to live in large colonies, and were treated with special honour in order to bolster up their creed of religious tolerance. And in thousands of cases during the long period of Hindu-Muslim war, these very minority Muslims who had been living as refugees in the Hindu states, never failed to rebel or sabotage the Hindu war-efforts, as soon as there was any foreign Muslim invasion. Even while they were seeing all these treacherous activities of the Muslims, the Hindu kings went on practising and committing to their memory the precepts of religious tolerance and large-heartedness, in utter disregard of the proper place, time or person and, of course, they fell as miserable victims. This is verily the distortion of virtue itself! The Grave Danger of the Muslim Abduction and Pollution of Millions of Hindu Women 439. One side-issue of the Muslim religious aggression, which caused a continuous drain on the numerical superiority of the Hindus, was the diabolic Muslim faith that it was a religious duty of every Muslim to kidnap and force their own religion into non-Muslim women. This incited their sensuality and lust for carnage and while it enormously increased their number, it affected the Hindu population in an inverse proprotion. To hesitate to acknowledge this hard fact under the guise of politeness, is simply a puerile self-deception. This abduction of thousands and millions of Hindu women by the Muslims is not such a trifling thing as to be dispensed with, by calling it religious fanaticism or simply by conniving at it. Even if it were a madness, there was a method in it! And the method in this Muslim madness was so horrible, that with the mistaken Hindu neglect of this so- called religious fanaticism, the Hindu nation came to have a perpetual bleeding sore. For, as a matter of fact, the religious fanaticism of the Muslims was not madness at all; it was an effective method of increasing the Muslim population with special regard to the unavoidable laws of nature. 440. The same law of nature is instinctively obeyed by the animal world. If in the cattle-herds, the number of oxen grows in excess of the cows, the herds do not grow numerically in a rapid manner. But, on the other hand, the number of animals in the herds, with the excess of cows over the oxen, grows in mathematical progression. The same is true of man, for at the core, man is essentially an animal. Even in the pre-historic times, the so-called wild tribes of the forest-dwellers knew this law quite well. The African wild tribes of today kill only the males from amongst their enemies, whenever

there are tribal wars, but not the females who are eventually distributed by the victor tribes among themselves. To obtain from them future progeny to increase their numbers, is considered by these tribes to be their sacred duty! It is said of at least one of the Naga tribes that when they attack an enemy, they shoot simple unpoisoned arrows at the males, but if any women are seen fighting on the enemy side, highly envenomed arrows are used to kill them instantly. For they argue, to kill one woman who cannot be captured alive is as good as to kill five men. 441. This very natural law was adopted and obeyed openly by the aggressive but numerically poor African Muslim armies and their chiefs while attacking the major populations of North Africa. On conquering those kafirs, the ransom that was collected was calculated in terms of money and women in equal share, and these women, collected as ransom, were distributed by fives or tens amongst the most faithful followers of Islam. The future progeny of these conquered women was born Muslim and so amongst the Muslim environments became literally fanatical. The Muslim chiefs who thus multiplied their numbers rapidly were honoured as ‘Ghazis’ by the religious authorities. The law of the Muslim religious warfare granted the victorious Muslim army every right to own the kafir women as completely as their other movable or immovable property. 442-443. After Ravan abducted Seeta and Shree Ramchandra marched on him, some of his well-wishers advised the demon king, just before the war, that because of his unjust act, the demon kingdom was threatened with a terrible war and that he should send Seeta back to her husband, because it was highly irreligious to kidnap her. “What?” cried the wrathful Ravan. “To abduct and rape the women folk of the enemy, do you call it irreligious? Pooh; Pooh!” — राक्षसानाम् परोधर्मः परदाराविघर्षणम् (To carry away the women of others and to ravish them is itself the supreme religious duty of the Rakshasas.) ‘Parodharmah’, the greatest duty! 444. With this same shameless religious fanaticism, the aggressive Muslims of those times considered it their highly religious duty to carry away forcibly the women of the enemy side, as if they were commonplace property, to ravish them, to pollute them and to distribute them to all and sundry, from the Sultan to the common soldier and to absorb them completely in their fold. This was considered a noble act, which increased their number.

