Pakistan Historian

1920s: Pandit Malaviya shuddi (reconversion) movement

The term ‘shuddhi’ literally means ‘purification’. It refers to the re-conversion into the Hindu fold of non-Hindus, especially of those Hindus who have been converted to other religions by hook or crook. The word ‘shuddhi’ has been retained throughout in this section. Savarkar

Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya was the president of the Indian National Congress during 1909 and in 1918. Pandit Malaviya led the Congress to oppose the just claims of the Muslim community. He founded the Hindu Mahasabha in 1906. Malaviya was a rabid racist and communalist conservative who believed in the ‘Varnashrama Dharma’ (caste system).

Before Gandhis arrival from Africa the Indian National Congress (INC)was led by people like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal, Lala Lajpat Rai, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Jinnah had excellent relations with Dadabhai Naoroji, the president of the sister Indian National Association and later Member of Parliament in the British House of Commons, the first Indian to win a seat there. Jinnah was called the Muslim Gokhle. Instead of creating consensus politics, the Congress moved to the religious fanatics of the time like Malaviya.

There were other such “Hitlers” who wanted Mahabharta cleansed of all Muslims, Jians, Sikhs and Chiristians. Here is Savarkar.

…Most of the nations that could not root out the political and religious power of the Muslims were destroyed and became Muslim themselves. But even those non-Muslim nations who succeeded in toppling Muslim political power but kept Muslim religious power intact could not escape from the persistent and terrible Muslim menace. Only three to five nations did not rest after toppling the political power of Muslims but immediately launched a bitter war against their religious power and made their nation free of Muslims. These nations alone not only managed to survive but actually smashed the Muslim menace. (1963, Sahaa soneri pane or Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History, Samagra Savarkar vangmaya, Vol.4, p. 787). Savarkar

I do not despise, let alone hate Muslim or Christian brethren, indeed even the most primitive tribes in the human race. I oppose the wickedness of individuals and groups belonging to them when I see it. It is my hope and conviction that Hindu-Muslim unity can be based on a permanent and beneficial footing only through the practice of shuddhi. (1927, Majhi janmathep or The Story of My Transportation for Life, Samagra Savarkar vangmaya, Vol.1, p. 511). Savarkar

Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya a former president of the Indian National Congress led the "Shuddi" (reconversion) movement directed as Muslims. Pandit Malaviya wanted to follow Hitler's plans

Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya and Lal Lajpat Rai, both ex-Congress Presidents, founded their own Nationalist Party that year, a Hindu first communal party, which won many seats in the United Provinces…..

Malaviya was president of the Hindu Mahasaba, a conserative communal society that focused on saving cows and slaughter Muslims while trying to force the conversions of Muslims to Hinduism, arguing that most of India’s Muslim population had originally been Hindus but had forcibly been converted to Islam during some five hundred years of Muslim rule.

One of the most militant popular Hindu communal leaders of that “reconversion” (shudhi) movement, Swami Shraddhanand, was assassinated in Delhi that December by a Muslim extremist. The swami, like Lala Lajpat Rai, belonged to another fundamentalist Hindu society, the Arya Samaj, which advocated turning back India’s history more than three thousand years to an ancient Aryan tribal polity, reflected in Vedic scripture, when Brahmans and cows were treated as gods on earth.Rajib Dogars

Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya led the “Shuddi” (reconversion) movement. One of the most salient developments in the 1920s was the launching of the shuddhi movement by the Arya Samaj to bring into the Hindu fold various groups considered outside the pale of what had now come to be defined as ‘Hinduism’, including untouchables and, later, Muslim, Christian and even Sikh communities. The Arya shuddhi campaign provoked Muslim leaders and groups to respond, and this took the form of various tablighi or Islamic missionary initiatives intended to counter the Arya Samaj’s conversion drive and, going further, to attempt to spread Islam among non-Muslims as well.

