Mughals? Who were they?

One thing the latest ‘rationalisation’ of NCERT books has done is to make the Mughals topical centuries after they passed into history. They are now comprehensively the “bad boys” of Indian history. This is part and parcel of exposing students to “our own” (read, Hindu) kings rather than those who came as invaders. Now that studying the Mughal period of our history is going to become, well, history, why not undertake a thought experiment before we let those 300-plus years appear as a giant hole in India’s history? No, this article is not going to be akin to memes predicting future responses to ‘who built the Taj Mahal?’ It’s a genuine thought experiment.

This moment already merits the question, can history’s bad boys genuinely be seen as having any value for the 21st century? Instead of studying the Mughals in their pejorative contemporary rendition, can we study them as human beings – with their narcissist failings, quirks, and eccentricities? Not only that, but is it possible to see them as people of their own epochs and circumstances, with the kind of human idiosyncracies that have glimpses of our own? At great risk of being declared excommunicado, we undertake this exploration.

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Let’s start with Akbar. They tout him as the ecumenical humanist, don’t they? Delving into his life shows us that even he was known to construct skull towers, those savage assertions of rabid triumphalism. A perplexing fact. How do we redeem the humanist now? His biographer Abul Fazl justified this by saying that Akbar did it to match “the standards of” Allauddin Khilji. Clearly, these “standards” were barbaric. In the 16th century, Akbar aimed to live up to, or surpass, the cult of Khilji of 13th-14th century. Cut to the 21st century, a Narendra Modi takes upon himself the title of “Pradhan Sevak”, with “Pratham Sevak” having already been taken by a certain Jawaharlal Nehru of the previous century. Further, the Nehru Jacket becomes the Modi Jacket with great alacrity! Was Khilji for Akbar, and Nehru for Modi, an “intimate enemy” (to borrow Ashis Nandy’s wonderful phrase) -- they clearly hate them, but want the world to think they’re better than them?

Allow me to stay on skull towers for a moment more. While Akbar’s skull towers help us understand that an aversion to a ruler’s predecessor is quite normal, Babur’s instrumentalisation of skull towers is a good guide to understand another phenomenon that plagues modern India – the art of “othering”. Manimugdha Sharma mentions in Allahu Akbar a telling incident in this regard. Babur had erected two skull towers in Kohat after his successful skull campaign of 1505. About 150-odd Afghans had come out of their pillaged town to shout at Babur’s army -- quite natural, since their homes had been demolished and their future uncertain. But to set an example, Babur killed them and erected a minaret of skulls. Notably, he didn’t do that in his own Timurid homeland of Transoxiana or Mawarannahr, because those were his “own” people. The Afghans were foreigners -- the “other”, so using terror against them was justified.

Cut to today, we don’t mind “othering”, either. Draconian attacks on Opposition politicians do not bother us – they are the “other”; we didn’t elect them for a reason, after all. Communal lynchings or instances of caste discrimination do not bother us, they affect the “others”. We flaunt India as a creature of diversity, plurality, and syncretism, but how true do we stay to that foundation? Are we being vigilant citizens and checking acts of oversight on the part of the State? Therein lies a non-Mughal tale.

Fascinatingly, the Mughals also showed us that creative propaganda is not something we have pioneered. The period is filled with innumerable instances of propagandist low blows: Akbar filled a dummy of Hemu with fireworks after the latter’s death and laughed publicly as it burned, even after Akbar had humiliated him enough in battle. This had a psychological rationale too, by symbolising the denunciation of Hemu’s very being. Turn to political party election campaigns today; low-level jibes for Opposition parties show us the medieval impulses that we have not eradicated even in a modern democratic polity.

Not to forget the media; the glaring partisanship of some sections of legacy media is akin to the audation of Mughal chroniclers like Abul Fazl, whose paintings were clever ploys hiding political messages. The beauty and ostentatiousness disguised the propaganda that was being attempted as people didn’t realise the political message underneath. At Chahal Shatun, there is a painting of Humayun meeting Shah Ismail to seek help and refuge. It shows Shah Ismail as larger in size and hence superior to Humayun, whose associates are also shown as standing, while Shah Ismail’s men are comfortably seated.

The same painting is reproduced in Fazl’s Akbarnama. However, here, both kings are shown to be of equal stature. Equal height and similar posture project a meeting of equals. Amazing how projection can change the very interpretation of an event. The 21st century has the television and its array of news channels. Unfortunate to note, Mughal chroniclers were dependent on the benignity of the despot for survival; the media in a democracy is meant to check despots. The cults of political personalities, the “image management” that has revamped politics as a game of competitive credibilities, and even the deference we Indians still foster toward our rulers, reflected in the extremely presidential nature of both state and national level elections, show that we are not as removed from the Mughals as we would like to believe.

From the Mughals to today, there is clearly a great similarity in traits of human personality, and how they express themselves in the political realm. NCERT may not consider the Mughals worth the effort, but our thought experiment shows us otherwise. Must we lose out on all that is rich, vibrant, interesting, and valuable in an era if it is politically uncomfortable, and throw out the baby with the bathwater?

History must not be taught in fragments, or by jettisoning that which is politically uncomfortable. The beauty of history is that epochs might change, but people, it seems, rarely do. Let students explore that for themselves!

(The writer is a student of political science at Kirori Mal College, Delhi
University)