By Duncan Greenleese
THE HINDUS: Over stupid petty dynastic and personal quarrels, the peoples of India, Hindu, Buddhist and Jain, put up a very poor defense against the ruthless, hardy and energetic invaders from the Muslimised Middle East.
In each province a few battles, a few secret betrayals were enough; indigenous rulers were replaced by Muslims, temples by mosques, the Puranas by the Quran. This on the national scale, but of course countless mil lions of Hindus retained their own religion, at a price, and under the shadow of the conqueror lived lives which were little more than slayery.
They practiced their Hindu rites and social customs on sufferance and were liable at any moment to have them interrupted, forbidden on pain of death. Many whose names history has not recorded died rather than tum false to the faith of their fathers; millions more found religion sits less heavy on their hearts, so that they embraced Islam, and in later years covered the name of that noble religion with shame for the atrocities they committed on their brothers who stood firm.
Hinduism, as it was then understood, taught nonresistance, turned the eyes of its believers to a future betterment in Swarga, and so led them to indifference about the miseries of life on earth. Only the Brahmins were allowed to study Scriptures written Sanskrit, and they neglected their duty to teach the spiritual realities to the masses, who sank into the most pitiable slough of superstition and materialism.
Religion for them became a mere matter of special ways of eating, drinking, bathing, painting the forehead with caste marks, marrying and disposing of the corpse. Where the local Muslim authorities were tolerant, or contemptuous enough, they were allowed to worship their idols and perform their pilgrimages giving liberally to the ignorant and lazy Brahmins who presided at these functions; where they were permitted, they even rebuilt their temples or went in procession to the holy places like Kasi or Pandharpur. The Brahmins themselves were satisfied with learning their mantras by heart, so that they might earn a living by reciting them; they cared little or nothing for the meaning, nor did they attempt to live according to their precepts and ideals.
Thus the people were ignorant and indifferent, their Priests selfish and careless; both alike were sunk in mean ingles rites and superstitions. Under the outer forms of various sects all spirituality was buried deeply many found useful, while in their hearts keeping a certain sentimental attachment to their ancestral religion, to con form outwardly with that of the conqueror, adopting Muslim dress, even attending the mosques and repeating the Muslim creed in public, so as to secure immunity from poll tax and persecution alike, and open the door to their own social and financial advancement for it was all but impossible for a loyal Hindu to gain worthy employment at that time or to hold offices about the court.
As the Muslims treated them, so the upper castes in tum treated the sudras and untouchables; they had no swords or the right to slay at will, but they murdered them with hatred, contempt and social exclusion. Even a saint like Tulsidas was not above referring to sudras as men whom even the highest virtues could not raise, and other saints like Ravidas and Kabir accepted their own up liftment in social life as exceptional, making little attempt to raise others of their own caste along with themselves. So utterly were the Hindus degraded that they were the prey to self-abasement and servility, had lost all self-respect and faith in their gods, and most of them being deprived by caste rules of the right to bear arms they had all but lost that natural manliness which alone could promise a better future. One half even of the higher castes was also held down by contempt and dislike; women were held down by contempt and dislike; women were held definitely inferior and could not attain to salvation or enter heaven till they had been reborn as men; they were considered to be sensual, natural tempters and spoilers of men’s spiritual life of which the first condition was their total renouncement. Thus the few who still looked for spirituality naturally turned away from society, and entered the forests or took to purposeless wandering; a few have “meditated” during their travels, but most were idle tramps and fell into evil ways and many vices.
Yes, it was an unhappy age for the heirs of the Buddha and Sankara, and the devotees of Vishnu. Politically the state of the people was miserable almost beyond belief. The Emperors at Delhi cared little or nothing for their welfare; most of them held that Hindus were created to be the slaves of Muslim believers and that their house holds might be freely broken up to satisfy the demands of lust. Nanak himself tells us that in his days “the kings had become butchers and cannibals, official dogs that licked the blood and devoured the flesh of the people in their power; there was none to protect the honor of the weak or the women. All was falsehood, and religion had flown away from such horrors as it beheld when Babar came to India”. Most people sank under the burden of misery into a pessimistic resignation, but it stung Nanak into even challenging God for tolerating such brutalities (cf. N. Asa 39: 12).
