Historian DN Jha says that his new book Against the Grain: Notes on Identity, Intolerance and History aims to challenge the depiction of the “ancient period of Indian history as a golden age marked by social harmony devoid of any religious violence”. This purported era of peace, he says, enables Hindutva ideologues to “portray the middle ages as … a reign of terror unleashed by the Muslim rulers on Hindus”.

The book says, “Central to (Hindutva) perception is the belief that Muslim rulers indiscriminately demolished Hindu temples and broke Hindu idols. They relentlessly propagate the canard that 60,000 Hindu temples were demolished during Muslim rule, though there is hardly any credible evidence for the destruction of more than 80 of them.”

There is no doubt that religious sects in ancient India were accommodative of each other. But it is just as true that Brahminical sects “bore huge animosity towards the two heterodox religions, Buddhism and Jainism”, Jha writes. This rancour resulted in attacks and the appropriation of Buddhist and Jain sacred places.

Presenting what he calls “a limited survey of the desecration, destruction and appropriation of Buddhist stupas, monasteries and other structures by Brahminical forces”, Jha says, “Evidence for such destruction dates as far back as the end of the reign of Ashoka, who is credited with making Buddhism a world religion.”

These facts seem to be at odds with India’s school-level history textbooks, which have been written – at least until recently – to promote what Delhi University professor Upinder Singh in her recent book Political Violence in Ancient India described as “the idealised Nehru model of the ancient Indian past…one in which Buddhism, Ashoka, nonviolence, and cosmopolitanism had a pride of place”. Hindutva ideologues have exploited this myth to portray the iconoclasm of Muslim rulers as a total reversal of India’s civilisational norms. Implicitly, therefore, Against the Grain highlights the problems of writing history, especially for schoolchildren.

A history of religious violence

According to Jha, “A tradition recorded in a twelfth-century Kashmiri text, the Rajatarangini of Kalhana, mentions one of Ashoka’s sons, Jalauka. Unlike his father, he was a Shaivite, and destroyed Buddhist monasteries. If this is given credence, the attacks on Shramanic religions seem to have begun either in the lifetime of Ashoka or soon after his death.”

Jha adds, “Other early evidence of the persecution of Shramanas comes from the post-Mauryan period, recorded in the Divyavadana, a Buddhist Sanskrit, which describes the Brahmin ruler Pushyamitra Shunga as a great persecutor of Buddhists. He is said to have marched out with a large army, destroying stupas, burning monasteries and killing monks as far as Sakala, now known as Sialkot, where he announced a prize of one hundred dinars for every head of a Shramana.”

Bringing up “evidence” from famous grammarian Patanjali, Jha says, he “famously stated in his Mahabhashya that Brahmins and Shramanas are eternal enemies, like the snake and the mongoose. All this taken together means that the stage was set for a Brahminical onslaught on Buddhism during the post-Mauryan period, especially under Pushyamitra Shunga, who may have destroyed the Ashokan Pillared Hall and the Kukutarama monastery at Pataliputra—modern-day Patna.”

Jha further says, “The possibility of a Shunga assault on Buddhist monuments is supported by the layers of debris and the evidence of desertion found at many centres of Buddhism, notably in Madhya Pradesh. For example, Sanchi, which was an important Buddhist site since the time of Ashoka, has yielded evidence of the vandalisation of several edifices during the Shunga period. Similar evidence comes from nearby places such as Satdhara, in Katni district, and Deurkothar, in Rewa district.”

“The destruction and appropriation of Buddhist sites continued in Madhya Pradesh even after Shunga rule ended”, says Jha. “At Ahmedpur, for instance, a Brahminical temple seems to have been constructed on a stupa base in the fifth century, and icons have been found at several sites around Vidisha, which were transformed into Shaivite or Jain places of worship around the eighth century.”

Then, “more than 250 kilometres north-east of Vidisha, a Buddhist establishment existed at Khajuraho before it emerged as a major temple town from the tenth century onwards, under the Chandellas. Here, the Ghantai temple appears to have been built on the remains of a Buddhist monument in the ninth or tenth century by the Jains, who also may have had a strong presence in the region.”