445. In every province where the Muslim rule established itself, the Sultan, the Nawabs and the Nizams—why even the meanest of Muslim officers in every town and village therein, levied on the Hindu population not only the Jazia tax for collecting wealth; but also the heinous tax of demanding openly the daughters and even married ladies from the Hindu royal families and others of high rank, and even carried them away forcibly and openly.
446. After Sindh, the Arabs did not attempt another invasion of India, yet the Arab bands did come here along with other Muslim armies, and like these Arabs, all those newly converted people like the Persians (Iranians), the Turanians, the Afghans, the Turks, the Moghuls and others fell on India with all the ferocity at their command. Obviously, they had not brought their millions of womenfolk along with them. But all those from the Sultans to the common soldiers, as a rule, began to settle down here with the kidnapped Hindu women, whom they either married or simply kept as their concubines. Let alone the vast numbers of Hindu women of high as well as low ranks, who led the most ignoble of lives in the harems of the Emperors, Sultans or Nawabs, but almost every Muslim kept at least three or four such forcibly pulluted women. Thus, women in this aggressive Muslim community came to be more numerous than men, and polygamy being an accepted practice sanctioned by their religion, these foreign Muslim communities began to grow rapidly year-after-year, from a few thousands to millions and more.
447. An interesting point to note is that Sultan Ghiyas-ud-din Tughlak, Sultan Shikandar, Sultan Phiroz-Shah Tughlak and many other devilish Hindu-haters were born of Hindu mothers! Muslim Women too played their Devilish part in the Molestation and Harassment of the Hindu Women
448. Hindu women were considered kafirs and born slaves. So these Muslim women were taught to think it their duty to help in all possible ways, their molestation and forcible conversion to Islam. No Muslim woman, whether a begum or a beggar, ever protested against the atrocities committed by their male compatriots. On the contrary, they encouraged them to do so and honoured them for it. A Muslim woman did everything in her power to harass such captured or kidnapped Hindu women. Not only in the troubled times of war, but even in the intervening periods of peace and even when they themselves lived in the Hindu kingdoms, they enticed and

carried away young Hindu girls, locked them up in their own houses or conveyed them to the Muslim centres in masjids and mosques. The Muslim women all over India considered it their holy duty to do so. The Hindu Chivalry towards Enemy Women 449. The Muslim women never feared retribution or punishment at the hands of any Hindu for their heinous crime. They had a perverted idea of woman chivalry. If in a battle the Muslims won, they were rewarded for such crafty and deceitful conversions of Hindu women; lull even if the Hindus carried the field and a Hindu power was established in that particular place (and such incidents in those times were not very rare) the Muslim men alone, if at all, suffered the consequential indignities but the Muslim women—never! Only Muslim men, and not women, were taken prisoners. Muslim women were sure that even in the thick of battles, and in the confusion wrought just after then, neither the victor Hindu chiefs, nor any of their common soldiers, nor even any civilian would ever touch their hair. For, albeit enemies and atrocious, they were women! Hence, even when they were taken prisoner in battles, the Muslim women—royal ladies as also the commonest slaves—were invariably sent back safe and sound to their respective families! Such incidents were common enough in those times. And this act was glorified by the Hindus as their chivalry towards the enemy women and the generosity of their religion! For a sample, read the following incidents. 450. Even now we proudly refer to the noble acts of Chhatrapati Shivaji and Chimaji Appa, when they honourably sent back the daughter-in-law of the Muslim Governor of Kalyan and the wife of the Portuguese governor of Bassein respectively. But is it not strange that, when they did so, neither Shivaji Maharaj nor Chimaji Appa should ever remember, the atrocities and the rapes and the molestation, perpetrated by Mahmud of Ghazni, Muhammad Ghori, Alla-ud-din Khilji and others, on thousands of Hindu ladies and girls like the princesses of Dahir, Kamaldevi, the wife of Karnaraj of Karanwati and her extremely beautiful daughter, Devaldevi. Did not the plaintive screams and pitiful lamentations of the millions of molested Hindu women, which reverberated throughout the length and breadth of the country, reach the ears of Shivaji Maharaj and Chimaji Appa? 451. The souls of those millions of aggrieved women might have perhaps said, “Do not forget, O, your Majesty, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, and O!

Your Excellency, Chimaji Appa, the unutterable atrocities and oppression and outrage committed on us by the Sultans and Muslim noblemen and thousands of others, big and small. Let those Sultans and their peers take a fright that in the event of a Hindu victory, our molestation and detestable lot shall be avenged on the Muslim women. Once they are haunted with this dreadful apprehension, that the Muslim women, too, stand in the same predicament in case the Hindus win, the future, Muslim conquerors will never dare to think of such molestation of Hindu women.” 451A. But because of the then prevalent perverted religious ideas about chivalry to women, which ultimately proved highly detrimental to the Hindu community, neither Shivaji Maharaj nor Chimaji Appa could do such wrong to the Muslim women. 452. It was the suicidal Hindu idea of chivalry to women, which saved the Muslim women (simply because they were women) from the heavy punishments of committing indescribable sins and crimes against the Hindu women. Their womanhood became their shield, quite sufficient to protect them. 453. Still worse was the ridiculous idea, which the Hindus of those times entertained, that it was a sin to convert a Muslim woman to Hinduism. They foolishly thought that to have any sort of relations with a Muslim woman meant their own conversion to Islam. Naturally, even in the midst of a Hindu community and the Hindu state, they were secure against any attempt by the Hindus at abducting them or their forcible conversion to Hinduism. Exceptions, however, were very rare. 454. Under these circumstances, the Muslim feminine class [fair (?) sex] was left seraphically free from any chastisement or penalty for their share of the crimes perpetrated against the Hindu woman-world, and their work of enticing and ensnaring the Hindu women and forcing them to accept Islam, went on for hundreds of years, unhampered and unimpeded. But if 455. Suppose, if from the earliest Muslim invasion of India, the Hindus also, whenever they were victors on the battlefields, had decided to pay the Muslim fair sex in the same coin or punished them in some other ways, i.e. by conversion even with force and then absorbed them in their fold, then? Then with this horrible apprehension at their heart, they would have desisted from their evil designs against any Hindu lady. If they had taken such a fright in the first two or three centuries, millions and millions of

