What will be the impact of erasing the Mughals from Indian history?

 Published

10 Apr, 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Aurangzeb holds court. Credit: Bichitr, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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The National Council of Educational Research and Training has just published a revised set of textbooks. The biggest change: an entire chapter related to the Mughal empire has been dropped from the Class XII history book, relating the workings of the imperial courts.

NCERT textbooks are used by students taking the Central Board of Secondary Education examinations, which are managed by the Union government. In terms of absolute numbers, the CBSE is followed by only a small proportion of Indian high school students. But given its prestige, it often acts as a guiding light for other boards.

For CBSE students, the removal of the chapter is a loss. The 30-odd-page text is beautifully written by Najaf Haider of Jawaharlal Nehru University and provides a succinct description of how the Mughal court was extensively involved in the production of its own histories. Texts such as this offer a wealth of information not only about the a highly centralised Mughal bureaucratic empire but also about medieval India.

A partial history

Without an understanding of the Mughals, it is unclear how history students will be able to understand medieval South Asia and, especially, the Hindi belt, which was the heartland of the empire. To take one example of how tightly the Mughals are woven into subcontinental culture, biographers of Tulsidas tell of a meeting between the Vaishnav poet-saint and Emperor Akbar. While probably apocryphal, given that in the tale, Akbar is impressed by Tulsidas’ power to work miracles, it illustrates how important the Mughal state was even for cultural and religious figures.

Similarly, in 1857, when the sepoys of the British East Indian Company revolted, they rushed to Delhi to solicit the Mughal stamp of approval, even though by that time, the emperor was powerless.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Capture of the leader of the Indian rebels and last Mughal King, Bahadur Shah Zafar. Source: London Printing and Publishing Co., Ltd., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

However, the effects of the deletion of this chapter will not be limited to students. The demonisation of Mughals is a core part of Hindutva, India’s ruling ideology that now stands on a nearly equal footing with Indian nationalism itself. As Hindutva’s chief ideologue Vinayak Savarkar laid out, Hindutva sees Muslims and Christians as perpetual outsiders in India. Attacking the Mughals is a key part of how Hindutva imagines Hindus as victims as victims even though they are the majority in India.

While mainstream historians recognise the British Raj as a colonial period, Hindutva supporters extend this idea back much further. In 2014, for example, the newly elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke of India having undergone “1,200 years of slavery”, presumably dating the country’s colonial age to the eighth century Arab conquest of Sindh in modern-day Pakistan. Framing India’s colonial experience as the longest-ever in the world provides a powerful source for Hindutva to draw on for its politics of victimhood.

Though this is ahistorial, it has paid rich dividends for the Bharatiya Janata Party. The constant ideological battle over India’s medieval period has provided powerful ideological buoyancy to the BJP that other other parties have found difficult to counter. This nationalist debate over history, in turn, has allowed the BJP to paper over economic and social fault lines that would have easily felled less ideological governments such as the United Progressive Alliance.

Lack of history

Of course, the battle for history will have much longer-term consequences than merely a few elections.

For one, the attack on the Mughals remakes the idea of India, casting it as a Hindu state. For a sovereign to be legitimate to Hindutva supporters, the ruler has to have been Hindu. This obviously rules out the Mughals and the many sultanates that dotted South Asia from Bengal to the Deccan. In some ways, it also excludes the Buddhist Ashoka. Sanjeev Sanyal, one of the Modi government’s chief ideologues, has sharply attacked Ashoka for “large-scale religious persecution”. (This analysis leaves out Hindu kings, who on the matter of, say, caste, are not held up to modern standards.)

In an even more fundamental way, however, these omissions will end up reshaping the foundation of the Indian state. Modern nation-states are, as the theorist Benedict Anderson suggested, based on “imagined communities” that share most commonly a language or, in some cases, religion. However, they also look back to historical states to legitimise themselves.

Modern China, for example, is a state with the Han ethnicity as its majoritarian core. Yet, it takes great care to include non-Han dynasties as a legitimate part of the historical Chinese state. The final Chinese dynasty, for example, are the Qing who were not Han but from the minority Manchu ethnicity. Yet, modern China includes them as legitimate emperors of China. It views the Mongol Yuans who ruled it the same way. (As it so happens, the word Mughal is a Persianised form of Mongol and the Mughals proudly noted the fact they descended, on the maternal side, from Genghis Khan).

This is not only catholic. It is a clever part of state formation. It allows China to project the myth of an unbroken history of thousands of years. It is also a powerful historical weapon for Beijing to wield in international affairs. For example, China’s claim to Tibet is based on the region’s conquest not by any Han king but by the Mongols. It now this to justify its occupation of significant swathes of Indian territory.

