Rahim Yar Khan

Year 2021

—Sabirbhai, why did you come to Rahim Yar Khan?

— Maharaja Dahirsen will be incomplete if we do not come to Rahim Yar Khan before leaving for Aror.

Sabirbhai stopped the car in front of the Maharaja Dahir Sen dental Clinic in Rahim Yar Khan and said, “Come and meet the Rajasaheb of Rahim Yar Khan.”

—Uff, Sabirbhai, we don’t have that much time at all. Is there any need to do this?

Can you find the tomb of Airavat by yourself? Nobody else in Aror knows anything about these things. Time is short, I know that very well, that’s why I brought you here.

They opened the glass door of the Maharaja Dahir Sen dental Clinic and entered, this time there was no patient inside, a huge painting of Maharaja Dahir was hanging from the wall, below that the name and time of Maharaja Dahir is mentioned. 2nd of July is recorded as the date of his death. There are black sofas on both sides of this room, evidently those are for the patients and party to be awaited, there is another room inside this room, Sabirbhai opened the door and entered that room, Dr. Iqbal followed him and find out a man sitting by, seeing Sabirbhai he stood up and do namashkar with folded hands. Looking at Dr. Iqbal Sabirbhai said, “Meet Dr. Amir Khan, who claims to be the living descendant of Maharaja Dahir.”

Seeing Dr. Amir Khan, Dr. Iqbal become awfully speechless. He didn’t have any detailed idea about Maharaja Dahir before, how much he was getting to know in detail since joining Mission Maharaja Dahir Sen. And without Sabirbhai, he would not have met Dr. Amir Khan. His very name suggests that he has nothing to do with Syria, but is a descendant of some other offspring of Dahirsen. Dr. Iqbal did not have to ask anything. Dr. Amir Khan himself started saying, “I met Sabirbhai through Facebook. He informed me that you are writing a biographical book on Maharaja Dahir, I can’t compose, God has not given me that quality, but I can give you a lot of information about our lineage, hope that information will enrich your book.”

Dr. Iqbal said, “What is the relationship between you and Maharaja Dahir?”

—I am a descendant of Jaisingh, son of Maharaja Dahir.

—Jaisingh was alive?

—yes Of course he was alive, otherwise where did I come from!

—Yes, certainly he is, how much false history we are being taught, the real history is found out from people like you. Please edify us by whatever you know.

—While Maharaja Dahir was engaged in the war of Rawar, Jaisingh was trying his best to preserve the independence of Brahmanabad and its surroundings. Maharaja Chach and his son Dahir had a deep emotional connection with this Brahmanabad, besides Maharaja Dahir ordered his son to ascertain the independence of Hind at all costs. Sindh is the wall of Hind, if Sindh falls, the invaders will inflict a terrible blow on Hind, which will cause ultimate damage to Hind. There shouldn’t come any kind of blow on such an ancient civilization and culture. What the people of Sindh had to endure, the people of Hind should not have to. Jaisingh use to follow his father word by word. Maharaja Dahir once came out hunting a lion and found that his pregnant wife had died and the new born child was alive.  Maharaja named his son Jayasingh as it was born through incision. Jaisingh was a very brave warrior. He realized that Muhammad bin Kashem’s army was very strong and had very good weapons, against which the Indus army was very weak. Jaisingh did not come in front of Muhammad bin Kashem’s army and organized the army in secret and started conducting the war. Jaisingh sought help from Drohar, the ruler of Multan, to protect Brahmanabad. Drohar also promised to help him in every way, but amidst of such circumstances Drohar’s sister proposed Jaisingh. But Jaisingh cultivating the situation outside rejected her proposal. The princess of Multan could not accept this insult at all and she accused Jai Singh of rape. This one incident changed everything. Drohar, the king of Multan joined Muhammad bin Kashem. The Arabs attacked both by sea and by land. Then the huge army of Multan also attacked Brahmanabad. Jaisingh alone led the battle bravely with his army but was defeated. Even the common people of Brahmanabad took up arms that day. I heard that Muhammad bin Kashem, agitated with the people of Brahmanabad, set the whole city in fire. That is why today like Deval we see the dire consequences of Brahmanabad.

—Then? What happened to Jaisingh?

—Jaisingh was alive. When he realized that there is no other way but to be captivated, then he fled. Because he would have been killed in captivity and he did not want to let Maharaja Dahir’s lineage end like this. At that time Maharaja Dahir’s brother was ruling Chittor. Jaisingh fled and took refuge to his uncle at Chittor. As far as I know, Jaisingh defeated Mohammad bin Qasim in a battle with the help of Chittor forces and nearby Rajput kings, after which Mohammad bin Qasim died due to the conspiracy of the Surya Devi. Then there was no one else to continue this attack. So maybe Hind was saved by the sacrifice of Sindh country.

Sabirbhai said “this meant that the Arabs were thwarted by the conspiracy of two scions of Dahir and Hind was saved.”

Jaisingh then moved to Kashmir, spent a few years under the auspices of the Maharaja of Kashmir, got married there, and then lived in complete secrecy to protect his lineage. Our family has some rules, our forefathers started living in Rahim Yar Khan and converted to Islam after independence, but still they follow some rules, like using the name Raja before the name of male family members and Rani before the name of female family members, every year observing the death anniversary of Maharaja Dahir on 2nd of July, greeting the guests with folded hands and offering puja to the Kali Maata temple in Aror on this special day of the year. Though we have become Muslims, we have to follow these rules. It has been almost thirteen hundred years we are following these rules and we have kept Jaisingh’s swords and ornaments with great care, they continue to bear the identity of our clan.

— Dr. Amir Khan, do you know where the tomb of Airavat is?

Hearing this question from Dr. Iqbal, Dr. Amir Khan became silent. He said, “Even if I knew, I would not have told you that, because it is one of the rules of our family, let Airavat sleep peacefully, and if he sleeps peacefully, it is good for our family.”

Sabirbhai requested many times, but Dr. Amir Khan did not agree to anything. Then they left for Rohri— Aror’s modern name. When Sabirbhai regretted to Dr. Iqbal that he should not have brought Iqbal to Dr. Amir Khan, Dr. Iqbal says, “you have done a very good job, after coming here I am sure now that Maharaja Dahir’s diary is kept inside the tomb of Airavat. We will have to look for a temple dedicated to Lord Indra after reaching Rohri, my intuition suggests somewhere like that there is a tomb of Airavat. (Continues)

Click here for Part-I , Part-II, Part-III , Part-IV , Part-V , Part-VI , Part-VII, Part-VIII , Part-IX , Part-X, Part-XI, Part-XII, Part-XIII , Part-XIV , Part-XV , Part-XVI, Part-XVII, Part-XVIII , Part-XIX, Part-XX, Part-XXI , Part-XXII, Part-XXIII , Part-XXIV , Part-XXV , Part-XXVI, Part-XXVII, Part-XXVIII, Part-XXIX, Part-XXX , Part-XXXI, Part-XXXII, Part-XXXIII , Part-XXXIV , Part-XXXV , Part-XXXVI , Part-XXXVII , Part-XXXVIII, Part-XXXIX, Part-XL , #Part-XLI , Part-XLII , Part-XLIII , Part-XLIV, Part-XLV 

______________________

Debasree Chakraborti is a renowned novel writer of Bengali language. Based in Kolkata, West Bengal, India, she has done Master’s in Modern History from the Kolkata University, and authored some thirty books, mostly the novels, with historical perspective and themes. Her most recent novel is ‘Maharaja Dahir’ that covers the history of Sindh from 662, the year of first attack on Sindh by the Arab armies till date.

Rajesh Giri, born in Kolkata, had his early schooling from Kolkata and then from Medinipur—a village in Bengal. He graduated from Calcutta University with Physics and Maths and Master’s from Burdwan University in 2016. Now he is associated with Adhdhyaan educational institution teaching Physics. History enthusiastic Rajesh Giri is particularly interested in the ancient civilization of India and other regions like Egypt, Mesopotamia, and North America. He loves traveling.

The post Maharaja Dahir – Resurgence of Sindh – Part-XLVI first appeared on Sindh Courier.

Suriya Devi writes, “Abdullah used to come to meet us sometimes; we used to get these news from him. Abdullah could speak broken Sindhi language while he was in the country of Sindh for a long time during war. From him I learned that Multan had been defeated and that Janaki, the sister of ruler of Multan, had been captured and brought to Bagdad. The Caliph was impressed by Janaki’s appearance and kept her in his service. Now Janaki is in a room of this palace near me. I was surprised to hear this. I told Abdullah that I wanted to meet Janaki. Janaki and all of us here are Khalifa’s sex slaves; from now on we have no way out, so we had no problem meeting her. One night I myself went to Janaki along with Parimal. Hearing our introduction, she covered her face with both hands and started crying. We were very surprised to see her behavior like this. I didn’t know what to say to her, then after crying for a while she herself started saying. She said that after the fall of Brahmanabad, our brother Jaisingh took refuge to the king of Multan. Hearing the news of our brother’s survival from her brought tears to our eyes. As if God conveyed this news to us through Janaki. Out of joy I lift both hands of Janaki to kiss them and immediately she moves her hands away saying, “I am sinful, these hands are drenched with sins; don’t touch it.”

She says that she fell in love with our brother when she first saw him, but one day when she told her brother about her feelings, he rejected it. Being rejected, out of anger, she complained to her brother against Jaisingh that he raped her. That night Jaisingh fled from Multan when the king of Multan was about to kill him. A few days after that incident, Muhammad bin Qasim captured Multan and killed her brother and brought her here as a prisoner. She says she has to suffer the consequences of her sins. After hearing all these from the girl, I did not develop any anger towards her. On the contrary, I liked her very much, because she loved Jaisingh. If my brother had not escaped that day, he might have suffered a lot. We met Janaki only once, and neither of us had any desire to meet again.

The dead body of Mohammad Bin Qasim was lying on the floor. I looked at the dead body and smiled with great satisfaction, then bowed to Maa Kali with folded hands – Suriya Devi

Then comes that day. One night when we were preparing to go to sleep, some women came, and started to make up us with various cosmetics; then we are dressed in white clothes and various ornaments, perfumed all over the body, just like a bride is dressed before a family wedding ceremony. Yes, that’s exactly how they kept dressing us up, but no hair tied with any flowers; we three sisters had been mentally preparing for this very moment for a long time; my whole body was burning with the passion of revenge. Then two guards appeared. We start to walk along with them; time seemed to get freeze. The severed head of my father was appearing in front of my eyes again and again, as if I could hear the sound of bells of our Kali Maa temple of Aror. Father used to say that we possess the power of Maa Kali within us. This particular manifestation of the divine mother appeared to slay demons. The face of Mohammad bin Qasim was floating in my eyes. Father used to say that you cannot hide yourself from the vision of divine mother; wherever the demon is, he will be turned into ashes by the mere sight of the mother. We were led into a large room; upon entering the room, the guards left from the outside through the door of the room.