The first recorded shuddhi of a born Muslim was reported in 1877, when Dayanand Saraswati performed the shuddhi of a Muslim man from Dehra Dun, giving him the name of Alakhdhari. Individual conversions of this sort were few and far between, for such converts not only severed all social ties with their relatives but were also not fully accepted as equals not just by the Sanatani Hindus, who vociferously opposed the shuddhi project, but even by members of the Arya Samaj, who Ghai says, ‘behaved like most of the traditionalists and conservatives, fearing the wrath of their caste biraderi’. Clearly then, the Aryas realized, shuddhi among the Muslims would have to take the form of conversion of entire Muslim social groups if it was to really succeed. As a prelude to the actual launching of this ambitious missionary drive, towards the end of the nineteenth century Maharaja Ranbir Singh, the Hindu ruler of the largely Muslim state of Kashmir, is said to have commissioned the preparation of a 21-volume encyclopaedia by the name of Ranbir Karit Prayaschit Mahanibandh ['Ranbir's Great Essay on Repentance'], which argued the case and suggested strategies for the mass conversion of all the ‘neo-Muslim communities’ [nau Muslim aqwam] of India to ‘Hinduism’. This book, Muslim leaders were to later allege, had been secretly circulated among leading Hindus so that the Muslims remained unaware of the plot.

The first attempts by the Aryas at mass conversions of Muslim groups date to 1908, when Arya missionaries began touring the area around Deeg in the Bharatpur State in eastern Rajputana, calling upon Muslims there to renounce Islam, which, they alleged, had been forcibly imposed on their ancestors.

Some years later, Arya missionaries found active among the neo-Muslim Malkanas, a Rajput group who claimed to be Muslim but followed several Hindu customs and beliefs, in Etawah, Kanpur, Shahajahnpur, Hardoi, Meerut and Mainpuri in the western United Provinces, exhorting them to return to what they called their ‘ancestral religion’. In 1910, shuddhi sabhas were set up in several places in these districts, and although it was claimed that they had converted some 1000 Malkana Muslims to the Hindu fold, they were wound up the following year. As in the case of Deeg, the Aryas are said to have met with little success, being successfully countered by the intervention of local Muslim bodies working in association with the Anjuman Hidayat-ul Islam, a Delhi-based Muslim missionary organization.

A decade later, however, the Aryas were to launch the shuddhi campaign in the Malkana belt on a war-footing. In August 1922, in the wake of grossly exaggerated reports of forced conversions of Hindus in Malabar in the course of the Mappilla rebellion, the Kshatriya Upakarini Sabha ['Kshatriya Upliftment Society'], an organization of Hindu Rajputs patronized by Rajput princes and landlords, passed a resolution at a meeting in Allahabad calling for the conversion of the Muslim Rajputs to the Hindu fold. In December that year, the Sabha met once again, and decided to launch a campaign to convert the Malkanas to ‘Hinduism’. This provided the stimulus to the Aryas to start shuddhi work among the Malkanas. In August 1923, Shraddhanand, the leading Arya shuddhi advocate, presided over a meeting to discuss strategies for the shuddhi of the Malkanas. The fact that the meeting was attended by leading Sanatani, Jain and Sikh spokesmen, all of whom vociferously supported the shuddhi campaign, clearly suggests, as Muslim leaders were to allege, that the race for numbers and political interests, rather than the propagation of the Arya brand of ‘Hinduism’, were the motivating factors behind the planned missionary drive. The meeting approved the setting up of the Bharatiya Hindu Shuddhi Sabha, an all-India shuddhi council, whose objective was said to be the conversion of all non-Hindu groups all over India to the Hindu fold.

The shuddhi campaign among the Malkanas, which was launched in early 1923, reached its peak by the end of 1927, by which time some 1,63,000 Malkana Muslims are said to have been brought into the Hindu fold. Significantly, although the Aryas played the leading role in the drive, the shuddhi-ed Malkanas, by and large, did not convert to the Arya faith as such. Other than renouncing some of their Islamic practices, such as burial of the dead or male circumcision, there seems to have been little change in their own beliefs and practices. If they chose not to accept the Arya brand of Vedic ‘Hinduism’, orthodox Hindus seemed reluctant to accept them, considering them as ritually impure and inferior. Having ‘rescued’ them from their Islamic past, the Aryas and the Sanatanis were quite content to leave the Malkanas to their own devices. De-Islamization, and not an impelling urge to spread Arya beliefs, seems to have been the fundamental impulse behind the Arya shuddhi drive among the Malkanas.