Nor did things improve under the Moghul rule. There may have been great splendors at court, lovely buildings like the Taj may have been built to delight the eyes of later tourists but they were built with mortar moistened with the blood and tears of the people. Ruthless taxation, the farming out of all lands to contractors who fleeced the people to the utmost so as to get enough for their own profits and for the heavy bribes which secured the privilege for the future, corruption and disorder everywhere rampant, the country a prey to brutal murders and dacoits, desolated by cruelty, wastefulness and vice, honors and places freely bought and sold, the rulers sunk in luxury and vicious debauchery.
Terrible famines swept the land, like that of 1630 which destroyed Tukaram’s family, irrigation was totally neglected, dynastic wars and rebellions were incessant, and travel was excessively unsafe and perilous. Such is the picture of the life Hindus lived under the Afghan and Moghul tyrants.
The Muslims
Nor were the Muslims themselves much happier. They were excessively intolerant and fanatical, to such an extent that Alud din would allow Hindus to keep only enough corn and coarse cloth for six months; the common folk were totally ignorant of their own religion, their Mullas being in no way more spiritual or religious than the Brahmins of their neighbors, and ignoring both the principles of the Quran and all the humane laws of the Shaniat. They throve on the self-assertion which their own brutality had made possible for them, regarded the non-Muslims as existing solely for their own pleasure as slaves, or worse, and so themselves degenerated swiftly. Their few saints imitated the Hindus in withdrawing from society for the most part into the forests, where they could live in peace undisturbed by the cruelties which devastated the “word”. Muslims too looked upon women as playthings for their own lusts, as little better than toys or animals; intense distrust of them made them imprison them in rooms away from sunlight and fresh air, letting them go out only under escort and disfigured with the hideous black veil (burqa), When a daughter was born to a family it was looked upon as a dreadful calamity, so infanticide, strictly forbidden by the Quran became quite common among them too, and it is even said that the practice of sati was not unknown among them in the days of Jahangir.
Religion in the Wilderness
When Elijah complained the he alone was faithful to God he was told that there were yet many, unknown to him, who had not bowed to evil. So even in those dreadful days there were still men, a few, who came out of a society which they felt incurable in order to live lives of dedication and prayer to God. Such a life was all but impossible in the towns, save for the very few who were strong enough and brave enough to fight at every stage. But in the gloomy picture we have just seen we must not forgettoadd the sunlight which came from Maharashtra where the saints of Vitthal, followers of Jnanadeva, Namdev and Ekanath, kept the saffron flag aloft; from Jujerat, where Narisingh Mehta was just finishing a glorious life of devotion to God in 1481; from Bengal, where Ghaitanya was about to be born from a saintly family into a life which is still the inspiration of crores of Hindus everywhere (14851533); from the Ganges plains, where Kabir had begun to stir the masses with a new feeling of devotion, hope and love; even from Andhra, where Vallabhacharya was awaiting the time to be born and to carry the fire through Western India (14791531).
So even before the Guru raised the standard of hope there were great trembling of as it were aspiration and desire: Advatacharya in far Navadwip was praying daily for an Avatar of God to save the people from the empty vanity of godless philosophers, the tyranny of their rulers, the slough of despond into which they had fallen. Here and there in the forests and lonely places, in little known valleys of the mountains, there were hermits and bands of seekers of God, who encouraged one another with hymns and strove by various logic ways to realize the truth. The Guru himself in his youth met many such and delighted in their company, which he could not have done had they all been hypocrites like the many. God was, it seems, preparing the Revival, and because India was so vast on one man could do the whole work, so He was sending one to each part of India. Men they were, not gods or avatars, though their followers naturally called many of them such; men like us, but tempered of a finer steel, purified by the fires of steady devotion lit with the torch of faithfulness and effort. To Punjab He sent Guru Nanak, when the hour has come and all was prepared.
The Guru’s Task
Out of this wretched, misery-trampled, hagridden peasantry the Guru had to build a nation of Self respecting men, devoted to God and to their Leader, filled with a sense of equality and brotherhood for all, ready to die, any, eager to die, as martyrs for their faith when opportunity allowed, and yet prepared to fight the tyrant with his own weapons in defense of the weak and to protect the righteous. The naturally law-abiding and peaceful Hindus had to be filled with courage, disciplined, and trained to use the sword and musket, where these were really required yet the Gurus never fought save in self defense, never raised the sword in anger, never forgot the noblest chivalry while fighting and looking to the future with hope and faith instead of the blind despair of accepting medley the effects of their Karmas of earlier lives. We are told that Nanak himself smelted the Hindu ore into steel by burning out the dross of hypocrisy and superstition; then Gobind Singh forged the sword of that steel.
(Continued
Article extracted from this publication >> December 1, 1989
