भारतीय इतिहास के ६ स्वर्णिम पृष्ठ (वीर सावरकर - विदेशी आक्रान्ताओं पर विजय गाथा)

543. In this brief account, one great proselytizing movement in the
     fifteenth century deserves some slight reference. That is the rigorous
     proselytizing movement carried on by the Portuguese missionaries after the
     passing of Gomantak into the Portuguese hands, and the opening of the
     centres of Christian propaganda on the Malabar coast. Their first energetic
     and determined archbishop to convert the Hindus by means of any horrible
     atrocities was Saint Xavier, who came to the land of Gomantak by about
     A.D. 1540. After moving heaven and earth for the spread of Christianity (of
     course in his horrible way), he wrote several letters to the Emperor of
     Portugal about the obstacles in his way of proselytization.
544. In one of his letters to the Portuguese King, he complains that the
     Portuguese officers in India, in spite of the fact that they were Christians
     themselves, irreverently set at naught, his orders in respect of the
     propagation of their faith. They were entirely given to lustful pleasures and
     a life of luxury, and were always on the lookout for every means to grow
     rich. Money was their God. To the service of the true God, to which the
     missionaries like himself had dedicated their lives, those officers, never did
     lend any helping hand. “The Second necessity for the Christians”, he wrote
     in his letter addressed from Amboina (Moluccas) to D. Joao III, King of
     Portugal on May 16, 1545, “is that your Majesty establish the Holy
     Inquisition, because there are many who live according to the Jewish law
     and according to the Mohamedan sect, without any fear of God or shame of
     the world. And since there are many, who are spread all over the fortress,
     there is the need of the Holy Inquisition and of many preachers.” In one of
     his letters to the Society at Rome, he wrote, “If it were not for the
     opposition of the Brahmins, we should have them all embracing the religion
     of Jesus Christ.” These Brahmins were alleged to hinder the progress of the
     Christian proselytizing movement. While the Christian missionaries went
     on converting thousands of Hindus to Christianity, these ‘wily’ Brahmins
     were found to be secretly taking them all to the banks of the Mandvi river
     and bluffed them into bathing in the river; after reciting some verses, in
     order to wash off all sins of being converted to Christianity, they were
     declared to be original Hindus. Thus, with these and various other blatant
     lies, these Brahmins were alleged to be purifying a number of Hindu
     converts to Christianity. In spite of all attempts to intimidate and terrorise
     these Brahmins, they were said to be carrying on their activities
     nonchalantly. Xavier complains that the Portuguese officers in India did not

inflict on these Brahmins such severe punishments, as he would have liked
them to do.
545. Tired of these incessant complaints of the Christian missionaries like
St. Xavier, the Portuguese Emperor issued stern orders to his Governors and
other officers, that they should not neglect help in any way in the sacred (?)
cause of the spread of Christianity, otherwise their whole properly would be
confiscated. Even then not satisfied, St. Xavier went on complaining against
the Brahmins. He, nevertheless, gloated at the tremendous success his
proselytizing efforts had achieved. At the very sight of a Christian
missionary, Hindu villages were taken alright and people there were said to
be running away helfer skelter, for most severe were the measures taken
against those of the Hindus, who did not court Christianity. Let alone the
common Hindu villagers, even the high priests of big Hindu temples, the
heads of Hindu monasteries and the rich in the cities, were all put into
prisons and were subjected to so much physical torture, that the priestly
class at many places is said to have made good their escape to places
outside Goa, carrying their sacred idols with them. “Whenever I hear of any
act of idolatrous worship”, wrote St. Francis Xavier to the Society at Rome
in 1543 A.D. “I go to the place with a large band of these children, who
very soon load the devil with a greater amount of insult and abuse, than he
has lately received of honour and worship from his parents, relations and
acquaintances. The children run at the idols, upset them, dash them down,
break them to pieces, spit on them, trample on them, kick them about and,
in short, heap on them every possible outrage.” He further wrote to the
same society at Rome from Cochin on the 27th Jan, 1545, “When all are
baptized, 1 order all the temples of their false gods to be destroyed and all
the idols to be broken into pieces. “The cruelties’, writes a Goan Historian,
J.C. Barreto Miranda, which in the name of religion of peace and love this
tribunal (of Inquisition) practised in Europe, were carried to even greater
excesses in India.... Every word of their’s (of the Inquisitors) was a sentence
of death, and at their slightest nod, was moved to terror the vast population
spread over the Asiatic regions, whose lives fluctuated in their hands and
who, on the most frivolous pretexts, could have been clapped for all time in
the deepest dungeons or strangled or offered as food for the flames of the
pyre.” The harrowing atrocities of St. Xavier and his successors on the
Hindus of his and later dates, cannot be described here for want of space.

