Sonia Gandhi

Shivaji Raje Bhonsle

Shivaji Raje Bhonsle

Shivaji Bhonsle, venerated in Maharashtra as the father of “the Maratha nation”, was born in 1627 into a family of Maratha bureaucrats. His father, Shahji, was the jagirdar of the Sultan of Ahmadnagar in Pune, but he shifted his allegiance to the Sultan of Bijapur; Shivaji’s mother, Jiji Bai, was devoted to her son, particularly after her husband took a second wife. This was not the only time that Shahji shifted his loyalties: when the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan decided to lead his forces into the Deccan, Shahji decided to accept the offer of a mansabdari from Shah Jahan. However, upon the emperor’s retreat in 1632, Shahji decided to accept once again the suzerainty of the Sultan of Ahmadnagar. However, the Sultan of Ahmadnagar was taken captive by the Mughal army in 1633, and though Shahji struggled valiantly to retain his political independence, he succumbed to the combined forces of the Mughal Emperor and the Sultan of Bijapur who had signed an accord between themselves in 1636. Shahji surrendered, was expelled from Pune, and retreated to Bijapur.




Shivaji, though his father was exiled from Pune, was raised in the city that was to become the capital not only of Maratha power, but the seat, as it were, of real and imagined Hindu martial traditions. (Much later, it is in Pune that armed resistance to the British led to a campaign of terror and assassination, and it is from Pune that Nathuram Godse, the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi, emerged to press forth the case for a masculine Indian nation-state.) Some historians have argued that Shivaji grew up with a hatred for Islam, but there is little in the historical record that directly substantiates any such reading. For a good many years, Shivaji and his band of Marathas, who can with some justice be claimed as having originated the idea of guerrilla warfare in India, plundered the countryside, and Shivaji came to acquire a formidable reputation as a warrior. But Shivaji’s main interest lay in subduing Bijapur, and the opportunity presented itself when the Sultan, Muhammad Adil Shah, died in November 1656. Muhammad Adil Shah’s successor, Ali Adil Shah, sent his general, Afzal Khan, at the head of an army of 10,000 troops to surround and subdue Shivaji in his fortress, Pratapgarh.



The most celebrated act of Shivaji’s life, if historians are to be believed, is his killing of Afzal Khan in 1659. According to the most commonly accepted narrative of events, Afzal Khan agreed to meet Shivaji in person to accept his surrender. It is suggested that Afzal Khan had treacherous designs upon Shivaji, but evidently he received a fatal dose of his own medicine before he could murder Shivaji. The Maratha leader carried a small dagger in one hand, and a tiger’s claw in the other, but these little weapons were concealed by the long sleeves of the loose-fitting clothes he wore. As the two men hugged each other, Afzal Khan nearly stuck a dagger at Shivaji’s side, but the Maratha passed his arm around the Khan’s waist and, to quote from the admiring biography by the Bengali historian Jadunath Sarkar, “tore his bowels open with a blow of steel claws”. It is a chilling fact that this episode, in which neither Afzal Khan nor Shivaji appear to have shown much honor, should have been described, amidst the euphoria of the celebrations in 1974-75 to mark the 300th anniversary of the coronation of Shivaji, as the “most glorious event in the history of the Marathas.” (See R. V. Herwadkar, “Historicity of Shivaji-Afzal Khan Confrontation”, in B. K. Apte, ed., Chhatrapati Shivaji: Coronation Tercentenary Commemmoration Volume (Bombay: University of Bombay, 1974-75.)



As is purported to be quite common with ‘Oriental armies’, Afzal Khan’s entire force is described as having become panic-stricken at the death of their commander, and Shivaji was left victorious. His triumph over Afzal Khan is often said to mark the birth of Maratha power. In 1664, Shivaji dared even to plunder Surat, a trading town with rich mercantile traditions and immensely wealthy merchants, but this invoked the fury of Aurangzeb, who sent his general Jai Singh to deal with this irritant. The Mughal commander Jai Singh used a variety of diplomatic and military measures to ease the path to his victory. It is said that Shivaji was visited in his dreams by the goddess Bhavani, who reportedly advised him that he could not triumph if he raised his hand against another Hindu prince, but this reading may be no more than an attempt to assuage the pride of the admirers of Shivaji bothered by Shivaji’s capitulation to Aurangzeb. Though Shivaji himself was incorporated into the Mughal system, becoming in John Richards’ words a “vassal” of the Emperor, it was his son, Shambhaji, who was rendered into a mansabdar of 5,000. Shivaji’ hagiographers at this point pause to reflect on their hero’s daring escape from the court of Aurangzeb in 1666. Though Shivaji had, by 1670, recaptured many of the fortresses he had previously surrendered to Aurangzeb, the hagiographers do not always mention the fact that he continued to petition the Mughal emperor to be entitled a “Raja”. This petition was granted in 1668.



Shivaji’s coronation in 1674 as Chhatrapati, or “Lord of the Universe”, constitutes the next pivotal chapter in his biography. It was in part to mark his independence from the Mughals, and to repudiate his formal relation to them of a feudatory, that Shivaji had himself crowned, but the very gesture of defiance points to the fact that he recognized the overwhelming power of the Mughals. Moreover, as a Shudra or low-caste person, Shivaji had perforce to enact some ceremony by means of which he could be raised to the status of a kshatriya or traditional ruler. To this end, he enlisted the services of Gagga Bhatta, a famous Brahmin from Benares, who did the Brahminical thing in falsely certifying that Shivaji’s ancestors were kshatriyas descended from the solar dynasty of Mewar. 11,000 Brahmins are reported to have chanted the Vedas, and another 50,000 men are said to have been present at the investiture ceremony, which concluded with chants of, “Shivaji Maharaj-ki-jai!”



The greater majority of the historians of previous generations and other scholars who have written on Shivaji have supposed that his battles with Aurangzeb, as well as his coronation, cannot be read as other than clear signs of his unrelenting hatred for Muslims and his desire to be considered a great Hindu monarch. But it is not at all transparent, as some recent work suggests, that his conflicts with Aurangzeb should be read through the lens of a communalist-minded history, where all conflicts are construed as the inevitable battle between Islam and Hinduism. It is precisely to thwart the communalist interpretations of Shivaji that Nehru made the pointed remark, in his Discovery of India, that “Shivaji, though he fought Aurangzeb, freely employed Muslims” (p. 272). The first Pathan unit joined Shivaji’s forces in 1658, and one of his trusted commanders who was present at Shivaji’s encounter with Afzal Khan was a Muslim, Didi Ibrahim. There is nothing to suggest that the animosity between the Shia rulers of Bijapur and the Sunni Mughal Emperors was of a different order than the conflict between the Hindu Shivaji and Aurangzeb, who were locked in battle over political power and economic resources. It is also a telling fact that, after the coronation, Shivaji struck a military alliance with the Muslim leader Abul Hasan, the Qutb Shah Sultan, and together they waged a campaign against Shivaji’s own half-brother, Vyankoji Bhonsle. Shivaji died in 1680.

Shivaji and the Politics of History :

In recent years, with the advent to power of the Bharatiya Janata Party in national politics, and of the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, the stock of Shivaji Bhonsle (1627-1680), the Maratha leader, has once again risen high. One hundred years ago, the Indian nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak succeeded to a considerable extent in reviving the political memory of Shivaji, and early nationalists, in search of martial heroes, raised him to the eminence of a “freedom fighter”. Tilak’s contemporary, the Indian nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai, nicknamed the “Lion of the Punjab”, published a biography of Shivaji in Urdu (1896), and commended him to the attention of the youth with the observation that “Shivaji protected his own religion, saved the cow and the Brahmin but he did not disrespect any other religion. This is the highest praise that can be bestowed on a Hindu hero like Shivaji in the days of Aurangzeb.”




Shivaji has assumed over the course of the last few years an extraordinary importance in the debates over the Indian past. To visit Maharashtra, particularly Pune, is to come to the awareness that a great many public institutions and buildings have been named after him. Victoria Terminus in Bombay, one of the preeminent landmarks of European colonialism in what was Britain’s foremost colony, is now Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, and one would imagine that Maharashtra, home to great saints, writers, and such nationalist leaders as the scholar Gopal Krishna Gokhale, was bereft of any other commanding personality. Even in Delhi the gigantic Interstate Bus Terminal (ISBT), which services the needs of millions of people every year, has recently been renamed the Chhatrapati Shivaji Bus Terminal. It is presumed that Shivaji was one of the earliest exponents of the idea of a Hindu nation, who kept the torch of Hindu resistance alive during the days of Muslim rule (generally characterized as ‘Muslim tyranny’). Lala Lajpat Rai, whom we have quoted previously, took the view that Shivaji’s life demonstrated that “during any [sic] time in Muslim rule Hindus did not lose any opportunity to show their valour and attain freedom nor did they quietly suffer oppression.” So long as Indian nationalists persisted in portraying Shivaji as a Hindu leader who withstood Aurangzeb’s military campaigns and religious fanaticism, they were given no hindrance by the British; but when Tilak invoked Shivaji’s name and courage to rouse Indians to resistance against British rule, he was convicted of sedition. The emergence of Gandhi, and the adoption by the Indian National Congress of non-violence as its official policy, did little to erode the popularity in which Shivaji was held. His name was kept alive by armed revolutionaries and by a nation, stung by charges that it was effete and incapable of offering resistance, eager to flaunt a martial past; and the emergence of communalism in the 1920s, leading eventually to demands for the creation of a Muslim state, again made it possible to urge resistance to Muslim demands in the name of Shivaji.



With the creation in 1960 of the new state of Maharashtra, carved out of the old Bombay Presidency, Shivaji became canonized as the creator of the Marathi nation, and the celebration in 1974 of the 300th anniversary of his coronation was to furnish ripe opportunities for consolidating the view that he was even a ‘national’ leader. To take any other view was to invite retribution, as one Marathi historian at Marathwada University found out in 1974 when he was dismissed from his position for disputing the hagiographic view of Shivaji. One volume of contributions, mainly by historians, was entitled Chhatrapati Shivaji: Architect of Freedom (1975). Its editor states that Shivaji “laid the foundation of a nation-state, the state of the Marathas, on a firm, secular basis.” But what is this nation-state of the Marathas, and of what “freedom” was Shivaji the architect? Doubtless, the Marathas were the dominant power in the Deccan for much of the eighteenth century, but the argument for Maratha sovereignty, and a Maratha nation-state, cannot so easily be sustained. Shivaji’s successors, taking advantage of the weakness of the later Mughals, would play more the role of plunderers and marauders than kings while still acting as the tax-collectors for the Mughal emperors; by the second half of the eighteenth century, they were also contending with the military strength of the East India Company’s forces, though they were nonetheless able to capture Delhi and Agra, the nerve centers of the Mughal empire, in 1770-71.



