Shruti Philosophy: The Hinduism that stands forgotten – Acharya Prashant

July 3, 2026VOI

The Upanishads stand where they have always stood: patient, piercing, waiting for the reader willing to be transformed. The question is whether we will stop postponing our own clarity and embrace the self-knowledge they offer. – Acharya Prashant

The morning begins in a house where everything is already decided by the past. The daughter is told to speak softly, dress “modestly”, and remember that a woman’s honour lies in obedience. The son is served first because “that’s how it has always been.” The maid uses the back door because the front is “not for her kind.” A neighbour’s illness is dismissed as fate, a child’s curiosity as an omen. If someone disputes these practices, an elder will quote a verse from a scripture they have never read and insist that this is the culture and tradition. Discrimination turns into discipline, casteism becomes order, superstition becomes faith, and fatalism becomes wisdom, mandated by texts they neither understand nor care to.

The Upanishads are sitting in the same city, unread. Yajnavalkya’s debates on the self, Nachiketa’s meeting with Death, and Ashtavakra’s unyielding advice to Janaka: these works that used to define a civilisation’s understanding of reality are now collecting dust, as astro downloads grow. Ask a devotee about the Kena Upanishad, which asks “By whom is the mind directed?”, and you get a blank stare. Ask about a ritual fast, and every detail is offered with aplomb.

This is not a harmless shift. It is a civilisational forgetting.

We call ourselves followers of Sanatan Dharma, yet few can explain the words. Vedanta is not one school among many; it is the philosophical culmination of the Vedic corpus, the summit toward which the Vedas move. To claim the Vedas as supreme while ignoring Vedanta is to possess a treasure and never open it.

The Bridge That Collapsed

To understand how we arrived here, one neglected distinction must be seen clearly: Shruti and Smriti.

Shruti means “that which was heard.” It refers only to the Vedas and the Upanishads. The philosopher-sages did not call themselves authors but seers. They claimed no originality; they said, “We heard.” Hence, Shruti is described as apaurusheya, not authored by human intention, making it timeless and authoritative.

Smriti means “that which is remembered.” It includes the epics, the Puranas, and the Dharmashastras. While useful for ethical guidance, Smriti is human-written and carries the colours, proclivities, and weaknesses of the human mind. These works reflect not the eternal truth but an author’s perspective influenced by the conditions of his era.

Smriti arose for a reason: The Upanishads are strict in their demand. They declare that the self one assumes is an illusion, that only Brahm is, and that one is ‘That.’ This is unbearable to the ego. Stories, rituals, and symbols were meant as a bridge toward this truth. A bridge is valid only if it leads somewhere; when it becomes the destination, preparation turns into postponement. The bridge collapsed.

Vedanta dissolves the ego. The ego resists dissolution, so it reshaped religion in its own image: gods to be pleased or angered, heavens to be earned, rituals promising reward. What was to lead toward Shruti was made a substitute for it.

Shruti remains the final authority. Whatever in tradition aligns with it is valid dharma. Whatever contradicts it, however old or popular, stands disqualified.

What Popular Religion Teaches

Look honestly at today’s Hindu practice. Much of it arises from genuine longing: the desire for meaning, protection, transcendence. That longing is not the problem. The question is whether these practices honour it or go against it. Do they align with Shruti or contradict it?

Worship as transaction: People make offerings, place requests, and wait for results. The lord is approached as a higher power who can be swayed through devotion, gifts, or persistence. Worship runs smoothly on this logic, and not many find anything wrong.

Psychologically, this breeds dependence. Instead of asking what is false within, the mind asks what must be offered to secure protection or advantage. Fear dresses as faith, obedience as devotion. The ego survives because it is never examined, only bargained with.

Vedanta dismantles this structure completely. The Mundaka Upanishad distinguishes between higher knowledge and lower, placing ritualistic action in the lower category. In the Katha Upanishad, Yama tells Nachiketa that the Self is not attained through instruction, intellect, or accumulated acts. Ashtavakra goes even further, declaring that he solely worships the Self. Once this is realized, petitionary worship collapses. One realises one was never intended to beseech the Absolute.

Physical locations as sacred: Pilgrimage is an important part of religious life. Sacred sites promise faster spiritual progress through physical closeness. The journey is hard, the effort visible, the seriousness unquestioned.

Yet pilgrimage often becomes movement without inner movement. Distance is mistaken for depth, fatigue for transformation. The body travels far, so the mind may avoid travelling inward. One returns with memories and souvenirs, but the same unexamined self resumes its routine.

Shruti leaves no ambiguity. The Mundaka Upanishad states plainly that the Self is found in the heart, not in geography or destinations. One may travel thousands of kilometres outward and still remain untouched within.

Fasting and vows: These are widely practised as spiritual bargaining. They may build discipline, but often reduce to “Suffer now, receive later.” Endure deprivation so that destiny might soften.

Psychologically, this preserves the ego while disciplining the body. The mind stays unquestioned while the stomach is trained. One feels serious without facing the far greater discomfort of self-inquiry. Austerity becomes a substitute for understanding.
Vedanta does not endorse this trade. In the Katha Upanishad, Yama tells Nachiketa that austerity without right knowledge does not lead to the Self. Ashtavakra is blunt: bondage arises from identification with the body, and only knowledge cuts that bond. If the problem is identification, starving the body does not address it. One can starve for years and remain as stuck as before.