546. In all the provinces in north India, the Hindus in general had to bear
     the brunt of the Muslim religious persecution only. But the Hindus to the
     South of Vindhyadri right up to Rameshwaram, had to suffer such horrible
     persecution not only from the five independent Muslim states, then ruling in
     the Deccan, but also from the even fiercer Portuguese, whose brutal
     treatment of the Hindus in order to force them to swear allegiance to the
     Christian faith, seems to have no parallel. Whoever wishes to understand
     the whole harrowing story should read [‘Os Hindus De Goa Republica
     Portuguesa’, by Dr. Antonio Norohna]. Although many great and small
     volumes of histories describe the horrible religious persecution of the
     Hindus by these Portuguese missionaries, before which the Muslim
     atrocities pale into insignificance, this book is particularly mentioned
     because the writer Dr. Antonio Norohna happened to be a judge of the
     Portuguese High Court in Goa. The Portuguese happily have the honest
     habit of preserving all the favourable and unfavourable documents
     regarding their history, right from the ancient to the modern times, and it is
     their ancient tradition to make all these available for study to any interested
     scholar. Naturally, he got every facility to read all those documents and
     books thoroughly, completely and publicly. That this Portuguese judge of
     the High Court should write this book after thoroughly studying all the
     documents, including the original letters of the then ruling Portuguese
     Emperor, the Portuguese Christian missionaries at that time in India, and
     the then Pope of Rome, deserves the special merit of this book!
547. Besides this book of Dr. Antonio Norohna, one is also recommended
     to read ‘The History of Reconversion in Gomantak in Marathi’. It was
     written under the supervision of the late Shree Masurkar Maharaj, who
     reconverted more than ten thousand Hindus, formerly made Christian under
     great coercion. The present book ‘Six Glorious Epochs’ is not really a
     history of India but a critical treatise, so the detailed account of this
     Portuguese religious persecution and forcible conversion of Hindus, cannot
     be given here at length. It is enough to say that the detailed discussion
     (which has here been recorded in the earlier chapters) of the thousand-year-
     old unprecedented and bitter Hindu-Muslim war since the invasion of Sindh
     by the Muslims, and the suicidal consequences of the various harmful and
     anti-national bans self-imposed by the Hindus on eating, drinking, touching,
     intermarrying and especially, that on re-purification and reconversion of the
     polluted Hindus, and many other foolish religious concepts of the Hindus of

the time, is applicable, almost word-by-word to the various acrimonious
battles of the Hindus with the Portuguese, after their arrival in India and the
Christian missionaries in general, and the Christian nations also.
548. It must also be remembered here that at this very time, the Arab and
the Christian nations established their rule over the South Sea (the Indian
Ocean). They attacked our old Hindu-Buddhist states, that had spread far
and wide up to Indo-China and deprived millions of Hindus of their
religion, causing the Hindus, indirectly, to fetter themselves with the new
shackles of the ban on sea voyage. This not only worsted the Hindu political
and religious authority, but caused a great loss to them of their grand
aspiration for the naval empire and foreign trade. They lost their whole
navy and naval trade. Not only did the ship-building industry of the Hindus
perish, but to maintain such seafaring naval force itself became sinful.
Hindu religion and Hindu nation became literally narrow-minded because
of its own blunders. Even if any daring Hindu tried to break this shell of
narrow-mindedness on the Eastern, Western and Southern oceans, there was
the prohibitive placard “समुद्रयातुः स्वीकार - कलौ पंच
विवर्जयेत्” — This was inviolable.
549. Heretofore, we have mentioned only some of the chosen events,
violent or non-violent, regarding the Muslim-Christian two-fold political
and religious armed aggression against the Hindus, and the way in which
they faced it, and even of the revenge that the Hindus also took of those
atrocities and humiliations during this violent thousand year-old Hindu-
Muslim war. They can easily show according to the ‘स्थाली पुलाक
न्याय’
(judging cooked rice by testing one cooked grain only), the enormity of
the struggle.
550. Truly speaking, while religious leaders like Shankaracharya
Vidyaranyaswami, national heroes like Chhatrapati Shivaji, Durgadas
Rathod Maharaja Jaswant Singh of Jodhpur and saints and sages like
Ramanand, Shree Chaitanya and others gave the lead in carrying on
counter-offensives on the religious front by individual or mass conversions,
the Hindu society as a whole ought to have rocked the skies by effecting
unceasing mass conversions of the Muslim men and women to Hinduism
and reconversion of Hindu converts, who had fallen victim to the violence

or guile of the enemy. They should have thrown to the winds, the old
traditional views and customs. They ought to have made it the religion of
the day!
550A. The Hindus were not averse to idolatory. Many of the Hindu seats
and many of the Hindu religious tenets had been established by great
personalities, and the Hindu society as a whole, had recognized them and
adapted them to the framework of their religious code, at least so far as
they concerned their followers. In their own individual capacity, the
followers of those particular religious heroes, obeyed those particular codes
of conduct. But the otherwise, highly idolatrous Hindu society did not
follow these new idols—the new heroes—who effected individual and
mass conversions and reconversions, carried on equally violent religio-
political counter-offensives. They avenged the humiliation and persecution
of the Hindu women on the Muslim women by similar treatment. The
national heroes, who did all this, have all along been highly honoured and
worshipped as idols among the Hindus, yet the way they showed as the
most suitable for the age was not actively and enthusiastically followed,
after they had passed away. As soon as those heroes died, their particular
followers relegated to oblivion their practical lessons of violent or non-
violent religious counter-aggression and their teaching in this respect. Why,
while the particular sects of Chaitanya and others have been still alive so
far as the other aspects of their teachings are concerned, and their
eulogistic biographies like the भक्ति विजय have been written and read
most devoutly, not the slightest mention of the armed revenge these very
heroes took against the Muslims is to be found in them. Does it not sound
very strange? Nor is any heroic ballad seen to have been composed on their
counter-aggression or on their mass reconversions by any of the minstrels
or bards or ‘Charans’ of those days! The Hindu society in general felt no
urgency of handing down to the later generations, the anecdotes and
legends of those heroic deeds.
551. FOR DEEP DOWN, THE MODERN HINDU MIND IS
TOLERANT, WHICH IN THE VULGAR MEANS SHAMELESS OR
CALLOUS!
THE MODERN-MOST EVENT OF THOSE TIMES, WHICH LENDS
THE STRONGEST HISTORICAL PROOF AND SUPPPORT TO ALL
THE STATEMENTS AND REMARKS THAT HAVE BEEN DISCUSSED
SO FAR IN THE EARLIER CHAPTERS OF THIS BOOK.

