Note 18 — Chapter IX · THE SPREAD OF ISLAM IN INDIA.

Official pressure is said never to have been more persistently brought to bear upon the Hindus than in the reign of Aurangzeb. In the eastern districts of the Panjāb, there are many cases in which the ancestor of the Musalman branch of the village community is said to have changed his religion in the reign of this zealot, “in order to save the land of the village.” In Gurgaon, near Dehli, there is a Hindu family of Banyās who still bear the title of Shayk͟h (which is commonly adopted by converted Hindus), because one of the members of the family, whose line is now extinct, became a convert in order to save the family property from confiscation.18 Many Rajput landowners, in the Cawnpore district, were compelled to embrace Islam for the same reason.19 In other cases the ancestor is said to have been carried as a prisoner or hostage to Dehli, and there forcibly circumcised and converted.20 It should be noted that the only authority for these forced conversions is family or local tradition, and no mention of such (as far as I have been able to discover) is made in the historical accounts of Aurangzeb’s reign.21 It is established without doubt that forced conversions have been made by Muhammadan rulers, and it seems probable that Aurangzeb’s well-known zeal on behalf of his faith has caused many families of Northern India (the history of whose conversion has been forgotten) to attribute their change of faith to this, the most easily assignable cause. Similarly in the Deccan, Aurangzeb shares with Ḥaydar ʻAlī and Tīpū Sulṭān (these being the best known of modern Muhammadan rulers) the reputation of having forcibly converted sundry families and sections of the population, whose conversion undoubtedly dates from a much earlier period, from which no historical record of the circumstances of the case has come down.22