Astrology and planetary fear: People fear Saturn, blame Rahu, wear gemstones and prescribe rituals. They project personal confusion onto the sky, and the adult mind goes back into infancy, seeking reassurance rather than clarity.

Vedanta does not contest astrology; it simply renders it superfluous. It doesn’t ask, “Which force governs me?” but, “Why am I so eager to believe something else does?” Astrology gives answers without understanding and predicts without responsibility. It survives only where there is reluctance to face one’s own fear, desire, and indecision. Once this question is faced honestly, planetary anxiety loses its grip.

The domesticated deity: Perhaps the most revealing distortion is what has been done to Krishna. This sentimental figure inspires devotion in millions, yet the voice of the Gita’s Krishna, revealing the structure of reality, has been softened into something manageable and harmless.

This choice is psychological. A god who demands transformation threatens comfort; a god who demands surrender threatens identity. A domesticated deity asks nothing and changes nothing.
When Arjuna breaks down on the battlefield, Krishna does not soothe him or offer emotional shelter. He calls out the confusion directly, telling Arjuna that what appears as compassion is ignorance, and that grief born of attachment is not wisdom. This is not a god who comforts a trembling mind; this is clarity speaking to delusion. One image of Krishna demands inner change, the other lets us remain as we are. We have chosen the latter, and we live with what that choice produces.

These practices differ in appearance, but they arise from the same refusal: to look directly at oneself. Ritual replaces inquiry, movement replaces insight, suffering replaces understanding, fate replaces responsibility, comfort replaces transformation. The forms are many; the avoidance is one.

The Lamp in Darkness

The irony is painful. Vedanta has awakened seekers across the world, yet remains unread in the civilisation that birthed it. The lamp was lit here, but the darkness remains here.

We recite stories with passion but often cannot explain a single Mahavakya: ‘You are That.’ We elevate Smriti above Shruti and then complain that our culture feels confused. We turn Krishna into sentiment and then wonder why courage does not appear. A civilisation does not collapse by losing rituals; it collapses by losing truth.

The test is straightforward. Whatever aligns with Shruti is dharma. Whatever defies Shruti, however old or beloved, is not. Shruti demands only one thing: self-knowledge. Everything else is ornament. Without Vedanta, Hindu identity risks becoming ritual without philosophy, sound without meaning. Offering flowers may express devotion, but it is not Sanatan Dharma. Seeing the Self is.

The Upanishads stand where they have always stood: patient, piercing, waiting for the reader willing to be transformed. The question is not whether they are available: they are, freely and abundantly. The question is whether we will stop postponing our own clarity and embrace the self-knowledge they offer. – The Pioneer, 20 December 2025

› Acharya Prashant is a teacher and author whose work centres on self-inquiry and its application to contemporary life.

India’s rise discredits China and the West – Minhaz Merchant

July 1, 2026VOI

Trump, Xi, Modi

India with its slow and steady rise, two steps forward, one step back, is the quintessential tortoise to the Chinese and American hares. But both China and America know who won the race – Minhaz Merchant

No nation has risen from an impoverished European colony to a major global power. India’s rise has been as unexpected for China and the West as it is unsettling.

Other global powers rose through either colonialism (Britain, France, Spain, Portugal), invasion (America, Canada, Australia) or communism (China, Soviet Union).

India’s rise—chaotic and incomplete but unstoppable—is different: no colonial conquest, no extraterritorial invasion, no communist dictatorship.

If India can become the world’s third largest economy by 2030 (which it will) and the world’s fourth largest military (which it already is), then the means other major powers adopted in their rise stand thoroughly discredited.

That is why India’s rise will be a “resisted” rise. The rise of other great powers was an “assisted” rise. The British Empire, for example, passed the baton willingly to the United States. The Soviet Union helped China rise.

Washington and Beijing have now arrived at a temporary modus vivendi. They will not let their competition lead to confrontation. On Taiwan it might have but US President Donald Trump has signalled it won’t. He paused $14 billion arms sales to Taiwan days after his summit meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing last month. In return Xi has pledged an uninterrupted supply of critical minerals to the US.

That doesn’t mean the world’s two largest economies don’t have friction points. Last week, Beijing expelled Vivian Wang, a New York Times correspondent based in China because the newspaper interviewed the President of Taiwan, even though Wang was not involved in the interview. The US instantly reciprocated by expelling a senior Chinese journalist from Xinhua, China’s state news agency.

Beijing has placed a limit of 100 on the number of US journalists allowed to report from within China. The US has placed a similar limit on Chinese journalists based in the US. Trade between the two countries continues to fall. It has plunged from $690 billion in 2022 to $414 billion in 2025.

At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on May 30, US defence secretary Pete Hegseth warned: “There is rightful alarm regarding China’s historic military buildup and the expansion of its military activities in the region and beyond. No state, including China, can impose its hegemony and hold the security or prosperity of our nation and our allies in question.”

Hegseth then offered an olive branch to Beijing: “President Trump and this administration seek a stable peace, fair trade, and respectful relations with China.”

Hegseth acknowledged India’s growing military power: “A powerful India, acting in its own self-interest, advances our shared goal of maintaining a balance of power across the region. India is modernizing its military to carry its share of the security burden, particularly in the Indian Ocean. It’s building out the heavy industrial and logistics capacity to sustain high-end military operations. We’ve also committed to pursuing co-production with India to advance capabilities like Javelin anti-tank guided munitions, real tangible steps to improve the collective readiness of our forces.”