552. Whatever instances we have quoted of the Hindu religious counter-
     aggressions so far in this chapter are, of course, only exceptions,
     considering the many centuries of the Hindu-Muslim epic war. They were
     inadequate attempts to patch up the shattered firmament. But it is because
     some Hindus performed brave deeds, befitting the valour of the Hindu
     nation, of retaliation to the Muslims on the religious front, that the Hindu
     side was not completely overthrown. The Muslim enemy always feared that
     even the Hindus also could avenge religious persecution on occasions. If
     without losing any time, the whole Hindu society had adopted the same
     military strategy on the religious front as these exceptions of Hindu heroes
     did in launching counter-offensive, not a single Muslim could have
     remained as a Muslim in this country—at least at that time. This, we have
     often shown in earlier chapters of this book.
553. But then why didn't all the other Hindus dare do so? Why were they
     afraid? Why did they feel it to be against their Hindu religion itself, to
     launch such armed counter-offensive against the Muslims? Why did they
     come to consider the various bans on repurification, sea voyage, eating and
     drinking and others, as the true religious codes of conduct for the Hindus?
     The answer to all these questions—the justification of their conduct—the
     Hindus of those times offererd, was that such an armed retaliation would
     not have been beneficial to the best interests of the Hindus, nor did it
     become the Hindu civility—Hindu culture! They meant to say that in those
     times of repeated terrific Muslim onslaughts if the Hindu kings and society
     had reconverted their unfortunate brethren, who were converted to Islam, or
     would have launched counter-attacks on the religious front and again, as we
     have suggested, converted the Muslim men and women to Hinduism, the
     Muslims would have been still more enraged and again-and-again in their
     fresh attacks, they would have wrecked far more appalling vengeance on
     the Hindus. It was this fear, they said, that prompted the Hindus to accept,
     as an exceptional code of conduct suitable for the adverse circumstances,
     those various bans and the morbidly perverted concept of virtues, which
     amounted really to abject surrender.
     553A. So, in order to refute these and other illogical arguments, and to
     support our arguments and opinions and the various references we have
     made in the foregoing discourse, we shall cite another event, which will go
     to prove conclusively our inference that the HINDUS HAD THE ABILITY
     AND STRENGTH TO LAUNCH ARMED COUNTER-OFFENSIVES

EVEN ON THE RELIGIOUS FRONT BUT THEY HAD NOT THE WILL
TO DO SO!
554. That event is the Maratha war with the Muslims in the South, that
destroyed Tipu Sultan!
❑
.

Tipu Sultan, The Savage
555. Towards the middle of the eighteenth century, the Maratha Empire
had become so expansive and so powerful as to have brought about the de
facto overthrow of the Moghul Empire at Delhi. The Hindu power had no
Muslim rival state to oppose it effectively throughout the length and breadth
of India, right from the Himalayas to Kanyakumari. But at this very time,
Hyder Ali, an ordinary Muslim soldier, had been gradually rising to power
in the army of the Hindu State of Mysore and had already become quite
indispensable. Even after the sad experience of centuries together how the
very Muslim servants, in whom the Hindu kings had placed complete
confidence and whom they had brought to prosperity and power, had
betrayed those very Hindu masters most treacherously ever since the times
of Mahmud of Ghazni and Ghori, this Hindu King of Mysore committed the
same blunder. Because of his usual artless, and almost unwise attitude of
equality to all religions, which was imbibed assiduously amongst the
Hindus in general, King Chikka Krishnaraj Vodyar or more particularly his
Chief Minister, Nanjeraj, entrusted the supreme military command to this
fanatical Muslim adventurer, Hyder Ali. The consequences were inevitable.
Hyder Ali set aside Chikka Krishnaraj Vodyar, with a little pension and
usurped the throne of Mysore. He once marched against the Marathas also
but was so sorely beaten by them on the battlefield that he dared not give it
a second trial again. He had also once attacked the English at Madras
successfully. But as we are not concerned here with the other activities of
his, it would be sufficient simply to add that after his death in 1782, he was
succeeded to the throne of the Hindu State of Mysore by his equally
unscrupulous adventurer of a son, Tipu Sultan-1.
556. As soon as he came to the throne, Tipu wiped out even the name of
the original Hindu King and proclaimed himself the Sultan of a Moslem
state. Tipu was the last of the Muslim rulers to establish a new independent
state, and style himself a Sultan during the millennial Hindu-Muslim war.
557. True to the usual Muslim tradition, Tipu performed his first duty as a
Sultan of announcing publicly in the very first session of his court (Darbar),
that he would see to it that all the kafirs were made Muslim willy-nilly. He
commanded all the Hindus in his state to embrace Islam. He ordered his
various officers of high and low ranks in every city, town and village to