Inside the room was a huge bed decorated, where the Khalifa was waiting for us dressed in white. He saw us and said, “I am a thirsty desert, quench my thirst.” Saying this he extended both his arms and I with folded hands said to him, “Muhammad bin Qasim kept us with him for three days before sending us to you. We have become his bedfellows, now think whether you will accept your servant’s concubines.”

This false statement of mine struck the Caliph like a thunderbolt and as he cried out, the guards opened the door and entered the room. Seeing the guards, he said, “Send messengers now to the Sindh and tell Muhammad bin Qasim to send himself as a gift to me covered in skins.” Then the Khalifa pointed us to leave.

That same night, the envoy left for Sindh with the news. In between one day a guard came and asked us to go with him; we were mentally prepared for all odds at that moment, so we went with the guard; we were taken to a room, where Abdullah was present. We had to wait for a while; then the Khalifa came with some old men, accompanied by a young man, who could speak Sindhi. The young man tells us that the Caliph has fixed the marriage of Sundari with Abdullah. But before that Sundari has to be converted to Islam. Sundari herself was somehow emotionally attracted to Abdullah. When she is asked if she is willing to marry Abdullah, she immediately nods her head. I saw tears in Sundari’s eyes at that time, as if she was searching for redemption on this path, but I found deep love in Abdullah’s physical expression. I also understood that Caliph did not accept the spoiled food by Muhammad bin Qasim and gave it to another of his slaves.

I replied, “He is the killer of thousands of innocent Sindhis including our father, we have done everything to take revenge.”

On that day Sundari was first converted by reading kalma; then she got married to Abdullah. After the nikah Sundari left us with Abdullah, and never looked back as she left. I could sense that if for some reason she was trapped here again, she never looked back. After that, several days had passed. I had no idea what was going to happen next. Sundari sometimes sent letters to us by Abdullah. We also used to reply to her through Abdullah. Then one day news came that a gift had arrived for the Caliph from Sindh. On that day, the atmosphere in the Khalifa’s palace was absolutely silent. He called us in the evening. Parimal and I went to his meeting, where we saw a large number of people present and a large leather sheet spread on the floor, on which the dead body of Mohammad Bin Qasim was lying. Those who were present at the meeting looked at us in surprise. Khalifa’s eyes and face were bloodshot with anger. I looked at the dead body of Mohammad bin Qasim and smiled with great satisfaction, then bowed to Maa Kali with folded hands. Before I lowered my hands, the Khalifa shouted something to me in his language. I did not understand what he said. Then the young interpreter said that at one order from me who could wrap himself in leather and set out to Bagdad, how he would enjoy the woman which are offered for me. It’s all lies, why do you lie?

I replied, “He is the killer of thousands of innocent Sindhis including our father, we have done everything to take revenge.”

The Caliph said, “You will have to suffer the consequences.”

I held Parimal’s hand tightly and said, “I am ready.”

On that day the Caliph ordered that I and Parimal should be buried alive. (Continues)

Click here for Part-I , Part-II, Part-III , Part-IV , Part-V , Part-VI , Part-VII, Part-VIII , Part-IX , Part-X, Part-XI, Part-XII, Part-XIII , Part-XIV , Part-XV , Part-XVI, Part-XVII, Part-XVIII , Part-XIX, Part-XX, Part-XXI , Part-XXII, Part-XXIII , Part-XXIV , Part-XXV , Part-XXVI, Part-XXVII, Part-XXVIII, Part-XXIX, Part-XXX , Part-XXXI, Part-XXXII, Part-XXXIII , Part-XXXIV , Part-XXXV , Part-XXXVI , Part-XXXVII , Part-XXXVIII, Part-XXXIX, Part-XL , #Part-XLI , Part-XLII 

__________________

Debasree Chakraborti is a renowned novel writer of Bengali language. Based in Kolkata, West Bengal, India, she has done Master’s in Modern History from the Kolkata University, and authored some thirty books, mostly the novels, with historical perspective and themes. Her most recent novel is ‘Maharaja Dahir’ that covers the history of Sindh from 662, the year of first attack on Sindh by the Arab armies till date.

Rajesh Giri, born in Kolkata, had his early schooling from Kolkata and then from Medinipur—a village in Bengal. He graduated from Calcutta University with Physics and Maths and Master’s from Burdwan University in 2016. Now he is associated with Adhdhyaan educational institution teaching Physics. History enthusiastic Rajesh Giri is particularly interested in the ancient civilization of India and other regions like Egypt, Mesopotamia, and North America. He loves traveling.

The post Maharaja Dahir – Resurgence of Sindh – Part-XLIII first appeared on Sindh Courier.