Decline and fall

Despite their rhetoric, Trump’s America and Xi’s China are both declining superpowers. The US economy grew by a paltry annualised 1.6 per cent in the January-March 2026 quarter. China’s economy is sputtering. Consumption has plummeted. Oversupply of manufactured goods has forced Chinese companies to slash prices. Many have gone bankrupt, including dozens of electric vehicle (EV) makers.

It takes decades for the decline of major powers to manifest itself. For example, the decline of colonial Britain and France was slow at first. But after their failed joint attempt to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956, the ability of London and Paris to influence global affairs fell sharply.

Could the Iran war be America’s Suez moment? It is exactly 70 years since Washington prevented Britain and France from seizing the Suez Canal in 1956. US global power has since been unrivalled, with the Soviet Union collapsing in 1991. China’s tiny economy was not yet a threat to Washington’s global hegemony.

As Washington and Beijing evaluate the rise and fall of nations across geographies over the next 25 years, they see a toothless Europe, fragmented Asia-Pacific, economically stressed Latin America, and war-torn Middle East.

India stands out in splendid isolation. Third largest economy soon. Fourth largest military already. Stable democracy with a noisy Opposition, an activist media, a strong judiciary and an economy growing at an average annual rate of 6.5 per cent, despite trade and war disruptions.

And yet. India confounds the West and China. Its bureaucracy is opaque. Regulations are onerous. Rote education stifles innovation. Corruption at state and municipal levels is endemic. Poverty is declining but millions of Indians are still destitute.

Can such a country ever rise to the stature of a major global power? Students of history recall the abject poverty of China in the 1980s and the 1990s and the famines of the 1960s and 1970s that killed millions of Chinese during Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution. They also recall the Great Depression of 1929-39 in the US when the stock market fell by 75 per cent and several American traders committed suicide by jumping off Wall Street’s skyscrapers.

Much can happen in the next 25 years. What is certain is that Europe will continue to atrophy. America will begin a gentle decline. China will age, shrink and grow old before it grows rich.

› Minhaz Merchant is an editor, author and publisher.

George Orwell: His war on totalitarianism, humbug, and sugar in tea – Preksha

June 28, 2026June 30, 2026VOI

On his 123rd birth anniversary, George Orwell remains a touchstone whenever societies argue about power, freedom and truth. – Preksha

In the spring of 1928, a young Englishman named Eric Blair moved into a rented room in a working-class neighbourhood in Paris. The walls of which, he would later describe as “thin as matchwood”. Despite an Eton education and five years with the Indian Imperial Police in Myanmar, he gave both up voluntarily. Seventeen years later, Blair would write the allegorical novella Animal Farm and then the dystopian novel 1984 under the pseudonym George Orwell—a name that outlived the man who created it.

During the Cold War, Orwell was the prophet of totalitarianism. After 9/11, he became a writer of surveillance. In the age of social media, algorithms, misinformation and governments that know more about their citizens than ever before, “Orwellian” has become one of the most overused adjectives in political vocabulary.

On his 123rd birth anniversary, the writer remains a touchstone whenever societies argue about power, freedom and truth. The fascination shows little sign of fading.

Perhaps, it was his first-hand experience witnessing the harsh realities of poverty, class division, and the rise of totalitarianism that influenced his later writings. Or perhaps it was writers such as Charles Dickens and Jonathan Swift, but one thing is clear: George Orwell did not beat around the bush. With a sharp, crisp, and direct manner, Orwell weaponised language as an instrument of truth rather than a medium of embellishment.

Les jours sombres

Blair did not find initial success, like most authors. He lived at the Paris address for eighteen months, writing novels and short stories that no one would publish. For days, he went without food and eventually pawned his clothes to survive.

Robbed and destitute, the budding novelist took a job as a dishwasher in a Paris restaurant. Working brutal hours in the dingy kitchens, he continued writing. Drawing on these observations, he would later write in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) that “the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.”

In August 1929, still in Paris, he sent an essay to the Adelphi magazine in London. “The Spike” was an account of spending a night in a workhouse. It was accepted and published under his real name.

But the tide turned slowly and with help. In December 1929, Blair returned to England and went directly to his parents’ house in Southwold. Over the next three years he wrote reviews, taught at a private school, and wrote and rewrote what would become his first full-length work, Down and Out in Paris and London.

The manuscript was rejected by Jonathan Cape and then by Faber & Faber. Before it was rescued by a friend, Mabel Fierz, who showed it to a literary agent. Years after Blair had left Paris penniless, Victor Gollancz published it in January 1933. And so the world came to know George Orwell.

When the time came to publish, his parents, Blair feared, would be embarrassed by what the book revealed.

“As to a pseudonym, a name I always use when tramping etc., is PS Burton, but if you don’t think this sounds a probable kind of name, what about Kenneth Miles, George Orwell, H. Lewis Always. I rather favour George Orwell,” Blair wrote to his literary agent in 1932.

‘Bah! Humbug!’

Eric Blair was born on 25 June 1903 in Bihar’s Motihari, the son of a British official in the Indian Civil Service. Before he was two, his mother had taken him and his sisters back to England. He would spend years trying to understand exactly where that placed him. In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), he said, “I was born into what you might describe as the lower-upper-middle class.”

Scholarships carried Blair to Wellington and then Eton, two of England’s most prestigious schools. “

For people like me, the ambitious middle class, the examination-passers, only a bleak, laborious kind of success was possible,” Blair later wrote in Such, Such Were The Joys published in 1952.

