Disowning the Mughals

Revisionists seem determined to erase the contribution of Muslims to India's evolution as a strong, pluralistic society. But we must study them without fear or favour

History, naysayers say, is an unfaithful wench. No historical narrative is pure—governed, as it often is, by political schools and therefore liable to many interpretations. Primary sources are rare to come by and accessible only to a well-funded and industrious researcher, a problem often compounded by insurmountable linguistic barriers; secondary sources are often repetitive, regurgitative, and therefore inauthentic—all of which call for extraordinary skills to undertake the job of history-writing.

Read | NCERT removes chapters on 'Mughal Empire' from Class 12 History book

There are schools of thought constantly at loggerheads with one another: Marxist historians versus the right-wingers; historians from the ‘Cambridge School’ versus the subaltern historians; nationalist historians versus the internationalists; and so on. But even if we concede that history-writing is always subjective and prone to biases peculiar to secular, nationalist, and Hindutva historians, turning our back on our Islamic past, as evident from the decision to remove chapters on Mughal history from our school textbooks, however reprehensible that may appear to the ruling dispensation, is an act of intellectual vandalism.

While historical revisionism refers to any reinterpretation of recorded history, regardless of whether that is good, bad, or necessary, the history of revisionism, which seeks disruptive changes to undo the status quo in the narrative, is unfortunately not the monopoly of the BJP. It is true that the Hindu sectarians are desperate to suppress important facts about the joint history of Hindus and Muslims, and school textbooks in India are, to a great extent, being refurbished now to either exclude or reduce the contributions of Muslims. For example, in Pakistani textbooks, the violence perpetrated against Sindhis by Arab General Muhammad Bin Qasim, who conquered Sindh in 712 AD, is not discussed because he is portrayed not as a persecutor but as a saviour. In India too, there seems to be an urgency to replace the previous “Marxist” textbooks with new “saffron” ones. This stridency for historical revisionism, evident since the destruction of the Babri Masjid and subsequent emergence of the right-wing Hindu communal forces in the last decade, might explain why the origins of the communal divide in the subcontinent have been brought into focus in social sciences and culture studies.

In case we care to look around, it is instructive to see how, after the Awami League returned to power in Bangladesh, history textbooks incorporated ‘corrective retellings’ of events surrounding the liberation war, particularly on the role of Islamic fundamentalists who had sided with the Pakistani Army rather than the Bengali freedom fighters, and in accounts on how the fundamentalists murdered Bengali intellectuals in 1971 and how they supported Pakistan. The political tussle between the Awami League and the BNP (Bangladesh National Party) in Bangladesh served as a crude example of historiography being subservient to political expediency.

We have seen how disparate personalities such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, and Veer Savarkar, among others, have been subject to revisionism time and again.

In Russia, a number of historical and literary personalities who were regarded with disdain in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution—figures as diverse as Peter the Great, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Lermontov, Alexander Pushkin, and Ivan the Terrible—returned to canonical status during the darkest days of the Stalin era.

Narratives change. Revisionists, who are also disparagingly called “Holocaust deniers,” claim that the Germans never planned to exterminate the Jewish people, that the killing factories, homicidal gas chambers, and gas vans did not exist, and that the figure of five to six million Jewish victims is an irresponsible exaggeration. Revisionists do not rule out that many Jews were shot by the Germans in the occupied Soviet territories, but they consider the figures peddled by the orthodox historians to be heavily inflated. But the rider is that anti-revisionist repression is especially ferocious in Germany, with hundreds of German revisionists being sentenced to stiff fines and jail sentences, most being prosecuted according to paragraph 130 of the Criminal Code (incitement to racial hatred). Denial of the Holocaust means exclusion from civilised humanity and destruction of one’s public life and academic reputation.

The omission of the Mughal empire from school textbooks is part of a larger agenda in sync with how the BJP-led central and state governments have renamed several landmarks and places in recent years, especially those linked with Mughal rule. After six gardens of the Rashtrapati Bhavan, including the iconic Mughal Gardens, were renamed Amrit Udyan’, leader of the opposition in the West Bengal Assembly Shuvendu Adhikari said names and symbols of the Mughals should be “uprooted and thrown away.” But however porous history might appear to be, facts on the ground cannot be suppressed.

To the question of whether India would have fragmented into many small states in the absence of British rule, eminent historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam once noted that the Mughal empire left a powerful cultural and institutional legacy of cohesion, however much we neglect that due to the ascendancy of Hindu right-wing rhetoric. Reading the archives and texts related to the Iberians, the Ottomans, the Mughals, the British, and other actors, Subrahmanyam took care to show unexpected connections and refractions during the period between 1500 and 1800, which was one of intense inter-imperial competition. He gave special attention to the depiction of South Asian empires in European visual representations, finding a complex history of cultural exchange: the Mughal paintings that influenced Rembrandt and other seventeenth-century Dutch painters had themselves been earlier influenced by Dutch naturalism, showcasing how these empires often borrowed from each other or built their projects with knowledge of other competing visions of empire. In short, to understand India, we cannot turn our back on our imperial past, despite the painful associations they evoke.

If pain and shame are the reasons why we behave maniacally with our Islamic past, there can be no room for denial. There is persistent international pressure exerted on the internal affairs of the education ministry in Turkey to express remorse in their school textbooks regarding the massacre of Armenians. How can a history book on China remain silent on the repression of the Uighur people and the Tibetans despite the chilling resonance it has with Nazi Germany’s imprisonment of Jews and other minorities? How can a post-independence history of India remain silent on its blind spots?

The impact of Islamic belief on scientific advancement, social structures, and cultural development is well documented. The stories of the Umayyads, Abbasids, and Ottomans, alongside accounts of Muslim Spain, the savannah kingdoms of West Africa, and the Mughal Empire of India, along with the later European colonisation of Muslim lands and the development of modern nation-states in the Muslim world, are not something that can be wished away.

The fact that the Mughal Empire dominated India politically, culturally, socially, economically, and environmentally—right from its foundation by Babur in 1526 to the final trial and exile of the last emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar at the hands of the British in 1858—is inalienable. We must remain open to exciting new insights, theories, and interpretations that come our way to understand the empire’s three centuries of rise, preeminence, and decline, however controversial and complex they might be, without fear or favour.

(The writer is a Kolkata-based
commentator on geopolitics, development and culture)