At the most, history textbooks in Indian schools might mention that a couple of temples were destroyed during Mughal times. That is not the same as mass forced conversions. I am asking you for evidence of the latter. Are there no scholarly studies or articles on this issue ?
Indeed. That there were instances of forced conversion is not to be denied. But it is dubious indeed to argue that the vast mass that converted did so under the force of the Islamic sword. We should remember that the regions on the fringes of political power during Muslim rule witnessed the greatest numbers converting to Islam and not the upper Gangetic Plain, where political and military force was at its most potent.
We, also, need to question exactly what conversion to Islam in South Asia means. In the words of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, writing in the Indonesian context, "Islamic conversion is not as a rule, sudden, total, overwhelming illumination but a slow turning to toward a new light." As Rafiuddin Ahmed has shown, it was as late as the nineteenth century in Bengal that many Muslims ceased to invoke the name of God as ‘Sri Sri Iswar’ and adopted Muslim surnames. On the other side of the Subcontinent, Richard Eaton has indicated that in Pakpattan, “it was as early as the fifteenth century, [that] Muslim names began to appear among Jat tribes associated with Baba Farid’s shrine, but they did not become dominant among those tribes until the early eighteenth, indicating a very slow and apparently unconscious process of Islamization.”
Richard Eaton is preeminent among historians who have studied the matter of conversion to Islam in South Asia. A historian known for immersing himself in archives, he has studied the growth of Muslim communities in the Deccan and the Punjab, but is most well known for his study on the ‘rise of Islam’ in Bengal. It was, as he reminds us, a region that became home to the second largest Muslim ethnic group after the Arabs. In the Sultanate period, pockets of Muslim communities sprung up but it was only during the Mughal period that mass Islamisation transpired.
In explaining conversion, Eaton highlights the following. Those that converted in eastern Bengal were people that had little exposure to Hinduism. As the course Bengal’s rivers moves eastwards the area witnessed a transition to settled agriculture, specifically wet rice cultivation. The Mughals gave land grants to many Muslim religious leaders who were tasked to clear forests and to make the land arable. These religious entrepreneurs be they mullahs, pilgrims that had returned from Mecca, preachers or pirs, were also responsible for establishing religious institutions that came to dot the Bengali landscape- mosques, shrines and Qur’an schools. Around these religious institutions and guided by charismatic holy men, a people that had formally been engaged in shifting cultivation or fisherman became absorbed into an Islamic cosmos.
Therefore the rise of Islam in Bengal owed much to the conjunction of environmental, economic and political factors, as the expanding agrarian frontier coincided with expanding Muslim political frontier.
We should note that the process of Islamisation certainly accelerated in the modern period. Although movements seeking to purify religious practices had existed for many years in Bengal, it was especially prominent from the eighteenth century onwards. The challenge of colonial rule, Islamic reform movements such as the Fara’izi and the Tariqah-i Muhmmadiyah, the growing numbers undertaking pilgrimage and the dispersal of paper and paper-making technologies, all facilitated “displacement” of local deities and their replacement by Islamic agencies.
Islam therefore, in the region of Bengal, became the religion of the axe and plough.
The memory of the tracts of jungles being cleared by their ancestors created a deep connection to land amongst Bengali peasants and shaped Muslim Bengali cultural discourse.