He explained the different outcomes possible if the middle class slacked on its upward mobility ladder.

“You clambered upwards on a ladder of scholarships into the Civil Service or the Indian Civil Service, or possibly you became a barrister. And if at any point you ‘slacked’ or ‘went off’ and missed one of the rungs in the ladder, you became ‘a little office boy at forty pounds a year’. But even if you climbed to the highest niche that was open to you, you could still only be an underling, a hanger-on of the people who really counted,” he claimed.

But the Englishman knew the ladder well enough; he did, after all, become the ultimate voice of caution against it. He left in 1921 and climbed the rung leading to colonial service in the Indian subcontinent.

In his 1936 essay, “Shooting an Elephant,” written after he had walked away from the Indian Imperial Police, Blair described having been sent to shoot a rogue elephant. Standing there, with a rifle in hand, before a crowd of two thousand Burmese, he realised that the animal no longer needed to die, but he fired because the crowd expected it.

“I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalised figure of a sahib,” he wrote.

By the time he left Burma at twenty-four, Blair had come to strongly oppose imperialism. He wrote later in his fifth book, Road to Wigan Pier (1937), “I hated the imperialism I was serving with a bitterness, which I probably cannot make clear”.

He left Burma in June 1927 on a medical certificate and never returned.

The following year found him in Paris: poor, unpublished, and persistently pursuing a life he had dreamt of as a child. After all, imagination cannot breed in captivity; it must be let free to roam, wander, and survive on its own.

“From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer,” he recalled in the 1946 essay “Why I Write.” He tried, for a while, to want something else. Between seventeen and twenty-four he turned away and felt, the entire time, that he was “outraging his true nature.”

He came back as writers always do, like a bee to the sweet scent of honey.

“What I have most wanted to do is to make political writing into an art,” he confessed.

But the young wordsmith also knew that work written without political fire went cold. He admitted that his purpose was not separate from his prose.

“Looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.”

Humbug. He spent his whole life at war with it. Truth, after all, is a revolutionary act.

A war that took him from Parisian slums to the coal mines of northern England, to the blood-soaked trenches of the Spanish Civil War and eventually, a cold farmhouse on a Scottish island.

Orwell’s war with totalitarianism also led to some of his greatest works and successes in life—Animal Farm. Written in 1943 and 1944, it was a thin fable about farm animals who overthrow their human master, only to find the pigs who lead the revolution had become everything they fought against.

Knowing it was a thinly-veiled critique Stalinism, the children’s book was rejected by four publishers for fear that the book might upset the Western wartime alliance with the Soviet Union. Even fellow essayist T.S. Eliot rejected it at Faber & Faber, and so did Gollancz.

It was finally taken on by Secker & Warburg and published on 17 August 1945.

But by then Orwell was already dying. On a remote Scottish island, consumed by tuberculosis, he typed the final draft himself working through fever and fits of bloody coughing. 1984 was published on 8 June 1949. It introduced terms such as “Big Brother,” the “Thought Police,” doublethink, and “Newspeak” to political discussions and popular culture. It was the dying man’s last gift to the language and the subject he had spent his life honing. 1984 went on to become one of the world’s most enduring warnings and an example of Orwellianism.

George Orwell died seven months later at the age of 46.

A nice cup of tea with Orwell

The man who gave the world biting satire also gave it eleven rules for making tea. Published in 1946, A Nice Cup of Tea finds Orwell arguing about teapots and the right moment to add milk. Like any real Englishman and tea lover, Orwell had strong views about tea, one that should never be taken lightly or messed with.

Tea, he declared, should be strong. The pot should be warmed. Milk should be added after the tea is poured. Sugar, meanwhile, had no business being there at all.

His letters are witnesses to his love affair with the world’s greatest beverage. Writing to Mamaine Koestler, the second wife of journalist Arthur, in January 1947, during the grey austerity of post-war rationing, he thanked her for sending some.

“We always seem to drink more than we can legally get, and are always slightly inclined to go round cadging it,” the tea-lover commented.

For years, the story of Animal Farm was told as Orwell’s alone. It is a version his adopted son, Richard Blair, has further elaborated on in an essay for The Guardian. In August 2025, he argued that the novel should be understood as the work of two people: Orwell and his wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, who typed manuscripts and offered detailed suggestions throughout.

He added that it was his mother who may have steered the project away from a straightforward political polemic toward the beast fable it came to be.

“The result of my parents’ teamwork was one of the most beautifully written books of the century,” Richard wrote.

In a world where authoritarianism, xenophobia, nationalism, and political lying remain, he added, “We need Animal Farm by our side more than ever now.”

Looking for ‘Jaarj Arwil’ in 1984

In 1984, as readers around the world revisited Orwell’s masterpiece, journalist Ian Jack wrote a piece in The Sunday Times titled “In search of a Jaarj Arwil.”

A year earlier, the Scottish journalist had travelled to Motihari and had gone through documents kept in archives at the collectorate. Jack recounted that locals were clueless that their town was the famed dystopian writer’s birthplace.

“I found that nobody, save the district magistrate, had ever heard of Orwell,” Jack wrote.

That began to change in 2003, the centenary of Orwell’s birth, when a local businessman named Debapriya Mookherjee decided something had to be done.

“It’s a matter of pride for us that a writer of his stature was born here. When we saw that no one else was willing to come forward and save the place, we thought it was our duty to do so,” he told The Caravan.