luckless Hindu ladies would have been saved all their indignities, loss of their own religion, rapes, ravages and other unimaginable persecutions. Our woman-world would not have suffered such a tremendous numerical loss, which means their future progeny would not have been lost permanently to Hinduism, and the Muslim population could not have thrived so audaciously. Without any increase in their womenfolk, the Muslim population would have dwindled into a negligible minority. 456. The sociological explanation for this contention has already been offered in paragraphs 439 to 446. 457. But haunted with the fantastic idea of chivalry to enemy-women and a blind eye to time, place or person, the Hindus of that period never tried to chastise the Muslim womenfolk for their wrongs to Hindu women, even when the former were many a time completely at their mercy. Misplaced Chivalry to Enemy Womenfolk and the Consequent Miserable plight 458. Well, did this misplaced chivalrous idea of the Hindus have any salutary effect on their Muslim foes? Were the latter ever ashamed of their sin of molesting a Hindu woman in view of this Hindu religious generosity and high mindedness? Did the Muslims ever sincerely feel thankful to the Hindus for the safe return of thousands of Muslim women to their own kith and kin? Never! On the contrary, they again and again reciprocated Hindu chivalrous behaviour with the same old treachery and atrocity, and thus held it to ridicule and scorn. 459. On the contrary, the Muslims were puffed up, perhaps with the thought, that if at all the Hindus were to show chivalry to anybody, it should have been to their own Hindu women! It was they who had the first right to such a chivalrous treatment! But if the Hindus could not rescue thousands of their own women who were being abducted, polluted and forced into Islamic religion in their very presence, through centuries, why should the Muslims not ridicule the Hindu chivalrous idea of civility to women, even enemy women? On the contrary, they perhaps thought that the Hindus dared not think of violating or even insulting the Muslim women for fear of horrible reprisals. Thus, they were more likely to misconstrue the Hindu idea of chivalry, than interpret it in the right sense as to have been born of cowardice than of strength and bravery. The Hindus of the Pre-Islamic era never Interpreted Chivalry to Women in this Anti-National silly way

460. A serpent, whether male or female, if it comes to bite must be killed. The enemy women, who enforced conversion and heaped all sort of humiliation on our mothers and sisters, had by that very devilish act, lost their womanhood and their right to chivalrous treatment, and deserved nothing but only the most stringent punishment for their atrocious crimes. Hence, when Tratika, the she-demon marched on Ramchandra with other demons, he killed her immediately, without a moment’s thought. When Shoorpanakha, another she-demon, rushed to eat away Seeta like cucumber, Laxman deprived her of nose and ears and sent her back—not honourably with generous gifts of ornaments, to show off his chivalay to women! When Narakasur carried away thousands of Aryan women to his Asur kingdom (Assyria of today), Shree Krishna marched upon the demon and killed him in the war. But he did not stop with military and political defeat he inflicted on Narakasur! He rescued all the thousands of imprisoned Aryan females, undergoing all sorts of humiliation there and brought them back to his own kingdom; and thus took a social revenge! Shree Krishna’s army did not forsake their kinswomen, simply because they were forcibly polluted and violated—a dastardly thought that he never entertained for a minute. On the contrary, Shree Krishna as the Bhoopati—the Lord of the whole Earth— brought all those sixteen thousand or more women to his kingdom, rehabilitated them honourably and took upon himself, the responsibility of feeding and protecting them. This very act of Krishna, as the Bhoopati has been fantastically construed by the writers of the Puranas as to describe him the husband of those thousands of women. He was later thought to have married all of them.
461. In the post-Puranik period, whenever our valiant and victorious princes vanquished the enemies like the Yavan, Shaka or Hun commandants, kings or emperors on the battlefield, they invariably married the enemy princesses. This seems to have been the tradition prevalent right from Chandragupta Maurya to the Gupta Emperors! Shalivahan kings too married Saka princesses. Not only our victorious kings but all Hindus, right from the Samants (feudatory princes) to common citizens, married unhesitatingly the Yavan, Saka or Hun women. The nation was valiant enough to absorb not only the progeny of those enemy-women, but the whole enemy communities in their own, and leave no trace of their origin behind. Harmful effects of the ban on Purification and Rehabilitation

