The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India c6.s2.4

c6.s2.4

Assisted by the translations of Muslim chroniclers by the first generation scholars, foreign and Indian historians embarked on writing on medieval Indian history. Some Indian scholars worked under British historians in England. Many others worked in India utilizing research techniques provided by the West. Indian historians owe a lot to the pioneering researches of British historians, whatever may be said about their merits and shortcomings. The first comprehensive history of India entitled *History of British India* (1818), was attempted by James Mill. He believed in the superiority of the British people over the Indians. But there were other scholars thinking on different lines. The work of Sir William Jones and other European scholars unearthed a volume of evidence on Indias glorious past. However, despite the European discovery of Indias past greatness and well-developed civilization, the British, having become the paramount power in India, remained generally convinced of their own superiority over Indians, and continued to feed themselves on Mill and Macaulay. They held Indians and their literature in low esteem, insisting on accepting the degenerate conditions of the eighteenth century Muslim India as its normal condition. Seeley declared that nothing as great was ever done by Englishmen as the conquest of India, which was not in the ordinary sense a conquest at all, and which he put on par with the Creek conquest of the East, pointing out that the British who had a higher and more vigorous civilization than the native races founded the Indian Empire partly out of a philanthropic desire to put an end to enormous evils of the robber-states of India. There is no need to get ruffled about such assertions. Most of the conclusions of British historians about Muslim history do find confirmation in the description of cruelties perpetrated by the Muslims in their own chronicles as well as their reiteration in indigenous source materials in Hindi, Sanskrit, Rajasthani and Marathi. Hindu source materials are few. They are also not as informative as the Muslim chronicles. But curiously enough the meagre Hindu and the voluminous Muslim source-materials corroborate and supplement rather than contradict each other about the behaviour of the Muslim regime.