With the help of the Motihari Rotary Club, Mookherjee launched a campaign to protect the site, celebrating Orwell’s birth and death anniversaries, inviting government officials and journalists. In April 2012, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar stopped by at the site while on his sewa-yatra in Motihari.

But Mookherjee met resistance at every turn. Residents rebuked him for promoting an “angrez (British)” writer.

“They simply didn’t know him,” Mookherjee said.

The town’s railway station bore a sign reading Bapudhaam Motihari—Gandhi’s town. The district had staked its identity on the Champaran Satyagraha of 1917. The tension broke into the open when officials laid a foundation stone at Orwell’s birthplace to dedicate it as a monument to Gandhi.

The plan was eventually scrapped. The state government declared the site—the 2.48 acres of Orwell’s house and the nearby opium warehouse—a protected area under the Bihar Ancient Monuments Protection Act (1976).

Gandhi and Orwell were born thirty-four years apart, on opposite sides of the colonial divide. Orwell was not entirely comfortable with Gandhi, and he said as much plainly.

“I have never been able to feel much liking for Gandhi, but I do not feel sure that as a political thinker he was wrong in the main, nor do I believe that his life was a failure,” he wrote in his 1949 book Reflections on Gandhi.

The temptation, with a life like his, is to make it into a monument. To begin in Motihari, pass through Burma and Spain, arrive at 1984, and call the journey complete. Orwell’s life resists such manichean characterisation.

And perhaps, no one understood that better than Orwell himself.

“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful,” he wrote in “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali” (1984).

“A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” – The Print, 25 June 2026

› Preksha is a TPSJ alumnus currently interning with ThePrint.

India: The history they studied in boxes – Nick Collins

June 25, 2026VOI

The Vedas do not describe an invasion or refer to a homeland outside India. The rivers, mountains and animals named in them are Indian. … The archaeological record shows no cultural break between the Indus-Saraswati cities and the Iron Age cultures that followed. So, the revision from Aryan invasion to migration doesn’t work either. – Nick Collins

I spent 40 years in the international shipping industry, in London, Tokyo, Singapore and Dubai. When I decided to write a book on the history of maritime trade, I had no academic position to defend and no orthodoxy to uphold. But I had a working knowledge of how trade actually functions and a professional habit of asking challenging questions and following evidence wherever it led.

When I followed the sea lanes backwards into deep antiquity, I found that they converged on the Indian subcontinent. That was not the book I had intended to write. It was the book the evidence forced me to write. And the more I looked, the more I came to understand that the conventional account of the ancient world had been built on a set of assumptions that nobody had thought to question for a long time.

Where archaeologists chose to dig

In the second half of the 19th century, European archaeologists made remarkable discoveries in the deserts of Mesopotamia: cuneiform tablets, the Code of Hammurabi, the great ziggurats. These were genuine and important finds. They were also conveniently located. The hot, dry climate of Mesopotamia preserves clay and brick beautifully. The Biblical and classical sources European scholars had read pointed them to the region.

So, they dug there. What they found became the foundation of the standard account: Mesopotamia as the cradle of civilisation, the birthplace of writing, of urbanism, of law, of mathematics. The story moved from Mesopotamia to Egypt to Greece to Rome to Christendom to modern Europe in a tidy westward, arc. India appeared only as a colonial possession at the end of it.

What they did not do was dig with comparable intensity in north-west India. Harappa was identified in 1842 but not seriously explored until the 1920s. Mohenjo-daro was discovered only in 1922. By the time these excavations began, the dominant assumption was already set. Mesopotamia was the centre. Anything found in India had to be derivative.

What was actually there

But the Indus-Saraswati civilisation was not derivative. It was the largest and most economically productive society of the ancient world.

By the middle of the third millennium BC, it supported about 300 riverine cities, each with populations of over 50,000 people. Two-thirds of them stood on the banks of the Saraswati, the central of the seven rivers described in the Rig Veda. Canals supplied water to 2,500 dependent settlements. Vedic kings ruled territory stretching, in the words of their own texts, from sea to sea—roughly 1.5 million square miles, comprising what is today Afghanistan, Pakistan and most of north-west India. Egypt covered about 13,000 square miles. Sumer was smaller still.

Cities were laid out with mathematical precision. Streets ran north-south and east-west in a strict grid. Covered drains carried wastewater from brick-built houses with bathrooms. Bricks across every site followed a 4:2:1 proportion. Weights followed a binary system: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32. Buildings were constructed in 5:4 ratios. A division on an ivory measuring rod found at Lothal measured 1.704 millimetres, the smallest Bronze Age unit of measurement ever recorded.

Lothal, its main port, had a dock 214 metres long, built with a million bricks, capable of handling thirty ships of sixty tons—the largest dock in the ancient world. Europe would not match it for 4,000 years. So divorced from maritime trade were the academics who first encountered it that they initially identified it as a communal bathing pool.

The Aryan invasion theory

Once the scale of these cities became impossible to ignore, the existing framework had a problem. So, the framework was adjusted.

The argument, developed by Max Müller and others in the late 19th century, was that pale-skinned Indo-European nomads, Aryans, from the Eurasian steppe, had invaded northern India around 1500 BC, bringing with them literature, mathematics, astronomy and philosophy. The Vedic civilisation was therefore not Indian in origin. It was European, transplanted. The theory preserved the assumption that complex civilisation must originate from European racial stock, and it conveniently justified the colonial presence.