462. Under the illusion of preserving the purity of their own caste and religion, the Hindu Society of the Islamic era began to enforce as their religious duty, the bans on exchange of food, on inter-caste marriage and other bans, even when they were harmful to the society. In a similar way and for the same reason of protecting the purity of their caste and religion, the ban on re-purification of the converted Hindus and that on sea-faring, began to be enforced most scrupulously and rigidly as religious injunctions. Neither any single Hindu who was converted under coercion, nor even his progeny could ever come back to Hinduism: their sin (?) had no redemption, no salvation. For generations together, the Hindus believed this to be their inviolable religious injunction; with very rare exceptions, every Hindu, from sweeper to Brahmin, from Chhatrapati (the sovereign) to Patrapati (the holder of a parchment), from Shankaracharya (the Religious Head) to Shankhacharya (the prince of blockheads), whether learned or illiterate, held this opinion about the ban on repurification of the converts unanimously and unswervingly from Kashmir to Kanyakumari.
463. On account of these very bans, thousands of our Hindu ladies kindled the fires of johar, century-after-century, in order to avoid violation at the hands of the Muslims. To save themselves from this humiliation of violation by enemies, millions others leapt into rivers, lakes and wells, all over the country and destroyed themselves along with their small children at their breasts. Most bravely, did many others die defiantly refusing to be converted to Islam, like Chahatrapati Samabhaji, Guru Teg Bahadur and many of our Sikh gurus like the martyr Bairagi Baba Banda, who kept on defying the Muslims till the last, even when his body was being cut off limb by limb. How can we ever forget this unprecedented martyrdom unless we are ungrateful to them? Few other communities in the history of the world could have sacrificed their lives on such a vast scale or with such severity as did the Hindus! This martyrdom of the Hindus was not altogether futile in respect of saving their religion from the Muslim onslaught. The heroic tales of their martyrdom have been inspiring generations of the nation to offer their life for protecting the religion, and this is not altogether insignificant.
464. Although highly detrimental to the interests of the nation as a whole, and as such deserving the severest of criticism, these various bans like those on exchange of food and sea-voyage and the custom of social ostracism, were all imposed by the Hindus of that period—let it not be forgotten—with the sole noble object of protecting the purity of their caste and creed.

Millions of Hindus who, for generations, suffered unimaginable pangs did so with unswerving loyalty to their accepted creed. Were they ever happy to boycott an individual for having—although unwillingly and through force —taken water from a Muslim hand or for other such reasons? How can one describe the agonies and pangs of the parents and other relatives at the unavoidable separation of their sons and daughters, of husbands and wives, of brothers and sisters? How many of them might have courted death owing to this extreme grief when they closed their doors on them, simply because they were, although unwillingly and forcibly, converted to Islam? But they suffered all this with the grim determination, viz., त्यजेदेकम् कुलस्यार्थे। ग्रामस्यार्थे कुलत्यजेत् ग्रामं जनपदस्यार्थे। धर्मार्थे पृथवीम् त्यजेत्॥ For the sake of the family, an individual is to be abandoned. For the sake of the village, a family has to be forsaken. For the sake of the state, a village has to be given up as lost, and, for the sake of religion, one should give up the whole world. 465. Should we not therefore be grateful to those Hindus for the unbearable pangs and unimaginable grief they suffered? They were misled into accepting those traditions of various bans as their religious duties, but their loyalty to their religion was unmistaken, unshaken! What was considered to be an antidote turned out to be poison itself! But the object in administering it was to give an antidote, to save the life of the nation! How can we, then forbear writing a word or two of sincere gratitude for the harrowing mental and physical agonies they suffered, with the honest intention of saving their religion? Anti-National illusory Platitudes! 466. An effective way of liquidating the Muslim religious authority could easily have been availed of by the Hindus of those times, if they had but done what the Muslims had been doing in their hundreds of offensives against Hindu states. The Muslims went on slaughtering wholesale the Hindu population. Similarly whenever the Hindus gained an upper hand, they could have retaliated by massacring Muslim population and making the region Muslim-less! Devoid of Muslims! Even their ban on re-purification (शुद्धि) would not have prevented them from doing this. For in doing this, there was no question involved of eating or drinking or of having any dealings with the Muslims.

