Excerpts from talk on “India and Indian Culture” delivered by Anbil Ramaswamy, at “Alterra Sterling House (Senior Care Facility) at 1277 S. Sawburg Rd, Alliance, OH 44601 on 22nd September 2007 (An All- American audience) – Part 3 For about five centuries from the thirteenth, Indo-Muslim states were driven by a 'theology of iconoclasm' - not to mention fanaticism, lust for plunder, and uncompromising hatred of Hindu religion and places of worship. Religious conversion with conquest - with conquest serving to facilitate conversion, and conversion serving to legitimize conquest became an unending vicious circle. Hindu rulers in those days derived authority and legitimacy due to their association with a royal temple - typically housing an image of a ruling dynasty's state-deity (usually Vishnu or Siva). Such temples were systematically looted, defiled or destroyed, for detaching a defeated ruler from his most prominent insignia of legitimacy. From about the sixth century on, images and temples associated with dynastic authority were considered politically vulnerable. The sultanate was in constant flux as five dynasties rose and fell: the Slave dynasty (1206-90), Khalji dynasty (1290-1320), Tughlaq dynasty (1320-1413), Sayyid dynasty (1414-51), and Lodi dynasty (1451-1526). The Khilji dynasty, under Alauddin (1296 - 1316), succeeded in bringing most of Sabuktigin and his son Mahmud of Ghazni (r. 998-1030) invaded Turkish rulers established themselves in north The Paramara dynasty attacked and plundered Jain temples in Ulugh Khan sacked in February 1299, Gujarat's famous Firuz Tughlaq invaded Orissa in 1359 and ravaged the most important Epigraphic evidence and literary sources spanning a period of more than five centuries (1192-1729) reveal at least eighty instances of temple desecration.
Malik Kafur (fl. 1296 - 1316), a general in the army of Alauddin Khilji, ruler of the Delhi sultanate from 1296 to 1316 invaded the south. In 1294 he led the sultan’s army against the capital city of the Yadava kingdom, Devagiri. He led further invasions southward into the Kakatiya dynasty and eventually into the Pandyan Kingdom in far southern India, winning immense riches for the sultanate. Kafur’s invasion of Pandya was the farthest south that any Muslim invasion would ever reach in
He stormed the most sacred Sri Ranganatha temple for SrivaishNavas at Srirangam. While Sruta prakasika chariar Swami who was 90+ in age stayed back in Srirangam raising a wall to conceal the main image, Pillai Lokacharya another nonagenarian carried the Utsava murthy to the north for safe custody. Swami Vedanta Desika took charge of the holy Sruta prakasika and the two sons of their author to Sathyakaalam (in present day
The Moghuls: The Moghuls who succeeded were only a slight better in their treatment of Hindus, probably because, they had family feuds and patricides etc that kept them busy. Babur (1526-1530), Humayun (1530- 1556), Akbar (1556- 1605), Jehangir (1605 – 1627), Shah Jahan (1627 – 1658) and Aurangazeb also known as Alamgir I (1618 –1707) imposed “Jezia” tax on the infidels and ruthlessly enforced collections. The British Friedrich Max Müller (December 6, 1823 – October 28, 1900), was a German philologist and Orientalist . He was amazed to find a wide variety of differences among the different ethnic groups that were divided by language, customs and habits. But all of them from the Himalayas in the north to Cape Kanyakumari in the South, from Gujarat in the West to Bengal in the East were bound mysteriously by the magic thread of Vedic literature especially the two great epics of Srimad Ramayana and Mahabharata. He wanted to strike at the root of this bonding. In a letter to his wife, he said: “The translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent on the fate of For this purpose, he learned Sanskrit through which religion expressed itself in those days. Later, he studied the scriptures. By the time he completed his studies, he became so fascinated by the morals conveyed therein that he became a slave to the scriptures. True to what Oliver Goldsmith put it in his “
Müller wrote both scholarly and popular works on the subject of Indology, a discipline he introduced to the British reading public, and the Sacred Books of the East, a massive, 50-volume set of English translations prepared under his direction, stands as an enduring monument to Victorian scholarship. While the Muslims sought to convert Hindus at the point of the sword, the British tactics consisted in brain-washing the elite through inducements. Macaulay 'used to refer to people as “born of Indian ancestry but adopting Western culture as a lifestyle, or display attitudes influenced by colonisers” all in a derogatory tone, and the connotation is one of disloyalty to one's country and one's heritage. The passage to which the term refers is from his Minute on Indian Education, delivered in 1835. It reads, “It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population” What were the reasons for the “cake walk” by the invaders? 1. Hindus in general were Satvic by nature following their “Sanatana Dharma” (eternal duties) prescribed in the Sastras. 2. The warrior classes (Kshatriyas) responsible for the protection of their country and their subjects dissipated their energies in fighting with each other instead of facing a common enemy. Dr. D.S. Sharma in his “Crescent in (To continue) ==================================================================================== __._,_.___
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