There was no evidence for any of it. The Vedas do not describe an invasion or refer to a homeland outside India. The rivers, mountains and animals named in them are Indian. No earlier-language place names survive of the kind one would expect if an invasion had occurred. Compare the Americas, where indigenous names like Mississippi and Massachusetts remain attached to almost every river and region. Genetic studies carried out between 1999 and 2006, reviewed by Michel Danino across nine large samples, found no trace of any invasion. The archaeological record shows no cultural break between the Indus-Saraswati cities and the Iron Age cultures that followed. So, the revision from Aryan invasion to migration doesn’t work either.

The Aryan invasion theory was a hypothesis to fit a preferred conclusion. It persisted in school textbooks well into the 21st century. It is still found in many today.

The problem of studying history in boxes

Both errors share a single methodological cause. Academic history is divided into specialities. Sumerian scholars study Mesopotamia. Egyptologists study Egypt. Indologists study India. Each discipline trains its own students, runs its own journals and rewards its own internal references. The connections between the boxes are studied less often than the contents of the boxes themselves.

This may work for political history, which universities mainly study. It works poorly for the history of trade, where everything that mattered crossed the boundaries of these boxes. The carnelian beads, timber and food (the latter archaeologically invisible) in Sumerian cities arrived on ships from Meluhha, the Sumerian name for the Indus-Saraswati civilisation. If you study Sumer alone, or Egypt alone, or India alone, the connections cannot be understood.

Correcting the record

When the artificial boundaries between geographic specialities are removed, the picture is consistent across every type of evidence: archaeological, linguistic, genetic, literary, geographic. The Indian subcontinent was the most economically productive and powerful region of the ancient world, and just as with today’s America, its influence on the rest of the world in ideas, culture and language was substantial. It was where the first long-haul maritime trade networks originated. It was the source of the Indo-European language family, not its destination. It was the cradle of philosophical and mathematical traditions that travelled westward through the same trade routes that carried cotton textiles, spices and gems.

None of this is controversial when the evidence is laid out. It only seems controversial because it contradicts a story assembled in the late 19th century by archaeologists working in a different climate, scholars working in a different intellectual tradition and political administrators working with a different agenda.

Correcting the record requires no ideology. It requires telling the story the evidence already supports. The Aryan invasion theory should be removed from textbooks where it still survives.

In my experience, many Indians already suspect this is the case. The evidence is overwhelming. But erroneous ideas are difficult to dislodge when received wisdom is protected by institutional interest. It is time to let the evidence speak. – Firstpost, 22 June 2026

› Nick Collins is the author of a three-volume history of maritime trade published by Pen & Sword Books and Garuda Prakashan. The first volume, How Maritime Trade and the Indian Subcontinent Shaped the World, was shortlisted for the Mountbatten Maritime Literary Award. He spent nearly forty years in the international shipping industry.

3 – Babur’s Sultanate: Parasite on an affluent civilisation? – Aabhas Maldahiyar

June 21, 2026June 23, 2026VOI

When Babur established Timurid rule in Hindustan, the country already commanded about 24.4% of the world’s GDP, second only to China. Hindustan was not made rich by the Timurids. It was already rich when they arrived. – Aabhas Maldahiyar

Imagine a civilisation so wealthy that merchants crossed oceans to reach its shores, so advanced that students travelled thousands of miles to study in its universities, and so productive that its goods filled markets from East Africa to Southeast Asia. That civilisation was Bharat.

Long before Oxford came into existence, Nalanda and Vikramashila were attracting scholars from across Asia. Indian merchant guilds connected distant markets through sophisticated trade networks. Indian textiles clothed the world. Indian steel was prized across continents. Indian mathematicians and astronomers laid intellectual foundations that transformed human civilisation. At a time when large parts of Europe and West Asia were bleeding through endless wars fought in the name of God, Bharat stood as a centre of learning, production, and prosperity.

The ingredients for scientific advancement and even industrialisation already existed. We possessed abundant resources, thriving commerce, skilled artisans, and one of the world’s largest reservoirs of human capital. Yet a troubling question remains: how did such a civilisation eventually become one of the poorest regions on earth?

As we mark 500 years since Babur’s invasion, it is worth revisiting the economic legacy of the dynasty commonly and incorrectly called the Mughals, though they identified themselves as the Timurid Grkniyn. We are repeatedly told that India accounted for nearly one-fourth of the world’s GDP under their rule, as though this statistic alone proves prosperity.

But does a large share of global GDP automatically mean that ordinary people were flourishing? More importantly, was India’s GDP share not already extraordinary before the Timurids set foot on its soil?

The answer lies in the very source most often cited to glorify the Timurid era: British economist Angus Maddison. Yet Maddison’s own estimates undermine the popular narrative. According to his calculations, India possessed the world’s largest share of GDP until around AD 1000 and, at its peak, accounted for nearly one-third of global output. When Babur established Timurid rule in Hindustan, the country already commanded about 24.4% of the world’s GDP, second only to China. Hindustan was not made rich by the Timurids. It was already rich when they arrived.

What happened thereafter is even more revealing. By AD 1600, during Akbar’s reign, China’s lead had widened significantly. The claim that the Timurids created India’s prosperity struggles against the very evidence invoked to support it.