Similarly, it is only possible to characterize Shivaji as the “architect of freedom” on the presumption that Hindus were laboring under severe disadvantages and were suffocated by Muslim tyranny before Shivaji freed them from their woes. One historian, taking this view, put the matter rather dramatically in another volume commemorating the tercentenary of Shivaji’s coronation when he described Shivaji as having liberated the Marathas from three centuries of “alien rule” which had “turned the natives fatalistic”: “It was Shivaji who emancipated them from this terrific mental torpidity. He created in them self-confidence . . . He gave them back their dearly loved religious freedom.” Yet this assessment appears almost moderate, when we consider R. C. Majumdar’s opinion that in the whole history of India, there was no Hindu other than Shivaji “who made such a pious resolve in his mind to save his country and religion from foreign yoke and oppression.” Dismissing with utter contempt the position of “modern Hindu politicians and pseudo-historians” [a reference to Nehru among others] who insist on “a complete assimilation between the Hindus and Muslims after the first fury of intolerance and oppression was over”, Majumdar remarked: “But Shivaji was in any case free from such ideas. He looked upon the Muslims as oppressive rulers and the Hindus as long-suffering subject peoples.”



To substantiate the Hindu communalist reading of Shivaji as the architect of Hindu freedom requires that Hindu-Muslim conflict be seen as the backdrop of his own times, just as it turns him into an inveterate foe of Muslims. Yet Shivaji employed Muslims in his army, among them 700 Pathans who had once worked for the Bijapur Sultan, and he forged alliances with Muslim rulers, in one case to wage a campaign against his own half-brother. It is not at all clear why the conflict between Shivaji and Aurangzeb should necessarily be viewed as a Hindu-Muslim conflict, rather than as a contest over power, resources, and sovereignty. Moreover, there is little documentary evidence to warrant the conclusion that Hindus in the Deccan were being systematically persecuted before Shivaji arrived to free them from their yoke. Indeed, quite to the contrary, at least some of the evidence points to the fact that many Muslim dynasties in the south (mainly Shiite) retained a catholic attitude towards Hinduism. Few historians in the 1970s, as communalism was becoming an important force in the writing of Indian history, were prepared to reflect on how far it is possible to infer from Shivaji’s encounters with Afzal Khan and Aurangzeb that people belonging to various social strata similarly felt their lives to be bounded by oppositional religious feelings. Yet, just as Aurangzeb and Akbar had become symbolic figures in the emerging dispute between secularists and communalists, so Shivaji was to become an iconic figure in the struggle to define the ‘authentic’ history of India.



With the rise to power of the Bharatiya Janata Party at the national level, and earlier of the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, the quest for a martial Hindu past has received a new impetus, and since the conflict has moved to the domain of history as well, it seems certain that Shivaji will continue to be viewed not merely as a chieftain and even Maratha leader, which he doubtless was, but – altogether erroneously – as the supreme figure in the “Hindu struggle for freedom” from Muslim tyranny and as the inspirational figure for Indian independence. Shivaji’s acolytes, in recent years, have embraced tactics of intimidation and terror that certainly do no credit to Shivaji himself. The scholar James Laine, author of Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), was placed under a death sentence for the expression of views considered detrimental to Shivaji, and Oxford University Press was compelled to withdraw the book from sale in India. One of Professor Laine’s local informants, a scholar at the venerable Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI), was publicly humiliated by hoodlums claiming to act in the name of venerating Shivaji’s memory, and the institute itself was sacked. Any intellectual history of how Shivaji’s name survives in India will thus have to contend not only with such obvious phenomena as the rise of the Shiv Sena, but also the strategies deployed to silence those who question the received versions of the history of Shivaji.




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The Mughal Empire

The Mughal Empire

The great grandson of Tamerlane, Babar, who on his mother's side was descended from the famous Genghiz Khan, came to India in 1526 at the request of an Indian governor who sought Babar's help in his fight against Ibrahim Lodi, the last head of the Delhi Sultanate. Babar defeated Lodi at Panipat, not far from Delhi, and so came to establish the Mughal Empire in India. Babar ruled until 1530, and was succeeded by his son Humayun, who gave the empire its first distinctive features. But it is Humayun's son, Akbar the Great, who is conventionally described as the glory of the empire. Akbar reigned from 1556 to 1605, and extended his empire as far to the west as Afghanistan, and as far south as the Godavari river. Akbar, though a Muslim, is remembered as a tolerant ruler, and he even started a new faith, Din-i-Ilahi, which was an attempt to blend Islam with Hinduism, Christianity, Jainism, and other faiths. He won over the Hindus by naming them to important military and civil positions, by conferring honors upon them, and by marrying a Hindu princess.



Akbar was succeeded by his son Salim, who took the title of Jahangir. In his reign (1605-1627), Jahangir consolidated the gains made by his father. The courtly culture of the Mughals flourished under his rule; like his great grand-father, Babar, he had an interest in gardens, and Mughal painting probably reached its zenith in Jahangir's time. Jahangir married Nur Jahan, "Light of the World", in 1611. Shortly after his death in October 1627, his son, Shah Jahan, succeeded to the throne. He inherited a vast and rich empire; and at mid-century this was perhaps the greatest empire in the world, exhibiting a degree of centralized control rarely matched before. Shah Jahan left behind an extraordinarily rich architectural legacy, which includes the Taj Mahal and the old city of Delhi, Shahjahanabad. As he apparently lay dying in 1658, a war of succession broke out between his four sons. The two principal claimants to the throne were Dara Shikoh, who was championed by the those nobles and officers who were committed to the eclectic policies of previous rulers, and Aurangzeb, who was favored by powerful men more inclined to turn the Mughal Empire into an Islamic state subject to the laws of the Sharia. It is Aurangzeb who triumphed, and though the Mughal Empire saw yet further expansion in the early years of his long reign (1658-1707), by the later part of the seventeenth century the empire was beginning to disintegrate.



Aurangzeb remains a highly controversial figure, and no monarch has been more subjected to the communalist reading of Indian history. He is admired by Muslim historians for enforcing the law of the Sharia and for disavowing the policies pursued by Akbar; among Hindus, laymen and historians alike, he is remembered as a Muslim fanatic and bigot. In the event, Aurangzeb's far-flung empire eventually eluded his grasp, and considerable disaffection appears to have been created among the peasantry. After Aurangzeb's death in 1707, many of his vassals established themselves as sovereign rulers, and so began the period of what are called "successor states". The Mughal Empire survived until 1857, but its rulers were, after 1803, pensioners of the East India Company. The last emperor, the senile Bahadur Shah Zafar, was put on trial for allegedly leading the rebels of the 1857 mutiny and for fomenting sedition. He was convicted and transported to Rangoon, to spend the remainder of his life on alien soil.

Indian History

Indian History

Indian History - Important events

History of India . An overview : The people of India have had a continuous civilization since 2500 B.C., when the inhabitants of the Indus River valley developed an urban culture based on commerce and sustained by agricultural trade. This civilization declined around 1500 B.C., probably due to ecological changes.



During the second millennium B.C., pastoral, Aryan-speaking tribes migrated from the northwest into the subcontinent. As they settled in the middle Ganges River valley, they adapted to antecedent cultures.



The political map of ancient and medieval India was made up of myriad kingdoms with fluctuating boundaries. In the 4th and 5th centuries A.D., northern India was unified under the Gupta Dynasty. During this period, known as India's Golden Age, Hindu culture and political administration reached new heights.



Islam spread across the Indian subcontinent over a period of 500 years. In the 10th and 11th centuries, Turks and Afghans invaded India and established sultanates in Delhi. In the early 16th century, descendants of Genghis Khan swept across the Khyber Pass and established the Mughal (Mogul) Dynasty, which lasted for 200 years. From the 11th to the 15th centuries, southern India was dominated by Hindu Chola and Vijayanagar Dynasties. During this time, the two systems--the prevailing Hindu and Muslim--mingled, leaving lasting cultural influences on each other.



The first British outpost in South Asia was established in 1619 at Surat on the northwestern coast. Later in the century, the East India Company opened permanent trading stations at Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta, each under the protection of native rulers.



The British expanded their influence from these footholds until, by the 1850s, they controlled most of present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. In 1857, a rebellion in north India led by mutinous Indian soldiers caused the British Parliament to transfer all political power from the East India Company to the Crown. Great Britain began administering most of India directly while controlling the rest through treaties with local rulers.

In the late 1800s, the first steps were taken toward self-government in British India with the appointment of Indian councilors to advise the British viceroy and the establishment of provincial councils with Indian members; the British subsequently widened participation in legislative councils. Beginning in 1920, Indian leader Mohandas K. Gandhi transformed the Indian National Congress political party into a mass movement to campaign against British colonial rule. The party used both parliamentary and nonviolent resistance and non-cooperation to achieve independence.



On August 15, 1947, India became a dominion within the Commonwealth, with Jawaharlal Nehru as Prime Minister. Enmity between Hindus and Muslims led the British to partition British India, creating East and West Pakistan, where there were Muslim majorities. India became a republic within the Commonwealth after promulgating its constitution on January 26, 1950.



After independence, the Congress Party, the party of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, ruled India under the influence first of Nehru and then his daughter and grandson, with the exception of two brief periods in the 1970s and 1980s.



Prime Minister Nehru governed India until his death in 1964. He was succeeded by Lal Bahadur Shastri, who also died in office. In 1966, power passed to Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister from 1966 to 1977. In 1975, beset with deepening political and economic problems, Mrs. Gandhi declared a state of emergency and suspended many civil liberties. Seeking a mandate at the polls for her policies, she called for elections in 1977, only to be defeated by Moraji Desai, who headed the Janata Party, an amalgam of five opposition parties.



In 1979, Desai's Government crumbled. Charan Singh formed an interim government, which was followed by Mrs. Gandhi's return to power in January 1980. On October 31, 1984, Mrs. Gandhi was assassinated, and her son, Rajiv, was chosen by the Congress (I)--for "Indira"--Party to take her place. His government was brought down in 1989 by allegations of corruption and was followed by V.P. Singh and then Chandra Shekhar.



In the 1989 elections, although Rajiv Gandhi and Congress won more seats in the 1989 elections than any other single party, he was unable to form a government with a clear majority. The Janata Dal, a union of opposition parties, was able to form a government with the help of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on the right and the communists on the left. This loose coalition collapsed in November 1990, and the government was controlled for a short period by a breakaway Janata Dal group supported by Congress (I), with Chandra Shekhar as Prime Minister. That alliance also collapsed, resulting in national elections in June 1991.



On May 27, 1991, while campaigning in Tamil Nadu on behalf of Congress (I), Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, apparently by Tamil extremists from Sri Lanka. In the elections, Congress (I) won 213 parliamentary seats and put together a coalition, returning to power under the leadership of P.V. Narasimha Rao. This Congress-led government, which served a full 5-year term, initiated a gradual process of economic liberalization and reform, which has opened the Indian economy to global trade and investment. India's domestic politics also took new shape, as traditional alignments by caste, creed, and ethnicity gave way to a plethora of small, regionally based political parties.




