I am an Indian and a practicing Hindu. I had to do a lot of research, read many texts, and history books before I started writing this article. You know why? Because India’s history and Hinduism as a religion go back more than 9000 years.
The arrival of Muslim invaders, the holocaust of Hindus, British colonial rule aren’t part of ancient Indian history. At best, it is part of modern Indian history. This was an era when Hinduism was gasping for air and paying jizya tax for religious freedom to the blood-stained hands of Muslim invaders.
It started with me stumbling upon an article titled - How Hindu Nationalist are erasing Muslims from India History?
The article claims Hindu nationalists along with BJP and Narendra Modi are on a name-changing spree of the Indian cities and that an act will erase Muslim history from India. It furthers with the label of “cultural genocide of Muslims.”
Everything in the article is so profoundly incorrect that it is hard to determine where to start. I will begin with the main claim of the article - renaming the Indian cities.
We, on the rational side, call it the un-naming of Indian cities. How? I will explain.
India and its civilization have existed for more than 9000 years now. Indian cities were named after their beauty, people, geography, and the clan that established it - Prayagraj, Ayodhya, Banaras . . .
Baam!!!!
Comes Muslim invaders bringing the wrath of the world’s worst genocide on Hindus. Killing thousands of innocent Hindus, looting temples, destroying cities and setting them on fire, burning down libraries and universities, enslaving women and children, and naming the ancient Indian cities after barbaric rulers.
Let’s take an example here:
Prayagraj, formerly Allahabad is an ancient Indian city that is estimated to be 4000 years old. ‘Prayag’ means river delta. It is a geographic name, simple and beautiful. Mughals, after invading India, started demolishing the temples which erased the history of this ancient city. They replaced the name Prayagraj with Allahabad (city of Allah). Using the original name of the cities was punishable by death during the Mughal period.
Millions of Hindus from the Indian sub-continent were wiped off by Islamic invaders while Hindus struggled to maintain their country and culture together.
What is in the name?
If this statement is to be taken literally, no one of us would have names. Our name is our identity. How bugged are you when the barista at your favorite Starbucks calls you Keran instead of Karen? Very. That holds true for the name of the cities as well.
I come from a country that has been attacked, colonized, and looted at the hands of foreign entities. I understand the pain and trauma that comes with it.
To paint you a picture, if a country falls under attack of ISIS and women of the country are enslaved. They are raped and forced to change their names to Begum, Biwi, or whatever. A few generations pass before you can muster all your strength to fight back and revive from this slavery. Now your granddaughters/sons want to change their names to what they were before the attack happened. Would they think - ‘What is in the name?’ Would you want them to re-think for a moment and be philosophical?
If the world wants to know what Islam did to Hindus in India, you do not have to look further. Just look at what ISIS is doing to Yazidis. Would you ask the women, children, and families to ‘forget and forgive’ their perpetrators?
We - the survivors of Islamic assault and barbarity, the Hindu and inheritors of the world's oldest surviving civilization do not have such compulsions. We stand up for what’s right and what’s just. The world must not forget we drew out a mighty colonizer from India with non-violence and fasting. What happened after the partition is a discussion for another day.
How intertwined the lives of Muslims and Hindus are in India...
Yet you fail to notice the fact that Indus Valley civilization was a Hindu civilization until Muslim invaders brought Islam with them. And yet today, India is a secular nation and not a Hindu nation. We have accepted Islam into our fold with respect. Every person in India is free to practice, preach, and spread their religion.
So that’s supporting culture and not an attempt to erase it. If India would have wanted to erase it as some of you profess, we wouldn’t have waited till 2018 to do it.
As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “To India, I come as a pilgrim.” You don’t go to India to just visit the Taj Mahal. You go to India as a seeker. A visit to India is never fulfilled if you don't go to a temple but I can’t say that about the Taj Mahal. If Hindu nationalists are trying to erase the Muslim culture from India, we would not be promoting tourism to the Taj Mahal. We are proud of the Taj Mahal as much as we are proud of the Somnath temple.
I do not blame people from the West or other countries for not understanding this sentiment because it comes from being an Indian, being a Hindu. I am proud to be recognized as a Hindu because India in its history of more than thousands of years, never once attacked another country and has been able to preserve its culture and religion even after witnessing barbaric invasions.
I am going to say this out loud. The Muslims in India right now are either children of or forcefully converted Muslims. People in the Indus Valley civilization were all Hindus. Hence the name. Islam arrived in the Indian sub-continent with Muslim invaders. All of us here belong to the same genetic DNA and traditions. They were converted to Islam on the blade of swords. Thanks to many valiant warriors and sages that we (Hindus) still exist today.
We have got to preserve our culture, traditions, and religion. When the Taliban entered Afghanistan and destroyed Buddha statues from Bamyan, it was people of the same ideology of destruction and intolerance of other religions that caused the destruction of temples in India. Very soon, the world will be told that Buddha statues never existed in Bamyan. In the future, if some Buddhists try to rebuild or put the broken pieces of statues together, they will be accused of erasing Islamic history. This is how all the propaganda works.
The holocaust of Hindus, although being the worst in the history of the world, never found its place in the pages of history. Makes me wonder - Is it because Hindus kept quiet? Is it because we didn’t strike back and chose the path of non-violence instead?
A Hindu will never forget how great universities, libraries, and texts were burned by Muslim invaders. The fire at Nalanda University burned for more than 3 months at stretch. Imagine the amount of literature it held. For Hindus and Buddhists, these texts and knowledge are lost forever and only exist as names of the texts in other scriptures.
Now, who’s trying to erase the culture? Do you want to keep quiet on this one just like history did? Or turn a blind eye?
We as Indians, do suffer from a non-violence disorder - if someone slapped our right cheek, we offer the left one and never really learned to raise our hand whether to protect or to attack.
I have mixed reactions (anger, sadness, disgust, and intolerance to stupidity) when I read such articles about Hinduism. Yet I find calmness in this chaotic world, because of my religion. As a Hindu, I have grown up to be a tolerant person. I welcome comments on India. But we don’t give a flying doodley doo about the views of people who grew up believing that their god was born without no one screwing no one.
I could have kept quiet and gone minding my business but if anything I have learned from the history of Hindus, keeping quiet hasn't worked well for us. Offer the left cheek if you get slapped on the right one. What should I do if I got slapped on both the cheeks, no one said anything about it. Being a proud citizen of a young country but an ancient nation here’s the start.
Namaste!
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