On the topic of forced conversion to Islam in Bengal, the following is a chapter from the book, the link of which I provided earlier:
The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204?1760
The Administration of Mughal Law—the Villagers’ View
The Mughals’ policy of not interfering with Hindu society was also noted by outsiders, in particular Fray Sebastião Manrique, the Augustinian friar who traveled through Bengal in 1629–30 and 1640.[61] Manrique’s narrative richly illustrates how a Mughal court of law actually adjudicated, at the village level, a dispute involving Bengali Muslims and Hindus.
It was August 1640, and Manrique, having just been shipwrecked in a violent monsoon storm off the coast of Orissa, had elected to return to Europe overland. Riding a horse and accompanied by a party of Muslim attendants, the missionary was making his way up Bengal’s western corridor from Orissa toward the Ganges River, which he intended to take through Upper India. He had adopted the dress of a Muslim merchant, apparently in the hope of not drawing undue attention to his true vocation. As the monsoon rains were then drenching lower Bengal with full force, Manrique and his party became bogged down in muddy swamps about ten miles north of Jaleswar, near the present border between Orissa and West Bengal. Unable to make further progress that day, the travelers were obliged to pass an uncomfortable night, tormented by swarms of mosquitoes, in the cowshed of a Hindu village. There they spent the next day, too, for heavy rains prevented immediate resumption of their journey.
While Manrique was dozing through the gray afternoon, one of his Muslim attendants, with an eye to a good meal, seized and killed a couple of peacocks that had wandered into the cowshed.[62] Awakened to what had happened, Manrique suddenly became agitated lest the Hindu villagers learn of the killing, which he knew would be seen as a grave transgression. So he ordered his attendants to conceal the birds until nightfall. Then, under the cover of darkness, they cooked and ate their quarry, promptly burying the birds’ feathers so as to hide the crime. The next day, however, a few uncovered feathers betrayed the deed to the villagers who, armed with bows and arrows, pursued the travelers out of the village and along the road with great fury. Manrique fired a musket shot over the heads of the villagers, but the gun blast so terrified his Hindu guide that the latter fell down in panic, causing the villagers to believe they had mistakenly killed one of their own with an arrow. In the confusion, Manrique revived his guide and got him to lead the party to the nearby town of Naraingarh, in present-day Midnapur District, where there was a caravansarai intended for travelers such as himself.[63]
Once in the safety of Naraingarh, Manrique tried with a gift of pepper to persuade his Hindu guide to forget about the unfortunate peacocks, while he and his party made themselves comfortable in the caravansarai. But the attempted bribe failed in its purpose, and the guide, together with another aggrieved villager, hastened to the house of the local shiqdār where they filed a formal complaint against the entire party. The shiqdār, appointed by Mughal authorities to supervise the collection of revenue, also maintained law and order at the pargana level, and it was in this capacity that he was approached by the aggrieved Hindus. Throwing themselves on their knees before the shiqdār in the middle of the night, the two loudly remonstrated that although they and the other villagers had received the foreigners with great kindness, these “robbers” and “men of violence” had nonetheless violated their religion by killing the peacocks. Evidently aware that to Hindus the peacock was a sacred bird, the shiqdār promptly ordered Manrique and his party arrested, bound, and brought to a dungeon beneath his house, where they spent the night and all the next day in a state of misery and fright.
After a detention of twenty-four hours, around midnight the next day the prisoners were brought before the shiqdār, who, seated in his tribunal, prepared to adjudicate the dispute. Summoned before the official, Manrique presented a document he had received from the Mughal governor of Orissa, affirming that he was a Portuguese from Hooghly (Manrique here dropped his Muslim guise) and permitting him to travel through Mughal territories. After hearing the document read out loud, the shiqdār salaamed and asked Manrique to approach nearer. “He told me of the Heathens’ complaint,” Manrique related,
in reply to which I gave him the true story of the occurrence. He then asked which of my attendants had committed the outrage on the peacocks; and while I hesitated in my reply, pretending not to understand, so as not to condemn the offender, one of his companions, with greater assiduity, at once named him. The Siguidar [shiqdār] then turned to the offender and said, “Art thou not, as it seems, a Bengali and a Musalman…? How then didst thou dare in a Hindu district to kill a living thing?”
As the wretched man was more dead than alive with fear, and unable to reply, I was obliged to take his hand and, after the usual salaam, exclaim, “Sahib! as a good Musalman and follower of your Prophet Maomet’s [Muhammad’s] tenets he pays no heed to the ridiculous precepts of the Hindus; as you yourself would not. This, principally because God in His final, sacred, and true faith has nowhere prohibited the slaying of such animals; for His Divine Majesty created all of them for man’s use. And, if we accept this dictum, this man has committed no fault against God or against His precepts or those of your Alcoran [Qur’an].”[64]
The shiqdār and several other venerable Muslim officials on hand leaned forward in rapt attention to Manrique’s speech, an impromptu homily on Islamic teachings respecting animal life. When it was finished they stared at one another in surprise and approval, while the shiqdār commented to his colleagues that “Allah, the sacred, has bestowed much wisdom on the Franguis [European].”