The final months of the Rao-led government in the spring of 1996 were marred by several major political corruption scandals, which contributed to the worst electoral performance by the Congress Party in its history. The Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) emerged from the May 1996 national elections as the single-largest party in the Lok Sabha but without enough strength to prove a majority on the floor of that Parliament. Under Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the BJP coalition lasted in power 13 days. With all political parties wishing to avoid another round of elections, a 14-party coalition led by the Janata Dal emerged to form a government known as the United Front, under the former Chief Minister of Karnataka, H.D. Deve Gowda. His government lasted less than a year, as the leader of the Congress Party withdrew his support in March 1997. Inder Kumar Gujral replaced Deve Gowda as the consensus choice for Prime Minister of a 16-party United Front coalition.



In November 1997, the Congress Party in India again withdrew support for the United Front. New elections in February 1998 brought the BJP the largest number of seats in Parliament--182--but fell far short of a majority. On March 20, 1998, the President inaugurated a BJP-led coalition government with Vajpayee again serving as Prime Minister. On May 11 and 13, 1998, this government conducted a series of underground nuclear tests forcing U.S. President Clinton to impose economic sanctions on India pursuant to the 1994 Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Act.



In April 1999, the BJP-led coalition government fell apart, leading to fresh elections in September. The National Democratic Alliance-a new coalition led by the BJP-gained a majority to form the government with Vajpayee as Prime Minister in October 1999.

Indian History - Important events

Indian History - Important events

History of India . An overview : The people of India have had a continuous civilization since 2500 B.C., when the inhabitants of the Indus River valley developed an urban culture based on commerce and sustained by agricultural trade. This civilization declined around 1500 B.C., probably due to ecological changes.

During the second millennium B.C., pastoral, Aryan-speaking tribes migrated from the northwest into the subcontinent. As they settled in the middle Ganges River valley, they adapted to antecedent cultures.



The political map of ancient and medieval India was made up of myriad kingdoms with fluctuating boundaries. In the 4th and 5th centuries A.D., northern India was unified under the Gupta Dynasty. During this period, known as India's Golden Age, Hindu culture and political administration reached new heights.



Islam spread across the Indian subcontinent over a period of 500 years. In the 10th and 11th centuries, Turks and Afghans invaded India and established sultanates in Delhi. In the early 16th century, descendants of Genghis Khan swept across the Khyber Pass and established the Mughal (Mogul) Dynasty, which lasted for 200 years. From the 11th to the 15th centuries, southern India was dominated by Hindu Chola and Vijayanagar Dynasties. During this time, the two systems--the prevailing Hindu and Muslim--mingled, leaving lasting cultural influences on each other.



The first British outpost in South Asia was established in 1619 at Surat on the northwestern coast. Later in the century, the East India Company opened permanent trading stations at Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta, each under the protection of native rulers.



The British expanded their influence from these footholds until, by the 1850s, they controlled most of present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. In 1857, a rebellion in north India led by mutinous Indian soldiers caused the British Parliament to transfer all political power from the East India Company to the Crown. Great Britain began administering most of India directly while controlling the rest through treaties with local rulers.


In the late 1800s, the first steps were taken toward self-government in British India with the appointment of Indian councilors to advise the British viceroy and the establishment of provincial councils with Indian members; the British subsequently widened participation in legislative councils. Beginning in 1920, Indian leader Mohandas K. Gandhi transformed the Indian National Congress political party into a mass movement to campaign against British colonial rule. The party used both parliamentary and nonviolent resistance and non-cooperation to achieve independence.





On August 15, 1947, India became a dominion within the Commonwealth, with Jawaharlal Nehru as Prime Minister. Enmity between Hindus and Muslims led the British to partition British India, creating East and West Pakistan, where there were Muslim majorities. India became a republic within the Commonwealth after promulgating its constitution on January 26, 1950.



After independence, the Congress Party, the party of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, ruled India under the influence first of Nehru and then his daughter and grandson, with the exception of two brief periods in the 1970s and 1980s.



Prime Minister Nehru governed India until his death in 1964. He was succeeded by Lal Bahadur Shastri, who also died in office. In 1966, power passed to Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister from 1966 to 1977. In 1975, beset with deepening political and economic problems, Mrs. Gandhi declared a state of emergency and suspended many civil liberties. Seeking a mandate at the polls for her policies, she called for elections in 1977, only to be defeated by Moraji Desai, who headed the Janata Party, an amalgam of five opposition parties.



In 1979, Desai's Government crumbled. Charan Singh formed an interim government, which was followed by Mrs. Gandhi's return to power in January 1980. On October 31, 1984, Mrs. Gandhi was assassinated, and her son, Rajiv, was chosen by the Congress (I)--for "Indira"--Party to take her place. His government was brought down in 1989 by allegations of corruption and was followed by V.P. Singh and then Chandra Shekhar.



In the 1989 elections, although Rajiv Gandhi and Congress won more seats in the 1989 elections than any other single party, he was unable to form a government with a clear majority. The Janata Dal, a union of opposition parties, was able to form a government with the help of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on the right and the communists on the left. This loose coalition collapsed in November 1990, and the government was controlled for a short period by a breakaway Janata Dal group supported by Congress (I), with Chandra Shekhar as Prime Minister. That alliance also collapsed, resulting in national elections in June 1991.



On May 27, 1991, while campaigning in Tamil Nadu on behalf of Congress (I), Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, apparently by Tamil extremists from Sri Lanka. In the elections, Congress (I) won 213 parliamentary seats and put together a coalition, returning to power under the leadership of P.V. Narasimha Rao. This Congress-led government, which served a full 5-year term, initiated a gradual process of economic liberalization and reform, which has opened the Indian economy to global trade and investment. India's domestic politics also took new shape, as traditional alignments by caste, creed, and ethnicity gave way to a plethora of small, regionally based political parties.

Sonia Gandhi

Sonia Gandhi

Sonia Gandhi is the leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament. She was born Sonia Maino in 1946 near Turin, Italy, to a working-class family, and spent her childhood in that region. Her connection with India developed when she met Rajiv Gandhi, the elder son of Indira Gandhi, at a language school in Cambridge, England. They were married in 1968, and Sonia settled in India with her husband. Rajiv worked as a pilot in Indian Airlines, and only his brother Sanjay’s death in 1980, in a plane crash, changed the course of his life. He entered into politics, apparently with immense reluctance, a decision that is said to have made Sonia exceedingly unhappy: she is on record as having said, "For the first time, there was tension between Rajiv and me. I fought like a tigress -- for him, for us and our children, above all, for our freedom." Sonia Gandhi was seldom seen in public, and led a very "private life"; indeed, the 1984 assassination of her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, did comparatively little to make her more visible. Some people thought that, in emulation of some supposed timeless Indian tradition, Sonia Gandhi preferred to remain by the sidelines, content in her roles as wife, mother, and -- to some degree -- official hostess. Her aversion to politics has been described by Tariq Ali, who recounts that Sonia is said to have stated that she would have rather seen her children beg than enter into the maelstrom of Indian political life.




However, the assassination of her husband in 1991 paved the way for Sonia’s entry into public limelight, and senior members of the Congress party, alarmed at the party’s declining popularity, sought to revive their fortunes by encouraging her to take an active part in politics. They might have thought that, once the Congress had been restored to popularity, Sonia could be marginalized. She resisted membership in the Congress, indeed the offer of the presidency of the party for several years, but eventually joined the Congress party in 1997. She became party president in 1998, thereby becoming the fifth member of the Nehru clan -- following Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, and Rajiv Gandhi -- to hold this important post. The following year, in the general election, she was finally elected to a seat in the Lok Sabha, though the Congress suffered a humiliating defeat at the polls. While she was praised for having saved the Congress party from utter extinction, at the same time the party’s continuing misfortunes through the end of 2001 were secretly, and sometimes openly, attributed to Sonia; but if she was construed as a liability, the pathetic state of the Congress party, a previous incarnation of which was the mainstay of the Indian independence movement, can be adequately judged from the fact that the Congress party’s other leaders most likely thought that without her they would be condemned to complete oblivion.



Sonia Gandhi was strident in her criticism of the slow investigation of the inquiry around her husband’s assassination, and made no secret of her opinion that her husband’s opponents and other ill-wishers were determined to keep the truth from the public. It has been argued, not without reason, that her own entry into politics might have been motivated partly by the desire to keep allegations of widespread corruption in the last few years of Rajiv’s prime ministership from becoming proven public facts. In the event, numerous other controversies have dogged her entry into Indian politics. Her opponents in the BJP and other Hindutva organizations, in particular, pointed to her foreign origins, and pressed forth the unsavory suggestion that a country willing to be ruled by a "foreigner", that too a woman, was evidently wanting in its masculinity and pride. Sonia acquired Indian citizenship in 1983, and questions have been raised why she took "so long" to acquire Indian citizenship. Since the Indian constitution, moreover, does not preclude people who have acquired citizenship by naturalization from holding the highest offices in the land, Sonia’s entry into politics became the pretext for offering the suggestion that a constitutional amendment would be required.



In these controversies, as they are described, Sonia Gandhi’s opponents have looked exceedingly foolish and nationalistic. It is scarcely surprising that Hindu nationalists should look to the United States, which forbids its presidency to anyone not born in the country, as the example that India should emulate. One would have thought that, in this matter as in most others, the United States sets the standard not for freedom or liberality of interpretation but for jingoism and provincialism. If loyalty is in question, the Indian Citizenship Act of 1955 is unequivocally clear: it does not allow foreigners to acquire Indian citizenship unless they have renounced their other allegiance. Of course, if the advocates of Hindutva are inclined to see adherents of Islam, who have been in India for over 1,000 years, as "foreigners", one should not be surprised that the same predictable and pedestrian argument should have been deployed against Sonia Gandhi. These advocates of Hindutva have invested less in India than did someone such as Annie Beasant, an Irish woman settled in India who was an ardent advocate of Indian self-rule. Had Sonia Gandhi’s opponents riveted on the fact that she has brought no distinct ideas, no imagination, indeed not an iota of new energy into Indian politics, they might have been more effective and less nauseating. To say this is not to gainsay the fact that as a politician, Sonia has learned the tools of the trade, and her decision in late 2002, to not host, on account of the "suffering caused to the people in several drought-affected states and in riot-hit Gujarat", the traditional part iftar party held as a mark of communal amity and friendship with Muslims during the month-long Ramzan, must be deemed at least in part as the gesture of a pragmatic politics. Whatever Sonia Gandhi’s eventual political fortunes, her own political presence is not calculated to breathe fresh life into Indian politics, though it may well be the training ground for the next generation of Nehrus.

Gopal Krishna Gokhale Biography

Gopal Krishna Gokhale Biography

Born: May 9, 1866

Died: February 19, 1915

Achievements: Political guru of Mahatma Gandhi; one of the pioneers of the Indian national movement; founder of the Servants of India Society.



Gopal Krishna Gokhale was one of the pioneers of the Indian national movement. He was a senior leader of the Indian National Congress. Gokhale gave voice to the aspirations of millions of Indians who were looking for freedom from the British rule. Gandhiji considered him as his political guru. Apart from being a political leader, Gopalkrishna Gokhale, was also a social reformer. He founded the "Servants of India Society"-an organization dedicated to the cause of common people. Gopal Krishna Gokhale's contribution to the making of Indian nation is invaluable.



Gopal Krishna Gokhale was born on May 9, 1866 in Kothapur, Maharashtra. His father Krishna Rao was a farmer who was forced to work as clerk, as the soil of the region was not conducive for agriculture. His mother Valubai was a simple woman. Gokhale received his early education at the Rajaram High School in Kothapur with the help of financial assistance from his elder brother. Later on he moved on to Bombay and graduated from Elphinstone College, Bombay in 1884 at the age of 18.



Gopal Krishna Gokhale was one of the first generations of Indians to receive college education. He was respected widely in the nascent Indian intellectual community and across India. Education influenced Gokhale greatly. His understanding of the English language allowed him to express himself without hesitation and with utmost clarity. His appreciation and knowledge of history instilled in him a respect for liberty, democracy, and the parliamentary system. After graduation, he moved on to teaching, and took a position as an Assistant Master in the New English School in Pune. In 1885, Gokhale moved on to Pune and became one of the founding members of Fergusson College, along with his colleagues in Deccan Education Society. Gopal Krishna Gokhale gave nearly two decades of his life to Fergusson College and rose to become principal of the college. During this time, Gokhale came in contact with Mahadev Govind Ranade. Ranade was a judge, scholar, and social reformer, whom Gokhale called his guru. Gokhale worked with Ranade in Poona Sarvajanik Sabha of which Gokhale became the Secretary.



Gopal Krishna Gokhale entered public life in 1886 at the age of 20. He delivered a public address on "India under the British Rule", which was highly appreciated. Gokhale regularly contributed articles to Bal Gangadhar Tilak's weekly "Mahratta". Through his articles he tried to awaken the latent patriotism of Indian people. Soon, Gokhale was promoted as Secretary of the Deccan Education Society. When the Indian National Congress held its session in Poona in 1895, he was the secretary of the Reception Committee. From this session, Gokhale became a prominent member of the Indian National Congress. Gokhale was twice elected as president of Pune Municipality. For a while Gokhale was also a member of the Bombay Legislative Council where he spoke strongly against the then Government.



In 1902, Gokhale left the Fergusson College. He became a Member of the Imperial Legislative Council in Delhi. There he spoke for the people of the country in an able manner. Gokhale had an excellent grasp of the economic problems of our country which he ably presented during the debates. In 1905, Gokhale started a new society called "Servants of India Society". This society trained workers for the service of the country. In the same year, Gokhale went to England to voice his concerns relating to the unfair treatment of the Indian people by the British government. In a span of 49 days, he spoke in front of 47 different audiences, captivating every one of them. Gokhale pleaded for gradual reforms to ultimately attain Swaraj, or self-government, in India. He was instrumental in the introduction of the Morley- Minto Reforms of 1909, which eventually became law. Though the reforms sowed the seeds of communal division in India, nevertheless, they gave Indian access to the seats of the highest authority within the government, and their voices were more audible in matters of public interest.



Gopal Krishna Gokhale was a diabetic and asthmatic. Excessive assertion took its toll on Gokhale's health and ultimately he died on February 19, 1915.

Hey Ram’: The Politics of Gandhi’s Last Words

Hey Ram’: The Politics of Gandhi’s Last Words

On the evening of 30 January 1948, around ten minutes past five o’clock, Gandhi emerged from the interior of Birla House, where he had been immersed in a meeting with Sardar Patel, and began to walk towards the garden where for some days he had been holding an ecumenical prayer meeting every evening. The details of that last two-minute walk are not unimportant, but have been often glossed over: in a life deliberately and insistently given to walking, Gandhi’s last walk appears to be of no paramount or unusual significance, except insofar as it terminated in the immediate extinction of his life. Perhaps a narrative of the circumstances under which Gandhi walked to his destination that evening may help illuminate the importance of the details. Gandhi was sworn to punctuality, and his life was governed by the watch to an unusual degree; though it should at once be added that despite keeping to a meticulous schedule for much of his life, Gandhi’s conception of time was never such that it did not allow him to make time for anyone, howsoever high or lowly, who should choose to enter into his life or make demands upon him. That pernicious word ‘busy’, with which we all excuse ourselves from the common obligations of humanity, and the onerous company of unwanted relatives, acquaintances, and others who seek to intrude upon our time, was surely no part of Gandhi’s lexicon. Yet on this, what would transpire to be the last day of his life, Gandhi would be late to his 5:00 PM appointment with friends, devotees, and those who came to seek his darsan. It is said of the philosopher Kant that he was so punctual in taking his daily walk that the housewives of Konigsberg set their clocks by his walk; well might one have said the same of Gandhi.

If the slightest slackening of the disciplined life was calculated to agitate him, it is a reasonable inference that Gandhi was in a disturbed or uneasy frame of mind as he quickly walked towards the garden of Birla House on the evening of January 30. Indeed, his grand-niece, Manu, later related that in the minutes before his assassination, he scolded her and Abha, who together with Manu tended to his needs, for failing to keep a watch on the time. He said, "I do not like being late for the prayer meeting. Today’s delay is due to your negligence . . . Even a minute’s delay for the prayer causes me great discomfort." (1) The onerous responsibility he had taken upon himself to heal the rift between Nehru and Patel, his two closest associates, and now the two most powerful in the government of independent India, could only have aggravated the distress that Gandhi might have been expected to feel that evening. We can never know how his mood affected his reception of the assassin’s bullets.



Among the very few possessions of his life, now preserved in the Gandhi Museum at Rajghat in New Delhi, is the time-piece that Gandhi attached to his dhoti or loin-cloth, and which had served him well for several decades. The iconic representation, in sculpture, painting, and photography, of the full-length Gandhi gives pride of place to his watch. As Gandhi approached the elevated platform from where he conducted the prayer meeting, Nathuram Godse brushed aside Manu, who was walking by Gandhi’s side, perhaps a pace or two in front of him, and fired three shots at him in rapid succession with a revolver at point-blank range. Gandhi fell to the ground, and the time-piece broke: it had lost its raison d’être, and would henceforth serve no master. It did its duty to the very end; the minute hand stood at 13, and the time-piece remains, perhaps, the most reliable witness to the assassination. Months ago, a nation had been vivisected; now a man was severed from his watch, and the man who had stood watch on the unfolding of the nation had descended into the bowels of the past. As for the assassin, it is reliably reported that Nathuram folded his hands in the posture of reverence, or at least in the traditional manner of conveying the Indian greeting of namaskar, before firing the shots that would put an end to the life of the man to whom he had just paid his profound respects. Engaged in an act of parricide, Nathuram had perforce to render solitary obeisance to the man who shaped the contours of his own identity, whatever his contributions to the nation.



Nathuram would live to have his day in court, and Gandhi would at once be revered and trivialized as the ‘Father of the Nation’. Some of his more unforgiving critics and detractors, his assassin included, would describe him as the ‘Father of Pakistan’. The hagiographers and admirers insisted that, as the bullets struck Gandhi and he fell to the ground, he uttered the phrase, "He Ram"; his foes state that Gandhi did no such thing, and that he merely gasped. When some three decades ago Nathuram Godse’s speech at his trial was finally published, his brother, Gopal Godse, averred in his introduction to the volume that Gandhi merely uttered a "feeble or faint ‘ah’" as breath left his body. (2) The now octogenarian Gopal has conducted a relentless assault on Gandhi since his release from prison in 1964, and in a recent interview that the Government of India has sought to proscribe, he claims that "the government knew that he [Gandhi] was an enemy of the Hindus, but they wanted to show that he was a staunch Hindu. So the first act they did was to put ‘Hey Ram’ into Gandhi’s dead mouth." (3) Gopal Godse was not present at the assassination, but it is apparently on Nathuram’s own authority that he describes Gandhi as having uttered "the faintest Ah!" (4)



Gandhi’s ‘final words’ have been a matter of some controversy, though the commentary has been surprisingly slim on the philosophical and political import of Gandhi’s last words, whatever they may have been. On the fiftieth anniversary of his death in 1998, the last day of his life became the focus of resolute attention in the print media. In "The Mahatma’s Final Hours", Vijay Rana stated, without describing his source, that "The apostle of non-violence could only utter ‘Hey Ram!’ before slumping on the ground" (5). The Hindu, in an unusual tribute entitled "Mahatma Gandhi: The Last 200 days", which consisted in describing the last 200 days of his life in 200 consecutive issues of the newspaper, concluded its final segment thus: "As the second and the third [bullets] hit, he sinks gently to the floor, breathing out his last two words, holy in thankfulness or supplication, ‘Hey Ram!’" (6) Yet Gandhi’s former "aide", V. Kalyanam, who claims to have been by his side when the assassination took place, recalled recently that "Mahatma Gandhi never said ‘He Ram’ when he died. It was a fiction of the imagination, of those who came later." Kalyanam admits that Gandhi often said, "I wish I could die with the name of Ram on my lips", but he denies that these words were uttered by Gandhi as the bullets struck him. (7) Kalyanam could not have been very close to Gandhi, however, since Manu and Abha were on either side of him; in the days following his last fast, moreover, Gandhi’s voice was very faint, and he was certainly further away from Gandhi than the two young women who became known as his walking sticks. Kalyanam’s testimony also stands contradicted by Manu and Abha, as one might expect. It is not unimportant that, though describing himself as an "aide" to Gandhi, Kalyanam is not mentioned in any of the noted, or even minor, biographies of Gandhi; indeed every modern-day politician has an aide, but Gandhi cannot be assimilated to the creatures who inhabit the world of modern politics. Neither is there any independent verification of Kalyanam’s whereabouts on that fateful evening.



