In the past, ‘Hindustan’ referred to the Indian subcontinent in all its diversity. Members of all religions were considered to be part of Hindustan. It was under British rule that Hindustan acquired a new meaning: a land specifically for Hindus, with Muslims and Christians as foreigners.
Writers from Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Dow in the late 1700s to liberal thinkers Thomas Macaulay and James Mill in the 1800s had a particular view of Hindustan (India). They saw it as a land belonging to Hindus with a 5,000 year history and an ancient glory. India’s development was ruined, they thought, by the Muslim invasions in the medieval period.
In 1817 the historian James Mill wrote a history of India that divided its past into three periods: Hindu (ancient), Muslim (medieval) and British (modern).
Colonial propaganda presented Muslim rulers as violent, temple-destroying, Hindu-persecuting fanatics who revelled in extreme glamour and sensual decadence.
Consider this piece of writing by Sir Henry Elliot in 1850:
“The few glimpses … we have of Hindus slain for disputing with Muhammadans, of general prohibitions against processions, worship, and ablutions, and of other intolerant measures, of idols mutilated, of temples razed, of forcible conversions and marriages, of proscriptions and confiscations, of murders and massacres, and of the sensuality and drunkenness of the tyrants who enjoined them, show us that this picture is not overcharged.”
Elliot then presented the coming of the British as a time “when the full light of European truth and discernment begins to shed its beams upon the obscurity of the past”.
It suited the British to demonise previous rulers, particularly the Mughals: they could present British colonial rule as Enlightenment and liberation from Muslim oppression.
Even during the beginning of British colonialism in India, though, many Europeans understood that this narrative of ‘oriental despotism’ was completely false. Edmund Burke, the great Irish philosopher and statesman, condemned the British East India Company as oppressive and exploitative in contrast to the previous rulers. At the impeachment of General Warren Hastings, accused of crimes against the Indian people, in the British Parliament, Burke declared:
“On one side, your lordships have the prisoner [Hastings] declaring that the people [Indians] have no laws, no rights, no usages, no distinctions of rank, no sense of honor, no property; in short that they are nothing but a herd of slaves to be governed by the arbitrary will of a master. On the other side, we assert that the direct contrary of this is true. And to prove our assertion we have referred you to the institutes of Ghinges Khân and of Tamerlane [the Mughal Empire]: we have referred you to the Mahomedan law [the Shari’a], which is binding upon all, from the crowned head to the meanest subject; a law interwoven with a system of the wisest, the most learned, and most enlightened jurisprudence that perhaps ever existed in the world. We have shown you, that if these parties are to be compared together, it is not the rights of the people which are nothing, but rather the rights of the sovereign which are so. The rights of the people are every thing, as they ought to be in the true and natural order of things.”
Bibliography
Manan Ahmed Asif, The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India (2020)
Edmund Burke, ‘Final Speech at the Trial of Warren Hastings’ (May 1794)