While Muhammad bin Qasim had set up his camp at some distance from the city of Jitor, Maharaja Dahir’s army began to prepare for battle on the banks of a lake between Raor and Jitor. While Yuvraj Jai Singh himself supervised the Bet fort, he was in daily communication with the troops at Raor, Jitor and with the troops on the banks of the lake between these two cities. These troops are selected and controlled completely by him. Muhammad Alafi had left his spies in the Sindh army, so the prince had to reorganize his forces. He had an army under his control, with Nerun as well as other neighboring rulers joined with Jaisingh along with their forces. These soldiers also worked as spy in disguise. One evening, from the western side of the lake between the cities of Raor and Jitor, an army man on horseback started rushing towards the army camp.

Watching the white turban on the head of the man, Pushkar, the commander-in-chief of this army camp, realized that Prince Jai Singh was coming. They all know that all news are delivered to Jai Singh. Jai Singh has spy among them also.

The nature has turned crimson. Pushkar slowly walks forward with the burning flambeau in hand and stands on the bank of the lake. There is a pole for holding torch, he placing the flambeau on that pole, waits. When Yuvraj Jai Singh’s horse came to a halt, a guard ran up and hold the horse, then when Yuvraj got down from the horse, General Pushkar advanced towards him with folded hands and bowed. They both went and sat on two rock base by the lake. The white herons used to gather here and feast on fishes with zeal at this time. They watch the bird’s feasting for a while— the birds consuming fishes tearing them apart alive, this turns down the mind heavily. For some time the breeze coming from the lake and the calls of the herons act as the background music in this situation. Then Yuvraj Jaisingh said, “I heard that the dead bodies of herdsmen are being found in the pastures across the river; 33 dead bodies of herdsmen have been found in the past few days.”

Pushkar said, “Yuvraj, the animals that these herdsmen had taken to the pastures are also not being found. I do not understand why they have collected a huge number of animals looted from those 33 herdsmen.”

Yuvraj said, “They are looting cows. There must be a very bad motive behind it. Cow-mother is goddess Bhagavati to us, there is a conspiracy to hurt our religious sentiments by injuring her.”

“But Yuvraj, it doesn’t seem so simple, they might have some more sinister motive behind it. But I don’t understand how they will use the cow.”

Jaisingh said, “I heard that the dead bodies of herdsmen are being found in the pastures across the river; 33 dead bodies of herdsmen have been found in the past few days.”

—Most importantly, they have been staying outside the city of Jitor for a long time. They never wait that long before attacking a city. The biggest thing is that nothing is comprehended about where they are removing these cattle after looting them.

—Yuvraj, how do you understand? For the past few days, several of our informers have also been disappeared. Their bodies are not found.

—This means that there are agents of Arab army in our forces, otherwise who is betraying our forces? Or it may be that those whom we employ as our scouts, are actually agents of the Arabs, who have long been concealed in the army of Sindh in disguise, as was Muhammad Alafi. Tomorrow send some army to Jitor, I will not let Jitor fall in any way.

Early next morning the roar of Allah Hu Akbar came from the wilderness beyond the city walls of Jitor towards the city like a battle cry. Prince Jaisingh’s army was ready on top of the city wall of Jitor, they started to shower arrows while shouting Har Har Mahadev at the Arab army. In a few moments several thousand soldiers fell to their deaths in the torrent of arrows, and then suddenly a herd of cows burst forth from within the Arab army, forming a shield in front of them. Cow is equivalent to mother to Hindus, Hindu soldiers lay down their arms in the presence of the cow. Guards from the top of the city walls rushed towards the bet fort, they approached prince Jaisingh inside the fort and informed that the Yavana soldiers were fighting in the battlefield, shielding themselves with cows.

Now he understood the reason behind the killing of 33 herdsmen and looting of cattle. Jaisingh belongs to the lineage of Brahmin, if a cow is killed by a Brahmin, that sin is considered the pinnacle of all sin. He was engrossed in the thought of how to formulate a strategy. At that moment, the city wall collapsed with a terrible noise. The Arabs had a special kind of machinery, by which they bring down the walls by catapulting rocks, in the same manner they tore down the walls of other cities of Sindh.

The Indus soldiers of Jitor did not understand that such a strong wall would be broken so easily by the Arabs. As soon as the wall got collapsed, the soldiers on top of the wall died. Then the Arabs entered Jitor with cows in front and started killing indiscriminately, they entered the houses of common people and started looting and raping women. Soldiers stationed in different parts of the city died bravely fighting the Arabs. Because they are helpless to do anything which may cause harm their religious beliefs and faith, it was very difficult to attack the cows with weapons in front of them. The long preparation and their mobilization to carry on the war became very difficult. Hindus had some rules of war, first of all, war cannot be conducted in locality; war must be organized in a deserted field. Unarmed or wounded soldiers cannot be harmed in battle, and after sunset there will be no more battles. But the Arab soldiers were not following any of these rules. There was no specific time for their attacks either. In the battle of Jitor they conducted this war by hurting the religious sentiments of the Hindus.

An army personal came to Jaisingh and said, “Prince, many of our soldiers are randomly killing their own comrades. All over the city our own troops are fighting against us along with Arab troops. In such circumstances it is absolutely impossible for us to win this war.”

Jaisingh said, “I will give one last try in time. As he descends on the ground floor of the bet fort with the army personal, he witnessed hundreds of dismembered bodies of soldiers. Jaisingh had the clothes of the Arab army, he secretly disguised himself and came out of the fort. His troops are still fighting hard. Jaisingh thought that this war would never be possible to continue alone by him. He prepared the army with his own hands. But he did not realize that the Arab soldiers would be hiding in him. In such a situation he had to take the help of neighboring rulers including Hind, if Sindh could be saved.