In the midst of all this, it is important to reflect on why the last words of Gandhi have elicited some controversy, and what bearing the resurgence of Hindu militancy may have upon the attempt by his most determined foes to put into question the received view about Gandhi’s last utterance. There is also the larger philosophical consideration that a person’s entire life is presumed to be captured by the last words or moments: the very word ‘last’ betokens a finality. The ‘last words’, or the final gestures, of ‘great men’ have often been the subject of much inquiry and speculation, though seldom have these words become the pivot for oppositional world views. Beethoven’s biographers, for instance, are agreed that that when he died on the evening of 26 March 1827, thunder and lightning struck; the composer is said to have raised a clenched fist, and looked upwards "with a grave and threatening expression, as though to say, ‘I defy you, hostile powers! Away, for God is with me!’" (8) Another biographer has argued that the clenched fist appeared to convey these words, "I was ever a fighter, so — one fight more, / The best and the last!" (9) The physician who attended upon him wrote, "Toward six in the afternoon came a flurry of snow, with thunder and lightning. Beethoven died. Would not a Roman augur, in view of the accidental commotion of the elements, have taken his apotheosis for granted?" (10) Beethoven’s contemporary, Goethe, is reported to have said, famously, "more light" as he lay dying: these words created a lasting impression, to the extent that Rabindranath Tagore wrote to his niece Indira, "How I cherish light and space! Goethe on his death-bed wanted ‘more light’. If I am capable of expressing my desire then, it will be for ‘more light and more space’." (11) Indeed, it is Tagore’s "space" that, in his final moments, was being violated by his admirers: as they tugged at the poet’s beard, so that each might get a specimen of the great man’s hair, Tagore is described as imploring and admonishing them with the words, "Chede dao, Chede dao", "Leave me alone! Leave me alone!"



Most strikingly, perhaps, one can understand the importance historically ascribed to the ‘last words’ by considering the manner in which the gospels attempted to imprint a portrait of Jesus as the Savior by imputing to him a final utterance that would been characteristic of his teaching. Jesus was nailed to the cross, and some women offered him drugged wine, which he refused to take — most likely because he wanted to die fully conscious. According to Matthew, "Jesus cried again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit" (27.45); and Mark similarly agrees that "Jesus uttered a loud cry, and breathed his last" (16.37). Both agree that sometime before he cried out loudly, Jesus said with evident anguish, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27.46; Mark 15.34) This may well have been imagined by Jesus’s disciples, since none of them were present at the crucifixion, or if they were, which is exceedingly unlikely, they could not have been close enough to Jesus to discern his last words. Indeed, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me", is a quotation from the Old Testament (Psalms 22.1), and was almost certainly inserted to make the prophecy of the appearance of the Messiah seem to come true. However, in the public imagination, it is the words which Luke ascribes to Jesus, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (23.34), which are most often viewed as Jesus’ last utterance, though the evidence for supposing that these words were inserted into the gospels much later, perhaps several decades after the death of Jesus, is compelling. (12) If the messianic view of Jesus had to prevail, doubtless something more than a "loud cry" had to be attributed to him as he was about to breathe his last. (13)



Gandhi’s reputed last words, "He Ram!", I wish to suggest, take on an exceedingly complex politics. Writing in December 1947, as if in anticipation of his death, he wrote: "In the end it will be as Rama commands me. Thus I dance as He pulls the strings. I am in His hands and so I am experiencing ineffable peace." (14) Gandhi had often expressed a desire to die with the words "He Ram!" on his lips (CWMG 90:489), and in his last prayer meetings he often described "Ramanama", or the constant invocation of the name of Ram, as the "best medicine". In his childhood, Gandhi had been taught to repeat Ramanama, but his enthusiasm then was short-lived; and it is not until he began to engage in various social and spiritual experiments, such as fasting, and returned to a close perusal of Tulsidas’s Ramacaritmanas, that he began to view it as an "infallible remedy." (15) Since at least 1924 (CWMG 23:302-3), Gandhi had been recommending the practice of Ramanama to his friends and acquaintances, but for nearly two years before his death, he had taken to advocating it enthusiastically to a wider public as an "unfailing remedy." (16) When he turned to a village-based natural health-care system in March 1946, after having realized that a nature-care clinic in an urban setting could not meet the needs of the villagers, he prescribed a regimen of mud packs, massage, sun baths, and the recitation of Ramanama for the patients; and yet, aware how the recitation could be debased to a mere mechanical exercise, Gandhi always cautioned against uttering the name of Rama except as part of a process of self-realization or as an effort to call forth the divinity within oneself (CWMG 83:107-8, 184-86, 336-7). Recognizing, as well, the weaknesses to which human beings are liable, Gandhi conceded that communion with God could in the beginning be "just lip repetition of his name even disturbed by impure thoughts. But ultimately what is on the lips will possess the heart. . . . We are monarchs in the Domain of Effort. God is the sole Monarch in the Domain of Results." (17) He even likened Ramanama to a "mathematical formula", thereby suggesting that its efficacy extended from well beyond the individual to society as a whole, transcending the barriers of space and time alike.



With belief in the efficacy of Rama, and with the desire to have the name of Rama on his lips when he should die, Gandhi commenced the walk from the interior to the garden of Birla House. If indeed he uttered the words, "He Ram!", as he slumped to the ground, he would appear, from the standpoint of Gopal Godse and his other detractors, to have outfoxed them — yet again. On 20 January 1948, Nathuram, Gopal, and a handful of others had engineered a bomb explosion at Birla House with the hope of killing Gandhi, but the attempt was a resounding failure; two days later, Gandhi took Manu aside and told her: "I wish I might face the assassin’s bullets while lying on your lap and repeating the name of Rama with a smile on my face. But whether the world says it or not — for the world has a double face — I tell you that you should regard me as your true mother." On the evening before his death, Manu has written, Gandhi suggested that the moment, and manner, of his death would reveal to the world whether he was a real Mahatma or not: if he were to die of a "lingering disease, or even from a pimple", she was to shout from the rooftops to the whole world that he was a "false or hypocritical Mahatma." Yet if an explosion took place, as it had last week, "or if someone shot at me", Gandhi told Manu, "and I received his bullet in my bare chest without a sigh and with Rama’s name on my lips, only then should you say that I was a true Mahatma." (18) That is precisely the manner in which Gandhi appears to have died, judging from the overwhelming consensus among his biographers. Thus, to enumerate two instances, B. R. Nanda relates that "Gandhi fell instantly with the words ‘He Rama’ (Oh, God)", while in her critical biography Judith Brown captures the last moment in Gandhi’s life in similar language: "The frail old body slumped to the ground; but his last words were, as he had wished, to call on the name of Ram, the God whose presence had sustained him and made him a prisoner of hope." (19)



It is understandable that Gandhi’s detractors should think of his last words as a fabrication: a hagiography was in the making, and nothing is likely to make a hagiographic representation more influential than have the subject of that portrait die what is at once a pious, dramatic, and heroic death, one in conformity with the subject’s own idea of a desirable death. Nathuram Godse’s speech in his own defence at his trial would stress what the assassin alleged to be Gandhi’s appeasement of the Muslims, and his unforgivable betrayal of the Hindus; and it could scarcely serve the assassin’s purpose if Gandhi had died in the manner of a Hindu bhakta, with the name of Ram on his lips. On the other hand, among his critics on the left, Gandhi’s practice of Ramanama, his invocation of the name of Ram and similarly of the concept of "Ram Rajya", was construed as a sign, if not of his partiality towards the Hindu faith, at least of political naivete. Gandhi was sometimes said to have alienated the Muslims by the evident display of his adherence to Hinduism and particularly Hindu symbols, though his critics were willing to concede that Gandhi had a rather expansive conception of his faith. That Gandhi’s "Ram Rajya" had no necessary reference to any historical Ram, or to the kingdom over which the Ram of the Ramayana is said to have presided, is a point that his secular critics appear not to have fully understood. As he was to write shortly before his death, "Sometimes we tread a dangerous path in believing that Rama and Krishna were historical entities and we are compelled to take recourse to all manner of arguments to prove that" (CWMG 88:148). To the advocates of secularism, Gandhi would have insisted that, whatever the course adopted in the modern West, the separation of religion and politics could not be countenanced in India; in the words of the concluding chapter of his autobiography, the "devotion to Truth" was bound to draw a person into the "field of politics", and yet "those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means" (20). When Gandhi uttered the words "He Ram", he was doubtless true to himself; but, politically speaking, he managed to confound, as he does so down to the present day, both the Hindu militants who falsely declared him a traitor to his faith and so showed only their own miserable conception of Hinduism, as well as the secularists whose conception of both religion and politics is much too narrow to accommodate the creative ecumenism of true dissenters like Gandhi.

Veer Savarkar Biography

Veer Savarkar Biography

Born: May 28, 1883


Died: February 26, 1966

Achievements: Founded the Abhinav Bharat Society and Free India Society; brought out an authentic informative researched work on The Great Indian Revolt of 1857 called "The Indian War of Independence 1857"; founded Hindu Mahasabha.



Veer Savarkar occupies a unique place in the history of Indian freedom struggle. His name evokes controversy. While some consider him as one of the greatest revolutionaries in the Indian freedom struggle, others consider him a communalist and Machiavellian manipulator. Vir Savarkar was also a great orator, prolific writer, historian, poet, philosopher and social worker. He was an extraordinary Hindu scholar. He coined Indian words for telephone, photography, the parliament, among others.



Veer Savarkar’s original name was Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. He was born on May 28, 1883 in the village of Bhagur near Nasik. He was one among four children born to Damodarpant Savarkar and Radhabai. Veer Savarkar had his initial education at the Shivaji School, Nasik. He lost his mother when he was only nine. Savarkar was a born rebel. He organized a gang of kids ,Vanarsena when he was just eleven.



During his high school days, Veer Savarkar used to organize Shivaji Utsav and Ganesh Utsav, started by Bal Gangadhar Tilak (whom Savarkar considered as his Guru) and used these occasions to put up plays on nationalistic themes. Savarkar lost his father during the plague of 1899. In March 1901, he married Yamunabai. Post marriage, in 1902, Veer Savarkar joined Fergusson College in Pune.



In Pune, Savarkar founded the “Abhinav Bharat Society”. He was also involved in the Swadeshi movement and later joined Tilak’s Swaraj Party. His instigating patriotic speeches and activities incensed the British Government. As a result the British Government withdrew his B.A. degree.



In June 1906, Veer Savarkar, left for London to become Barrister. However, once in London, he united and inflamed the Indian students in England against British rule in India. He founded the Free India Society. The Society celebrated important dates on the Indian calendar including festivals, freedom movement landmarks, and was dedicated to furthering discussion about Indian freedom. He believed and advocated the use of arms to free India from the British and created a network of Indians in England, equipped with weapons.



In 1908, brought out an authentic informative researched work on The Great Indian Revolt, which the British termed as "Sepoy Mutiny" of 1857. The book was called "The Indian War of Independence 1857". The British government immediately enforced a ban on the publication in both Britain and India. Later, it was published by Madame Bhikaiji Cama in Holland, and was smuggled into India to reach revolutionaries working across the country against British rule.



