The War on Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb

The Wire

19-07-2025

The following is an excerpt from Ghazala Wahab's book The Hindi Heartland: A Study, published by the Aleph Book Company.
The truth about Ganga-Jamuni that my neighbours referred to, comes from two sources. One is pedantic and another political. And they feed on each other. Bestselling author and lawyer, J. Sai Deepak claims to have busted the myth of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb in his books. Thereafter, he has given numerous interviews and talks on the subject. In one interview, he says, 'This composite creature called the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb is a relatively new construct in our public discourse, which can at best be traced to the period between 1916 and 1923. Not before, nor after.' In the same interview he says, 'Non-cooperation movement was launched to support the Khilafat, it was not for India's independence, that much is clear. Nobody can claim otherwise…this is a myth that needs to be busted and I have done that. Post-independence, the deification of this creature Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb must be laid at the door of distortion of history under Jawaharlal Nehru and the Marxist-Nehruvian coterie of historians that he put together. And then, to this particular cabal called IPTA (Indian People's Theatre Association), which had a lot of Marxist Muslims. And then Bollywood started to play a huge role in this. So, we are told that Mohammed Rafi sang bhajans and Naushad composed some of these bhajans. But I am not going to let a bhajan come in the way of my larger perspective of history.'
'The Hindi Heartland: A Study', Ghazala Wahab, Aleph Book Company, 2025.
What seems like nit-picking on terminology is actually an attempt to discredit the notion of interdependent, mutually benign existence between Hindus and Muslims before the coming of the British in India. Hence, what starts as pedantic becomes political. In a recent talk, Sai Deepak says, 'Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb is not a product of a foreign religion's ability to coexist. It is a product of a convert Hindu's inability to give up his religion, his cultural roots, language. Nariyal phodna, diya jalana (breaking of coconut, lighting lamps) is not a sign of the accommodation of the outsider. It is the sign of passive resistance of the insider for a few generations, until it is completely scrubbed off his atman (soul).'
Deepak is not the only one 'busting myths' about India's history of syncretism. Much before he emerged as a thought leader for a certain ideology, different analysts, commentators, and 'historians' have been busting this 'myth'. YouTube is full of videos on the subject. The insistence that Hindus and Muslims never lived in harmony is driven by the need to justify the present divisiveness by showing it as a historic continuum. In this, academics and writers pitch in with selective reading of history. For instance, Pavan K. Varma writes, 'Hindu civilization had never seen conquerors like the Islamic Turkic invaders, who were so blindly committed to the destruction of a culture, so fanatically driven by a belief in the superiority of their religion, so unrelenting in their hatred for those not belonging to it and so passionate about the need to convert the unbelievers.'
Of course, Varma offers no historical evidence to support his sweeping statement. However, this emotional viewing of history is not new. In 1955, barely seven years after the brutal sundering of the nation, Hindi poet and essayist Ramdhari Singh Dinkar expressed somewhat similar emotions in his book Sanskriti ke Chaar Adhyay (Four Chapters of Culture), for which India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru wrote the foreword. The book also won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1959.
In the section on Hindu–Muslim coexistence in India, Dinkar rues the division between the two communities, writing that 'the mental problem of Hindus is that no matter how hard they try, they cannot forget the torture Islam inflicted upon them. And Muslims are caught in a bind thinking that they will now have to live as a minority in a country which they used to rule.'
In the same chapter, he writes, though in the context of literature, and not religion, what is now echoed by people like Deepak. 'The truth is that in comparison with the interest and knowledge that Hindus acquired of Urdu literature, the Muslim knowledge of Hindi literature is miniscule.' Despite this one-sided nature of the relationship, Dinkar offers a way forward. He writes that both the majority and minority communities must learn to trust one another again. However, 'it is important that one must not put the history behind the curtains, nor exaggerate the stories about Hindus' influence on Islam or Muslims' influence on Hindutva simply to encourage Hindu-Muslim brotherhood. History must be presented the way it was.' Interestingly, Dinkar chose to use the term Hindutva in 1955 instead of Hinduism, despite the term having been appropriated by Savarkar in his book Essentials of Hindutva in 1922.