convert every Hindu to Islam. If the Hindus did not willingly take to Islam,
they were to be forced to do so, or else the men were to be slaughtered and
the women were to be distributed as slaves among the Muslims.
558-560. This campaign by Tipu of pollution and proselytization of the
Hindus was so thorough and ruthless, and it was carried to such vast
dimensions, that there was universal wailing and a sense of unimaginable
horror throughout the Hindu community in the State. Not only the soldiers
in his army but even the Mullah-Maulvis in the meanest of villages too,
with the Muslim hooligans and ruffians to help them, began a systematic
persecution of the Hindus! At a later date, Tipu invaded Malabar and at the
first stroke, converted a hundred thousand Hindus in that one single coastal
district. Then overtaking the Karnataka, he even marched on the Maratha
territory. Millions of Hindus from Dharwar to Travancore were horror-
stricken, and hundreds of men and women from all castes and sects of the
Hindu society feeling thoroughly incapable of facing its armed attack of the
Muslims, preferred death by drowning themselves in the Krishna and the
Tungabhadra to all the indignities and atrocities of Muslim vandalism.
Hundreds of others leapt into the fire but did not become Muslims!
Tipu’s Arrogant Proclamation!
561. Puffed up by the speedy success of his atrocious aggressions upon
the Hindus and diabolically elated at their miserable plight, Tipu once
proudly declared in his court that his campaign of mass conversion of the
Hindus was accomplished beyond all expectations. On one occasion, he
said fifty thousand Hindus in his kingdom were converted hardly within
twenty-four hours! No other Muslim Sultan before him, he proudly stated,
could have achieved that stupendous success, but that by the grace of Allah,
he had been able to perform that amazing task of the spread of Islamic faith
and the total annihilation of the kafirs!
562. In order to carry on this prodigious task, Tipu formed a special
division of his army, which surpassed all other Muslim soldiers in enormity
and vandalism. He manned it by the pick of the bitterest enemies of the
Hindus and most lovingly called them his own sons. Whoever of those
loving sons of his did some exceptionally brutal act of ravaging Hindu
women, of forcibly converting Hindu families, of plunder and arson, or of
wholesale massacre was rewarded with the youngest and most beautiful of
the thousands of Hindu girls captured from different parts of the State.

563. The whole of the Muslim world was, no doubt, overcome with the
     highest gratitude to Tipu Sultan for his unprecedented success in the violent
     propagation of the Muslim faith. He was honoured as Gazi, the hero of the
     Islamic faith by his Muslim brethren all over. Naturally, the whole of the
     Muslim community was, thus, a party to this fanatical persecution of the
     Hindus by Tipu. Especially, the whole of the Muslim society from
     Karnataka to Travancore, which had collectively but actively participated in
     these artrocities, richly deserved punishment from the Hindu standpoint.
     Now at Poona
564. Now on hearing the piteous cries and heart-breaking screams of the
     persecuted Hindus of Mysore, there arose a violent surge of fury at Poona,
     the capital of the Maratha Empire, which was duty-bound to defend
     Hinduism. The Maratha diplomats and warlords decided forthwith to invade
     Mysore in order to crush this new demon of a Sultan in South. The Chief
     Administrator of the Peshwas, Nana Phadnavis issued an instant order to all
     the available Maratha chieftains to march on Tipu from all sides with huge
     armies.
     War with Tipu
565. Tipu was extremely annoyed to learn that the Maratha forces were
     proceeding against him. So, before the main Maratha battalions could arrive
     to their rescue, he maliciously attacked Nargund and Kittur in quick
     succession. These two very small Hindu states were very close to Mysore
     and far detached from the Maratha territory.
566. Tipu hated all the Hindus, yet more vehemently the Brahmins, who
     were foremost in trying to kindle in the Hindu Society, a burning pride for
     their religion and self-respect. He had reached the limit of his brutality in
     persecuting the Brahmins more than any other caste of the Hindus. The
     great historian Sardesai writes: 'Brahmins were singled out for special
     indignities by Tipu.' The rulers of Nargund and Kittur were both Brahmins
     and both of them had spitefully declined his demand for immediate
     surrender. Furiously, therefore, did Tipu march first on Nargund and then on
     Kittur at the head of a very powerful army. The ruler of Nargund Bhave
     fought bravely to the bitterest end but for want of any timely assistance
     from Poona, his small army was easily vanquished. The moment the city of
     Nargund fell, Tipu, like a hungry wolf, rushed straight to the ruler's palace,
     his Muslim army burning and plundering the citizens and their houses.
     There he arrested the ruler Bhave himself and his valiant minister Pethe,