In 1909, Madanlal Dhingra, a keen follower of Savarkar shot Sir Wyllie after a failed assassination attempt on the then Viceroy, Lord Curzon. Savarkar conspicuously did not condemn the act. When the then British Collector of Nasik, A.M.T. Jackson was shot by a youth, Veer Savarkar finally fell under the net of the British authorities. He was implicated in the murder citing his connections with India House. Savarkar was arrested in London on March 13, 1910 and sent to India.



After a formal trial, Savarkar was charged with serious offences of illegal transportation of weapons, provocative speeches and sedition and was sentenced to 50 years' of jail and deported to the Kalapani (Blackwaters) at Andaman cellular jail.



In 1920, many prominent freedom fighters including Vithalbhai Patel, Mahatma Gandhi and Bal Gangadhar Tilak demanded the release of Savarkar. On May 2, 1921, Savarkar was moved to Ratnagiri jail, and from there to the Yeravada jail. In Ratnagiri jail Savarkar wrote the book 'Hindutva'. On January 6, 1924 he was h freed under the condition that he would not leave Ratnagiri district and abstain from political activity for the next five years. On his release, Veer Savarkar founded the Ratnagiri Hindu Sabha on January 23, 1924 that aimed to preserve India's ancient culture and work for social welfare.



Later Savarkar joined Tilak's Swaraj Party and founded the Hindu Mahasabha as a separate political party. He was elected President of the Mahasabha and toiled for building Hindu Nationalism and later joined the Quit India movement.



The Hindu Mahasabha opposed creation of Pakistan, and took exception to Gandhi's continued Muslim appeasement stances. Nathuram Godse, a volunteer of the Hindu Mahasabha, assassinated Gandhi in 1948 and upheld his actions till his hanging. Veer Savarkar was arrested and indicted by the Government of India in the Mahatma Gandhi assassination case. But he was acquitted by the Supreme Court of India, for reasons of lack of evidence.



Veer Savarkar died on February 26, 1966 at the age of 83.

Babar's History

Babar's History

The Mughal empire in India was founded by Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babar, a Chaghatai Turkish ruler born on 14 February 1483. He was the son of the ruler of the petty kingdom of Farghana and inherited his father's precarious throne when he was but eleven years old. Though it was Babar's dream to rule Central Asia and capture Samarqand, he had fierce opposition from Persians and the Afghans. Consequently he turned his eyes from the West to the East, from the steppes of Central Asia to the fertile plains of Hindustan [India].

North India was at that time ruled by Afghan chieftains known as the Lodis. Babar invaded the Lodi-governed Punjab several times from his capital at Kabul before winning a decisive victory. In 1526, at the battle of Panipat, only a few miles from Delhi, Babar's small but well-trained army of 12,000 men defeated a much larger force under the command of Ibrahim Lodi, the sultan of Delhi.



In the following year, Babar led his army to victory over a confederacy of Rajput kings headed by Rana Sanga, ruler of the state of Mewar of Rajasthan. Babar's small army defeated the eighty thousand strong army of the Rajputs. These brisk victories gave Babar, who had extraordinary military acumen, a base from which to consolidate his rule in Northern India. His guns and his long-practiced use of the enveloping tactics of Central Asian cavalry proved to be effective against the Rajputs as well as the Afghans. His kingdom included Central Asian territories, Kabul, the Punjab, Delhi, and other parts of North India as far south as Gwalior and as far east as the Bihar.



Babar was more of a soldier than a politician. It has been suggested by historians that the government he set up was saifi (by the sword ) and not qalami (by the pen). Considerable parts of his empire were ruled by his ministers with full sovereignity. He was an orthodox Sunni muslim and loved architecture and music; he was also a master of Turki, his mother tongue, as well as Persian. The chronicles of his life, the Babarnama, remains widely used and is a masterpiece of that genre of literature. Babar appears not to have been enamored of Delhi and India, and in recent years his name has been mired in controversy. A mosque by the name of Babri masjid, apparently built in 1526 at his command, was destroyed on 6 December 1992 by Hindu militants. They claim that a Hindu temple, marking the site of Lord Rama's birth, was destroyed at Babar's orders, and a mosque built at that very site. For Hindu militants and chauvinists, Babar's name has become synonymous with the history of Muslim tyranny and oppression, but almost nothing in the historical record warrants this reading.



Babar nominated his son Humayun as his successor and died on 30 December 1530 at the age of forty eight.

Rajiv Gandhi

Rajiv Gandhi

Mohandas Gandhi, the Mahatma, “the Great Soul”, was never awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This has been a perennial source of unhappiness for those Indians inclined to view Gandhi as by far the most deserving candidate of the twentieth century, and the hand of Britain, and the imperial West more generally, is seen as having been instrumental in depriving Gandhi of this “great honor”. Many Nobel Laureates in Peace are themselves agreed that Gandhi should have been honored before they were honored. The Dalai Lama, in his acceptance speech in Oslo on 10 December 1989, described himself as accepting the award “as a tribute to the man who founded the modern tradition of non-violent action for change, Mahatma Gandhi, whose life taught and inspired me.” [See http://www.tibet.com/DL/nobelaccept.html] Many others besides Indians have pondered over Gandhi’s omission from the list of winners, and as Gwladys Fouché and Sally Bolton wrote in the Guardian not long ago, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has been “criticised for failing to honour Mahatma Gandhi” (“The Nobel Prize”, 11 October 2002). (The Peace Prize alone is conferred by a committee of the Norwegian Parliament; the other awards are handed out by a Swedish committee.) Some Indians imagine that racist sentiments prevented Gandhi from receiving this signal honor, and they are doubtless right -- to a degree. The feeling persists that this omission mars the history of the Nobel Peace Prize. When, in 2001, V S Naipaul received the Nobel Prize in literature, and Kofi Annan and the UN were conferred the peace prize, even a critic of the entire institution of the Nobel prizes such as the journalist Amit Gupta, who was correct to criticize both Naipaul and Annan, could not cease to mention the omission of Gandhi as one of the reasons why the Nobel Prizes stand discredited. [See Amit Sengupta, “Grateful Alive”, Hindustan Times (16 October 2001).]

When all is said and done, most middle-class Indians, the Indians who are keen on such forms of adulation from the West and believe that score-keeping in these arenas is a worthy way of measuring the progress made by nations and individuals alike, would be delighted to see Gandhi being awarded the peace prize posthumously. That would chalk up the number of Indians who have been conferred the Nobel Prize in any area. However, as I shall suggest, we should be relieved that Gandhi was not given the Nobel Peace Prize. Considering that its recipients have included naked imperialists such as Theodore Roosevelt, a self-avowed terrorist such as Menachem Begin, and Henry Kissinger, the architect of the secret bombing of Cambodia, a war-monger and war criminal for whose arrest a warrant should be put out if there was any respect for the tens of thousands of the victims of Kissinger’s policies in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, and elsewhere, it would be doing Gandhi a discredit to place him in that company. There are, as we shall see, other compelling reasons why Gandhi is much nobler without a Nobel.



A little history on Gandhi and the Nobel Peace Prize is in order. Gandhi was nominated for the award five times -- in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947, and 1948. Under the rules governing the award of the Nobel Peace Prize, there was nothing to preclude the posthumous conferral of the award, though the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s own deliberations appear to have muddled the issue. On 30 January 1948, Gandhi was assassinated by Nathuram Godse; that year, six nominations were received on Gandhi’s behalf. On November 18th, the committee, in a public pronouncement, declared that it had found “no suitable living candidate” for the award, thereby implying that that it was not empowered to confer posthumous awards. To be sure, there were practical questions as to who -- one or more of his sons, and their families; or Navajivan Publishing House, which was charged with publishing Gandhi’s writings; or any of the numerous institutions which received Gandhi’s blessings -- would inherit the award if it were given to Gandhi, who was on the shortlist in 1948; but this cannot have been a principal consideration in denying Gandhi the award. If, as is true, a posthumous award had never been conferred previously, here was certainly more than good cause to create a new precedent. There hadn’t been anyone quite of the stature of Gandhi before the committee’s considerations either, so in every respect the committee was called upon to be thoughtful and creative. That was, evidently, asking too much of the committee.



The first nomination of Gandhi for the Nobel Peace Prize took place in 1937. The nomination originated from among Europeans, a testament not merely to the fact that Gandhi had countless number of admirers outside India, but also to his belief that allies would never be found wanting in India’s endeavor to gain independence. Notwithstanding his critique of the modern West, Gandhi always recognized the “other” West, the marginalized, dissenting West within the West. Though Gandhi made it to the shortlist, the Committee’s advisor, a professor (now obscure) by the name of Jacob Worm-Muller, wrote of Gandhi that he is “frequently a Christ, but then, suddenly, an ordinary politician.” Gandhi’s critics, among them British officials, held him responsible for the bouts of violence into which the nonviolent movement was thought to degenerate from time to time. A feeling persisted among some of his critics that Gandhi was preeminently an Indian nationalist, and that Gandhi himself was inclined to put the welfare of Indians before the good of humankind as a whole. As Worm-Muller observed, in obvious criticism of Gandhi, “One might say that it is significant that his well-known struggle in South Africa was on behalf of the Indians only, and not of the blacks whose living conditions were even worse.” Ten years later, it was still held against him that he was a “patriot” before being an advocate of peace. In 1947, in any case, the conferral of the award upon Gandhi would have been nearly inconceivable. Mountbatten knew enough of what was transpiring in India to understand that Gandhi was the single largest force for peace in strife-ridden Calcutta, and like many others he waxed eloquent about the miracle of Calcutta. As he wrote in appreciation to Gandhi, “In the Punjab we have 55,000 soldiers and large scale rioting is on our hands. In Bengal our forces consist of one man, and there is no rioting.” But many outside India, aware of the widespread killings that were taking place as India got partitioned and the new state of Pakistan came into being, might have been wondering whether India had been led astray under Gandhi’s leadership. Within India, of course, Gandhi had more than his share of detractors, and some of his opponents, not only among the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS, even held him responsible for the partition and its bloodshed.



And so it is that Gandhi was never conferred the Nobel Peace Prize. But why should this be a matter of misgiving and regret, and why should we strive for such accolades? Anyone familiar with Gandhi’s life would at once recognize that Gandhi scarcely cared a jot for such forms of recognition, and it is in the fitness of thinking that Gandhi, who left this world with very little on him, and almost made a virtue of nakedness, should have been unadorned by any titles, awards, formal designations, and the like. The Nobel Prize would have made Gandhi small: as the historian Jens Arup Seip, acting as the committee’s advisor in 1947 and 1948, divined Gandhi had left such an immense ethical mark on the world that he could “only be compared to the founders of religions.” Moreover, even a cursory familiarity with Gandhi’s writings suggest that he understood that colonization of the mind is in many respects more far-reaching than economic colonialism and political domination, and one insidious and pervasive form of such colonization is the fact that Indians, as well as other people in the “developing” world, continue to look to the West to validate their lives and make them meaningful. Our obsession with the Nobel Peace Prize that was never conferred on Gandhi is not so much inspired by indignation that he was overlooked as by the feeling that we think of our lives as incomplete until we have been given proper recognition by the West. Above all, it behooves us to recall that Gandhi was deeply immersed in the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita, and the Gita offers no more supreme teaching than the injunction that just duties must be pursued with detachment, without any expectation of compensation or rewards. It does Gandhi enormous discredit to continue to be agitated by an omission of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee for which we should be grateful.

