Our story really opens with two civilisational downfalls. The first, a catastrophe and the second, a calamity, both words semantic cousins. The catastrophe was the self-invited defeat of Prithviraja Chahamana III; the calamity, the defeat and horrible death of Jayachandra (Jaichand). With these, the main door to mainland Bharatavarsha was not only irreparably shattered, an alien barbaric religious despotism was near-permanently lodged in Delhi. In polite terms, the Delhi Sultanate is a civil idiom for a black garb that conceals the smothering imposition of a grisly, blanket regime of all-encompassing enslavement of Hindus in their own homeland. Enslavement owing exclusively to theological diktats…your existence as a Hindu is the sole justification for my oppression.
It would require more than a century for the Delhi Sultanate to plant reasonably sturdy roots there. The greatest threat was the phoenix-like revolts from the Hindus who had by then coined a new obscenity: Turushka, the unclean, savage, cow-eating, slave-taking, and temple-wrecking foreigner to who the word “culture,” like him, was foreign. The word has retained all its historical connotations till date.
Prithviraja’s terminal defeat had also rudely unglued one of the immemorial and enduring foundations of Hindu polity and military organization that had delivered stability, safeguarded, defended and preserved some of the world’s greatest empires: the impeccably well-oiled system of Kshatriya contingents…loyal vassals, vast private armies, timeless bloodlines, and a subterranean network of fighting forces that would get battle-ready on command. Now, this foundation was smashed in an unprecedented fashion by an enemy who knew no rules and was alien to scruples. Innumerable such warrior-clans found themselves roofless, uprooted and scattered overnight. This cruel displacement was generational… lasting up to our own time. Until they were not introduced to the hated alien Turushka, earlier military defeats had not translated into uprooting let alone large-scale displacement. The victorious Hindu Rajas of the past were mostly satisfied with vassalage and tribute. But this new beast had an additional diabolical fang: forcible, vicious conversion to his alien, mleccha religion.
This violent eviction brought with it another far-reaching dimension: former rulers, chieftains, generals, and commanders became overnight beggars, vagabonds, fugitives and what the fledgling Delhi sultanate called, “bandits.” One such warrior clan of untold antiquity and unparalleled valour that was reduced to this desolate fate was the Mewatis, more familiar today as Meos.
The name Mewati is a geographical derivative: from the Mewat region encompassing eastern Rajasthan, Delhi, and Haryana…the wide belt that bore the brunt of repeated Muslim invasions, the site of untold Hindu bloodshed.
If a painting was drawn that depicts the thirty year-long succession tussle that followed the death of the Mahakal Temple-vandal and Shia mass-murderer Iltutmish, this is how it would look: a macabre riot of various shades of red representing palace bloodletting, fratricide, debauchery, profligacy, and despotism-by-proxy.
But there’s another side to this painting.
This was also a period of freedom struggle. Relentless. Recurrent. Unceasing. Unyielding. The large, arched bow stretching from Arbudaranya (Mount Abu) to Kalinjara (Bundelkhand) is the scene of this painting. A single scene imbued with a million freedom struggles; wherever, whenever possible, Hindus reorganized themselves, recouped even their most meagre resources and began multi-pronged, courageous sagas of repulsing the Turushkas and reclaiming their original homes. In Rajasthan and Bundelkhand especially, Muslim garrisons were rapidly purged of the Turkic governors. The undaunted resistance proved devastatingly effective. From Bundelkhand to Bihar, from Rajasthan to Varanasi, highways and valleys and mountain passes and riverbanks became forbidding , closed dens where the sultanate’s soldiers, writ and taxmen feared to tread.
Of the countless doughty warriors that led and participated in these freedom struggles…women, men, and teenagers with a sword in one hand and a foot in the cemetery, the Mewatis were peerless. It was a truly casteless struggle; all the Varnas united, smilingly put their necks on the altar of death to defend and reestablish their ancient, eternal Dharma. It is a measure of the perverse downfall of our civilization that today the descendants of these brave warriors are fighting with each other in a race to the bottom, to seek supremacy in being called the “most backward.”
One of the world’s most vicious barbarians, Ghiyasuddin Balban had a firsthand taste of the Mewati daredevilry on three occasions before he declared himself sultan in 1266. On all three occasions, what had stunned him was their unyielding will and love for freedom. By 1257-8, the Mewatis had reconquered an impressive swathe of territory encompassing about eighty miles to the southeast of Delhi. One branch of the Mewatis, the Koh-Payahs formed a thewy backbone that contributed to the surging wave of the Rajput resurgence in Rajasthan. They originally hailed from northern Alwar and were descendants of the Yaduvamshi Rajputs.