and put heavy fetters on their hands and feet. They and their relatives, their
families and friends were all subjected to unbearable torture. The brutal
humiliation Tipu himself inflicted on the royal ladies in the palace and
caused his followers to perpetrate elsewhere in the city, is beyond all
description! The young and fair ones of the royal ladies were first put to
inhuman torture and then brutally ravished. Tipu locked in his harem, the
exceptionally beautiful young lady from the royal family and took her to his
capital. The sight of the inhuman and disgraceful treatment meted out to her
daughters and daughters-in-law, nieces and grand-daughters broke the heart
of Pethe's grand old mother and she died instantaneously.
567. Tipu's army too spared no pains in torturing and violating the Hindu
men and women in the city of Nargund and plundered to their fullest
satisfaction, the palatial residences of the wealthy Lingayats as also every
single house of the commonest of Hindu citizens. Finally, setting fire to
their houses, Tipu carried away the select Hindu men and women as abject
slaves.
568. Tipu next fell violently on the other Hindu state of Kittur and
stamped it out of existence in the like manner. He himself repeated and
made his army repeat to the letter all the infernal outrages, which were
performed at Nargund, on the Kittur ruler, his family, all the men and
women in his pay and all the people in the city.
569. By this time, the main body of the Maratha army was advancing
rapidly, reconquering the regions and cities formerly subjugated by Tipu.
Skipping over the other details of this campaign on Tipu, which are not
quite pertinent to the topic in hand, we think it quite sufficient to say that in
the end, Sardar Patwardhan Phadke, Behare Holkar, Bhonsale and other
Maratha Chiefiains routed the Muslim armies of Tipu on various battle,
fields and after rescuing the whole of Karnatak, pressed him back up to
Mysore and there, encircled him into a tight grip! Snatching this
opporutunity of Tipu's distress, the English at Mudras too marched on him.
As the strokes of the Maratha swords and the thrusts of their spears began
to make bloody incisions on the back of Tipu's religious fanaticism, the
devil in him began to relent and his haughtiness began to temper down.
Tipu grew despondent.
And then Tipu fell at the feet of Hindu Gods
570. Whether to appease the Marathas or to win back the millions of
Hindus groaning sorely under the yoke of his religious persecution, Tipu,

all of a sudden, began to make munificent grants to Hindu temples. He even
had new idols ceremoniously installed in the big temples, formerly smashed
to pieces by his own Muslim hirelings. He requested the Hindu Brahmins lo
pray to their gods in various Hindu temples that he might get success in this
war with the Marathas. In order to please the very Brahmins he hated most
bitterly and tortured mercilessly, he now paid them large sums of money.
He had ceremonial prayers made. He himself paid great homage to Shree
Shankaracharya (of Shringeri), to avert the imminent calamity and asked for
his blessings, which the great man readily gave. Tipu not only attended the
Chariot-festival of certain Hindu gods at Kanchi, but he himself walked in
the festive procession. With his own hands, he ignited the fireworks to
heighten the festive spirit of the occasion.
Demons Worship Gods
571. It is said that even devils start worshipping those gods, who have the
weapons powerful enough to destroy the enemy.
But neither God nor Devil came to save the wicked Tipu from that
calamity and at last, after two or three expeditions, the Marathas and the
English forces subjugated the whole of his kingdom. Tipu himself was
killed in 1799 and his dominions were divided. The small portion formerly
belonging to the Hindu King of Travancore was returned to him, and the
original royal family of the Vodyars was reinstalled at Mysore. Some of the
remaining territory was taken over by the English, while the large tract from
Karnataka to the Tungabhadra river was annexed by the Marathas to their
empire. All the Hindu states, which he had vowed to wipe out at the time of
his accession to the throne, began once again to rule peacefully in their own
places. If any one was totally ruined, it was Tipu himself with all his
Muslim territory.
Hindus’ Success
572. Thus, the violent religious aggression under Tipu’s leadership, which
the Muslims in South India had launched and perpetrated with a crescendo
against the Hindus during the two decades or so immediately preceding the
year A.D. 1790, was heroically and successfully put down by the Hindus
politically, as well as, on the battlefield.
Muslims Gain
573. Maratha warriors, claiming to defend Hindu religion, smashed the
Muslim military and political might, as has been already described. But
they did not simultaneously deal any counter-blow to their religious front,

in order to repulse and avenge their all-out attempt to disrupt Hinduism,
their mass conversions of Hindus, their most heinous attacks upon the
chastity of thousands of Hindu women. They did not severely penalize the
perpetrators of these crimes. No, they did not do anything of the kind to
attack the Muslim religion in return!
The Result
574-575. The inevitable consequence was that the two or three hundred
thousand forcibly converted Hindu men and women and children remained
groaning with agony in the clutches of the Muslim community in South
India. Although Tipu’s political power perished completely under the
heavy counter-blows of the combined Maratha-English swords and spears,
the religious domination he forced on the millions of Hindus grew ever
stronger and stronger in the absence of any counter offensive. The future
generations of these converted Hindus, in the absence of any immediate
reconversion, went on adding rapidly to the numerical strength of the
enemy of Hinduism, by at least one and a half times or twice as much.
Being brought up from birth under the Islamic influence, this future
progeny of the Hindu converts became the inveterate enemies of the
Hindus, and instead of desiring to come back to Hinduism, they cherished
like the wolf in the ‘Aesop’s fables,’ the fiendish ambition of converting
the rest of the Hindus to Islam. They considered it their most sacred duty!
576. If the Marathas had so retaliated, all those two or three hundred
thousand Hindu men and women recently converted during those four or
five years of the war with Tipu, would have, in all probability, courted
Hinduism most willingly because of the love they bore for their original
families and relatives, and because of the pangs of separation they suffered.
Their devotion to and fascination for their recently lost religion, their love
and affection for their separated Hindu fathers and mothers, sons and
daughters, relatives and friends, must have at that time been so acute and
fresh as to cause them many a heartache, and to make them shed many an
agonized tear at their slightest mention and recollection.
577. How very simple it would have been, at that time, to reconvert all
those luckless two or three hundred thousand Hindu brethren and absorb
them all in the Hindu society!
578. After Tipu’s defeat, the victorious Maratha armies of Sardar
Patwardhan, Holkar, Raste and other great chieftains were returning
triumphantly to Maharashtra from their respective fronts and by different

