Book Excerpt: Did British History Of The Norman Conquest Influence Lala Lajpat Rai's Views On Islamic Rule In India?

Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood. Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav. Penguin. Pages 800. Rs 896.

After 1915, Lajpat Rai moved in a different direction. In light of his new ‘Indian’ nationalist imagination, he felt the need to revisit and reinterpret the medieval Persianate period of India’s history. Rather than underscoring how the Hindu nation was actualized while resisting Muslim rule, this new historical narrative attempted to counter portrayals of Muslim rule as foreign and as a period marked by domination, oppression and antagonism.

The period of ‘Muslim rule’ was re-imagined as one involving socio-cultural interaction, political equality, religious tolerance and concord, and even exemplifying virtuous Indian self-governance. To be sure, in his account of India’s past in Young India, Lajpat Rai retained his earlier narrative of pre-Muslim ‘native’ Hindu rule.

He insisted that ‘the idea of universal sovereignty over the whole of India under one paramount power’ was known to Hindus; ‘Chandragupta, the Hindu’ had established a complex, modern administration in North India from Assam to Afghanistan, and under Ashoka ‘the whole country was consolidated under one imperial sway’. The two most famous Maurya kings—one likely Jain, and the other Buddhist—were incorporated into Rai’s narrative of Hindu rule.

Lajpat Rai also continued to deny narratives that interpreted ‘Muslim rule’ as implying the complete political defeat of Hindus, underscoring that the first three of six centuries of ‘Muslim rule’ remained confined to the North. Even when Akbar consolidated the whole country, fierce resistance was offered by the valiant Rana Pratap of Udaipur, who gained the sympathy of the ‘patriotic Hindus’ in Akbar’s court.

Writing of the Sikhs, Rajputs and Marathas in the eighteenth century, Lajpat Rai maintained that ‘Muslim supremacy was destroyed by the Hindus and not the British’. The insistence on ‘independent’ Hindu political rule in the South, ‘Hindu’ compassion for Rana Pratap’s resistance to Akbar, and the final Hindu challenge to Muslim authority continued his earlier attempts to bolster Hindu self-esteem, and maintained a distinction between Hindus and Muslims problematic for any attempt to construct for them a common ancestry or history as Indians.

However, Lajpat Rai qualified this discussion with elaborate intellectual manoeuvres aimed at indigenizing ‘Muslim’ rule (i.e., emphasizing its indigenous, non-foreign nature):

After annexing or subjugating significant parts of present-day Tajikistan, Iran and Iraq, Russia, Syria, Turkey and Egypt, the Central Asian conqueror Timur had invaded India and sacked Delhi in 1398–99, clashing with the Tughluqs of the Delhi sultanate, and destroying their power and prestige.

A little more than three centuries later, in 1739, the Persian warlord Nadir Shah would similarly sack Delhi, after defeating a Mughal army under Mohammad Shah, a post-Aurangzeb-era Mughal emperor. Then, in 1748, Ahmad Shah Abdali, the powerful Afghan warlord, raided North India, attacking Mughal governors as much as the Marathas.

Lajpat Rai was broadly correct when he clarified that these had been instances of non-Hindustani ‘Muslims’ attacking Hindustani ‘Muslim’ sultans. He was also largely correct in viewing the Mughals as Indian. Having appropriated much of India’s pre-Persianate culture, the Mughals had seen themselves as Hindustani kings and wished to be seen by others as such. And a similar desire to stress their nativity to their Hindustani homeland was also witnessed during the pre-Mughal Delhi Sultanate era.

Lajpat Rai drew on British history, specifically themes of the gradual amalgamation of the foreign Norman conquerors into Britain, to emphasize the eventual Indianization of the once-foreign Muslim invaders. Although propagated in a different century in a different context and for entirely different purposes, Lajpat Rai’s intellectual manoeuvres to underplay the conventional trope of ‘the Muslim conquest’ resembled attempts by English parliamentarians in the seventeenth century to downplay and legitimize the Norman conquest in 1066, and refute claims that the Normans had a relationship of pure domination over the Saxons.

This is virtually how Lajpat Rai now saw India’s Sultanate and Mughal emperors. Without suggesting direct influence, it is interesting to note the striking affinity between Lajpat Rai’s words and those of a seventeenth-century English politician–historian who asserted that ‘William did not conquer England: it was the English that had conquered William’.

In his 1918 review of Vincent Smith’s Akbar, Lajpat Rai endorsed Smith’s statement that while Akbar conquered India, ‘it cannot be denied that Akbar was also conquered by India’. Whether or not Smith was influenced by earlier British discourses, he used a remarkably similar language whilst writing about Akbar. Affirming Smith, Lajpat Rai was possibly indirectly influenced by diffused British discourses legitimizing the Norman conquest as he reinterpreted ‘Muslim’ rule in India.

Just as English parliamentarians had once underplayed the Norman conquest to limit the power of the monarch, just so Lajpat Rai now reinterpreted and minimized the significance of the ‘Muslim’ conquest by asserting the acquired indigeneity of Indian Muslims.