Gandhi & the Nobel Peace Prize

Gandhi & the Nobel Peace Prize

Mohandas Gandhi, the Mahatma, “the Great Soul”, was never awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This has been a perennial source of unhappiness for those Indians inclined to view Gandhi as by far the most deserving candidate of the twentieth century, and the hand of Britain, and the imperial West more generally, is seen as having been instrumental in depriving Gandhi of this “great honor”. Many Nobel Laureates in Peace are themselves agreed that Gandhi should have been honored before they were honored. The Dalai Lama, in his acceptance speech in Oslo on 10 December 1989, described himself as accepting the award “as a tribute to the man who founded the modern tradition of non-violent action for change, Mahatma Gandhi, whose life taught and inspired me.” [See http://www.tibet.com/DL/nobelaccept.html] Many others besides Indians have pondered over Gandhi’s omission from the list of winners, and as Gwladys Fouché and Sally Bolton wrote in the Guardian not long ago, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has been “criticised for failing to honour Mahatma Gandhi” (“The Nobel Prize”, 11 October 2002). (The Peace Prize alone is conferred by a committee of the Norwegian Parliament; the other awards are handed out by a Swedish committee.) Some Indians imagine that racist sentiments prevented Gandhi from receiving this signal honor, and they are doubtless right -- to a degree. The feeling persists that this omission mars the history of the Nobel Peace Prize. When, in 2001, V S Naipaul received the Nobel Prize in literature, and Kofi Annan and the UN were conferred the peace prize, even a critic of the entire institution of the Nobel prizes such as the journalist Amit Gupta, who was correct to criticize both Naipaul and Annan, could not cease to mention the omission of Gandhi as one of the reasons why the Nobel Prizes stand discredited. [See Amit Sengupta, “Grateful Alive”, Hindustan Times (16 October 2001).]

When all is said and done, most middle-class Indians, the Indians who are keen on such forms of adulation from the West and believe that score-keeping in these arenas is a worthy way of measuring the progress made by nations and individuals alike, would be delighted to see Gandhi being awarded the peace prize posthumously. That would chalk up the number of Indians who have been conferred the Nobel Prize in any area. However, as I shall suggest, we should be relieved that Gandhi was not given the Nobel Peace Prize. Considering that its recipients have included naked imperialists such as Theodore Roosevelt, a self-avowed terrorist such as Menachem Begin, and Henry Kissinger, the architect of the secret bombing of Cambodia, a war-monger and war criminal for whose arrest a warrant should be put out if there was any respect for the tens of thousands of the victims of Kissinger’s policies in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, and elsewhere, it would be doing Gandhi a discredit to place him in that company. There are, as we shall see, other compelling reasons why Gandhi is much nobler without a Nobel.



A little history on Gandhi and the Nobel Peace Prize is in order. Gandhi was nominated for the award five times -- in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947, and 1948. Under the rules governing the award of the Nobel Peace Prize, there was nothing to preclude the posthumous conferral of the award, though the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s own deliberations appear to have muddled the issue. On 30 January 1948, Gandhi was assassinated by Nathuram Godse; that year, six nominations were received on Gandhi’s behalf. On November 18th, the committee, in a public pronouncement, declared that it had found “no suitable living candidate” for the award, thereby implying that that it was not empowered to confer posthumous awards. To be sure, there were practical questions as to who -- one or more of his sons, and their families; or Navajivan Publishing House, which was charged with publishing Gandhi’s writings; or any of the numerous institutions which received Gandhi’s blessings -- would inherit the award if it were given to Gandhi, who was on the shortlist in 1948; but this cannot have been a principal consideration in denying Gandhi the award. If, as is true, a posthumous award had never been conferred previously, here was certainly more than good cause to create a new precedent. There hadn’t been anyone quite of the stature of Gandhi before the committee’s considerations either, so in every respect the committee was called upon to be thoughtful and creative. That was, evidently, asking too much of the committee.



The first nomination of Gandhi for the Nobel Peace Prize took place in 1937. The nomination originated from among Europeans, a testament not merely to the fact that Gandhi had countless number of admirers outside India, but also to his belief that allies would never be found wanting in India’s endeavor to gain independence. Notwithstanding his critique of the modern West, Gandhi always recognized the “other” West, the marginalized, dissenting West within the West. Though Gandhi made it to the shortlist, the Committee’s advisor, a professor (now obscure) by the name of Jacob Worm-Muller, wrote of Gandhi that he is “frequently a Christ, but then, suddenly, an ordinary politician.” Gandhi’s critics, among them British officials, held him responsible for the bouts of violence into which the nonviolent movement was thought to degenerate from time to time. A feeling persisted among some of his critics that Gandhi was preeminently an Indian nationalist, and that Gandhi himself was inclined to put the welfare of Indians before the good of humankind as a whole. As Worm-Muller observed, in obvious criticism of Gandhi, “One might say that it is significant that his well-known struggle in South Africa was on behalf of the Indians only, and not of the blacks whose living conditions were even worse.” Ten years later, it was still held against him that he was a “patriot” before being an advocate of peace. In 1947, in any case, the conferral of the award upon Gandhi would have been nearly inconceivable. Mountbatten knew enough of what was transpiring in India to understand that Gandhi was the single largest force for peace in strife-ridden Calcutta, and like many others he waxed eloquent about the miracle of Calcutta. As he wrote in appreciation to Gandhi, “In the Punjab we have 55,000 soldiers and large scale rioting is on our hands. In Bengal our forces consist of one man, and there is no rioting.” But many outside India, aware of the widespread killings that were taking place as India got partitioned and the new state of Pakistan came into being, might have been wondering whether India had been led astray under Gandhi’s leadership. Within India, of course, Gandhi had more than his share of detractors, and some of his opponents, not only among the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS, even held him responsible for the partition and its bloodshed.



And so it is that Gandhi was never conferred the Nobel Peace Prize. But why should this be a matter of misgiving and regret, and why should we strive for such accolades? Anyone familiar with Gandhi’s life would at once recognize that Gandhi scarcely cared a jot for such forms of recognition, and it is in the fitness of thinking that Gandhi, who left this world with very little on him, and almost made a virtue of nakedness, should have been unadorned by any titles, awards, formal designations, and the like. The Nobel Prize would have made Gandhi small: as the historian Jens Arup Seip, acting as the committee’s advisor in 1947 and 1948, divined Gandhi had left such an immense ethical mark on the world that he could “only be compared to the founders of religions.” Moreover, even a cursory familiarity with Gandhi’s writings suggest that he understood that colonization of the mind is in many respects more far-reaching than economic colonialism and political domination, and one insidious and pervasive form of such colonization is the fact that Indians, as well as other people in the “developing” world, continue to look to the West to validate their lives and make them meaningful. Our obsession with the Nobel Peace Prize that was never conferred on Gandhi is not so much inspired by indignation that he was overlooked as by the feeling that we think of our lives as incomplete until we have been given proper recognition by the West. Above all, it behooves us to recall that Gandhi was deeply immersed in the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita, and the Gita offers no more supreme teaching than the injunction that just duties must be pursued with detachment, without any expectation of compensation or rewards. It does Gandhi enormous discredit to continue to be agitated by an omission of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee for which we should be grateful.

Aurangzeb: A Political History

Aurangzeb: A Political History

The four sons of the Mughal Emperor , Shah Jahan, all laid claim to the throne when their father fell seriously ill in 1658. Each had considerable administrative experience and military skills, each commanded a considerable military force, and each had a loyal following. Dara Shikoh (1615-58), the eldest son, was resident at Shah Jahan's court as the designated heir; Shuja was Governor of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa; Aurangzeb governed the Deccan; and Murad was Governor of Gujarat and Malwa. Dara's forces were defeated by Aurangzeb, who occupied the imperial capital of Agra; and Aurangzeb took his own father prisoner. Shuja's army was routed in battle; and Murad was lured into a false agreement and taken prisoner. Dara eventually collected together another force, suffered defeat as before, and once again he fled; but soon he was betrayed by one of his allies, and handed over to his brother. Accused of idolatry and apostasy from Islam, Dara was condemned to death, and the sentence was carried out on the night of 30 August 1659, one year after Aurangzeb took over the Fort at Agra and assumed the throne. Aurangzeb delivered the head of his brother to their father.

Aurangzeb Alamgir ("World Conqueror"), whose reign lasted for forty-nine years until his death in 1707, conducted vigorous military campaigns to extend the frontiers of the vast Mughal empire which he had inherited. Both in the northwest and northeast, the imperial armies gained ground, but the losses, which were very considerable, drained the treasury. Already under his father, the revenue of the crops had been raised from a third to a half, and the extensive and interminably long military campaigns he waged required him to keep the peasantry heavily taxed. Some notable victories were likewise achieved in the Deccan. Aurangzeb retained Shahjahanabad as his capital, but after some two decades the capital, in a manner of speaking, shifted to wherever Aurangzeb would set camp during his long military campaigns, which in the Deccan alone lasted some 26 years and perhaps cost him his life. Aurangzeb's mobile army consisted of some 500,000 camp followers, 50,000 camels, and 30,000 war elephants; and when this gargantuan force moved, bands of Maratha guerrillas would strike the rear, attacking the stragglers and fleeing with booty.





A considerable part of Aurangzeb's energies were consumed in keeping his numerous opponents at bay, and he had to deal with the Rajputs, the disloyalty of his son Akbar, and the Sikhs, whose leader, Guru Tegh Bahadur Singh, was killed at Aurangzeb's command when he refused to convert to Islam. Neither could Aurangzeb forgive the Sikhs for having supported his brother and principal rival, Dara. The most effective opposition to his rule, however, came from the Marathas, whose chief, Shivaji, could not be contained. Only Shivaji's premature death at the age of 53, in 1680, appeared to offer the Mughal Emperor some relief, but that very year the Rajputs of Jodhpur and Mewar forged an alliance against Aurangzeb and declared themselves free from his sovereignty. The army that Aurangzeb sent under his son Akbar to subdue them was formidable, but the emperor had perhaps not reckoned with his son's traitorous conduct. However, Akbar, who had rather vainly declared himself the emperor, was compelled to flee to the Deccan, where he enlisted the help of Shivaji's son, Sambhaji. Aurangzeb decided to take to the field himself, and eventually drove his own son into exile in Persia, from where Akbar never returned. The Sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda were also reduced to utter submission, and Sambhaji was captured in 1689 and tortured before being murdered.





