Islamic invasions of India

There was an article written by Yvette Rosser PhD in 2002 about how there's little space in academia to have an honest conversation about things like temple desecration or persecution and that religious motivations are downplayed. She talks about how this history is viewed from the lens of the conquerors and not of those who resisted them (ex. Jats, Sikhs, Rajputs, etc). You can study things like Tantra or the Kama Sutra in India, but if you try to bring up why they died out in certain parts of India, you get shut up. Unfortunately, if you try to bring up these problems, you get gaslighted and just get labeled as Hindu nationalist or RSS.

And this is a major problem with India/Hindu/South Asia studies, where words like Hindu nationalist or RSS are used as a stick to beat Hindus with, if they try to explain their point of view. There's a Brown Pundits podcast with Dr. Ajay Verghese, who is a self-identified secularist and of Malayali Christian background. He tries to say that religion had a more important role than people say. Ex: Secularists would say that Muslim conquerors would exaggerate the number of temple desecrations and Verghese would ask but why did they view temple destruction as something to exaggerate about in the first place? Most of the backlash he has gotten from other liberals and left-wingers.

As to why this is downplayed, I think there is a desire to just blame everything on the British because there is romanticized idea of the composite Hindu-Muslim culture which isn't that accurate. Plus, Dr. Verghese wrote The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence in India and found that while the parts of India that were ruled by the British had greater caste violence, the parts of India that were ruled by Hindu or Muslim princely states had greater Hindu-Muslim conflict than the parts ruled by the British. There needs to be an honest analysis of these things occurred without having knee-jerk reaction of labeling everyone as a "Hindutva", "RSS".

/r/ABCDesis Thread