By the time Balban occupied the sultanate, the Mewatis posed a lethal threat to the capital city, Delhi itself. For more than half a century, they led devastating raids of plunder and destruction almost on a daily basis and terrorized the people of Delhi to the extent that the gates of the city were closed shut after the afternoon Muslim prayers. Plunder was the secondary objective. At its deeply injured heart, these incursions were among other methods the Mewatis followed to inflict as much damage as they could on the hated alien sultanate. The kind of all-round terror the Mewatis had instilled in the Delhi sultanate is best described by the Muslim chronicler and zealot, Zia-ud-din Barani.
The turbulence of the Mewatis had increased, and their strength had grown in the neighbourhood of Delhi…At night they used to come prowling into the city, giving all kinds of trouble, depriving the people of their rest; and they plundered the country houses in the neighbourhood of the city. In the neighbourhood of Delhi there were large and dense jungles, through which many roads passed. The disaffected in the [Ganga-Yamuna] Doáb, and the outlaws towards Hindustan grew bold and took to robbery on the highway, and they so beset the roads that caravans and merchants were unable to pass. The daring of the Mewatis in the neighbourhood of Delhi was carried to such an extent that the western gates of the city were shut at afternoon prayer, and no one dared to go out of the city in that direction after that hour, whether he travelled as a pilgrim or with the display of a sovereign. At afternoon prayer the Mewatis would often come to the Sar-hauz, and assaulting the water-carriers and the girls who were fetching water, they would strip them and carry off their clothes. These daring acts of the Mewatis had caused a great ferment in Delhi. [Emphasis added]
In retrospect, freedom fighters like the Mewatis…the tactics and methods of warfare they adopted under extremely dire circumstances, can be called the precursors to Chhatrapati Shivaji. It is because they never stopped fighting, they never gave up that a Shivaji could arise sometime in the distant future, half a millennium later. Why is the story of this extraordinary resistance, this deathless Himalayan ascent of the Sanatana Spirit never told anywhere…in nonfiction, stories, novels, dramas, and films? The story that is told today of the Mewatis is the following. By the eminent distorian, Satish Chandra: the Mewatis were robbers, brigands, bandits, and criminals who were a constant source of “trouble,” who disturbed the “peace” of the “great” Delhi sultanate. It is a mathematical certainty that all Marxists are third-rated mouthpieces and pamphleteers of an X-rated genocidal ideology. It logically follows that Satish Chandra too, is highly unoriginal: his slur against the freedom-loving Mewatis is a direct plagiarism of Barani as seen from the preceding quote.
The glorious saga of the unbending, doughty Mewati resistance had a gory, bloody end. The first thing Balban the barbarian did after becoming sultan was to turn in the direction of southeast Delhi. He unleashed an army of semi-barbarian Afghans and in a single stroke, heartlessly slaughtered one lakh Mewatis in the region and cleared all the jungles in a hundred-mile circumference around Delhi to deprive other Mewati-like freedom fighters of shelter or hiding places. The other bigoted chronicler, Ferishta celebrates this Mewati genocide as a great victory over the darkness of infidelity. The Mewatis that survived either fled or were forcibly converted to Islam. In the serpent-tongue of secularism, this violent conversion becomes a religious hymn: embraced Islam. Over time, these Mewatis came to be known as Meo Muslims.
These are roughly the origins of the Tablighi Jamaat whose core comprises the selfsame Meos.
Balban also undertook another grand project. He built a large palace, the Kushaki Lal in Ghiyaspur. Today, Ghiyaspur is better known as Basti Nizamuddin, named later in the honour of the Sunni Sufi bigot, Nizamuddin Auliya, Balban’s contemporary. Auliya’s dargah, which is housed in the center of Basti Nizamuddin is much loved by the Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb, syncretic, biryani-loving Hindus.
Since the time it was established during Auliya’s time, this place became one of the most prominent prep schools inculcating the Faithful into and radiating Jihad all over Hindustan. It was here that the “mystics” of the Chisti Sufi order wrote elaborate treatises and delivered pious sermons, invited and guided all hues of despots and would-be sultans to wage Jihad against Hindu kingdoms for hundreds of years, a phenomenon that continues intact till date.
It is thus imperative, even mandatory for Hindus to grasp this 700-year historical backdrop to fathom the ongoing deadly reality of the national spread of the Tablighi virus. The super-spreaders, indeed, the core of the contemporary Tablighi Holy-War Squad comprises the Meo Muslims.
It is a phenomenon that undams a deluge of historical, psychological and civilisational streams that has all-embracing consequences for what survives of the Sanatana civilization. The phenomenon is an unprecedented rekindling of two temporary pauses that occurred first, with the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, and then after the Partition of India in 1947. Two pauses in an interval of 240 years.
The first pause will be discussed in the next part of this series.
The complete list of references will be provided in the concluding part of this series.
To be continued
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