Part I: Chapter 18

INTER-FACE BETWEEN HINDUISM AND ISLAM - A MISCONCEPTION

Bamzai and Bazaz have waxed eloquent on the positive aspects of the inter-action between Hinduism and Islam in Kashmir. The analyses that they have offered to buttress their thesis are a pack of cliches and platitudes, which conventional historians take a resort to in utter contravention of historical facts and verities. Their thesis prima facie fails to hold out because of the fact that outside Muslims, so called dervishes of Bamzai and religious humanists of Bazaz encountered a powerful, well-entrenched and articulate religious and philosophical tradition and history in Kashmir, which they being intellectually too lay never understood nor did they endeavour to comprehend and delve deep into it to facilitate their proselytising campaigns and activities. Hindus, to them, appeared pinning their faith in all sorts of incompatible maze of ideas and beliefs, thus doling out an impression of not one religion, but multiple sects and religions harbouring the same name-tag. The varied strata and tenets of Hinduism were too profound for them, which, they only denigrated and straightaway rejected in a sheer snarl of contempt and indifference. The psychology of total decimation and demolition of material manifestations of Hindu culture and civilisation was born of blind negation on part of Muslims.

Not only in the beginnings, but even after the entrenchment of Muslim domination in Kashmir, not a single discernible attempt was made to discover Kashmir and its sum-total of heritage. Most of the segments of human activity especially aesthetic in essence and nature were heretical and therefore forbidden fields for the where they dared not tread and had no history, cultivation and capacity to tread. The processes of inter-face get generated in discovering ideas and beliefs and their raison dinette, which, when interpreted and debated, inter-mingle with diverse paradigms, approaches and premises giving rise to a new pattern. In Kashmir the pattern never came into being because Islam globally has a history of spurning and rejecting the roots of the countries where the citizens are unable and forbidden to own and appreciate a pyramid, a Martand or a statue of Buddha in deep meditation. Muslims from outside Kashmir lacking in the spirit of quest had very weak and infirm intellectual and cultural instrumentalities and traditions and did not penetrate through query and quest the solid monolith of Hindu-Buddhist-vaishnavite thought amalgam but brutally vandalised and demolished the whole baffling monolith. They burnt and destroyed books but never wrote a single treatise on Hindu thought and its underlying principles even from a highly critical point of view. How many of them learnt Sanskrit and interpreted Sanskrit works on varied branches of learning and religion. Forced Conversion admittedly are not a feature and cardinal principle of Christianity and that is why the Christian erudites assiduously learnt Sanskrit as the idiom of Indian culture and thought process and probed to know and discover the past of India to enable them to persuade, not force and coerce, the Hindus to accept Christianity with its allied tenets and precepts with a view to humanising them as per their colonial parlance.

What has, in reality, misled Bamzai and Bazaz into sponsoring a thesis of inter-face between Hinduism and Islam is the non-purge and retention of Hindu practices, attitudes and rituals by the Muslims even after they were tortured and coerced to accept Islam. The neo-converts to Islam had miserably suffered two defeats, one that they as Hindus were politically discomfited and even as converts to Islam were kept away as untouchables and hatefuls from sharing and tasting the fruits and privileges of power on an equal footing with the outside Muslim masters in corridors of power and secondly they were forcibly converted to Islam and thus smarted under a deep sense of guilt and schizophrenia. The twin defeats forced them to fall back upon and seek a re-affirmation of their identity which, though severely threatened and lost, could be provided and reinforced only by sticking fast to the practices they were habituated and inured to and in their quest of identity Lal Ded with her Indian thought and spirit grew and emerged into a symbol of that identity and Nund Rishi despite his abominable conversionary activities as the perpetuator of the same identity. It appears intriguing that Nund Rishi professing Islamic faith was not very enthusiastic about and dragged his feet from accepting the spiritual superiority of a Sayyid and contributed to a large measure in generating a psyche that led to a tremendous upsurge against the Sayyids, who had brutally spearheaded and sponsored Islamisation of Kashmir and slaughter of Hindus. The Rishi-cult undoubtedly embedded in the Hindu heritage of Kashmir in spite of its erratic deviations from the mainstream throve on the preservation of the indigenous ethos of Kashmir, thus establishing that the Muslims conquered only the body of India (Kashmir-mind) the soul of which is ever defiant and invincible.

Inter-action as such is a matter of two-way traffic and the Muslims with nothing to offer were never a party to this inter-action. If Muslims in the words of Sir Walter Lawrence have not abandoned the Hindu religion of Kashmir and Hindu practices that never denotes and connotes mutual traffic and inter-action. It only signals failure of Islam in Kashmir as it was unable to provide and invest the neo-converts with an alternate culture-model uncompromising Islamic tenets and precepts.