Providing evidence from Mathura, which was a flourishing town in western Uttar Pradesh during the Kushana period, Jha says, “Some present-day Brahminical temples, such as those of Bhuteshwar and Gokarneshwar, were Buddhist sites in the ancient period. Here, the Katra Mound, a Buddhist centre during Kushana times, became a Hindu religious site in the early medieval period.”

Further, at Kaushambi, near Allahabad, “the destruction and burning of the great Ghositaram monastery has been attributed to the Shungas — more specifically to Pushyamitra”, says Jha, adding, “Sarnath, near Varanasi, where the Buddha delivered his first sermon, became the target of Brahminical assault. This was followed by the construction of Brahminical buildings, such as Court 36 and Structure 136, probably in the Gupta period, by reusing Mauryan materials.”

Quoting Chinese pilgrim Fa-hsien, who visited India in the early fifth century, during the Gupta period, Jha says, at Sravasti, where the Buddha spent much of his life, “Brahmins seem to have appropriated a Kushana Buddhist site, where a temple with Ramayana panels was constructed during the Gupta period.”

Jha notes, “In fact, the general scenario of Buddhist establishments in what is today Uttar Pradesh was so bad that in Sultanpur district alone no less than 49 Buddhist sites seem to have been destroyed by fire when, as described in a paper by the archaeologist Alois Anton Führer, ‘Brahminism won its final victories over Buddhism’.”

In the post-Gupta centuries, says Jha, Chinese Buddhist pilgrim and traveller Hsüan Tsang, who visited India between the years 631 and 645, during the reign of Harshavardhana, “states that the sixth-century Huna ruler Mihirakula, a devotee of Shiva, destroyed 1,600 Buddhist stupas and monasteries and killed thousands of Buddhist monks and laity. He further tells us that 1,000 sangharamas in Gandhara were ‘deserted’/and in ‘ruins,’ and describes 1,400 sangharamas in Uddiyana as ‘generally waste and desolate’.”

Then, says Jha, “Hsüan Tsang tells us that the king Shashanka of Gauda cut down the Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya in Bihar — the place of the Buddha’s enlightenment — and removed a statue of the Buddha from a local temple, ordering that it be replaced by an image of Maheshvara… Bodh Gaya came under Buddhist control again during the period of the Pala rulers, who were Buddhists, and the place has, in fact, remained a site of religious contestation throughout Indian history.”

Referring to the internationally reputed Buddhist university at Nalanda, especially the its vast monastic complex where Hsüan Tsang spent more than five years, Jha says, it’s library was set on fire by “Hindu fanatics”, insisting, “The popular view, however, wrongly attributes this conflagration to the Mamluk commander Bakhtiyar Khilji, who never went there, but, in fact, sacked the nearby Odantapuri Mahavihara at modern-day Bihar Sharif.”

Suspecting that even the Jagannath temple at Puri, one of the most prominent Brahminical pilgrimage centres in eastern India, built in the twelfth century during the reign of the Eastern Ganga ruler Anantavarman Chodaganga Deva, “is said to have been constructed on a Buddhist site” something which “may be contested”, Jha says, “There is hardly any doubt that the temples of Purneshvara, Kedareshvara, Kanteshvara, Someshvara and Angeshvara, all in Puri district, were either built on Buddhist viharas, or made of material derived from them.”

These are just some of the examples taken from Jha’s list of religious sites that were appropriated or destroyed, making it clear that ancient India witnessed a level of religious violence that was certainly not insignificant. However, this is barely evident in the National Council of Education Research and Training’s textbooks prescribed for India’s Class 12 students.

What the textbooks leave unsaid

For instance, though Themes in Indian History – Part I speaks of the construction plan of the famous Sanchi Stupa and deciphers its sculptures for students, there is no mention of Pushyamitra vandalising the shrine.

Part I describes various sects participating in philosophical debates that were deemed democratic and civilised. “If a philosopher succeeded in convincing one of his rivals, the followers of the latter also became his disciples,” it observes. “So support for any particular sect could grow and shrink over time.” However, students are not told about how Buddhists were killed for challenging Brahminism.