He somehow got out of Jitor in disguise and reached the shore of the lake between Raor and Jitor. Finding an Arab army approaching, the Pushkar army became alarmed. But Yuvraj Jaisingh continued to advance with the flag of Sindh in his right hand. When Pushkar’s army was fully prepared to attack the intruder, Pushkar saw the flag and forbade them to attack. Jaisingh came to Pushkar and said, “They are hidden in our army, save Jitor, Pushkar, you are my last asset, if you can, save Jitor, otherwise Jitor’s downfall is evident. I myself preparing for last-ditch effort.”

Jaisingh let Pushkar army for Jitor and sat for a while looking at the water of that lake. He felt a stream of blood coming from the direction of Jitor and mixing with the water of this lake, in a moment the water of the lake turned bloody. As if he could hear jitor’s screams, Jitor’s humanoid projection seemed to be melting away slowly. The blood and tormented flesh of the city of Jitor is being blended with the water of this lake with the stream of blood. Rotting smell of human flesh created a disgusting environment around. The white egret on the banks of the lake took the form of vultures tearing apart the flesh of men and hovering in the sky, their screams can no longer be tolerated, the prince sets out on his horse for Raor.

The battle continued for ten days, the Pushkar army and Jaisingh’s army present at Jitore desperately tried to defend Jitor. But more Arab troops from Makran by sea and land began to reach Jitor with arms. Meanwhile, the Sindh army did not have so many weapons. Rules of Indus strategy was unarmed soldiers can never be harmed. But when the troops of the Sindh became bereft of weapon, the Arabs pounced on them, attacked them from all sides and started killing the unarmed soldiers. Pushkar’s death was the most gruesome of all, he was tied hand and foot to a pole and burned alive. Mohammad Alafi set fire to Pushkar’s body with his own hands, he said while setting fire, “I want to set you on fire with my own hands before you go to hell, you will be set on fire again when you go there. But I myself will not be there to enjoy your terrible screaming. The defeat of an army equivalent to his death, so I want to cremate your body according to prescribed ritual of your religion. You Hindus put fire in your face first, hey, I put fire in your face…”

The Arab soldiers dismembered the corpses of the Sindh soldiers and scattered them along the banks of the lake on the way from Jitor to Raor.

Saying this he set Pushkar’s body on fire, then while it was still burning, severed his head from his body and placed it on a torch holder and fragmented his body brutally and was scattered by the lake. When Pushkar’s head was severed from his body, he was still alive.

After the victory of Jitor, Mohammad Alafi announced to the Arab troops that the stench of the victory of Jitor should spread far and wide. This odor will create an atmosphere of fear towards Islam in the surroundings. After that no one will have the courage to fight against Islam; everyone will fall at the feet of Islam without a fight. You start dismembering these bodies and spreading them from Jitor to Raor. The Arab soldiers dismembered the corpses of the Sindh soldiers and scattered them along the banks of the lake on the way from Jitor to Raor.

Groups of vultures and kites started flocking around from all directions for the greed of this sumptuous meat. They take these meats by air to the locality and start eating them. The people of the Indus were vegetarians, their lives made miserable by the smell of rotting flesh. Due to the ongoing prolonged massacre the sky littered with ravenous vultures; the brutality grew exponentially when Mohammad Alafi joined the Arab army. The people should start to witness hell during their lifetime. (Continues) 

Click here for Part-I , Part-II, Part-III , Part-IV , Part-V , Part-VI , Part-VII, Part-VIII , Part-IX , Part-X, Part-XI, Part-XII, Part-XIII , Part-XIV , Part-XV , Part-XVI, Part-XVII, Part-XVIII , Part-XIX, Part-XX, Part-XXI , Part-XXII, Part-XXIII , Part-XXIV , Part-XXV , Part-XXVI, Part-XXVII, Part-XXVIII, Part-XXIX, Part-XXX , Part-XXXI, Part-XXXII, Part-XXXIII , Part-XXXIV , Part-XXXV 

____________________

Debasree Chakraborti is a renowned novel writer of Bengali language. Based in Kolkata, West Bengal, India, she has done Master’s in Modern History from the Kolkata University, and authored some thirty books, mostly the novels, with historical perspective and themes. Her most recent novel is ‘Maharaja Dahir’ that covers the history of Sindh from 662, the year of first attack on Sindh by the Arab armies till date.

Rajesh Giri, born in Kolkata, had his early schooling from Kolkata and then from Medinipur—a village in Bengal. He graduated from Calcutta University with Physics and Maths and Master’s from Burdwan University in 2016. Now he is associated with Adhdhyaan educational institution teaching Physics. History enthusiastic Rajesh Giri is particularly interested in the ancient civilization of India and other regions like Egypt, Mesopotamia, and North America. He loves traveling.

The post Maharaja Dahir – Resurgence of Sindh – Part-XXXVI first appeared on Sindh Courier.

