Why Buddhism Declined?
As
the first millennium of the Common Era (C.E.) gave way to the second, the
contours of political geography shifted substantially in South Asia. The Indian
Ocean became an integrated commercial system, and South Asia became a land of
wealth and trade, connecting the Silk Road and the Indian Ocean.
In
Sri Lanka, virtually the whole population shifted to the coast doing business
with merchants and traders that frequented the island from the territories to
the west, especially the Muslim world. Though the Arab and Persian merchants had
been trading for centuries before Islam, they started dominating the entire sea
trade along the Indian Ocean since around the middle of the 7th
century.
South
Asia’s encounter with Islam dates back to the time of the Prophet Muhammad (S),
beginning with the conversion of a Hindu king of Kerala and the presence of the
Mappila (also called Moplah) Muslim community in the Malabar Coast since the early
7th century CE. Sindh came under Muslim rule after its conquest in 712
CE by 20-year old Muhammad bin Qasim under the order of Hajjaj bin Yusuf – the Umayyad
governor of Iraq. By the early 13th century, vast territories of
South Asia came under Muslim rule who dominated the political scene for the
next six centuries. No mass conversions into Islam were attempted by these
Muslim rulers and the destruction of temples was forbidden. Historian Lane-Poole writes, "As a rule
Muslim government was at once tolerant and economic."
From its capital of Ghazni in today’s Afghanistan, the
Ghaznavid rule in Northwestern India lasted over 175 years from 1010 to 1187 CE.
It was during this period that Lahore assumed considerable status apart from being
the second capital, and later the only capital, of the Ghaznavid Empire. Then
the Ghurids from Afghanistan ruled India extending their eastern territories to
the northern Ganges-Jamuna Doab, with Delhi as the capital. The Muslim Sultans
in Delhi expanded their territory rapidly. By early 13th century,
Bengal and much of central India was under the Delhi Sultanate, which became an
epoch-making dynasty by repelling Mongols who were unstoppable elsewhere in
Asia. This event changed the political landscape and culture in South Asia,
because it marked a domestication of Central Asian Sultans inside India, where
they had rich territory to defend. Yesterday’s invaders thus became India’s
defenders.
Several Turko-Afghan dynasties ruled from Delhi: the
Mamluk (1206–1290), the Khalji (1290–1320), the Tughlaq (1320–1414), the Sayyid
(1414–51), and the Lodhi (1451–1526). Muslim kings extended their domains into
Southern India; Kingdom of Vijayanagar resisted until falling to the Deccan
Sultanate in 1565. The Mughals ruled the country from 1526 until its collapse
in 1857 when the last of the great Mughal emperors - Bahadur Shah - was deposed
by the British.
The vicious attacks of the 13th century on
cities and towns across southern Eurasia by the Mongols, however, launched
centuries of migration into India. As
noted by Professor Ludden, warriors, scholars, mystics, merchants, artists,
artisans, peasants, and workers followed ancient trade routes and new
opportunities that opened up in the new domains of Indian sultans. “Migrants walked and rode down the Hindu
Kush; they traveled from town to town, across Punjab, down the Ganga basin,
into Bengal, down the Indus into Sind and Gujarat, across the Vindhyas, into
the Deccan, and down the coast. From
Bengal and other sites along the coast, some continued overseas. They moved and resettled to find work,
education, patronage, influence, adventure, and better living. They traveled these routes for five centuries,
never in large numbers compared to the resident population; but as time went
by, new-comers settled more often where others had settled before; and their
accumulation, natural increase, and local influence changed societies all
across South Asia forever. This was one
of the world’s most significant long-term migratory patterns; and it not only
carried people and wealth into South Asia but also a complemented flow of
commodities from South Asia to West Asia and Europe.” [India and South Asia: A Short History]
Immigrants from Persia
increased over time, especially after 1556, when Persian literati came into the
Mughal service and the center of gravity of Persian culture shifted into South
Asia.
Muslim rule saw a greater urbanization of India and the
rise of many cities and their urban cultures. The biggest impact was upon trade
resulting from a common commercial and legal system extending from Morocco to
Indonesia. When Moroccan traveler Ibn Batuta traveled to India in the early 14th
century, he found Bengal to
be "a vast country, abounding in rice and nowhere in the world have I
seen any land where prices are lower than there.” He also observed that “most of the merchants
from Fars [Persia] and Yemen disembark” at Mangalore, where “pepper and ginger
are exceedingly abundant.” On the road from Goa to Quilon, he wrote, “I have
never seen a safer road than this, for they put to death anyone who steals a
single nut, and if any fruit falls no one picks it up but the owner.”