Towards the end of his reign, Aurangzeb's empire began to disintegrate, a process which would be considerably accelerated in the years after his death, when "successor states" came into existence. Aurangzeb's harsh treatment of Hindus, and the reversal of the liberal religious policies of his predecessors, particularly Akbar, have been cited as principal reasons for the disintegration of his empire. [For a more detailed consideration, see the accompanying article on "Aurangzeb and the Encounter with Religion."] More likely, the peasantry was bled to death, and the system of political alliances established by Akbar was allowed to go to seed. The empire had become far too large and unwieldy, and Aurangzeb did not have enough trustworthy men at his command to be able to manage the more far-flung parts of the empire. Many of the his political appointees broke loose and declared themselves independent, and Aurangzeb's preoccupation with affairs in the Deccan prevented him from meeting political challenges emanating from other parts of the empire. Shortly after the death of Aurangzeb, the Mughal Empire ceased to be an effective force in the political life of India, but it was not until 1857-58, when the Indian Rebellion was crushed and the Emperor Bahadur Shah was put on trial for sedition and treason, that the Mughal Empire was formally rendered extinct.

AURANGZEB: RELIGIOUS POLICIES :

The disintegration of the Mughal Empire followed rapidly after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707. During his long reign of 49 years, Aurangzeb had done much to extend the frontiers of the empire he had inherited from his father, Shah Jahan, but the extensive military campaigns he conducted, particularly in the Deccan, created a severe financial drain on his resources. The burden of oppressive taxation fell on the peasantry, and political feudatories who owed their positions to Aurangzeb were constantly breaking loose from the emperor's control. But more often than not, it is the religious policies pursued by Aurangzeb that have been cited as one of the principal reasons for Aurangzeb's undoing, and among many Hindus the name of Aurangzeb evokes the same passionate hatred as do the names of Mahmud of Ghazni and Muhammad of Ghori. With the ascent of the Hindu right to political power in India, a great many people have been emboldened to further attack Aurangzeb. A brief consideration of Aurangzeb's policies, consequently, is in order, but not only to understand the nature of his reign, or the state of Hindu-Muslim relations in India over a period of time, important as are these questions; it is also imperative to ask questions about how our histories are written and how notions of 'minority' and 'majority' get constructed and become part of the political vocabulary.




A year after he assumed power in 1658, Aurangzeb appointed muhtasaibs, or censors of public morals, from the ranks of the ulema or clergy in every large city. He was keen that the sharia or Islamic law be followed everywhere, and that practices abhorrent to Islam, such as the consumption of alcohol and gambling, be disallowed in public. But he was at the outset faced with one problem, namely that the treatment he had meted out to his own father, subjecting him to imprisonment, was scarcely consistent with the image he sought to present of himself as a true believer of the faith. Accordingly, Aurangzeb sought recognition of his ascent to the Mughal Emperor's throne from the ruler of the holy places in the Hijaz, and he became a great patron of the Holy Places. He is reported as well to have spent seven years memorizing the Koran, and unlike his predecessors, his reign was marked by austerity. The monumental architecture that characterized the reigns of Akbar and Shah Jahan -- the Agra Fort, Fatehpur Sikri, the Taj Mahal, Shahjahanabad, among others -- held little interest for Aurangzeb, and similarly the musicians who had adorned the courts of his predecessors were dismissed.



From the standpoint of Aurangzeb's Hindu subjects, the real impact of his policies may have started to have been felt in 1668-69. Hindu religious fairs were outlawed in 1668, and an edict of the following year prohibited construction of Hindu temples as well as the repair of old ones. Also in 1669, Aurangzeb discontinued the practice, which had been originated by Akbar, of appearing before his subjects and conferring darshan on them, or letting them receive his blessings as one might, in Hinduism, take the darshan of a deity and so receive its blessings. Though the duty (internal customs fees) paid on goods was 2.5%, double the amount was levied on Hindu merchants from 1665 onwards. In 1679, Aurangzeb went so far as to reimpose, contrary to the advice of many of his court nobles and theologians, the jiziya or graduated property tax on non-Hindus, and according to one historical source, elephants were deployed to crush the resistance in the area surrounding the Red Fort of Hindus who refused to submit to jiziya collectors. The historian John F. Richards opines, quite candidly, that "Aurangzeb's ultimate aim was conversion of non-Muslims to Islam. Whenever possible the emperor gave out robes of honor, cash gifts, and promotions to converts. It quickly became known that conversion was a sure way to the emperor's favor" (p. 177).



It can scarcely be doubted, once the historical evidence is weighed, that the religious policies of Aurangzeb were discriminatory towards Hindus, Sikhs, and other non-Muslims. Nonetheless, numerous inferences have been drawn from the literature which are not warranted by the historical record. Though many historians have written of conversions of Hindus, surprisingly little, if any, evidence has been offered to suggest how far the conversion of Hindus took place, and whether there was any official policy beyond one of mere encouragement that led to the conversion of Hindus. Then, as now, conversion would have been more attractive to the vast number of Hindus living under the tyranny of caste oppression, and it isn't clear at all how the kind of inducements that Aurangzeb offered -- if indeed he did so for the purposes of conversion, as Richards maintains -- are substantially different from the inducements that modern, purportedly secular, politicians offer to people in their electoral constituencies. And what of the popular representation of Aurangzeb as a ferocious destroyer of Hindu temples and idols? Hindu temples in the Deccan were seldom destroyed, notwithstanding Aurangzeb's extensive military campaigns in that area. True, in north India, some Hindu temples were undoubtedly torn down, but much work needs to be done to establish the precise circumstances under which these acts of destruction took place. The famed Keshava Rai temple in Mathura was one such temple, but here Aurangzeb seems to have been motivated by a policy of reprisal, since the Jats in the region had risen in revolt. Like his predecessors, Aurangzeb continued to confer land grants (jagirs) upon Hindu temples, such as the Someshwar Nath Mahadev temple in Allahabad, Jangum Badi Shiva temple in Banaras, and Umanand temple in Gauhati, and if one put this down merely to expediency, then why cannot one view the destruction of temples as a matter of expediency as well, rather than as a matter of deliberate state policy? Moreover, recent historical work has shown that the number of Hindus employed as mansabdars, or as senior court officials and provincial administrators, under Aurangzeb's reign rose from 24.5% in the time of his father Shah Jahan to 33% in the fourth decade of his own rule. One has the inescapable feeling that then, as now, the word 'fanaticism' comes rather too easily to one's lips to characterize the actions of people acting, or claiming to act, under the name of Islam. It is also notable that as a firm Sunni, Aurangzeb dealt as firmly with the Shia kingdoms of Bijapur and Golconda as he did with the Hindus or Muslims. One can safely assert that Aurangzeb acted to preserve and enhance the interests of his own Muslim community, and restored the privileges of the Sunni ulema, but his actions with respect to the Hindus, Shias, and others are more open to interpretation.


Aurangzeb's Fatwa on Jizya [Jizyah, or Poll Tax] :

Much has been made of Aurangzeb's reimposition of the poll tax (jizya, or jizyah) on Hindus. However, as the text of the fatwa, which is seldom read, indicates, an exemption was provided for various classes of people, such as those who were indigent, without employment, unable to work on account of poor health, and so on. Moreover, the fatwa clearly shows that the amount was, far from being uniform, fixed according to a person's ability to pay. The statement that the jizyah was imposed as well on "the people of the Book" -- here doubtless a reference to Christians and Jews -- is particularly significant, since it suggests that there was no animus directed particularly against the Hindus. The translation below is by Anver Emon of the Department of History, UCLA.










Source:



Al-Fatawa al-Alamgiriyyah = Al-Fatawa al-Hindiyyah fi Madhhab al-Imam al-A‘zam Abi Hanifah al-Nu‘man (Beirut: Dar al-Ma‘rifah, 1973), 2:244-245.



Chapter on Jizyah



[Jizyah] refers to what is taken from the Dhimmis, according to [what is stated in] al-Nihayah. It is obligatory upon [1] the free, [2] adult members of [those] who are generally fought, [3] who are fully in possession of their mental faculties, and [4] gainfully employed, even if [their] profession is not noble, as is [stated in] al-Sarajiyyah. There are two types of [jizyah]. [The first is] the jizyah that is imposed by treaty or consent, such that it is established in accordance with mutual agreement, according to [what is stated in] al-Kafi. [The amount] does not go above or below [the stipulated] amount, as is stated in al-Nahr al-Fa’iq. [The second type] is the jizyah that the leader imposes when he conquers the unbelievers (kuffar), and [whose amount] he imposes upon the populace in accordance with the amount of property [they own], as in al-Kafi. This is an amount that is pre-established, regardless of whether they agree or disagree, consent to it or not.



The wealthy [are obligated to pay] each year forty-eight dirhams [of a specified weight], payable per month at the rate of 4 dirhams. The next, middle group (wast al-hal) [must pay] twenty-four dirhams, payable per month at the rate of 2 dirhams. The employed poor are obligated to pay twelve dirhams, in each month paying only one dirham, as stipulated in Fath al-Qadir, al-Hidayah, and al-Kafi. [The scholars] address the meaning of "gainfully employed", and the correct meaning is that it refers to one who has the capacity to work, even if his profession is not noble. The scholars also address the meaning of wealthy, poor, and the middle group. Al-Shaykh al-Imam Abu Ja‘far, may Allah the most high have mercy on him, considered the custom of each region decisive as to whom the people considered in their land to be poor, of the middle group, or rich. This is as such, and it is the most correct view, as stated in al-Muhit. Al-Karakhi says that the poor person is one who owns two hundred dirhams or less, while the middle group owns more than two hundred and up to ten thousand dirhams, and the wealthy [are those] who own more than ten thousand dirhams...The support for this, according to al-Karakhi is provided by the fatawa of Qadi Khan (d. 592/1196). It is necessary that in the case of the employed person, he must have good health for most of the year, as is stated in al-Hidayah. It is mentioned in al-Idah that if a dhimmi is ill for the entire year such that he cannot work and he is well off, he is not obligated to pay the jizyah, and likewise if he is sick for half of the year or more. If he quits his work while having the capacity [to work] he [is still liable] as one gainfully employed, as is [stated in] al-Nihayah. The jizyah accrues, in our opinion, at the beginning of the year, and it is imposed on the People of the Book (whether they are Arab, non-Arab, or Majians) and idol worshippers (‘abdat al-awthan) from among the non-Arabs, as in al-Kafi...The [jizyah] is not imposed on the idol worshippers from among the Arabs or from among the apostates, where they exist. Their women and children [are considered] as part of a single liability group (fi’). [In other words], whoever from among their men do not submit to Islam shall be killed, and no jizyah is imposed upon their women, children, ill persons or the blind, or likewise on the paraplegic, the very old, or on the unemployed poor, as is stated in al-Hidayah.