No less than Narendra Modi, India’s erudite prime minister, had attributed the self-disparaging Indian character to its thousand years of slavery, that too on the floor of the Indian parliament. And it’s no wonder that Asaduddin Owaisi, the Islamist revivalist in the Indian remnant, promptly contested the said proposition. Needless to say, while Modi echoed the lament of the Hindu nationalists, albeit in a politically correct vocabulary, Owaisi sees the Muslim invasion of Hindustan through the prism of eight-hundred years of Islamic hukummat over the same. Whatever, a critical examination of India’s Islamic history, even the one dished out by its Muslim overlords, and an objective analysis of its socio-cultural construct therein would belie the supposition that Hindus were forced into slavery in any which way.
No doubt, when the Islamic marauders eyed it for loot and rapine, India was long since the home to the Nalandas and the Takshasilas, the Ivys of yore, and it was also the world’s largest economy with some thirty-percent share of its gross domestic product. Thus, it’s as if India then was the crown of the creation, adorned with Hindu jewels, and that being the case, maybe the Hindus of that time were justified to feel top-of-the-world, like the Americans of the day do. So, that’s exactly what they felt like, and we have Aberuni’s testimony for that In his eponymous book on India of around 1030CE.
“… the Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no kings like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs.”
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