The impact of Islam on Indian culture has been
immeasurable. It permanently influenced the development of all areas of human
endeavor – language, dress, cuisine, all the art forms, architecture and
urban design, and social customs and values. It replaced both Hinduism and Buddhism as the great cosmopolitan
trading religion. Royal
endowments to temples and Brahmans and monks continued, mostly in the form of
tax-free grants of land carried over from earlier dynasties. Mughal emperor Aurangzeb revitalized a legal
proclamation of the Manusmriti in his
famous 1665 farman, declaring that,
"whoever turns (wasteland) into cultivable land should be recognized as
the (owner) malik and should not be deprived (of land)."
With its unique
message of casteless equality and brotherhood of men, and simple and easy to
understand and practice the tenets, and superb morality it was quite
natural that the vast majority of people in certain areas with access to Sufi Muslims
would embrace Islam. The impact was felt more so in the Bengal region
where under Sufi influence, the pressures of caste, and with no political
support structure left in place to resist social mores, many converted to
Islam. There is no doubt that the turmoil and millennium-old hostility between
the two major religions - Hinduism and Buddhism - with the ordinary masses
(e.g., non-priestly and non-ruling classes) caught in the middle that
were tired of incessant religious wars greatly helped the cause of Islam
to get rooted into the region.
As hinted
above, this task was accelerated by exemplary missionary works of the Sufis and
other pious Muslims who migrated into the region from areas that had been
devastated by Mongol invasion. They essentially acted as cultural activists or
goodwill ambassadors of Islam. To this day, Sufi dargahs still attract as many
Hindu, Sikh and Christian pilgrims as they do Muslims.
Moreover,
the taxation imposed by the Muslim rulers was much lighter on general masses
(compared to how they were taxed under Hindu and Buddhist rulers). This also
helped the downtrodden Indians to entertain a favorable opinion about Islam. To
garner further concessions, some ruling classes also embraced Islam. And this
change did not happen overnight but took centuries to gradually make Islam the
dominant religion of the masses in some parts of India, especially in the
eastern and western parts of South Asia.
Geographies
of people living in South Asia kept changing with the times. By the 18th
century, social identities that were expressed in overlapping ethnic idioms of
religion, language, caste, class, and occupation were typically attached to
geographical places -- villages, towns, and regions -- which were separated
from one another and ranked in relation to one another. Residential segregation was the norm for
ethnic groups.
What
was once administered by the Mughals came gradually under the East India
Company first and then the British Empire. In 1757 the Nawab of Bengal was
defeated by the Company at the Battle of Plassey. In the 1820s, the Company
tightened its grip on the Ganga basin and on Bengal, Madras, and Bombay
Presidencies. In 1833, English became the imperial language replacing Farsi. Brahmans
took up the English literacy religiously, thus, essentially transforming them
to hold most of the important administrative positions under the British Raj.
In
1848, Punjab was conquered solidifying imperial territory. In 1857, the
mutineers for freedom against the Company were crushed – mostly through loyal
Sikh and Hindu troops from Punjab, thus, securing imperial authority and
crushing the last vestige of Mughal authority. In 1876 when Queen Victoria
became Empress of India, British imperialism entered its heyday.
All
the territories east and northeast of Bengal were contested between the English
and rulers in Burma. All these
territories had local rulers who like the Ahom and Koch represented ethnically
coherent, though often very small, populations of people who worked in forest
and on farm lands on upland and high mountain fringes of medieval dynasties,
the Mughal regime, and its successors in Bengal. Huge populations of Rohingya
Muslims and Buddhist Maghs from the independent state of Arakan moved to
Company-administered Muslim majority Bengal in the aftermath of Burmese king
Bodawpaya’s genocidal conquest in 1784.
In
the Himalayas, Bhutan became a new political territory in the eighteenth
century, when a Tibetan Buddhist monk, Sheptoon La-Pha crowned himself Dharma
Raja and his successors consolidated their power over the peoples living in the
steep slopes around their forts. Their
Drukpa sect of Tibetan Buddhism became a ruling monastic order.
Sikkim
was established in 1642, when Phuntsog Namgyal became chogyal, a ruler who like the Dharma Raja combined
administrative and religious power. The
new state rested on the strength of Bhutias, who began to come from Tibet in
the fourteenth century and settled among Lepchas.
Nepal
became an imperial dynastic realm under Prithvi Narayan Shah, who brought many
small mountain ethnic territories under a centralized military administration
based in the Kathmandu Valley. Nepal officially became a Hindu state, when the
Rana made the caste system law.