But -! But if not the ban on re-purification, the suicidal Hindu creed of religious tolerance was certainly a major obstacle! From the very ancient times, the Hindus had been boasting of their high ideals of religious tolerance, of the equal status they conceded to all the religions of the world, of preaching the sameness of Ram and Rahim, of allowing every one to follow his own faith! This they considered to be the height of their religion! 467. Instead of massacring en masse the hundreds of thousands of Muslims, who from time to time fell in their hands completely vanquished and utterly helpless, in order to avenge the untold wrongs and humiliation heaped by them on the Hindus, the Hindus, in their turn, refrained themselves from doing the Muslims even the slightest harm, because they were in minority and belonged to another religion. On the contrary, the Muslims were allowed to enhance the glory and scope of their own religion without the least possible hindrance. Not only like the Hindu citizens, but even more leniently and with more facilities were the Muslims allowed, by Hindu states of those days, to enjoy the legal rights—a fact that is borne out by pages after pages of Indian history. 468. Is it necessary to add that these 'cow-faced' followers of Hinduism, proud of their utmost tolerance of other religions, were not (in the least) likely to hit back the tiger-faced Muslims on religious grounds? 469. Religious tolerance! A virtue! Yes. It can be a virtue only where the other religion is tolerant of our own! But to tolerate the Muslim religion, the followers of which right from the Sultans like Mahmud of Ghazni and Ghori and others to the various Shahs and Badshahs, thought it their religious obligation to massacre the kafir Hindus to celebrate their accession to the throne, and had been carrying on horrible religious persecution of the Hindus for nearly a thousand years, was tantamount to cut the throat of one's own religion! It was not tolerance towards other religions, it was tolerance of irreligion! It was not even tolerance, it was impotence! But this truth never dawned upon the Hindu society of those days even after the horrible experience of a thousand years or so. They, on their own part, went on tolerating even such a hideous religion as the Islam and considered it a glorious virtue of their own—a special ornament in the crown of the Hindu community! 470. O thou Hindu society! Of all the sins and weaknesses, which have brought about thy fall, the greatest and most potent are thy virtues themselves.

471-472. Ahimsa (non-violence), kindness, chivalry even towards the enemy women, protection of an abjectly capitulating enemy, क्षमा वीरस्य भूषणम् (forgiveness, a glorious emblem for the brave!) and religious tolerance were all virtues no doubt—very noble virtues! But it is blind and slovenly—even impotent—adoption of all these very virtues, irrespective of any consideration given to the propriety of time, place or persons, that so horribly vanquished the Hindus in the millennial Hindu-Muslim war on the religious front. For पात्रापात्रविवेकशून्य आचलि जरि सद्गुण॥ तों तोचि ठरे दुर्गुण, सद्धर्मघातक॥ [Every virtuous act done without the least regard to the propriety of the persons concerned—without the least thought, whether the other person deserves such noble treatment or not—becomes a glaring vice most harmful to the true religion.] ❑

Super-Diabolic Counter-Offensive the Only Answer 473. It has already been shown in the earlier chapters how the Hindu Society was unable to recover its tremendous numerical losses suffered due to forcible mass conversions and tyrannical anti-Hindu laws of Muslim kings and sultans, because of its own silly, anti-national traditions of caste- differences, bans on reconversion of the helpless Hindu proselytes, and the like, and many other perverted concepts of virtue. Had it not been for some prophetic social and religious reformers, astute diplomats, gigantic thinkers and philosophers, and men of action among the Hindus of that time, who towered, though only from time to time, over the all-pervading gloom and guided their community, the Hindu society would never have escaped total extinction. Maharshi Deval and Medhatithi 474. Two of these thinkers are Maharshi Deval and Medhatithi, the critic of Manusmriti, who unfailingly attract our attention because of their dazzling intellectual brilliance. Their extant writings show us, beyond any shadow of doubt, that even during those calamitous years, that intervened between the first Arab invasion of Sindh and the Muslim religio-political atrocities in the Punjab and its final occupation, they had pointed out to Hindus brave new ways, new religious thoughts, new weapons which were calculated to bring them success. 475-476. The Chapter on the pollution of religion in Deval Smriti, begins with the line सिंधुतीरमुपासन्नम्! देवलं मुनिसत्तमम्! It clearly shows that it was in Sindh first, that a section of Brahmins, Kshatriyas and others was organised. It determined to improve the code of social and religious behaviour of the Hindus as much, at least, as to recuperate the numerically stupendous losses suffered at the hands of the Muslims. For, they clearly saw that the laws of behaviour laid down in different smritis were in every way powerless to counteract the armed religio-political aggression of the enemy. The Hindu leaders, present in the hermitage of Deval on the bank of the Indus, once asked the sage, “Will it be possible to bring back to Hinduism, thousands of Hindu men and

women, who have fallen victim to the religious persecution of the Muslims and have been forcibly converted to Islam, by some form of atonement and by repurification?” The verses in Deval Smriti clearly mention that such discussions were held at different times and the authoritative and final answers were given, and the rules of conduct propounded by Maharshi Deval favouring reconversion. These advocates and writers of this new Smriti and their followers declared as unlawful and irreligious in those adverse circumstances, the very religious act of banning reconversion as it was causing tremendous numerical losses to the Hindus. Special Weapons for Special Occasions 477-478. In the armoury of our religious code of conduct, there always had been very special and progressive weapons for meeting very special and exceptional circumstances. All that was needed was a class of leaders to use them from time to time! If in the initial stages of adverse times of the Hindu-Muslim war, these special and exceptional weapons had only been unsheathed and sharpened, Hinduism itself might have completey routed Islam from the Indian soil, as it happened when the valiant (because they were attacking the enemy!) and victory-longing gods and the Aryans fought with the demons (dashyus). Even if the same religious resplendence was not uniformly shown by the Hindus, it was, in some measure, seen in the revolutionary religious reforms of Deval Maharshi of Sindh. Maharshi Deval is said to have lived sometime between A.D. 800 to A.D. 900. 479. Because of this religious resplendence alone, Deval Maharshi could kick away the traditional religious ban on redemption for the unwilling converts and propounded in his Smriti, an expedient of atonement for the sin of conversion. It has been laid down in the Deval Smriti, that if, within a certain period of his or her forcible conversion to Islam, a Hindu man or woman showed his or her desire to be reconverted to Hinduism with due atonement, he or she was to be administered simple and practical penance of fast or something else and absorbed once again in the Hindu society. The liberal attitude of this Smriti towards women, in the context of the times is specially laudable. It enjoined that the women forcibly converted to Islam, or those who served in the Muslim households as menial servants or slaves, be considered pure after their next menses and should be completely absorbed in the Hindu community. Even a pregnant Hindu woman, freed from the Muslim bondage, was to be considered as pure as a bar of gold

