The Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb (born 1618, reigned 1658-1707) is the most reviled of all Muslim rulers in India. He was supposed to be a great destroyer of temples and oppressor of Hindus, and a 'fundamentalist' too! As chairman of the Allahabad Municipality (1948-53), Dr Pande had to deal with a land dispute between two temple priests.
One of them had filed in evidence some farmans (royal orders) to prove that Aurangzeb had, besides cash, gifted the land in question for the maintenance of his temple. Might they not be fake, Dr Pande thought, in view of Aurangzeb's fanatically anti-Hindu image? He showed them to his friend, Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, a distinguished lawyer as well a great scholar of Arabic and Persian. He was also a Brahmin. Sapru examined the documents and declared they were genuine farmans issued by Aurangzeb.
For Dr Pande this was a 'new image of Aurangzeb'; so he wrote to the chief priests of the various important temples, all over the country, requesting photocopies of any farman issued by Aurangzeb that they may have in their possession.
Sir Ashutosh Chaudhary. Sir Ashutosh promptly ordered Shashtri's book out of the course. Yet years later, in 1972, Dr Pande was surprised to discover the same suicide story was still being taught as 'history' in junior high schools in Uttar Pradesh. The lie had found currency as a fact of history.
Srikantia wrote to say that the Gazetteer mentioned no such incident and, as a historian himself, he was certain that nothing like this had taken place. Prof Srikantia added that both the prime minister and the commander-in-chief of Tipu Sultan were themselves Brahmins. He also enclosed a list of 136 Hindu temples which used to receive annual grants from the Sultan's treasury.
It transpired that Shastri had lifted this story from Colonel Miles' History of Mysore which Miles claimed he had taken from a Persian manuscript in the personal library of Queen Victoria.
When Dr Pande checked further, he found that no such manuscript existed in Queen Victoria's library. Yet Dr Shastri's book was being used as a high school history text-book in seven Indian states, Assam, Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. So he sent his entire correspondence about the book to the vice chancellor of Calcutta University,
Therefore, Dr Pande was extra careful. Whenever he came across a 'fact' that looked odd to him, he would try to check and verify rather than adopt it uncritically.
He came across a history text-book taught in the Anglo-Bengali College, Allahabad which claimed that 'three thousand Brahmins had committed suicide as Tipu wanted to convert them forcibly into the fold of Islam'.
The author was a very famous scholar, Dr Har Prashad Shastri, head of the department of Sanskrit at Calcutta University. (Tipu Sultan (1750-99), who ruled over the South Indian state of Mysore (1782-99), is one of the most heroic figures in Indian history. He died on the battlefield, fighting the British.)
Was it true? Dr Pande wrote immediately to the author and asked him for the source on which he had based this episode in his text-book. After several reminders, Dr Shastri replied that he had taken this information from the Mysore Gazetteer. So Dr Pande requested the Mysore University vice chancellor, Sir Brijendra Nath Seal, to verify for him Dr Shastri's statement from the Gazetteer. Sir Brijendra referred his letter to Prof Srikantia who was then working on a new edition of the Gazetteer.
In his famous Khuda Bakhsh Annual Lecture (1985) Dr Pande said: 'Thus under a definite policy the Indian history books text-books were so falsified and distorted as to give an impression that the medieval [i.e. Muslim] period of Indian history was full of atrocities committed by Muslim rulers on their Hindu subjects and the Hindus had to suffer terrible indignities under Muslim rule. And there were no common factors [between Hindus and Muslims] in social, political and economic life.'
However, the noted Indian scholar and historian, Dr Bishambhar Nath Pande, who passed away in New Delhi on 1 June, ranked among the very few Indians and fewer still Hindu historians who tried to be a little careful when dealing with such history. He knew that this history was 'originally compiled by European writers' whose main objective was to produce a history that would serve their policy of divide and rule.
Lord Curzon (Governor General of India 1895-99 and Viceroy 1899-1904, d.1925) was told by the Secretary of State for India, George Francis Hamilton, that they 'should so plan the educational text books that the differences between community and community are further strengthened'.
Another Viceroy, Lord Dufferin (1884-88), was advised by the Secretary of State in London that the 'division of religious feelings is greatly to our advantage', and that he expected 'some good as a result of your committee of inquiry on Indian education and on teaching material'.
'We have maintained our power in India by playing-off one part against the other,' the Secretary of State for India reminded yet another Viceroy, Lord Elgin (1862-63), 'and we must continue to do so. Do all you can, therefore, to prevent all having a common feeling.'
The Muslim rule in India lasted for almost 1000 years. How come then, asked the British historian Sir Henry Elliot, that Hindus 'had not left any account which could enable us to gauge the traumatic impact the Muslim conquest and rule had on them'? Since there was none, Elliot went on to produce his own eight-volume History of India from its own historians (1867).
His history claimed Hindus were slain for disputing with 'Muhammedans', generally prohibited from worshipping and taking out religious processions, their idols were mutilated, their temples destroyed, they were forced into conversions and marriages, and were killed and massacred by drunk Muslim tyrants. Thus Sir Henry, and scores of other Empire scholars, went on to produce a synthetic Hindu versus Muslim history of India, and their lies became history.
The noted Indian scholar and historian, Dr Bishambhar Nath Pande, ranked among the very few Indians and fewer still Hindu historians who tried to be little careful when dealing with the Muslim rule in India that lasted for almost 1000 years.
Dr Pande passed away on 1 June 1998 and Impact International of London (July 1998) wrote the following obituary [at the end of the article], which we think sheds some light into some of the myths on Indian history, such as on Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, created by the British with the clear objective of divide and rule:
