I am wading into one of the most fierce ongoing debates. It is about shrinking the space occupied by the Mughals in the history textbooks, which, the so-called seculars and liberals think is unfair to the legacy of the Great(?) Mughals. However the other view is that the space hitherto occupied by them is disproportionately large, overtly glorified and embellished with a lot of fiction.
Let us examine some of the facts. The 'glorious' period of the Moghul empire - between Babur's arrival in 1526 and Aurangzeb's death in 1707 - is 181 years and it occupies nearly 1/3 of history textbooks. The peak period of the Gupta dynasty was between 319 to 477 CE, 158 years and it is wound up in one chapter by historians like Romila Thapar.
The admirers of the Mughals talk passionately about the Taj Mahal and Red Fort but would never dare discuss the destruction of the traditional architecture of India - the Kashi Vishwanath temple, the Ram Janmbhoomi temple and Krishna Janmbhoomi temple.
They also never tell that the most valuable literature in North India was created not with the support of the Mughal court, but in spite of them. Tulsidas, Surdas, Mirabai and Kabir never got any royal support or patronage whereas the Gupta courts actively promoted the likes of Aryabhatta and Kalidas.
A certain Shashi Tharoor has given a very funny logic that Mughals were 'Indian' because more than half of the Mughal princes were born to Indian mothers. Dear Tharoor, why are you rubbing salt into the wounds of a hurt psyche? Can you give one, only one, example of a Mughal shahzadi being given to an Indian family in marriage?
Furthermore, why the obsession that the history of India is only the history of monarchies in and around Delhi? How much space do you give to the Vijaynagar Empire, its economy and socio-cultural richness? In fact , I don't remember if Odisha and the North Eastern parts of India get any coverage during the Mughal era.
And why only the Mughal period? Even before that period the history of the southern India never got proportionate coverage. How many students of history have in depth knowledge of Cher-Pandya-Chola? How many know that more than 2000 years ago a certain Ilangovan created a classic called "Shillapadikaram" which should be ranked alongside the best literature created in the subcontinent? Mir and Ghalib were great poets but there were better and greater poets.
The fact remains that the history of India has been written more like fiction (like Nehru's Discovery of India) rather than History.
Akbar and Bharmal, a Mughal emperor and a Rajput king, between themselves stitch up a political treaty whereby the later "gives away" his daughter to the former. The poor girl, raised in Rajput customs and traditions, goes into a household with unfamiliar culture and food habits. She finds herself in a very large harem of women acquired through a large variety of formal and informal marriages. And the fools create romantic concoctions around this story. No feminist cries foul that Akbar, a party to this treaty, was anything but great.
*Akbar the 'Great':* The oft-quoted icon of the composite culture. We can try to sift what has been presented from what really happened.
The siege of Chittorgarh (1567–1568) when Akbar was already married to Harka Bai. So it's not like Asoka's invasion of Kalinga that happened soon after Asoka's coronation. The 'secularisation' of Akbar had already happened in 1562 when, through a treaty with Aamer, he married Harka Bai (filmi name Jodha Bai).
It is documented in the contemporary sources that Akbar gave a religious colour to the struggle by declaring it as a Jihād against the infidels. After the conquest of the fort, Akbar ordered a general massacre of Chittor's population in the course of which 30,000 Hindu civilians were slaughtered and a large number of women and children were enslaved.
He also issued a victory letter on 9 March 1568 where he addressed his governors of Punjab about the campaign (quoted by Andre Wink):
"We, as far as it is within our power, remain busy in Jihad and owing to the kindness of the superior Lord, who is the promoter of our victories, we have succeeded in occupying a number of forts and towns belonging to the infidels and have established Islam there. With the help of our bloodthirsty sword we have erased the signs of infidelity from their minds and have destroyed temples in those places and also all over Hindustan."
Do we know that Akbar was created as "Akbar the Great" as a parallel to Ashoka the great? And, mind you, Ashoka was not created by a JNU bunch and a Nehru. Ashoka's name was lost to history until he was identified by the British scholar and orientalist James Prinsep (l. 1799-1840 CE) in 1837 CE. After reading Ashoka's inscriptions, and being amazed by the contents thereof, Prinsep accorded the status of "Great" to Ashoka.
Lest misunderstood, let me confess that Nehru's Discovery of India is a great writing. I dare not contest that. But does it pass for 'History'? I concede that Pt Nehru's account is not altogether fictional, but he certainly did not carry out any research to form opinions and derive conclusions. Pt Nehru has derived conclusions of his choice. Had he accessed any primary sources? There is no evidence. Did he have knowledge of historiography? Certainly not. I am giving an example of another book, "Aag Ka Daria" by Qurtlain Haider. In her book she has traced the evolution of Indian culture from the 6th century BC till her own times, the twentieth century. Maybe purely my personal view, but her book, categorised as 'fiction', is less opinionated about different phases. So, my view about the book by Nehru is that it may not be fiction, but it is not history either. Nehru was a very learned person, he has written a great book, but he was not a historian.
When historians like Prinsep and Vincent Smith wrote, before picking up the pen they had carried out extensive research of the primary sources, the scriptures in the case of the history of ancient India. Even our own historians of the first generation, scholars like DR Bhandarkar, RK Mukherjee and RC Majumdar have all supported their theories with intensive study of primary sources. Till date, to my mind, the least opinionated book on mediaeval history is by Iswari Prasad. Unfortunately, their works got systematically marginalized to promote the 'desirable' version written by the likes of Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib and Bipin Chandra.
The greatest disservice to our collective psyche has been to present a 'desirable' history. Unfortunately, we don't have a supply of the likes of Majumdar and Roychaudhary. My worry is who will pick up the threads from where they left?
We are living in an era of intellectual fraudsters. There is one Ramchandra Guha who carries the tag of a historian. His academic credentials? He graduated from St. Stephen's College, Delhi with a bachelor's degree in economics in 1977, and completed his master's in economics from the Delhi School of Economics. He then enrolled at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, where he earned a Ph.D. in Sociology, focusing on history and prehistory of the Chipko movement.
Historical blunders have to be corrected.
