As part of its “syllabus rationalisation” process last year, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) deleted various elements of the syllabus from its class 12 textbooks, citing “overlapping” and “irrelevant” reasons, including teachings on Mughal courts, and it stirred a hornet’s nest, goading for an objective debate on the subject. NCERT Director Dinesh Prasad Saklani clarified that chapters on the Mughals have not been ‘dropped’ from CBSE books and said, “It’s a lie. Chapters on the Mughals have not been dropped. There was a rationalisation process last year due to COVID; there was pressure on students everywhere,” the NCERT director told ANI.
While the chapters on the Timurids—popularly and, as a matter of fact, wrongly glorified as Mughals—haven’t been expunged in toto as falsely sensationalised and propelled by a select clique, and that too, globally, the moot point remains the need to prospect and retell the Mughal history of medieval India, and this time, matter-of-factly. This may pique the interest of and affront many ‘eminent historians,’ but the time is ripe to divest the long-stuck bandages off the colonial past and the mindset where Indian history has been written by foreigners, painting us in a poor light. That mindset laid the foundation of the historiography for the Marxist historians in independent India, who picked up cues from that.
The NCERT head further added that expert committees appraised the books from standards 6–12. “They recommended that if this chapter is dropped, it won’t affect the knowledge of the children, and an unnecessary burden can be removed… The debate is unnecessary. Those who don’t know can check the textbooks…,” Saklani noted. That’s the bone of contention for a legion of individuals and disparate sections, including the writer himself. The Gen-Z generation and posterity—unbeknownst of their genesis, their civilisational journey and struggle with the Abrahamic invaders, and the resistance put up by their ancestors—need to be educated with this rousing history.
The Muslim invasions of the Indian subcontinent began in 1000 A.D. and lasted for several centuries with the invasion of India by Mahmud of Ghazni. Nadir Shah erected a mountain out of the skulls of Hindus he murdered in Delhi alone. After Babur conquered Rana Sanga in 1527, he constructed towers of Hindu skulls at Khanua, and performed the same at Chanderi after conquering the fort. After capturing Chittorgarh in 1568, Akbar ordered the wholesale extermination of 30,000 Hindus. “Bahmani sultans in central India (1347–1528) killed a hundred thousand (100,000) Hindus, which they set as a minimum goal whenever they felt like punishing the Hindus; and they were only a third-rank provincial dynasty,” writes Indologist Dr Koenraad Elst in his telling article ‘Was There an Islamic Genocide of Hindus?’ Col. James Tod, the British historian, writes, “Akbar measured his success by the quantity of cordons (janeu) taken from the necks of the slain Hindus. And 74 and a half muns is the amount recorded. A mun is 40 kilos. So, 2980 kilos were the weight of the threads of Janeus on the Hindus killed on that dark day.”
From available historical and contemporary eyewitness reports, we have extensive literary evidence of the world’s biggest holocaust. Historians and biographers of India’s invading armies and later rulers have left extensive chronicles of the atrocities they performed in their day-to-day contacts with Hindus. These contemporary panegyric records are overweening, gloating, and glorifying the monstrous crimes committed, and the genocide of tens of millions of Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains, as well as mass rapes of women. The destruction of thousands of ancient Hindu and Buddhist temples and libraries has been well documented and provides solid proof of the world’s largest holocaust. To cite a few out of the plethora of first-hand sources available:
The Afghan ruler, Mahmud al-Ghazni, invaded India no less than 17 times between 1001 and 1026 AD. The book ‘Tarikh-i-Yamini’, written by his secretary, documents several episodes of his bloody military campaigns. “The blood of the infidels flowed so copiously [at the Indian city of Thanesar] that the stream was discoloured, notwithstanding its purity, and people were unable to drink it… The infidels deserted the fort and tried to cross the foaming river. but many of them were slain, taken, or drowned. Nearly fifty thousand men were killed.”
The Persian historian, Wassaf, writes in his book ‘Tazjiyat-ul-Amsar wa Tajriyat-ul-Asar’ that Alauddin Khilji (an Afghan of Turkish origin and second ruler of the Khilji Dynasty in India, 1295–1316 AD) once asked his spiritual advisor (or ‘Qazi’) as to what Islamic law was prescribed for the Hindus. The Qazi replied: “Hindus are like mud; if silver is demanded from them, they must, with the greatest humility, offer gold. If a Muslim desires to spit into a Hindu’s mouth, the Hindu should open it wide for the purpose. God created the Hindus to be slaves of the Mohammedans. The Prophet hath ordained that if the Hindus do not accept Islam, they should be imprisoned, tortured, and finally put to death, and their property confiscated.”
The Mughal emperor Babur (who ruled India from 1526–1530 AD), writing in his memoirs called the ‘Baburnama’, wrote: “In AH 934 (2538 C.E.), I attacked Chanderi and by the grace of Allah captured it in a few hours. We got the infidels slaughtered, and the place that had been Daru’l-Harb (a nation of non-Muslims) for years was made into Daru’l-Islam (a Muslim nation).” In Babur’s own words, in a poem about killing Hindus (from the ‘Baburnama’), he wrote: “For the sake of Islam, I became a wanderer; I battled infidels and Hindus;
I determined to become a martyr; thank God I became a killer of non-Muslims!”
The atrocities of the Mughal ruler Shah Jahan (who ruled India between 1628 and 1658 AD) are mentioned in the contemporary records called Badshah Nama, Qazinivi, and Badshah Nama, Lahori, and it goes on to state: “When Shuja was appointed as governor of Kabul, he carried on a ruthless war in the Hindu territory beyond the Indus triad… The sword of Islam yielded a rich crop of converts…. Most of the women burned themselves to death (to save their honour). Those captured were distributed among Muslim mansabdars (noblemen).”
American historian Will Durant rightly argued in his 1935 book, ‘The Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage’ (page 459): “The Mohammedan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. The Islamic historians and scholars have recorded with great glee and pride the slaughters of Hindus, forced conversions, abductions of Hindu women and children to slave markets, and the destruction of temples carried out by the warriors of Islam between 800 A.D. and 1700 A.D. Millions of Hindus were converted to Islam by sword during this period.”
The first point to be accentuated, if not to ponder upon, is the presence of profuse documentation and historic accounts, yet obscurity in the national consciousness. Secondly, what is the motivation of the vested lobby to espouse the barbaric Mughals and tout them as the torchbearers of Bhartiya culture? Thirdly, why a dire need to create an equivalence of the modern-day Bhartiya Muslims with the gory Timurids when the distinction is palpably clear? It is paradoxical for the flagbearers of pseudo-secularism to bat for the grisly butchers called the Mughals, all the while claiming their secular credentials. This is where this writer differs with his erudite editor friend when the latter opines, “NCERT Mughal Saga Exposes India’s ‘Eminent’ Historians And Their Subterfuge,” for this may turn out to be a classic case of “too late, too little.” This nation needs to know that more than 40,000 temples were razed during the Islamic invasion of Bharat.
Aabhas Maldahiyar writes in an article, “Borrowing references from Fatawa ‘Alamgiri to project Mughal history should be the last thing anyone should do, for the book had nothing more than contempt for the kafirs.” The writing on the wall says that time is propitious for the government of the day to muse on the topic of austere course correction in the wrongly prescribed civilisational saga before things get vague and muddied by the scope of time and the sly left hand of Marxism, while being buoyant of further and prompt changes, before it’s too late!
Yuvraj Pokharna is an independent journalist and columnist. He tweets with @pokharnaprince. Views expressed are personal.
Read all the Latest Opinions here
Comments
0 comment