Shuddhi emerged as a powerful mobilizational symbol and tool to consolidate Hindu ranks, helping galvanize the process of the construction of a pan-Indian Hindu community rigidly set apart from the rest. It is hardly surprising that Shradhhanand, the leading force behind the Malkana shuddhi, was also the most ardent advocate of sanghathan, the consolidation and militarization of all Hindudom. As testimony to the success of the shuddhi campaign in mobilizing and consolidating the Hindus, both Aryas as well as the Sanatanis who had initially been vehemently opposed to shuddhi, as one, transcending deep-seated caste, sectarian, racial, linguistic and regional divisions, the Tribune of Lahore, in its editorial of 2 May, 1927, remarked: ‘The shuddhi… propaganda is no longer the exclusive concern of the Arya Samaj; an overwhelming majority of the Hindus are identified [with it]‘.

Muslim reactions to the shuddhi campaign – ii. The success of the Aryas in their campaign among the Malkanas led them on to attempt to spread their work among several other neo-Muslim groups in northern India, including Muslim Jat, Gujjar and Rajput communities in the Punjab and the United Provinces. Soon, appeals began being issued calling for the shuddhi of virtually all the Muslims of India. At a public rally in Lahore, Shraddhanand delivered a fiery speech, appealing to the Hindus to convert to the Hindu fold 65 million Indian Muslims. Bhaskarteertha, the Sanatani Shankaracharya of the Sharada Peetha, went even further and declared that barring ‘a few hundred thousand’ Indian Muslims whose forefathers had come from ‘Afghanistan and Baluchistan’, the rest of the Muslims of the country were descendants of Hindu converts and that they should, therefore, be all made Hindu once again.

The Muslim reaction to the prospect of mass desertions of large numbers of only partially-Islamised Muslims, perhaps the majority of the Indian Muslim population, to the Hindu fold, was, naturally, one of shock and panic. Leading Muslims now appealed for frantic efforts to be made to rescue the Malkanas, to prevent further conversions to ‘Hinduism’, and even to begin counter-missionary drives among the Hindus themselves. They were unanimous in asserting that the need of the hour was to launch an India-wide missionary drive, to purge Muslim groups of what were seen as their Hinduistic customs, to spread awareness about the teachings of Islam among them and to bring their practices and life-styles in conformity with the Islamic law [shar'iat] and thereby create clear boundaries between Muslims and others, to prevent Muslims from easily being absorbed into the Hindu fold. As a leading Deobandi ‘alim of the Jami’at-ul Ulama-i-Hind asserted, the need of the hour was to ‘dye the Hinduistic society [hinduana mu'ashrat] deep with the colour of the culture of the Hijaz’.

