famous Dal,to serve as a pathway between Shehr-i- Khas and the Mughal gardens- to the dumping of entire Sanskrit literature of Kashmir in the yawning lake is a deliberate effort to malign its medieval period. It is implausible to imagine Kashmir to have ever been in such position to produce a gargantuan of hand written manuscripts sufficient enough to raise an extensive pathway across the deep Dal waters spreading over several Kilometres. It is not at all conceivable by human mind, only some magic could have done the trick. We cannot envisage such a possibility even today. And gathering together the entire literature of the subcontinent and bringing in use all the available technological devices for the purpose cannot oblige us to do the wonder. However, our writers are very “proficient to dream up such fairy tales to entertain the naive and the plebeian. By such fabrications they strive to satiate the obscurantist’s hunger and quench the thirst of the powers that be and, thus, widen the communal dichotomy to the determinant of the society.
There is no denying that dirty and filthy things of the past make many ears to prick up and bodies sway. But we need develop necessary courage, ethics and a rational approach to acknowledge brightness and darkness as objective realities of our lived and living life. Undoubtedly, such recognition will thoroughly strengthen us both morally and intellectually- to overcome all the challenges of our times. It will put us in a firm, fine mould to face joys and despairs as two inalienable facets of our existence and prevent us from being too high on sentiment. Also, it will enable us to strike a balance between the two to grasp adequately the true import of history which otherwise remains almost incomprehensible and obscure. As long as history’s beauties continue to be selectively treated in isolation and evaluated without any comparison with its ugliness the problem of misunderstanding facts or abusing them for purpose other than genuine remains there to destroy the civil society.
……concluded
Dr. Abdul Ahad is a well-known historian of Kashmir. He presents a perspective on the Kashmir issue and talks about Kashmir’s history and individuality and personality.