routes. Their multiple infantry, cavalry and artillery brigades were gaily
fluttering their saffron-coloured banners and rending the skies with their
war-cry ‘Har Har Mahadev!’ And in those very districts, towns and cities of
Mysore, Karnataka and Maharashtra, through which these warriors paraded
their victorious exultation, lay rotting and slaving in various Muslim
houses, the thousands of abducted Hindu women, while men equally large
in numbers, were leading a miserable life of shame and remorse for their
forced conversion to Islam. The exultant war cries of ‘Har Har Mahadev’ of
these Hindu warriors, following closely the glad news of victory and the
downfall of the Muslim state of Mysore, must have informed them of the
triumphal march of the Maratha conquering armies through their own
towns, villages and cities. How eagerly these unfortunate Hindu converts—
and especially the women—must have hastened to crowd the windows,
doors, fissures and small openings of those Muslim prison-like houses and
cottages, to have, at least, a fleeting glimpse of those martial processions!
And how keenly must their sorely afflicted hearts have felt the happy yet
acutely painful pangs of intense expectation of imminent deliverance from
those satanic Muslim dungeons and confines! ‘At last—at long last—they
have come! ’They might have said to themselves, “Our/my Hindu brothers
have come trampling down the wicked hearts of the Muslim tyrants to
deliver us from their abject servitude!’ On occasions, some of them might
have very probably seen their own fathers or brothers or husbands or
relatives or at least some neighbours proudly strutting through the streets in
their triumphal marches!
The lack of will
579. On such occasions, if only these proudly marching military
detachments of Hindu warriors had simply willed it, they could have in no
time set free those thousands of miserable Hindu men and women rotting in
Muslim bondage. They could have simply gone on doing it just as they
passed along the streets! So simple the whole thing really was. But...!
580. For, at that time, the Muslims, neither individually nor collectively,
had any courage or strength left in them to oppose the triumphant Hindu
army. At the approach of the Maratha soldiery, the Mullah-Maulvis and the
rogues, knaves and brigands were at great pains to hide their faces into
whichever nook or ditch they could find, in order to save their lives.
580A. If only one gay blast from the Maratha bugle had rung out and
reverberated through every town and every village, assuring the people in

some such manner! “Come, O you, Hindu mothers and sisters, come! You,
who have been wickedly polluted and forced to do all sorts of menial and
dirty wretched work in the Muslim household, come out, come under our
protection! We, your foster-brothers, have come lo your doors in order to
rescue you and take you to your respective families. Whichever Muslim
comes to obstruct you, dies instantly. May that Muslim be then a man or a
woman of high rank or low! Similarly, O you helplessly converted Hindu
brethren come, join us when and where you can; join our conquering
brigades! The moment you gather under this Saffron-coloured Hindu
banner, you will have every sort of protection.”
580B. If only such a reassuring blast was heard and echoed through towns
and villages, thousands upon thousands of those ill-fated Hindu converts,
men and women, mothers and sisters, would all have rushed most willingly,
and of their own accord to join those Maratha warriors, and they all could
have been most easily purified and reconverted to Hinduism, and the
Muslim religious victory under Tipu’s leadership would have been totally
nullified.
But alas! Nobody ever thought of this!
581. Neither those Maratha warriors, nor their commanders, nor the
Sardars and Chieftains nor the Shankaracharyas, nay not even the Peshwa at
Poona, nor the Chhatrapatis of Satara and Kolhapur—alas! not a single
Hindu soul ever dreamt of this simple way of reconversion of those ill-
starred Hindus! Nobody of them ever felt ashmed of marching straight
ahead, without casting so much as a sympathetic glance at the thousands of
the brutally ravaged Hindu mothers and sisters! Their martial drums and
pipes proclaimed to the world their military and political victory! The
Maratha companies and battalions proudly paraded through the villages,
towns and cities, supremely unconcerned about the two or three hundred
thousand of their miserable Hindu brethren in Muslim bondage. No, no! not
a single miserable soul was at that time reconverted to Hinduism!
582. The natural consequence of it all was that, those thousands of our
brutally converted Hindu mothers and sisters anxiously waiting for the
victorious Hindu armies to set them free from those hellish tortures and
death-like humiliation in the Muslim prison-like homes, must have most
probably turned away from the doors and windows in utter despair! To see
none of the soldiers ever caring to recognize and pity them—let alone to
rescue and reconvert them—must have rent their hearts in two! They must