Mendicants and blind beggars should sing Islamic songs while asking for alms. This strategy promises to be particularly effective, because, Nizami says, ‘In India song and music have a far more powerful effect than lectures and sermons’. Muslim writers should write tracts on methods of tabligh as well as stories about the brave feats of the Muslims. The latter, Nizami says, will have a special appeal for ‘martial groups’ such as the Rajputs.Nizami set up the Nizamia Sufi Mission to carry out his tablighi project. He does not, however, seem to have met with much success. More fruitful, however, were the efforts of Islamic groups opposed to the popular Sufism that Nizami represented. Such, for instance, was the Tablighi Jama’at, launched by a Deobandi ‘alim, Maulana Muhammad Ilyas in 1925, and which today has emerged as the single largest Islamic movement in the world, active in almost every country. The launching of the Tablighi Jama’at was a direct fall-out of the Arya shuddhi campaign. Apprehensive that the Meos of Mewat, a nominally Islamised group living in the vicinity of the Malkana belt, would also fall prey to the Aryas, Ilyas began a campaign aiming at what he saw as their fuller ‘Islamisation’. He instructed the Meos to give up their Hindu practices and beliefs and to strictly abide by the shari’at in their daily lives. Meo villagers, who hardly had any knowledge of Islam and whose practices were scarcely different from those of their non-Muslim neighbours, were formed into groups [jama'ats] and despatched to Deobandi madrasas in the western United Provinces and Delhi, there to learn the basics of Islam, such as the creed of confession and the five ritual prayers, from leading ‘ulama. On their return to Mewat, they transmitted this knowledge to their kinsmen, and exhorted them to join the jama’ats as well. Great rewards in heaven [sawab] were promised in return for this. According to Tablighi Jama’at sources, in a few years after the launching of Ilyas’ campaign, most Meos had given up worshipping at Hindu shrines, wearing Hindu-style clothes and sporting Hindu names.Like Nizami and Ilyas, other Muslim ideologues argued for the ‘ulama and Sufi divines to play a leading role in spearheading the tabligh counter-offensive. The Jamiat-ul Ulama-i-Hind, an organisation of leading, largely Deobandi ‘ulama, called for the setting up of a chain of madrasas all over the country to impart Islamic education to ordinary Muslims to prevent them from falling into the clutches of the Aryas. ‘No number of madrasas is too much, and nor is any amount of money to be spent on them’, declared Maulana Muhammad ‘Abdul Halim Siddiqui, the treasurer of the Department for the Propagation and Protection of Islam, set up by the Jami’at in 1923 in the wake of the shuddhi campaign among the Malkanas. A similar demand was voiced by the leading ‘alim of the Firangi Mahal madrasa of Lucknow, Maulana ‘Abdul Bari, who called for Sufi preceptors to instruct their disciples to form teams and tour the countryside preaching Islam to neo-Muslim groups. These teams would include, besides Muslim scholars, individuals with a good knowledge of medicine who would administer to the sick and thus play an important role in spreading Islam among non-Muslims.

This focus on spreading Islamic knowledge among the Muslims to combat the threat of the Aryas emerges as particularly salient in the writings of the period of one of the leading Islamic ideologues in recent South Asian history, Maulana Sayyed Abul A’la Maududi, who was later to go on to found the Jama’at-i-Islami. In a series of articles in 1925 of Al-Jami’at, the official organ of the Jami’at-ul Ulama-i-Hind, of which he was then the editor, Maududi argued the case for a more activist and broad-based tabligh campaign that fitted in with his own understanding of Islam as an all-embracing ideology that covered every aspect of life. Maududi stressed that the success of the Arya campaign was but a reflection and a consequence of Muslims having forgotten what he calls ‘the fundamental aim’ of a Muslim’s life and existence–the establishment of Islam in its entirety in accordance with the Will of God, through constant engagement in its tabligh, inviting others to the Truth. ‘The entire life of the Prophet Muhammad’, he wrote, ‘was a manifestation of this da’awat-i-haq [Invitation to the Truth']‘, and Muslims must follow in his footsteps. A Muslim’s entire life, he stressed, is a form of tabligh. For a Muslim to fulfil this divine mission, he or she must have at least a modicum of knowledge of Islam. Further, he or she must be a self-conscious believer. It is not enough, Maududi says, for someone to claim to be a Muslim simply because of birth in a Muslim family. The tablighi project of spreading knowledge of Islam among Muslims, Maududi suggests, must also be accompanied by efforts at social

reform on the lines of the shari’at. In particular, social inequalities and caste-like features within the Muslim community, taking advantage of which the Aryas had managed to make considerable headway in their shuddhi campaign, must be combatted. In this way, what Maududi calls for is a consolidated, homogenous, well-defined and closely-knit Muslim community, defined and set apart from the others by strict observance to the shar’iat.

Conclusion

The Arya shuddhi offensive was thus seen as a grave challenge by Muslim leaders, who responded to it by advocating a grand community-wide effort of Islamic reform, reaching out to hitherto neglected neo-Muslim groups, seeking to draw them into the fold of the emerging pan-Indian Muslim community, united on the basis of allegiance to common beliefs and ritual practices. In the changed socio-political context, ordinary people thus assumed far greater importance in elite-led mobilisational projects than they had hitherto been. In the process, individual Muslims, no matter how humble their station in life, were now seen as crucial symbols and representatives of Islam, assuming the place that the Muslim ruler had traditionally enjoyed. Tabligh and the defence of Islam as a duty of all Muslims, men and women, whatever their social position. Yogi Sikand