after being heated in the goldsmith’s chafing dish, once her foetus came out after delivery. 480. It is, however, really strange that even this Deval Smriti, which was so particular about the re-purification and reconversion of the fallen Hindu women, with a view to stopping the numerical losses of our community, should not have cared to do the same for their children born of the Muslim women. It is very difficult to explain why it should have failed to do so. We were reminded of this Deval Smriti when once we were told of a custom amongst the Bengali Hindus: if a child widow or an unmarried girl in a Hindu family gave birth to an illegitimate child, it was to be solicitously given over to the Muslims, who lived beyond the local river for being brought up as their own. This expedient was no doubt thought of by the Hindu priesthood with the best intention of saving the family from public humiliation and the society from every contagion of that sin. The Muslims too, thinking that these Hindu children increased their number, gladly accepted them. The simple god-fearing Hindus on the other hand, never for once understood that their own number decreased to that extent. It is quite evident that this Bengali custom must have been popularized by some Smriti like the Deval Smriti. 481. The basic cause of this cowardly arrangement made by even those reformers who condemned the caste division, ban on repurification of the ‘fallen’ and favoured reconversion, was the deep-rooted silly belief of the Hindus, that the purity of the caste was to be preserved at all costs and even at the risk of caste extinction. But the Hindu society of those days never understood that the very same purity of their caste was lost, when lakhs of their women fell into the hands of the Muslims, and that if those prohibitions on reconversion were to continue, the whole of the Hindu society would perish. 482. Another thing to be noted is that the portion, now extant, of the Deval Smriti does not provide for the conversion of the original Muslims to Hinduism, as it did for the conversion of the unfortunate Hindu converts. The reason probably is only this, that the Hindus considered it a great sin to admit another community into their own fold. Even the religious laws gives up to the writer of the Bhagwat Geeta seemed to be extremely worried how to keep off the intermingling of the castes and subcastes within the Hindu Society itself.

483. In fine, we can say, the daring reformers at the Ashram of Maharshi Deval made at least some provision for admitting the forcibly converted Hindu men and women to the Hindu society. But it seems that the writers of Smritis and the warriors of the time dared not use at every stage, more violent means to beat down the monstrously violent Muslim aggression. Nevertheless, under the adverse circumstances, when the Muslim power had established itself firmly in the land, this religious revolt of the hundreds of Hindu leaders like Deval and others was not a small thing. Check on Muslim Religious Aggression in Sindh
484. Strangely enough, the above-mentioned attempt of the Hindu leaders like Deval was supported by the Hindu society as a whole. The Hindu society, which was originally zealously fond of their caste-sysetem, reconverted thousands of convert men and women and absorbed them in their midst. Not only on the political (cf. para 357) front, but on the religious front, too, the Muslims were thus beaten completely in Sindh. This two-fold victory of the Hindus in Sindh—of reconquering Sindh within thirty years of Kasim’s invasion and maintaining their grip on it for nearly two hundred years afterwards, and of the revolutionary redemption of the ‘fallen’, by Maharshi Deval and others—has to be stressed again and again, as it has not been adequately described not even mentioned at all, in Indian histories.
485. Although there is very slender evidence on our side to bear out this two-fold Hindu victory in Sindh, we can find a stronger proof in the writings of the enemy. The Muslim writers were vexed at their general rout in the reconquest of Sindh by the Hindus.
486. Al Biladuri (or Baladhuri) writes, “In the days of Tamim, the Musalmans retired from several parts of India and left their position...Hakim, son of Awanah al Kalbi, succeeded Tamim. The people of India had returned to idolatory, excepting those of Kassah and the Musalmans had no place of security in which they could take refuge, so he built a town on the other side of the lake facing India and called it Al Mahfuza, ‘the secure’, and this he made a place of refuge and security for them and their chief town.” (Elliot HIED, Vol. I., p. 126.)
487. History places Maharshi Deval somewhere between A.D. 800 and A.D. 900. Round about this period, i.e. about A.D. 850 to A.D. 950, was born fortunately for the Hindus, another upholder of this new surge of religious revival. He sought to overcome the disastrous Muslim religious