This lacuna is partly offset by a passage in Themes in Indian History – Part II. “Those who valued Vedic traditions” condemned the practices that did not involve sacrifices or the precise chanting of mantras, it says. Their “relations with other traditions, such as Buddhism and Jainism, were also often fraught with tension if not open conflict”, the passage notes.

Part II also says that “one of the major themes in Tamil bhakti hymns is the poets’ opposition to Buddhism and Jainism”. An explanatory sentence follows: “Historians have attempted to explain this hostility by suggesting that it was due to competition between members of other religious traditions for royal patronage.”

Yet, the picture of the past that Part I and Part II create is far removed from the one Jha paints – contestations that often snowballed into violence, destruction and appropriation of places of worship of those sects that lost royal patronage, as Buddhism and Jainism gradually did.

The underplaying of religious violence is equally true of Part II, which mostly deals with the Muslim rulers who came later. “Several” Muslim rulers are credited with granting land endowments and tax exemptions to non-Islamic religious institutions. One sentence names two Mughal emperors – Akbar and Aurangzeb – for making such grants.

That, indeed, is a fact. But Part II mostly glosses over Aurangzeb’s reign, including his destruction of temples. It does mention jizya, which is defined as a tax paid by followers of “revealed scriptures, such as the Jews and Christians” for gaining the “right to be protected by Muslims”. It adds, “As you will see, rulers such as the Mughals came to regard themselves as emperors of not just Muslims but of all peoples.” A sentence crediting Akbar for abolishing jizya in 1564 is followed by another saying Aurangzeb re-imposed it.

Certainly, these few sentences do not provide a perspective to students on whether it was fair to impose jizya and Aurangzeb’s motivation in reversing Akbar’s abolition of it. Part II says the sultans of Bijapur, Golconda and Ahmadnagar joined forces to sack Vijayanagar in 1565. The treatment is too cursory for students to grasp whether people like Nobel laureate VS Naipaul have tenable reasons to nurse a deep grievance against those who turned Vijayanagar into a ruin.

Growing up on a myth

Apart from reinforcing the model of a harmonious past in the hope of creating a peaceful present, the scholars who drafted the National Council of Education Research and Training’s policy perhaps believe contentious issues of religious differences, discrimination and conflict are just too sensitive for Class 12 students.

Yet, the irony is that Class 12 students are mostly 18 years or 17 years of age, already voters or months away from being able to exercise their franchise. Their voting decisions are supposed to be based on reasoned judgement. With history increasingly becoming a site of political contestations, their school books do not equip them to engage with contentious ideas such as Muslim rule having been a “reign of terror”.

The knowledge of history that most people have is confined to what they read in school. They grow up with the myth that India was free of religious conflict until the arrival of the Muslims. This is precisely why even middle-class Hindus are susceptible to political campaigns built around stories about the persecution of Hindus by Muslim rulers.

India’s text books have created a history, however true, that is out of sync with a remembered past that has been crafted and popularised to fan hatred. This notion of the past is not interrogated in textbooks.

School is, of course, just one aspect of a student’s social milieu. On hearing the incessant chatter, particularly from parents and friends, about the violence that Muslim rulers perpetrated against Hindus, an 18-year-old cannot be faulted for thinking that the writers of schoolbooks practise deception through concealment.

In the preface of Against the Grain, Jha writes that his book is “addressed to the people who are vulnerable to the balderdash of the Hindu Right”. Once acquainted with knowledge of sectarian fissures and conflicts in the first millennium, India’s young students will be equipped to perceive the religious policies of Muslim rulers as a continuation of the norms that had long prevailed. Against the Grain should be the model for writing history textbooks for schools.

[Compiled by us from 2 articles: “Why It’s Essential for School Students to Learn About Religious Violence in Ancient India”, by Ajaz Ashraf, Scroll.in, 1 May, 2018; and “Buddhist Shrines Were ‘Massively Destroyed’ by Brahmanical Rulers: Historian DN Jha”, Counterview, 22 June 2018.]