And then, offering the model of 'good Muslim' as opposed to 'bad Muslim', he writes, 'Muslims must understand that a person's religious devotion cannot be in opposition to his devotion to the country. People like Amir Khusrau, (Malik Mohammad) Jayasi, Akbar, (Abdul) Rahim (Khankhana) and Dara Shukoh were devotees of Islam, as well as Bharat.'
Dinkar was not a proponent of extremist Hindu thinking, as Savarkar or founders of the RSS were. A Gandhian, a freedom fighter, and recipient of multiple literary awards in India, Dinkar was thrice sent to the Rajya Sabha by the Congress party between 1952 and 1964. Clearly, his views were the mainstream perspective in India at that time. Not a historian, his views were based on what he had read. The primary, and the most accessible sources of history at that point were those written by British historiographers. Among the most popular versions were the thirteen volumes of The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians compiled by Henry Miers Elliot and John Dowson published between 1867 and 1877. Reprinted several times, the book chronicles the history of India from the time the Arab traders landed on the subcontinent in the ninth century until the eighteenth century, by translating and interpreting the records of Arab and Persian writers.
Quoting from the book's preface, Amita Paliwal, historian of medieval history, says, "These bombastic Bengali babus are here and clamouring how ill we are governed under the British rule. Let us show you how badly you were governed under the Muslim rule'. So, the translation of the Arabic and Persian history was done with the intention of showing how bad the Muslim rule was. It was a selective reading of India's past, done with the intention of sowing the seeds of communalism.' According to her, this recasting of India's past to show the British in a positive light was conceived in the aftermath of 1857. 'They felt that if these two qaums (communities) came together again, it would be detrimental to their rule,' she says.
Putting Dinkar's writings in a context, Swapna Liddle says that Dinkar's writings were part of the Hindi movement of the Nagari Prachirini Sabha (see the chapter on language), which was a political movement. Dinkar's writings, according to her, reflected that movement which justified itself as opposing the hegemony of the Muslims who had imposed their culture on the Hindus.
'It was very much a part of the politics of that period. This understanding of history was required to feed into the politics of that time at various levels. It didn't matter if it was correct or not,' she says.
Historian Manan Ahmed Asif has written two books, A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia (2016) and The Loss of Hindustan, The Invention of India (2020) exploring the deliberate misrepresentation of India's past by British historians. In the latter he writes, 'In the colonial episteme it is the Muslim medieval that is demonised, elided, ignored and put up as the literal Dark Age between the Golden Age of ancient India and the modern liberal age of British rule.'
British historiographers viewed Arab and Persian texts through two lenses. They accepted as truth the portions where the scribes lauded their emperors as 'Ghazi' (Islamic warriors), eulogizing their role as destroyers of idols. However, they dismissed their writings on administration and policies as superfluous or propaganda. To achieve this, Ahmed writes, 'The 'India' that colonial powers made was filled with cliched natives, invented temporalities, and religious antagonisms presumed to be factual and true. In contrast, 'Hindustan' was made to be figurative, a place of false harmonies, limited geographies, and forgotten languages. The philologists asserted the supremacy of texts such as the Manusmriti to contextualise 'custom' and law. Colonial historians sidelined Persian histories as demonstrative solely of Muslim despotism.'
Curiously, Indian nationalists, including Nehru and Dinkar, accepted the colonial construct of Indian history, because as Professor Abhay Kumar Dubey says, giving the example of the South American continent, 'The colonial powers controlled the historical narratives of the lands they conquered to control the thinking of the natives.' Perhaps this explains why Nehru also looked at the reign of only Emperor Ashoka as India's 'Golden Age', which 'India' must aspire to reclaim.
Ghazala Wahab is the editor of FORCE magazine. She has written Born A Muslim: Some Truths About Islam in India (winner of Book of the Year Award, non-fiction, at the Tata Literature Live and Atta Galatta), edited The Peacemakers, and Dragon On Our Doorstep: Managing China Through Military Power (with Pravin Sawhney).
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