Hobbling India

In contrast, India is currently in an odd situation. Legally, modern India is a successor state of the British Raj – universally seen as a foreign-controlled, colonial state. But while the British might offer some legal justifications, modern India clearly would not want to claim inspiration from Britain’s Indian empire.

Till now, Indian nationalists could fall back on the Mughal empire. The powerful medieval state, at its height, covered a large section of territory that now forms part of the Indian Union. However, if the Mughals too are branded as a colonial power, the modern Indian state has nothing to offer as medieval equivalent. Unlike the Chinese, who can easily deploy the Mongol conquest of Tibet, the current Indian government will not be able to use the powerful argument that Ladakh has been a part of India since the Mughals integrated it in the seventeenth century.

To understand how powerful this history is for state building, it is worth noting that even Modi has, for a decade now, used the Mughal Red Fort in Delhi as a backdrop for state functions such as Independence Day. In 2021, when farm protestors stormed the Red Fort, harking back to Sikh oral histories of attacks on Mughal Delhi, there was widespread outrage in Hindutva circles: given the continuities between the Mughal state and the modern Indian Union, they saw the Red Fort as an Indian symbol.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Modi at the 2022 Independence Day function at the Red Fort. Credit: PTI.

Space for a non-Delhi history?

While the erasure of the Mughals might present problems in extending the Indian state back in time, it may inadvertently address a long-highlighted problem: the lack of texts that correctly portray the subcontinent’s diverse political pasts.

Given that much of medieval North Indian history overlaps with Mughal history, it was easy to give the dynasty the lion’s share of historical space. However, other states in India have their own histories that often diverge sharply from Delhi’s. With the gradual erasure of the Mughals and the pan-subcontinent history they so easily portrayed, the Indian Union’s many states and communities may finally have the opportunity to tell their own rich histories.

Source: The India Fix

Blogger's Note:

Christianity came to India in the 1st century C.E. The reason for the suppression of the real strength of Christianity in India, as Jenkins put it, “is because of systematic and widespread persecution by Hindu extremist sects, often operating in alliance with local governments and police authorities" Sep 12, 2020

Islam came to India in the 10th century.

History is repeating.  Hindutva is not Hinduism.

Watch: Why you shouldn't believe the video in which Narendra Modi says he's only passed high school

Modi Watch

It's truncated, giving the false impression of the prime minister admitting to not having got a college degree.




By now, everyone knows that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s educational qualifications have come under a scanner. Thanks to Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's Right to Information query, the Central Information Commission has directed the Prime Minister's Office to provide the "specific roll number and year" of Modi's degrees from Delhi University and Gujarat University.

Against this backdrop, a video clip (above) circulating on social media has been seized on by many to establish that Modi himself has admitted to having only passed Class Ten. In truth, that's not what he said. The clip has been truncated to make it seem that way.

In this old interview, well before he became the Prime Minister, Modi starts off by saying he is not very educated, and then clarifies to the astonished host Rajiv Shukla that he finished high school before leaving his home. The clips is cut off abruptly, to suggest that's the end of the story.

The entire interview (video below) tells a different story. Modi explains that he got his undergraduate and graduate degrees as an external student. (Also, that he came first.)



Of course, this doesn't settle the controversy. But it does establish that, contrary to belief, Modi has not made any admission of failing to have moved beyond Class Ten.

In his election affidavits, Modi has mentioned that he completed his undergraduate degree through a distance learning programme from Delhi University in 1978, and, later, his MA from Gujarat University in 1983. Although Gujarat university has issued statements supporting that claim, there are allegedly no details available, according to this report.

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Source: scrollin

Nothing new: Modi’s own favourite police officer raised fears of growing intolerance in 2002

The prime minister, then as Gujarat CM, ignored an official letter warning against boycott of Muslims following the 2002 carnage and, when questioned, pleaded amnesia about it in 2010.

Manoj Mitta  · Today · 09:00 am

For all its rhetoric, the two-day special discussion in Parliament on “Commitment to the Constitution” has done little to dispel the concerns of civil society over growing intolerance. But it should be no surprise, for in his earlier avatar as chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi has a record of disclaiming knowledge of such a warning even from one of his own trusted police officers.

A letter from Gujarat 2002 presaged, however unwittingly, the intolerance on display in India 2015. It’s an official communication from then police commissioner of Ahmedabad, PC Pande. He was such a favourite of Modi that, although the largest number of Muslims had been killed in his jurisdiction during the carnage, Pande went on to become the state police chief.

In the letter to his superior in the home department, Ashok Narayan, on April 22, 2002, less than two months after the massacres in Ahmedabad, Pande complained about the “undesirable activities” of the Vishva Hindu Parishad and its youth wing, the Bajrang Dal, both of which were described by him as “organisations supporting the government”. Going by Pande’s own description in that mail, the “undesirable activities” were actually a range of serious crimes such as extortion and mobilisation of Hindus to enforce a social and economic boycott of Muslims.

