Delhi to Gujarat, outsiders blamed in riots, but most victims know attackers In the Delhi riot of 1729, the kazi, who was aligned with the older Shia nobility, were attacked by Punjabi Muslim shoe-sellers, protected by the Rohilla Afghans. Again, in the anti-British riot of 1816 in Bareilly, Hindu urban and commercial men joined the revolt of Maulvi Mahomed Ewaz, a strict Naqushbandi Sunni with connections to Delhi, pledging to fight for both endangered religions.Ĭlearly, these conflicts are better understood as sectarian rather than communal, because they were partial, local, issue-centric and as often intra-religious as inter-religious, very different from how communalism appears today.Īlso read: Kejriwal is wrong. The Rohilla Afghan rulers of the 18th-century states northeast of Delhi, even though they had a military alliance with Kutheir Rajputs, became orthodox Sunni activists and were often blamed for causing disturbances. But those were mostly led by newly demilitarised mercenaries like Afghans and Abyssinians and new arrivals seeking to replace the established Irani and Turani nobility. There were several religious conflicts in the 1720s in the city.
This in addition to the fact that the Satnamis themselves practised mixed Hindu and Muslim rituals of devotion.
The Satnami war against Aurangzeb at the borders of Delhi, despite being glossed today as a conflict between a fanatic Muslim emperor and pious, hardworking Hindu peasants, had equally to do with caste protest against aristocratic landlords and peasant protest against state taxation. Nor were these conflicts purely religious. There certainly were scattered instances of religious strife, but neither all Muslims nor all Hindus were involved in them as well defined or clearly bounded totalities.
Riots in India in 17 th and 18 th centuriesĭespite being a major centre of purist revivalism of Shah Waliullah and Shah Abdul Aziz and home to wealthy, pious and vegetarian Hindu and Jain traders, with a Jain temple right next to the Red Fort, Delhi was relatively free of Hindu-Muslim tension throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. The rest is a well-known story, with medieval India being painted by both the British and Indian nationalists, as a dark age, notwithstanding Hindustani music or Mughal cuisine or Brajbhasha poetry or Urdu ghazal or indeed the elegant salwar kameez, none of which would have been imaginable without Persian and Arabic influence.Īlso read: Why Delhi riots are different - what ThePrint’s 13 reporters, photojournalists saw on ground And the British unsurprisingly disguised their conquests as a war for the liberation of Hindus from Muslim despotism and the setting up of, ironically, the rule of law. When the British came to India, the Mughals were still ruling. But these disputes did not constitute ‘communalism’. There are also occasional instances of banning of cow killing, including interestingly by Muslim rulers, from Akbar down to Farrukhsiyar, destruction of mosques and temples and local quarrels over right to street processions during Holi or Muharram. Just as there are innumerable instances in Indian history of Hindu and Muslim rulers patronising each other’s religious traditions and of ordinary people assuming Hindu-Muslim mixed identities, there are also many records of religious disputes, between Hindus and Buddhists, Shias and Sunnis, Mughals and Satnamis, Brahmans and Nathpanthis and so on. To say this does not require us to say that there were no conflicts in India’s past. What we see as communalism today is indisputably a recent phenomenon. Many liberal, secular and Leftist Indians insist that India had had a syncretic culture before the British Raj. The Hindu Right retorts, by virtue of its favourite ‘two-nations theory’ that communalism has always characterised Indian history – India being a Hindu nation and Muslims being either foreigners or converted Hindus led astray from their original destiny.
Are communal riots a recent phenomenon in India, incited by the British divide-and-rule policy since the late 18th century? Or have communal hostilities been part of India’s history since the 12 th century, when Muhammad of Ghor took on Prithviraj Chauhan in the battle of Tarain? This is a 200-year old debate, which has taken on new life after the recent Delhi riots.