Sri
Lanka was the first region substantially controlled by Europeans and it became
a microcosm of European imperial history in South Asia. After 1498, Portuguese soldiers conquered a
dozen major port cities on the Indian peninsula and Sri Lanka to build coastal
fortress enclaves. Portugal remained the
dominant European power in the Indian Ocean during the sixteenth century, when
Portuguese captains controlled the western Sri Lanka coast. They lost their position to the Dutch in
1707, and by 1818, Portugal retained only a few settlements in South Asia,
including Goa, south of Bombay, which was then they surrounded by British
India. Eighteenth century English and French merchant companies competed with
the Dutch in Asian waters. The English
finally uprooted the Dutch from Sri Lanka during the wars that followed the
French revolution.
A
drive began to bring hill peoples under British control, most strikingly in the
northeast, where Naga, Lushan, Garo, Shan, Khasi, Chakma, and Mizo chiefs were
all attacked.
British
wars for Burma began in 1852 although Arakan and many of the Burmese
territories on the western frontier had already been lost to the Company in the
First Anglo-Burman War of 1824. Rangoon
fell in 1862; upper Burma, in 1886.
Battles for Kachin territories on the Burma border lasted from 1884 into
the 1930s. India's northeastern hill
states were conquered between 1859 and 1893; and Bhutan and Sikkim, in 1865 and
1890, respectively. British troops
conquered Baluchistan in 1877, 1889, and 1896; invaded Tibet, in 1903; and
invaded Afghanistan from 1878 until 1891.
Mountains north of Assam (now in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh)
came under British control in 1914.
According
to Professor Ludden, by the 20th century the context of everyday social
experience changed so dramatically in all the regions that medieval
environments had virtually disappeared beyond any recognition. “South Asia became densely populated for
the first time. Its wide open spaces
were gone; its open frontiers and free movements of peoples and cultures,
forgotten. Its new modern landscape
filled up with farming communities, towns, and cities inside territorial
boundaries that were fixed in place by the modern state. Urban populations grew
more rapidly and with them the need to control resources in the countryside.”
[India and South Asia: A Short History]
In August
14 and 15 of 1947, when Pakistan and India emerged as two newly independent
states, it was religion which mattered most for division of British India. As
many Hindus and Muslims lived in either side of the border, the partition saw
one of the largest migrations in history when tens of millions moved from east
to west and vice-versa. The poorly defined borders left Muslim enclaves in
various parts of India and Burma, who became permanent hostages in foreign
countries.
The
partitioning of Punjab between India and Pakistan was followed within two decades
by the repartitioning of the Indian Punjab into two new states, Punjab and
Haryana, in which Sikhs and Hindu Jats, respectively, held sway. In 1956, partitioning old provinces according
to linguistic majorities gave Marathas, Rajputs, Gujaratis, Tamils, Telugus,
Oriyas, Kannadigas, and Malayalis their own territories.
When
formerly eastern districts of Bengal Presidency became East Pakistan after
August 14 of 1947, Bengalis in Pakistan found their government dominated by
West Pakistanis. Separated by a thousand
miles of hostile Indian territory, Pakistan's two "wings" had little
in common. The disparity between the two wings eventually led to the emergence
of Bangladesh in December 16, 1971 after a civil war in which hundreds of
thousands died.
In
Sri Lanka, the Citizen Act (1948), Indian and Pakistani Residents Act (1949),
and the Parliamentary Elections Amendment Act (1949) denied citizenship to most
Indian Tamils and then disenfranchised the rest. As in India and Pakistan,
language became a volatile issue in Sri Lanka. Parliamentary elections in 1956
triggered national mobilization by Sinhala-speaking rural elites who sought
more positions in a Civil Service that was still dominated by English-literate
Tamils, and also by Buddhist monks who sought more influence in government on
the 2,500th anniversary of Buddha's enlightenment.
In 1956 the "Sinhala Only" election
slogan attracted votes from aspiring Sinhala speakers and Buddhist monks in Sri
Lanka. In 1956, the most prominent public definition of nationality in Sri
Lanka became Sinhala-Buddhist. In 1972, a new constitution gave Sinhala and
Buddhism supreme official status. Anti-government riots ensued in the
Tamil-majority areas in the north and east. Tamil demands for regional Tamil
authority were opposed in Colombo and increasingly met with Sinhala hostility.
In 1981 and 1983, political division and public hostility turned into civil war
with the creation of Tamil fighting forces led by the Liberation Tigers of
Tamil Eeelam (LTTE). National violence
reigned from 1987 to 1990, as troops and rebels killed each other on two broad,
ill-defined fronts. Civilian victims
remain uncountable. Up to a hundred thousand
people officially "disappeared" without a trace. While the government
has recently won the battle against the LTTE, peace remains elusive in Buddhist
majority Sri Lanka.
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