More crucially, GDP measures the size of an economy, not the wellbeing of its people. Maddison’s data shows that per capita GDP growth between AD 1500 and 1820 was negative. The empire remained wealthy, but its people did not become wealthier. The imperial treasury overflowed while large sections of society saw little improvement in their lives.

Contemporary travellers and court chronicles reinforce this picture. In the Baburnama, Babur records dispatching immense quantities of wealth after Panipat to Samarkand, Khurasan, Kashghar, Mecca, Medina, and Iraq. His successors continued the practice. After Akbar’s conquest of Gujarat in 1573 gave him access to Surat, enormous sums from Indian revenues were channelled into Hajj pilgrimages, gifts to Mecca and Medina, and projects designed to enhance Timurid prestige across the Islamic world.

This was not merely an expenditure. It was a sustained outward transfer of wealth from one of the richest lands on earth. The celebrated GDP figures tell only part of the story. To understand the reality of Timurid rule, one must ask a far more important question: who created the wealth, where did it go, and who ultimately benefited from it? One imperial proclamation issued during Akbar’s reign declared:

The travelling expenses of anybody who might intend to perform the pilgrimage to the Sacred Places should be paid.

The scale of wealth flowing out of Hindustan under Timurid patronage becomes stark when one examines the Hajj caravans. According to Dutch merchant-commander Wollebrant Geleynssen, in AD 1576 a royal caravan left Agra carrying six lakh rupees for Mecca. To understand this magnitude, a barber in AD 1637 earned roughly half a rupee a day. That single donation was equivalent to nearly 1.2 million days of a barber’s labour.

Nor was this an isolated gesture. The very next year, another caravan carried five lakh rupees, along with an additional one lakh rupees for the Sharif of Mecca. Contemporary accounts record that people from across the Islamic world flocked to Mecca hoping to receive a share of these riches drawn from Indian revenues.

Behind this generosity lay political ambition. Akbar sought more than prestige. He aspired to become the foremost ruler—caliph—of Islam. In 1579, he persuaded the ulema to recognise his supreme religious authority, adopted the title Padshah-i-Islam, and even began leading Friday prayers in imitation of the Abbasid Caliphs. When these ambitions met resistance, he founded Din-i-Ilahi in 1582. The objective remained the same: Indian wealth was increasingly spent acquiring religious legitimacy and influence far beyond India’s borders.

After Akbar, Jahangir carried forward the same tradition. In his Tuzuk-e-Jahangiri, he records allocating two lakh rupees for the sponsorship of the Hajj:

During the reign of my father, the ministers of religion and students of law and literature, to the number of two and three thousand, in the principal cities of the empire, were already allowed pensions from the state; and to these, in conformity with the regulations established by my father, I directed Miran Sadr Jahan one of the noblest among the Seyeds of Herat, to allot a subsistence corresponding with their situation; and this is not only to the subjects of my own realms, but to foreigners—to natives of Persia, Roum, Bokhara, and Azerbaijan, with strict charge that this class of men should not be permitted either want or inconvenience of any type.

Despite his reputation for religious moderation, Jahangir also continued the transfer of Indian wealth to Mecca. He gifted an amber candlestick adorned with gold, gems, and diamonds, valued at an extraordinary Rs 2.5 lakh. In AD 1650, another jewel-encrusted candlestick accompanied a 300-carat diamond to the holy city. Under Aurangzeb, such patronage expanded further. Between AD 1661 and 1667, he lavished gifts upon rulers and dignitaries from Persia, Bukhara, Kashgar, Balkh, Urganj, and Ottoman-controlled Basra, continuing a long tradition of outward wealth transfers. Sir Richard Burn, the editor of Cambridge History of India, states:

His policy was to dazzle the eyes of these princes by lavish gifts of presents to them and to their envoys, and thus induce the outer Muslim world to forget his treatment of his father and brothers. The fame of India as a soft milch cow spread throughout the middle and near East, and the minor embassies were merely begging expeditions.

The scale of this outward flow of wealth was staggering. Timurid records indicate that Aurangzeb spent nearly Rs 30 lakh between AD 1661 and 1667, while also maintaining annual donations to Mecca through his agents. In AD 1668, he gifted Rs 10 lakh to Abdullah Khan, the deposed ruler of Kashgar who had sought refuge in his court. Yet this transfer of wealth was largely a one-way street, with little of substance returning to India.

French physician-traveller Franois Bernier illustrates this vividly:

When the Ethiopian monarch’s embassy arrived in AD 1664 bearing modest gifts; a mule skin, an ox horn, and a few impoverished slaves; Aurangzeb responded with lavish presents of far greater value.

Aurangzeb’s generosity towards foreign Muslim visitors extended far beyond diplomatic courtesy. The Ethiopian ambassadors were maintained entirely at public expense during their stay in Agra. At a subsequent audience, both were honoured again with rich sashes and a gift of 6,000 rupiah. Yet even here, religion influenced imperial favour. The Muslim merchant received 4,000 rupiah, while Murat, the Armenian Christian ambassador, received only 2,000 rupiah.

The merchant then played his cards shrewdly. He promised Aurangzeb that upon returning home, he would persuade the Ethiopian monarch to permit the restoration of a mosque allegedly destroyed by the Portuguese. Tempted by the prospect, Aurangzeb granted an additional 2,000 rupiah, hoping to finance a religious project in a distant land using revenues drawn from India.