aggression with still more disastrous counter-aggression. The weapon worship religious law given by Acharya Medhatithi, became the most effective guidance to the Hindus, like the Arthashastra of Arya Chanakya to the generation of the valiant Chandragupta Maurya. To the whole of Aryavarta, he wanted to teach once again the lesson of expansionism and victorious imperialism. Medhatithi, the new interpreter of Manusmriti, was the sole religious leader and perhaps the last of the writers of Smriti. He tried to erect before the perplexd Hindus of the 9th and 10th centuries, a huge lighthouse tower of the former Aryan imperialism and expansionism of Chanakya, and to regenerate into them, new courage to push ahead determinedly and strike hard at the aggressor. His intention was clearly to animate his society with the vibrant inspiration to repulse instantly the armed religious aggression of the Muslims of those times, in the same magnificent tradition of the Aryan empires of old and with their military strategy, in fighting down the aggressive rakshasas (enemies). He wanted the Hindus to establish not only the old empire of Aryavarta, but to conquer and annex the Muslim states even beyond the limits of Aryavarta and establish Hinduism there, if necessary, even with force. The Aryan slogan ‘Krunvanto Vishvam Aryam’ (We are going to make the whole world Aryan) of the Vedic times, resounds incessantly throughout his critique on Manusmriti. 488. There had been a great confusion wrought in the Hindu Society over a thousand years or so preceding Medhatithi’s age by the anti-national and imbecile social traditions (which we have mentioned so far and will mention hereafter), about the differentiation of caste, religious tolerance and fear of pollution, which appeared as if laid down by the shritis (Vedas), and ruled as per the injunction of the Smritis. The critic Medhatithi was the only one, who on seeing the miserable plight of the Hindus determined to check their downward course and convulse the imbecile and intellectually stagnant Hindu society into its original Aryan form. Naturally, he decided to criticise Manusmriti itself, which was considered to be the basic foundation of all other smritis. He ruthlessly tested the laws of political conduct propounded therein on the anvil of Chanakya’s Arthashastra. In this way, with the original Manusmriti of the Aryans in one hand and the empire- worshipping conquest-loving Kautilya’s Arthashastra in the other, Medhatithi declared irreligious all the codes of conduct, which had been

rendered impotent because of the imbecile and intellectually sterile Hindu Ahimsa. With one stroke of remonstrance like the following: 489. या वेदब्राह्याः यस्मृतमयः याश्च काश्च कुदृष्टयः। सर्वास्तान् विपरीतार्थान्, वेदविद् न समाचरेत्॥ He rendered not only all the silly ‘codes of conduct’, but even the smritis that called them caste-laws absolutely defunct and valueless. 490. Most probably, Medhatithi might have seen and heard about all the religious persecution by the Muslims in Sindh and the Punjab and the failure of the Hindus, for various reasons already discussed, to avenge it or even to counteract it effectively. Naturally, in order to din once again into the ears of the then defeated, fallen and perplexed Aryan nation the echoes of the smritis of the old Aryavarta, which was on its way to glory and which, with the motto • कृण्वन्तो विश्वम् आर्यम on its banner was conquering in all directions, Medhatithi picked up and extolled in his own critique as Manu’s original commandments, only the warlike, arms-adoring and imperialistic religious rites and precepts. All others, he condemned as वेदब्राह्याः स्मृतयः (smritis against the Vedas)! His thundering sentences did not befit the then powerless Hindu kings, nor could those kings utter them with proper dignity and grandeur. Those precepts were really meant for an Emperor like Chandragupta or Emperor Pushyamitra! 491-492. Medhatithi clearly declares that to invade another kingdom— especially an enemy state—can never be an injustice in political science. It is, on the other hand, the duty of a king, he said, to pounce upon the non- Hindu enemy and crush him before he grows powerful enough to invade the former. In statesmanship, the protection of the Aryavarta is the supreme duty of a king. That is why he condemns as suicidal, dilatory and so adverse to the kingly duty, everything that the other imprudent foolhardy critics recommend as proper code of conduct: viz that while attacking a foreign kingdom and especially the Muslim kingdom, the Aryan kings should not strike till the other gives offence of some sort or the other. On the contrary, he says that the neighbouring king is an enemy is in itself his fault; at an opportune moment, he should be pounced upon and crushed. What more, if the neighbouring non-Aryan kingdom is seen to be getting stronger and mightier than our Aryan state, whether it is guilty of any tangible offence or not, we should ourselves form alliance with other friendly or unfriendly