Rethinking and re-imagining Sindh’s past – especially concerning the era starting from Mohenjodaro and ending in Muhammad bin Qasim’s arrival is crucial

By Manan Ahmed Asif

It is a fact not so easily known, thus rarely acknowledged, that the British colonial project in India at one moment turned into an excavation of India’s pasts. This excavation was aimed at exploring the arrival of various ‘foreign’ people, cultures, religions and politics into the Subcontinent. After all, the Indian peninsula had been the site of commercial, political and military incursions by the Portuguese, the Dutch and the Timurids since 1498. Surely, one reason for the excavation was that, as the latest foreigners to arrive in India, the British wanted a justification for their own arrival. The other reason is tied to the way in which the British saw themselves as heirs to the Romans.

Edward Gibbon published the first volume of his book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776, the year Great Britain lost 13 of its colonies in America. All six volumes of the book came out by 1788 to tremendous acclaim and sales. A central theme in Gibbon’s work was his quest for historical linkages between Pax Britannica – the period of British-dominated world order – and Pax Romana.

He provided the foundational stone for a theory that sought to legitimize British colonial enterprise as a successor to a great empire of the past that brought a long era of peace and prosperity for Europe in its wake. Even more influential, I would argue, is his exploration of the relationship between race and politics within the context of the Roman experience. This relationship was immediately employed in legitimizing the British conquest of India.

The British formally began their imperial project in India in 1757 after the Battle of Plassey. In 1783, William Jones arrived as a Sessions Judge at Fort William in Calcutta. Over the next decade, he founded the new science of philology that combined linguistics with human migration patterns and mingling of races across the Indo-European region. He linked ancient languages and prehistoric migrations to the long history of foreign arrivals into India, a process that would culminate in the advent of the British presence in the Subcontinent. He came up with a story that linked Greek, Latin and Sanskrit languages via a “common source” that “no longer existed”. This “common source” was “conquerors from other kingdoms in some very remote age”.

By the early 19th century, a new generation of British officers became scholars of India’s pasts. They imagined themselves as latter-day Alexander the Greats, amassing accounts of geographies, peoples and objects that connected India to the Greeks, and by extension to the Romans, of the past. Alexander Burnes, James Tod, Richard F Burton and Edward B Eastwick were most prominent among them.

They traveled between Kabul and Bombay and collected manuscripts, coins and copper utensils in order to establish how India came under Greek influence through Alexander the Great’s conquest of the northwestern parts of the Subcontinent. Their research focused on Greek and Roman trade with India, Alexander’s conquest and the remnants of his armies that stayed back in the areas he had passed through.

They also looked into migrations from the Central Asian Steppe into the Subcontinent and the relationship of all these developments to the evolution of languages, cities, religions and polities. The journals of the royal Asiatic societies of Bengal and Bombay published their findings on the presence of the Arya, the Indo-Parthians, the Indo-Bactrians and the “White Huns” in the Indian subcontinent – communities that had hints of a common Eurasian ancestry.

By the middle of the 19th century, a new generation of British historians took up the project of collating this ‘raw’ data into historical treatises. H M Elliot and M Elphinstone were the forerunners in this generation. They were followed by Vincent Smith, Stanley Lane-Poole, Alexander Cunningham and R B Whitehead, among others. As the British colonial project expanded geographically – from Calcutta to Delhi, from Madras to Bombay and from Lahore to Peshawar – it delved deeper and deeper in time as far as excavation of India’s pasts was concerned.

The roots of the Sanskrit language, the genealogy of the Aryan race, the origins of the Subcontinent’s indigenous “tribes” and the etymology of names of places show up regularly in the huge reams of colonial speeches, journal articles, travelogues, district reports, histories and commentaries of that era. Nestled in the middle of this project – and first highlighted in the middle of the 19th century – is the question of Muslim arrival in India.

The East India Company defeated the Talpur Mirs in 1843 at Miani and conquered the princely state of Sindh. The conquest was cast as a corrective to the Muslim conquest of India – a move to emancipate the Hindus from the clutches of foreign Muslim rule going as far back as the early eighth century. Centered on the delta of the Indus River opening into the Arabian Sea, Sindh comprised a series of ports and large tracts of dry, desert-like terrain.

The state was a borderland for the East India Company at the beginning of the 19th century, though in contemporary maps it is surrounded by other parts of the Subcontinent such as Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab and Balochistan. Indus, uncharted by the company till then, offered an upstream link from Bombay to Lahore, the capital of Ranjit Singh’s Sikh kingdom. Through the deserts of Thar and Balochistan, Sindh linked India to the Durrani court in Kabul.

The company envisioned it as a necessary buffer between its long-established Bombay Presidency and Afghanistan (as well as French and Russian interests in Central Asia and Iran). More importantly, its scholar-warriors had already discovered that it was in Sindh that Muhammad bin Qasim had defeated the polity founded by the “White Huns” – remnants of the Indo-Bactrians – in 712 and pushed the Hindus of India into a millennium of domination by the Muslims. This discovery was immediately put to political use.

Edward Law Ellenborough, governor-general of the East India Company at the time, dramatically brought back the “gates of Somnath” temple from Kabul to show to the Hindus that his company was there to counter Muslim tyranny. In his declaration of 1842 to “all Princes and Chiefs and People of India”, he announced that the return of the spoiled remains of the temple to India avenged “the insult of 800 years … the gates of the temple of Somnath, so long the memorial of your humiliation, are become the proudest record of your national glory”. Ellenborough’s political strategy was to cast the company as a rectifier of the historical harm the Muslims had inflicted on Hindus. It mattered little that the “gates” had little to do with Somnath.

Charles Napier, a veteran military commander of imperial wars in Europe who was chosen by Ellenborough to conquer Sindh, was a deeply religious man. He had just arrived in India when he launched his campaign in Sindh.

He was convinced that the company had become beholden to commerce and had shied away from its divine mission. He saw the ‘liberation’ of Sindh from its despotic Muslim rulers as his Christian duty. He called the Talpurs the “greatest ruffians” and “imbeciles” who possessed “zenanas filled with young girls torn from their friends” and treated the women in the harem “with revolting barbarity”. The Talpurs, he said, were even prone to enjoying occasional “human sacrifice”.

Napier’s annexation of Sindh on February 17, 1843 was hailed by the British as a heroic event. Some of them likened it to the Battle of Plassey, the founding moment of British rule in India: “Since Clive’s glorious victory at Plassey there has been nothing achieved by native or European troops in India at all to compare to it,” wrote one. It was in his victory that stories about the advent of British rule in India – portrayed as the return of the long displaced and dominated Indo-European races – and those about the origins of Muslim rule in the Subcontinent, presented as domination by a foreign religious power, converged.

British quest for Muslim ‘origins’ in India subsequently shaped the historical consciousness of native historians trained at University of Calcutta, Aligarh Muslim University, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and Osmania University. Shibli Nomani (1857–1914), Jadunath Sarkar (1870–1958), Syed Sulaiman Nadvi (1884–1953), R C Majumdar (1888–1980), Mohammad Habib (1895–1971) and B D Mirchandani (1906-1980) are some of the key historians who grappled with the question of Muslim arrival in the Subcontinent as they endeavored to find a nationalist response to colonial historiography.

Writing in journals such as Calcutta Review, Muslim Review, Islamic Culture and Indian Historical Review, many of them found their efforts to come up with an anti-colonial history clashing with colonial narratives about Muslim rule in India. They struggled to weave Muslim history into a nationalist narrative, given that Muslim rulers in the Subcontinent had been shown by colonial historians to be despots of foreign origin who had demolished countless Hindu temples during their conquests and reigns.

Central to the argument about Muslims in India being religious invaders from outside was a particular text – Chachnama. It entered, in bits and pieces, into colonial historiography in the early 19th century. From Elliot to Elphinstone and Smith, the British historians writing on the history of Islam in India treated Chachnama as a book of conquest. Originally written in Farsi around 1220, it was a self-proclaimed translation of an eighth century Arabic history of Muhammad bin Qasim’s campaign in Sindh. It describes events that preceded his conquest as well those that happened during his stay in this part of the world – a period stretching roughly over 60 years.

In the writings of Indian nationalist historians such as Sarkar and Majumdar, Chachnama and the figure of the outsider Muslim loomed large. Sarkar’s lectures on Indian pasts – as well as his histories of Mughal India – took their cue from British historians and argued that India’s conquest by “foreign immigrant” Muslims differed fundamentally from all preceding invasions because of Islam’s “fiercely monotheistic nature” – something that contrasted with polytheistic religious practices of pre-Islam India. Majumdar’s treatment of the “Arab Conquest of Sind” presented the Muslims as conquerors by disposition who inevitably cast their covetous eyes on India after conquering Spain.

In contrast, a generation of Muslim scholars emphasized historical connections between Arabia and India that predate Muhammad bin Qasim’s arrival. Nomani highlighted those connections in his biographies of the Prophet of Islam and other key figures of early Islam. Between 1882 and 1898, he produced a wide variety of historical essays on the early Muslim state in India, highlighting the earliest links between the two regions. Nadvi and Abdul Halim Sharrar wrote histories of Sindh in the early decades of the 20th century in the same vein. Habib, a Marxist historian, forcefully argued in his 1929 essay Arab Conquest of Sind that Muslims arrived in India not as conquerors but as settlers.

These Muslim historians, however, could not get past Chachnama’s categorization as a book of conquest. Even after 1947, historians working across South Asia and the United Kingdom have produced further investigations into the history of Muslim pasts in Sindh, treating this ancient text the way the colonial historians did. U M Daudpota, Nabi Bukhsh Khan Baloch, Mubarak Ali, H T Lambrick and Peter Hardy have all written numerous articles and books on Chachnama. They all agree that Sindh’s military conquest by Muhammad bin Qasim heralded Muslim arrival in India.

Yet this ‘origins’ narrative was based on the false categorization of Chachnama. It reads unlike any other history of conquest written in Arabic or Farsi at the time. It incorporates much that is of little relevance to Muhammad bin Qasim’s invasion and occupation of Sindh. It is less a history of the eighth century and more a political theory for the 13th century. Its claim to be a translation of an earlier Arabic text is, in fact, meant to evoke the memory of nearly 500 years of Muslim presence in Sindh as an era of cohabitation and accommodation.

It offers a history of both land and sea links between ports in Sindh and Gujarat – such as Daybul, Diu and Thane – and the Arabian ports of Aden, Muscat, Bahrain, Dammam and Siraf. It draws upon texts in Farsi, Pahlavi and Prakrit that explore thousands of years of connections between Oman and Yemen on the one hand and Sri Lanka and Zanzibar on the other. In Chachnama, these relationships span trade, marriages, settlement, languages and customs and they render it impossible to create and maintain a dichotomy between the Muslims and the Hindus as being merely rivals.