have resigned themselves helplessly to the Muslim bondage and rotted till
death, bringing forth Muslim offsprings! What wonder if they might have
borne the bitterest grudge against these unavailing Hindu brethren!
583. On the other hand, the Mullah-Maulvis and the Muslim hooligans
and rogues, who had so far disappeared underground for fear of death, very
soon came to know that neither those victorious armies, or their chiefs, nor
even the rulers and administrators of Hindu states, were going to punish
them individually or collectively for all the wrongs they had perpetrated
against the Hindus. Being thus assured of safety, they came out boldly and
began to move about freely and enjoy, as their legal right, the abducted
Hindu women and the plundered Hindu property as their own. It also might
have happened that many Hindus had the misfortune to witness meekly
with their own eyes, their own daughters and nieces and daughters-in-law
slaving as wives or maids in Muslim houses in their own villages and
towns. But, strangely enough, neither the Hindu population there nor the
Hindu administrators nor again the officers at those places, ever thought of
freeing any of those luckless ladies! Hardly any such instance is recorded in
history. For, the Hindus had cultivated a shameless religious conceit for
over centuries together, to suffer all the heart-rending humiliation without a
prick of conscience. Nobody, as a rule, is ashamed of a thing that is not
considered blameworthy by the society. Because of the one ban on
reconversion, what was this shameless perversion of ideas and emotions to
which the Hindu society had brought itself!
A heap of Contemporary Documentary Evidence
584. Abundant information in all details is now available about this war
with Tipu. Histories written in English by Marshman and others, those in
Marathi by Rao Bahadur Sardesai and the contemporary correspondence of
the then English diplomats, administrators and political agents and
ambassadors have been published. Research scholars such as Rajwade,
Parasnis and Khare have brought to light heaps of letters by the Chiefs of
the Maratha States, their subordinate officers and ambassadors and agents,
of merchants and men of rank in the society, of various people in political,
religious and social walks of life. A clear picture paints itself of the daily
routine life of the Hindu Society of the time, its habits and customs, its
codes of religious, political and social conduct, its ethics and philosophy, if
one cares to read the dispatches of the great personalities of the times such
as Haripant Phadke to Nana Phadnavis at Poona about his association with

Lord Cornwallis at the battle of Shreerangpattam against Tipu, those about
his high-level discourses on war-moves and treaties, down to the letters
describing the raids of robbers and pilgrimages of devout pilgrims, letters of
(Travels and those giving market rates, and also those of Shankaracharya
complaining about the ransacking of his ‘Ashram’!
585. But no evidence can be generally found in all this heap of documents
to show if anyone was yearning to avenge the Muslim atrocities and their
religious victory over the Hindus. No Hindu commander, nor a small troop
of soldiers, nor even a group of men, is ever reported to have drawn swords
to rescue the converted Hindu women and to cut down the Muslim
miscreants. No one is reported to have felt any shame at the humiliation of
these unfortunate women and at the Hindu failure to rescue them. These
hundreds and hundreds of letters show a lamentable want of realization—
not to speak of any anxiety about it on the part of the Hindu society, that
day by day, they were losing territory and power so far as their religion was
concerned. Howsoever strange and sad it might appear, the fact cannot be
gainsaid. Not a word seems to have been breathed or recorded about the
retaliation of the Muslim atrocities—let alone its actual execution!
586. We may set aside the whole heap of contemporary documents, but we
cannot help referring to one letter of Haripant Phadke in particular. The said
letter was written to Nana Phadnavis, informing him of the two sons of
Tipu, taken as hostages by the Marathas and the English, to ensure the
prompt execution of the terms of the treaty, which was signed by Tipu after
his defeat. Writes Haripant Phadke, perhaps casually, to show how they had
brought Tipu to such a miserably low condition:
586A. “Lord Cornwallis sent the two sons of Tipu to me. When I saw
them, they pleaded they were hungry. I sent them to a neighbouring tent and
ordered that they should be well fed. Then after some time, they were
returned to the English camp of Lord Cornwallis!”
586B. The incident referred to in this letter and the one we are shortly
going to quote here, with reference to the Battle of Kharda hold as it were,
to a searching analysis under the X-ray, the perverted sense of virtues,
which had permeated, through centuries, to the marrow of the Hindu
society, rendering it slovenly and imbecile, and insensible to all sorts of
shameful humiliation.
587-588. Haripant Phadke’s genial treatment of Tipu’s two sons reminds
us of another incident, which by contrast, will give us a practical illustration

of our discussion of the perverted Hindu sense of virtues in paragraphs 405
to 471.
588A. In the first or the second decade of the seventeenth century, the
tenth Guru of our Hindu-Sikhs, Dharmveer Shree Govind Singh found it
impossible to continue the war with the Moghuls. He was at last besieged in
the fort of Chamkaur along with his sons. Overcome with terror, some of
his sworn disciples from the Sikh army conspired to desert their Guruji,
renounce their Sikh religion and left the fort secretly. Two elder sons of the
Guruji were killed before his eyes in the battle. At last, in the face of such
grave danger, the Guruji advised all to leave battle and run for life,
wherever they could. Finding a suitable opportunity, he made good his own
escape. But in that confusion, two of his sons, of a tender age of 12 or
below, missed the way and fell into the Muslim hands. How did the
Muslims treat them according to THEIR OWN RELIGIOUS CODE?
589. The Letter of Haripant Phadke referred to above shows how kindly
and sympathetically, according to THEIR OWN RELIGIOUS CODE, the
Marathas treated the two sons of Tipu, when they came into their hands.
590. On the contrary, as soon as the brave cubs of Guru Govind Singh fell
into the Muslim hands, they were taken straight to their war council and
asked: “Are you willing to be Muslims? If so, you will be given your life
and everything you want. Otherwise nothing!” The children answered: “We
won’t be Muslims even if our life is not spared!” Immediately, the diabolic
Muslim justice decreed that the two small children be forthwith built alive
in a brickwall! While they were thus being built in, they were asked, as
each brick was placed on the wall, “Do you become Muslims?” The two
brave Hindu cubs would reply again and again: “No, we won’t be
Muslims!’ The last brick was laid on the heads of both the young martyrs
and they ceased to breathe! Then today, a true Hindu enters the vicinity of
that scene of martyrdom, he will very likely hear the words reverberating
the whole atmosphere there: “I won’t become a Muslim: nay, not at all! I
am a Hindu, I am a Sikh! I bravely court death!”
591. Supposing that by an adverse turn of events, two children of our
Peshwas were to fall in the hands of Tipu or any Muslim ruler—what then?
He would not have fed as the Hindu-hearted Haripant Phadke did, the two
tender-aged children and returned them to the Peshwa! Such a behaviour
would have been considered sacrilegious and cowardly, according to the
Muslim religious belief; they would most probably have been built up alive

