According to Freud, conversion hysteria is a pathology that manifests repressed unconscious conflicts into overt physical symptoms. Freud believed that psychological distress could be “converted” into physical symptoms, with the physical manifestation representing a symbolic expression of an underlying emotional conflict. In this article, I will show how the forced conversion of Hindus to Islam is a type of pathology, aka, conversion hysteria of Freud.
“In the morning an individual has come to put a rope around a cow. What is your name, we asked. It is a Muslim name; he was wearing a lungi. We understood that he is a latent/covert Hindu. We told him to take the name of Rama. He said, “But they will kill me!” We said, Gandhi said that, here everyone who was Hindu, will remain Hindu. He said, “Yes we heard that.” Then sing, “Raghupati Raghva Raja Ram, Patita Pavan Sita Rama.” Music, singing and dancing started in the streets. A couple of Muslims came out of their houses. They politely asked some questions. We understood that with Gandhi, things have started changing” (Untold Hindu Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing, translated, Rinita Mazumdar, from Sandip Mukherjee’s Noakhali, 1946). “
In Noakhali, 5000 Hindu minorities were killed and around 350,000, were converted to Islam, and all of them were forced, either overtly or covertly.
As Sinha and Dasgupta say that the Hindu Muslim divide and the clash is not just a communal affairs. According to Sinha and Dasgupta, the Hindus have been fighting this conundrum since the 8the century of a different value system and specially one that was inflexible, exclusive, vigorously expansionist and eager for reigning on others. According to Sinha and Dasgupta, “Those were principally the Turkey flags on India though at the initial stage the Arab and then the Afghan flags had their shares. But those were not the flags for the majority of the Muslims in India who, in subsequent period, had to enter Islam as the breakaways from the Indian societies. Those Muslims were/are ex Hindus and their number surged to be 98% of the Muslims in India. The Turks, Iranians, Afghans, Arabians etc, that invaded India as alien races having Islamic faith and later others of the same categories that entered into India as job seekers could not have formed more than 2% of Indian Muslims and the 98% of the Indian Muslims were exploited by the 2% of Asrafi Muslims more than the Hindus. Hindus were tortured, robbed of their fortunes and economic prosperity, their temples were desecrated but the Buddhist and Hindus converted to Islam were robbed of their innate culture, moral and ethical inheritance and way of living that nurtured them through generations…..
Conversion was not merely a shift in faith, conversion is much more deep tooted, much more a question of society and civil life and it involves the whole inherent cultural and traditional world. Indian Buddhist and Hindus that had to be converted to Islam at various periods of history had to be deprived of their way of living, social customs, ethical senses and entire rich cultural world. Instead, being exclusive from their erstwhile vast root society they were put in a tight compartment as if the arrested people because of such conversion to Islam. They were brought into an unknown world were they found the new faith recognized nothing of their land as positive and approving, instead systems and order of the land and people wherefrom the new faith had originated and had been carried into this land were proclaimed as by far superior in all respects. Thus, morally and culturally they lost their natural health and had to believe that they belonged to an inferior race and the victors owned them after conversion. They, thus, entered Islam as refugees being evicted from their own society and cultural world. They were constantly tutored those ideas and those gradually grappled them within one or two generations. This de-culturing is the area for which the ex-Hindu Indian Muslim could have been severely exploited by the alien Turk-Afghan in both he ways –economically and socially. The economic world functions on different objective realities than here shifting of faith. The economic conditions of poor Buddhist and Hindus converted mainly from the artisan classes did not improve at all as the Turk-Afghan were invading martial people, themselves fortune seekers in pressing ways and means. They wanted some people converted to their faith around them for menial domestica and petty professional works and some protection around them. The theoretical aspect of their religion were often not often comprehensive to the invaders themselves even (Sinha and Dasgupta).
According to Sinha and Dasgupta, “From 712 A. to 1860 A, 98% of Indian Muslims, Ajlab Muslims had confront four prongs 1) seclusion from their natural social habitat 2) loss of cultural identity 3) migration from traditional customs and academic attainment, and 4) finally enslavement remaining in poor economic conditions under the alien invading rulers. Further, according to Sinha and Dasgupta, “Our research work show while enlisting more than two hundred names of Amir, Umrah, Sepah-slaha, Subadards, etc as sample survey, during the sultanate period, did not find a single name to belong to the converted Muslims. One converted Muslim occupied the throne of Delhi during the intriguing days of minor Khalis and could hold on the throne of a brief period as he was a converted one (Nasiruddin Khasru Shah, from 7th April 1320 to 6th September 1320). This is a single instance.”
Indian Muslims enjoyed no recognition from the upper echelon of the ruling classes of the invaders Muslims, i.e, Ashraf Muslims and the converted Indian Muslims were regarded as Ajlab Muslims. Such social, moral and class divisions existed all through the centuries and it degraded lives, in general, of the Ajlab Muslims more than the Hindus.”
According to Sinha and Dasgupta, “the Indian Ajlab Mulims’ real enigma is, though they live in the India civilization, they are made not to feel it. The identifiable belonging in the same root not perceived in the subjective plain is the major cause for the suffering of the Indian Ajlab Muslim. Their rootless dilemma stems out from this junction.”
What we see above is that the Aljab Muslims were themselves converted and have some inter generational memories of their past trauma, including their alienation from the “real Muslims” on the one had and from Indian society on the other. So, they have what is known as the “Slave Morality” of Nietzsche, who is always interested in showing how inferior the other is, in order to validate themselves. To overcome this, they convert others, a symbolic physical act, which is a manifestation of the deeper emotional conflict, a conversion, a pathology. Conversion, as it happened in Noakhali, was mostly under threat and pressure. This was an overt brute action, a physical reaction to the repressed emotional conflict of the Aljab Muslims of East Bengal from their own trauma of alienation. These are the facts that have to be addressed at a deeper level to understand conversion. Of course, there are other several issues here which is outside the scope of this paper. https://www.amazon.com/Books-Rinita-Mazumdar/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3ARinita+Mazumdar
