Growth of Scheduled Castes and Tribes in Medieval India by KS Lal: Review
A review by Member Pushkar Choudhary
Contemporary Hindu society is divided into several castes, further classified into backward and forward (unreserved) classes based on their social and economic status. Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes form the lowest strata within the backward classes of Hindu society and have been subjected to various discriminatory practices for centuries. However, there is limited historical evidence to analyze the conditions of Scheduled Castes and Tribes during the medieval period when India was under Muslim rule.
In this book, Kishori Sharan Lal assesses the socio-political role played by the Harijans during the Medieval period when the land was doomed by frequent warfare. The book has a political tone and the author seems disturbed by the recent attempts to isolate SCs and STs from mainstream Hinduism therefore he tries to defend their allegiance to Hinduism by sneaking into the medieval Persian chronicles. He states, “Throughout the medieval period, the lower castes fought shoulder to shoulder with the upper castes and against the foreign invaders and tyrannical rulers”. Here lies his central argument which resonates in the whole book, that the Lower castes united with the Caste Hindus to fight the Muslim invaders who were the common enemy which proves that there was no bitter animosity among the two.
The book is divided into seven chapters each dealing with a different theme, the second chapter titled “Tribes and castes all staunch Hindus” elaborates on the cemented religious belief of the so-called Scheduled castes as you will call them today. Lal tries to rebuke the popular belief that attributes the conversion of the Indian population to Islam because of its egalitarian appeal and the caste immobility and rigidity of the Hindu religion. Using the British census data, he argues that Chamar who are the single most populous caste in almost all the districts of Western Uttar Pradesh and some of Awadh retained their Hindu faith while we come across instances of conversion of the so -called upper caste to the creed of Islam. He draws parallels between several tribes in different regions of India and the Hindus settled in the plains and advocates for the religious similarity if not homogeneity between the two. He gives a general outline of all the major tribes except those who are in south India as this region was not much affected by the Turkish onslaught.
The third chapter details the various confrontations between invading Muslim armies and the Hindu tribes as per Lal. Jats and Meds harassing the army of Muhammad bin Qasim when he invaded Sindh, and Khokhars raiding Ghori’s troops are some of the earliest instances of tribes inflicting damage on the Muslim army. It is widely known to the readers of Indian medieval history that Khokhars residing in the Salt ranges were a constant source of menace to the Delhi sultanate who periodically pillaged their camp and lay waste the country, looted the caravans and disrupted trade. The assassination of Muhammad Ghori is credited to them in some accounts. However, Lal takes this as a symbol of defying the invaders who belonged to an alien creed, he argues that Khokhar who were Hindus by faith detested the invading central Asian rulers and as a result, they often laid siege to the area in their vicinity. The crystallization of Hindu identity in medieval India as we know it today has been a matter of debate among scholars but Lal tries to prove that Khokhars as a freedom-loving Hindu tribe could not tolerate subjugation and humiliation on the hand of their Muslim masters and rebelled frequently.
The upcoming chapters shed light on the growth of the Scheduled Caste population during the Muslim rule, here lal give a very reasonable argument which finds itself often in this book. He argues that the Forests, mountains, and other impassable geographical regions of India were a safe haven for the fighters who resisted Muslim rule in India. With time they lost contact with people in the plains and due to scanty resources and hard life inside the forests lost the sense of civilization and started practicing barbarity as a result many caste Hindus, various well-off clans whose pride prevented them from submitting to the invader used the forests as their refuge but eventually they formed the present day population of Scheduled Tribes and castes losing their well to do status during the Islamic onslaught. He gives the example of various castes, One suc is Gonds of the central India, who were a thriving civilized community before the Mughal general Asaf Khan laid their country to waste which led to the death of their heroic queen Rani Durgavati. Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta gives an interesting description of this phenomenon, he writes, “The Muslims dominate the infidels but the latter fortify themselves in mountains, in rocky, uneven and rugged places as well as in bamboo groves”. There are several references to the rebels hiding out in the forests where the imperial armies were unable to chase them. Lal used these references to claim that the present-day Scheduled tribes people were once freedom-loving patriots who are currently in a destitute condition because they fought tooth and nail with Islamic imperialism.
He also goes on to blame the harsh economic policy of sultanate rulers along with their religious despotism which forced people to flee into the forests. We get the reference to the impoverished conditions of the peasants in the works of Ziauddin Baranai during the days of Alauddin Khalji who raised the tax to half of the produce which led to rampant pauperized conditions of farmers across the country and several of them were unable to face the harsh punishments of failing to submit the tax fled towards forests and swelled the ranks of rebels who are now termed as Scheduled tribes or castes. Nearly every King of the Delhi sultanate and Mughal empire faced the issue of highway robbery which was frequent in those times, this appears as a stark difference when compared to ancient India which was attested as a low-crime society by many foreign travelers. Lal argues that these robbers were the Hindu opposers of the Islamic and they used every opportunity to pounce upon the Muhammadans in order to take their vengeance which has forced them to this barbarity. In this way the highway robbery was a means of resistance as they could not match the might of the imperial army, they engaged in guerilla warfare through this form of robbery to harass the Turks. We came across several campaigns taken by the sultans himself to chastise these robbers but their eradication was never complete.
In the last two chapters, Lal emphasizes the Hindu nature of these tribes and blames the Muslim invaders for the present harsh condition of Scheduled tribes and castes who were reduced to this status because of consistent discrimination practiced against them. He faintly recognizes the role of Hindu orthodoxy in sanctifying the inhumane discriminatory policy such as Untouchability but even goes on to justify them on the ground that untouchability was mainly prevalent among the castes who ate beef and it was also practiced against the Muslims as they ate beef too. It can be partially too but it’s far from the truth as untouchability was the order of the day and is still practiced in the Indian villages and a religious sanctity to it has been one of the major causes behind its continuation. Lal downplays any role of the upper caste in oppressing the backward classes and conveniently shifts the whole blame on Muslim rulers. While It can be true that the bigoted policies of the medieval rulers resulted in the economic ruin of a considerable population who may now form part of Scheduled tribes and caste populations, several arguments of Lal are obscure and seem forced to prove a certain view. He terms the frequent Mewati raids in Delhi as a form of Hindu resistance but their sudden conversion to Islam is left unexplained by Lal. However, this work can be well termed as a subaltern study as it primarily deals with the role played by the lower strata of the society during the Muslim rule.
However, the last chapter of the book drifts away from the title as Lal goes on to elaborate much upon the Organisation of the Muslim army, the weapons used by them, and the war ethics of Islamic theology without informing the readers how it’s relevant with the title of this work. The book is dependent entirely upon the scanty references available in the medieval Persian chronicles and most of the arguments belong to the author’s own reasoning which he has deduced from the available evidence. They may sound coherent sometimes and sometimes entirely arbitrarily but it obviously guarantees a fresh perspective in understanding medieval Indian history and its consequences