in brick-walls or else would have been crushed under an elephant’s foot.
The Hindus, on the other hand, would not have avenged such brutality with
any hyper-brutal retaliation, even if they had the strength and opportunity to
do so. For, the virus the perverted sense of virtues had been flowing through
their arteries and veins for centuries together.
592. It should be made clear at this very stage, that the ethics of war, which
demanded that a charioteer must fight with another charioteer only, the
sword should meet another sword alone, that the armed warrior ought not to
fight with an unarmed one, till he has been armed equally, that a fallen
senseless warrior was never to be attacked till he had regained
consciousness etc. etc., was perhaps quite suitable for the ancient times
before Mahabharat. For both the contending parties obeyed the same set of
rules: both worshipped the same ethics of war. The Pandawas themselves
had violated, at the instance of Lord Krishna, many of these chivalrous rules
of war! But the Hindus of these middle ages forgot the lesson taught by the
Bhagwat Geeta, of giving due consideration to the time, place and person or
persons concerned, while obeying these rules of war. They, on their own part
kept on fighting the diabolic Muslim ways of war with the same old—
originally sane and civilized, but now outmoded and so highly suicidal—
tactics in war.
592A. Besides this incident of Tipu’s two sons, we should like to cite
another—equally shameful for the Marathas and the Hindus, inasmuch as it
offers another illustration of the perverted sense of virtues of the Hindus of
those times! It happened during the Battle of Kharda (1795 A.D.) against
the Nizam, the last restlessly writhing remnant of the Muslim power at
Delhi! The Nizam was at that time completely at the mercy of the Marathas;
he would have been wiped out of existence and saved all further trouble,
but for the shameless exhibition of this perverted sense of virtues, by the
Marathas!
593. The Maratha forces with their excellent strategic moves had encircled
the Nizam at such a desolate and dry place, that his vast army could get no
food or water. The scarcity of drinking water was so acute that hundreds of
Muslim soldiers drank stinking water from dirty pools, not fit even for
animals. Nizam-Ali himself was almost in tears. And at this most critical
moment, the big Maratha guns began to rend the skies with their
thundering.

594. But at this most crucial moment, the Maratha war cabinet was seized
     with such a paroxysm of their age-old incurable disease of the perverted
     sense of virtues, viz. misplaced generosity to withhold the strokes and allow
     time to even the inveterate fainting enemy to regain consciousness, that had
     it lasted a little longer, the scales of war would have turned against the
     Hindus themselves and the Muslims would never have failed to annihilate
     them completely. At a time when the Nizam himself, the chief enemy of the
     Marathas, was dying of thirst and when the Marathas luckily had the best
     opportunity of capturing him alive and of destroying his whole army, the
     Peshwa, Sawai Madhavrao, was inspired with the grand idea that the true
     greatness of a warrior was to show mercy to the downcast enemy. He,
     therefore, sent in consultation with his war-cabinet, a very valuable supply
     of water enough for the Nizam and his royal family from his own stock of
     drinking water, which was preserved with no less difficulty. And this was
     done in the thick of the fray—quite consistently with the maxim: क्षमा
     वीरस्य भूषणम (Forgiveness is the virtue of the brave). [Remember for a
     contrast ‘The Battle of Samugad or Shambhugad’ (1658 A.D,) and the siege
     of Agra by Aurangzeb—Shahjahan was brought to his knees by cutting off
     the water supply to the fort of Agra.]
     A fine illustration of self-contradiction!
595. A common belief seems to prevail that the Hindus strictly banned
     any reconversion of Muslimized Hindus or any conversion of born
     Muslims, because they dreaded fresh outrages from the Muslims in India
     and perhaps new horrible invasions of foreign Muslims, resulting in untold
     monstrocities and consequent horrible retribution.
596. It is purposely to show how erroneous, unrealistic and wholly
     improbable this belief is, that we have quoted the episode the Maratha war
     with Tipu, which provides ample historical evidence to support all the
     points we have made so far.
597. Setting aside that episode of the war with Tipu for a while, it is
     enough to pose a question: If at all the Hindus were so terribly and
     incessantly obsessed with the dread of Muslim retaliation, they would have
     offered no resistance, however slight it might have been! They would never
     have counter-attacked the Muslims on the political and military fronts and
     won at great odds. For, it is only in those Hindu states, which the Muslims
     conquered, that such religious persecution of the Hindus was, or would