But the friar’s appeals to Islam and Islamic sentiment were to no avail. The shiqdār turned to Manrique and replied that notwithstanding the religious truths he had just uttered, when Akbar had conquered Bengal—sixty-five years previous to this time—he had given his word “that he and his successors would let [Bengalis] live under their own laws and customs: he [the shiqdār] therefore allowed no breach of them.” With that the Muslim offender was led off to prison, while the others were given leave to return to their caravansarai, it now being 3:00 A.M. The punishment would be severe. By local custom, Manrique tells us, this particular offense required a whipping and the amputation of the right hand. Feeling compassion for the prisoner, Manrique tried the next day to intervene on his behalf by plying the shiqdār’s wife with a piece of silken Chinese taffeta, worked with white, pink, and yellow flowers. This time his gift yielded its intended effect. “She, by importuning her husband, cajoling him, and pretending to be annoyed with him,” he wrote,
at length accomplished what we so ardently desired, that no mutilation of any of the prisoner’s members should take place; for although the Governor had decided to forgo the punishment of the amputation of a hand, it did not follow that they would not cut off the fingers from it. But such is the power of a lovely face, strengthened by the seal of matrimony, that even the remission of the fingers was acceded to, and in the end it resolved itself into no more than the carrying out of the whipping.[65]
What is remarkable in this narrative is not that the culprit was released with only a whipping. Given that the accused was a Bengali Muslim being tried and sentenced by a Muslim judge, and that the offense was understood as one that violated specifically Hindu sensibilities, it may seem remarkable to modern readers that the man was punished at all. Yet we hear the words the shiqdār used when interrogating the accused: “How then didst thou dare in a Hindu district to kill a living thing?”[66] The shiqdār clearly ruled on the principle that the district’s predominantly Hindu population must be judged according to its own customs and not by Islamic or any other law. Nor were Muslims to be judged differently from Hindus when it came to breaching local custom, informed in this case by Hindu sentiment. Notwithstanding Manrique’s appeals to the official’s own religious beliefs, the shiqdār, though duly impressed by the friar’s knowledge of Islam, at once invoked the pledge made by Akbar to allow non-Muslims to live under their own laws and customs.
The incident compares with Islam Khan’s refusal to encourage or reward religious conversion while subduing Bengali rebels some thirty years earlier. The Mughal government was simply not interested in imposing or advancing religious causes, either in its official pronouncements or, what is more important, in the way provincial commanders or local district officials implemented official policy. Ultimately, the Mughals had conquered Bengal in order to augment the wealth of the empire, and not for the glory of Islam. And they understood that the application of social justice was a more practical means to achieving this end than was religious bigotry. This, in any case, was the policy that a lowly shiqdār of Naraingarh professed on that rainy night in August 1640. Neither a foreigner’s appeal to the common Islamic faith binding the judge and the judged nor bribes slipped to the shiqdār’s wife prevented the execution of that policy.
In sum, the vignette of Fray Manrique and the several peacocks illustrates the functional compartmentalization of religion and politics in Mughal Bengal. Legally, such compartmentalization was expressed in the strict protection of Hindu custom in local courts. Spatially, it was expressed in the emergence of two functionally discrete cities—Dhaka, the administrative center, and Gaur-Pandua, the sacred center. It was also expressed in the lack of congruence between the Mughal heritage and the Islamic religion in the imperial service, since non-Muslims were not obliged to convert to Islam on entering the Mughal ruling class. This de facto separation of religion and state permitted a distinctively Mughal style of political authority, etiquette, patronage, and architecture to survive and flourish throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Yet the functional compartmentalization of religion and politics also encouraged an autonomous Muslim ashrāf class to view itself as a self-contained community encapsulated within the larger Mughal ruling class. Seeing Islam as the proud emblem of their cultural heritage, ashrāf Muslims did not regard their religion as something that should properly be assimilated by the indigenous classes of non-Muslim “natives,” whether those were the more Sanskritized Hindus of West Bengal or the less Sanskritized semi-tribals of the east. Hence the Mughals did not officially encourage conversion to Islam among the general population. Nonetheless, Bengalis in various parts of the delta responded quite differently to the imposition of Mughal rule and the influx of Mughal culture, including Islam. Politically, responses ranged from placid acceptance to outright rebellion; religiously, they ranged from indifference to an exceptional degree of Islamization. Let us look closer at these responses.