powers and go to war against this non-Aryan state, the moment we are assured of success. 493. Throughout the critical treatise of Medhatithi, one dominant aspiration makes itself felt on almost every page that the smaller states of Shreeman Bhojraj—the Rajput prince—and other Hindu kings should be united into a powerful kingdom and once again a mighty empire like the old —nay, an invincible and victorious Bharatiya Empire—should rise on the Indian soil. From this point of view, while writing about the other kingly duties, he has emphasized one, viz. that even before the Mlenchchas (non- Aryans) attack an Aryan state, the latter should march against the enemy kingdom. Once you are engaged in war with the enemy, you should throw kindness and generosity to the winds and crush the enemy outright. The crafty enemy should be struck down with super-cunning and skilful deception under any pretext whatsoever. In a war, the so-called virtues like honesty, simplicity, consistency in speech and action and politeness, gentility and generosity themselves prove fatal to the nation. Hence, a king should not fall a prey to them—should keep himself aloof from them. 494. Medhatithi has most powerfully expounded this sort of stern political theory (ethics). For, it was absolutely essential for saving the Hindus from complete annihilation at the hands of the Muslims, because of their simplicity. To teach them the arch-diplomacy of Arya Chanakya, was his sole aim. Medhatithi plainly says that the Aryadharma nowhere decrees that the Aryans should confine themselves to the boundaries of Aryavarta. On the contrary, the pith and marrow of the religious code of the Hindus, he says, is that if the mighty Aryan kings invade the non-Aryan kingdoms beyond the Aryavarta and conquer them, and immediately spread their Aryadharma there and finally establish their empire in those lands, then even those former non-Aryan lands should thereafter be considered Aryan lands and incorporated in Aryavarta! 495. At least some Hindu states of those times followed these precepts of Medhatithi and like Chanakya's ideal disciple, Chandragupta, literally crossed the boundaries of Aryavarta and waged successful wars against the Muslim powers. Although to the north, the frontier Hindu states were forced not to cross but to defend their boundaries, yet till nearly one hundred and fifty years after the death of Mahmud of Ghazni, the Southern Hindu states remained independent and powerful. So the Indian Hindu States were able to carry out the victorious political experiments of the

Mauryan era as per the injunctions of Medhatithi And that is why the Kalingas, the Pandyas, the Cheras, Cholas and other Hindu states sent powerful naval expeditions across the Western (often misnamed the Arabian Sea), the Southern and the Eastern Seas, carrying their victorious banner to the non-Aryan kingdoms, right up to the African coast on the one side and the Chinese on the other. The astonishing fact is that while in the north, Mahmud of Ghazni and Mohammed Ghori were ravaging and plundering capital-after-capital and temple-after-temple of the Hindus and trampling down their powerful kingdoms in the South, the colossal temples like the one at Bhuvaneshwar were being erected. Kings like Rajendra Chola marched with their mighty victorious naval forces, through Burma, Pegu, the Andamans and the Nicobars and other archipelagos in the Eastern Sea. They visited the Hindu confederate states in Java, Indo-China and Thailand, conquered the Lakshadiv and Maldiva island states in the Western Sea, and finally conquering Ceylon, hoisted their invincible flag on the Southern Ocean. 496. It is doubtless that on the strength of religious authority of Medhatithi, illumined by the glorious tradition of Chanakya, these victorious Hindu naval forces conquered kingdom-after-kingdom beyond the great seas and annexed them to the Aryan empire. This was accomplished not on the hobby horse to tight conventions and rigid injunctions which came into force a century or two before, but because of the enlightening and guiding commentaries of Medhatithi. ❑

10.

Intermittent Hindu Retaliation Against

Muslim Religious Aggression

497. At the end of an earlier chapter, we had expressed our astonishment as to how the Hindu Society did not perish completely in spite of the various defects of class-differences, ban on reconversion misconceptions about virtues and the like, and how it escaped with the loss of only some millions of Hindus converted. For beyond the frontiers of India, wherever such Muslim religious aggression took place, the natives there were totally deprived of their religions. The northern coast of Africa up to Spain and the Asian lands up to the frontier India, were totally converted to Islam. But in India alone, then attempts were not completely successful. At the time of Muhammad Kasim’s invasion of Sindh in the 8th century and then from the 11th century, i.e. for nearly a thousand years, from the marauding expedition of Mahmud of Ghazni and of Ghori to the complete overthrow of the Moghul empire by the Peshwas in the 18th century, the Muslim invaders violently converted lakhs of Hindus and tried to multiply their numbers. The circumstances in this land—most adverse for the Hindus— also favoured them. Why then did the Muslims fail to destroy the Hindu Society completely?
498. The first reason that can explain this strange occurrence is the political defeat, which the Hindus inflicted on these Muslims. In the initial stages, Bhim and Rana Pratap and other Rajput princes and next, the Hindu kings of Vijayanagar had rendered the Muslim power out of gear and crippled it. Lastly, the Marathas dealt it deadly blows and fluttered their victorious banner under the leadership of the Peshwa right up to Attock. This political defeat of the Muslims at the hands of the Hindus, which is well known to all, made it impossible for the Muslims to bring all the Hindus under their green flag.
499. But the other potent reason for this strange phenomenon is that there arose from time to time, heroic men and women warriors, who staunchly opposed the armed religious aggression of the Muslims with counter aggression following the precepts of Maharshi Deval and Medhatithi. It is this counter-aggression on the religious front by the Hindus, that has really