The book has been deliberately misappropriated and misread by British colonial historians since the early 1820s. They changed the “other” with the “outsider” in their work and a history of belonging became a history of exclusion.

John Jehangir Bede’s doctoral dissertation, The Arabs in Sind: 712-1026 AD, was written within this academic context. Submitted to the University of Utah in 1973, the thesis remained unpublished until Karachi’s Endowment Fund Trust for Preservation of the Heritage of Sindh (EFT) printed it earlier this year.

We do not know why Bede never published his work. Notes on the dust jacket of the book state that all attempts to trace his family or career were largely unsuccessful. The only thing we know is that he worked with Dr. Aziz S Atiya, an influential historian of the Crusades, and that his work has been cited and expanded upon by historians such as Derryl MacLean, Mubarak Ali, Muhammad Yar Khan and Yohannan Friedman in the 1980s and 1990s. How are we to read this dissertation in 2017? One possible way is to see what the history of Muslim origins in India, as well as the historiography detailed above, looked like in 1973.

Bede starts his dissertation by reflecting on the fact that the history of Sindh has received little contemporary attention. He observes that this is because there have been relatively few textual sources for this history and that historians have been “generally subject to preconceived prejudices mainly colored by the religious outlook of particular authors”.

Instead of treating the Muslims as religious invaders, he explores an economic basis for their conquest of Sindh by examining a variety of sources, earliest of which date to the middle of the ninth century. In his last chapter, Commerce and Culture in Sind, he draws upon travelogues, merchant accounts and poetry from the ninth and 10th centuries to argue that there once existed an interconnected Indian Ocean world in which Sindh was a pivot.

Bede also subverts the colonial historical narrative that projected British arrival in India as being diametrically different from Muslim arrival in the Subcontinent. He instead states that the history of the Arab conquest of Sindh is quite similar to the history of its British conquest in 1843. “… There is a striking similarity between the Arab administration of Sind and the British administration in India a thousand years later,” he comments.

Bede’s work enters our world as an artefact or an object. It is inert – a frozen specimen from an earlier era of history writing. Its inertness prompts us to look at EFT which has brought this object into the world. EFT is a non-profit, non-governmental organization dedicated to preserving the “artistic, tangible and intangible heritage” of Sindh. It seems to be doing salutary work in conserving, maintaining and preserving various archaeological sites in Sindh.

The book is part of its publications program that publishes older, unavailable scholarly writings besides commissioning new works. I, however, see the re-publishing of older scholarship without new, updated, critical introductions as an ill-advised move. This is particularly so for Bede’s work because, being previously unpublished, it has not gone through necessary scholarly review and debate. The Arabs in Sind, thus, appears as a new text to an ordinary reader who has no idea where to place it in scholarship on Sindh or how to understand its contents.

The practice of publishing old texts is common in Pakistan; British-era district gazetteers and other colonial texts are routinely reprinted as de facto introductions to the history of the Subcontinent. The unwholesome after-effect of this is that colonial biases and frameworks remain uncontested and widely popular. There is neither any attempt to decolonize our history nor is there any awareness of what violence colonial knowledge practices have wreaked on writings about our pasts.

Seventy years after Partition, it is about time that readers and writers in Pakistan rethink and reimagine their histories. The past requires analysis in the light of new questions and new critical frameworks. We cannot be held hostage to British narratives about Muslim arrival in India as religion-inspired invaders from Arabia.

Rethinking and reimagining Sindh’s past – especially concerning the era starting from Mohenjodaro and ending in Muhammad bin Qasim’s arrival – is crucially relevant to Pakistan’s history precisely because it will help us determine whether we came here from outside on a divine mission or whether our story is more complex than British colonial historians, as well as our own state-sponsored histories, have us believe.

Also read: Mohammed Bin Qasim – the first Muslim invader

We need to expand the primary sources of our history and Bede’s treatise offers helpful information on this count. We need to encourage the study of languages such as Sanskrit, Pahlavi, Farsi, Arabic, Sindhi and Gujarati in which these sources were written so that we do not end up misreading and misinterpreting them as we did in the case of Chachnama. These studies can enable our students to look at medieval pasts in all their complexity. We also need to equip our institutions to promote new methods of researching and writing history.

We need all this to stem the erasure of nuance and diversity in historical accounts, a practice that started with colonial historiography and continues in our postcolonial present. The last footnote in Bede’s dissertation offers a strong rationale for working against this erasure.

The note pertains to a paragraph that praises “the successors of the Arabs” who “though Muslims themselves, wisely maintained a tolerant attitude toward their non-Muslim subjects”. What subsequently changed, Bede argues, was the attitude of the later Turkic rulers. The note itself reminds us that “roughly one-fourth of the entire population of Sind was non-Muslim” in 1947. This proportion has continued to decrease since then. The population of Hindus in Sindh was roughly six percent as per the 1998 census. This should trouble all of us who care for a diverse Pakistan.

Just as Sindh’s past cannot be reduced to the history of one community, one sect or one faith, so should we aim for an inclusive present for the province – as well as for the country?

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Manan Ahmed Asif is a historian at the Columbia University in New York.

Courtesy: The Wire.in 

(This article was originally published in the Herald’s August 2017 issue)

The post Colonial Myths about arrival of Muslims in Sindh first appeared on Sindh Courier.