The modus operandi

Betraying an inability to exercise the legal powers vested in him, Pande recorded a chilling account of the hate mongering that was going on in Ahmedabad even “when the situation", in his words, was "returning to normal”. This was how Pande, a key member of the Modi regime in Gujarat, listed out what the Hindutva outfits were engaged in:

    * In Ahmedabad city, activists of VHP and Bajrang Dal are extorting money from merchants, on the pretext of providing protection from the minority community. Out of helplessness, the merchants pay up but they are unhappy about it.

    * VHP and Bajrang Dal activists are exerting pressure on merchants to prevent employment of members of the minority community in their areas of business. The merchants are scared of revealing this truth in public or to the police.

    * There are instances in which whenever members of the minority community go for jobs in the localities of the majority community, they are intimidated and told to look for jobs in their own localities. Since this is adversely affecting their means of livelihood, members of the minority community are quite frustrated about the situation. Consequently, stray incidents of violence are taking place. VHP and Bajrang Dal activists are involved in these incidents.

    * In places where properties of the minority community are burnt and destroyed, members of the minority community, besides being intimidated, are not being being allowed to reopen their shops. One cannot rule out the possibility of such incidents being driven by interested persons to misappropriate the properties involved, with the help of VHP and Bajrang Dal.

Without a word of explanation for his own inaction, Pande concluded his letter saying that there was “an urgent need on the part of the state government” to clamp down on the VHP and Bajrang Dal for “widening the chasm between the two communities” and to avert the danger of alienated Muslim youths “taking to violence”. But there was no follow-up whatsoever from the state government, despite Pande’s buck-passing and the gravity of the details flagged by him.

How the letter came to light

The letter would have probably never come to light had copies of it not been marked by Pande to the then state police chief, K Chakravarthi, and the then state intelligence chief, RB Sreekumar. Sreekumar produced the document before the Supreme Court-appointed special investigation team in 2009 while testifying on riot victim Zakia Jafri’s complaint accusing Modi and others of complicity in the 2002 mass violence. This was followed by the testimonies of Narayan and Pande confirming that they had received Pande’s letter.

Chakravarthi told the SIT that he had advised Pande on the phone to take action if there was any specific complaint against the VHP or Bajrang Dal members. Pande however told him, according to Chakravarthi’s testimony:

    “the affected parties were not willing to come forward with a written complaint and as such the matter needs to be brought to the notice of the government to control such nefarious activities”.

Chakravarthi testified that he had then called up Narayan to “apprise” him of Pande’s views.

Narayan, on his part, testified that he had spoken about Pande’s letter with not just Chakravarthi but also Modi. The conversation he claimed to have had with Modi has a contemporary resonance. For when Narayan urged him to “use his good offices” with Sangh Parivar activists to “restrain” them, Modi was apparently reluctant to intervene. Narayan said that “the CM was noncommittal” even as he held forth “in a general manner that the state government was committed to the safety and security of all the citizens living in Gujarat”.

Convenient amnesia

So did Modi himself admit that he was “noncommittal” about Pande’s allegations against his saffron supporters? After being shown Pande’s letter, Modi was asked during his testimony in 2010 as to what action he had taken on it. Modi ducked the SIT’s question, saying:

    “In this connection, it is stated that I do not remember now, whether this issue was brought to my notice or not”.

The amnesia pleaded by Modi seemed to have, however, forced the SIT to cover up Pande’s letter. As with so many other inconvenient facts, the SIT report made no reference to the letter. Any reference to this tell-tale issue, especially the disparity in the testimonies of Narayan and Modi, would have come in the way of the SIT's blanket exoneration. For it could not have touched upon the police commissioner’s missive without running the risk of admitting Modi’s negligence, if not collusion.

After the SIT clean chit had paved the way for his ascent to the office of the Prime Minister, Modi seemed to have come full circle earlier this month when VHP supremo Ashok Singhal passed away. Making no bones about his affinity for this staunch votary of Hindu Rashtra, Modi tweeted that the deceased leader was “an inspiration for generations” and that he was “always fortunate to receive Ashok ji’s blessings & guidance”.

Little wonder then that in the course of the SIT investigation, Modi disclaimed any knowledge about the hate campaign run by the VHP and its youth wing even when one of his trusted police officers had warned in writing about it.

Manoj Mitta authored The Fiction of Fact-Finding: Modi and Godhra. As a fellow with National Endowment for Democracy, Washington DC, he is currently working on a book on impunity for caste violence.

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Source: scrollin