Franois Bernier records a similar pattern with an embassy from the Uzbek Tatars, who arrived bearing modest gifts: boxes of lapis lazuli, a few long-haired camels, several horses, and loads of fresh and dried fruits. Bernier himself described them as remarkable for the “filthiness of their persons” and observed that “there are probably no people more narrow-minded, sordid, or unclean than the Uzbek Tatars”.

Yet none of this diminished Aurangzeb’s favour. The envoys were publicly showered with honours, receiving two rich sashes each, 8,000 rupiah in cash, costly brocades, fine linens, silk woven with gold and silver, carpets, and jewelled daggers. While such largesse flowed freely to foreign Muslim embassies, Bernier also records a harsher reality within India, where tax-defaulting subjects could be hanged from trees. His observations help explain how imperial wealth remained immense even as per capita prosperity stagnated or declined. He writes:

Gold and silver are not in greater plenty here than elsewhere; on the contrary, the inhabitants have less the appearance of a moneyed people than those of many other parts of the globe.

Bernier informs us about Aurangzeb’s period by stating as below:

Labourers perish due to bad treatment from Governors. Children of poor are carried away as slaves. Peasantry abandon the country driven by despair. As the land throughout the whole empire is considered the property of the sovereign, there can be no earldoms, marquisates, or duchies. The royal grants consist only of pensions, either in land or money, which the king gives, augments, retrenches or takes away at pleasure. The artisans who manufactured the luxury goods for the Mughal aristocracy were almost always on starvation wages.

The glitter of the Timurid court concealed a far darker reality. The artisans who produced the empire’s celebrated luxuries were rarely allowed to enjoy the fruits of their labour. Prices for their goods were often dictated by powerful buyers, and refusal to comply could invite imprisonment or even death. Franois Bernier tells us that the very weavers who created some of the finest brocades and textiles in the world walked about half-naked. The hands that clothed emperors could barely clothe themselves.

The same contrast struck the English ambassador, Thomas Roe. In Jahangir’s court he saw dazzling displays of diamonds, pearls, rubies, and unimaginable wealth. Yet as he travelled from Surat to Delhi, another India unfolded before his eyes: an India of poverty, deprivation, and ordinary people struggling to survive beneath the shadow of imperial splendour.

Nothing illustrates this contradiction more brutally than the reign of Shah Jahan. As discussed in the introduction of my book Babur: The Chessboard King, his policies contributed to the catastrophic famine of AD 1630-32, a disaster estimated to have claimed around 7.4 million lives. It was during this very period that he commissioned the Taj Mahal at a cost of approximately 41.8 million silver coins.

The priorities of the Timurid state stand exposed in the celebrations of Nauroz in AD 1628. Shah Jahan opened the treasury with astonishing generosity. Mumtaz Mahal received 50 lakh rupiah. Jahan Ara was gifted 20 lakh rupiah and Raushan Ara 5 lakh rupiah. Contemporary records indicate that nearly 1.6 crore rupiah was distributed as rewards and pensions to the imperial elite alone.

Now place this beside the empire’s response to famine.

Contemporary accounts describe roads littered with corpses. Millions wandered in desperation for food. Fathers tried to sell their sons into slavery so they might survive. Mothers, unable to watch their children starve, threw themselves into rivers along with their daughters. Yet the relief sanctioned by Shah Jahan amounted to only 1 lakh rupiah, barely 2% of what he gifted Mumtaz Mahal on a single festive occasion. At the same time, Mumtaz’s annual maintenance was 1 crore rupiah, the treasury held 6 crore rupiah in cash, and the Peacock Throne alone was valued at nearly 3 crore rupiah.

This was not simply royal extravagance. Angus Maddison estimates that 15 to 18% of national income was absorbed by the state and its dependants. Nearly 21 million people were sustained by an imperial machine of courtiers, princes, harems, servants, slaves, eunuchs, and armies that consumed enormously while producing little. Maddison’s judgment is devastating: “As far as the economy was concerned, the Moghul state apparatus was parasitic.” He further argued that it resembled a regime of warlord predators where wealth was hoarded in jewels and precious metals rather than invested productively.

For a civilisation whose strength had long rested upon its farmers, craftsmen, and productive classes, this was a dangerous transformation. The burden of sustaining imperial grandeur fell upon those who tilled the soil and worked the looms, while the rewards accumulated at the top. As American historian J.F. Richards notes in Fiscal States in Mughal and British India:

The Mughal dynasty’s wealth and power was based upon its ability to tap directly into the agrarian productivity of the Indian sub-continent. Trade, manufacture and other taxes were much less important to the imperial revenues than agriculture, most estimates putting them at less than 10% of the total.

Let us again come back to the writings of Bernier:

Of the vast tracts of country constituting the empire of Hindustan, many are little more than sand, or barren mountains, badly cultivated and thinly peopled; and even a considerable portion of the good land remains untilled from want of labourers; many of whom perish in consequence of the bad treatment they experience from the Governors.

These poor people, when incapable of discharging the demands of their rapacious lords, are not only often deprived of the means of subsistence, but are bereft of their children, who are carried away as slaves. Thus, it happens that many of the peasantry, driven to despair by so execrable a tyranny, abandon the country, and seek a more tolerable mode of existence, either in the towns, or camps; as bearers of burdens, carriers of water, or servants to horsemen. Sometimes they fly to the territories of a Raja, because there they find less oppression, and are allowed a greater degree of comfort.

The reality becomes difficult to ignore once one moves beyond courtly glamour and examines the economic record. Across scholarly literature, the Timurid state never emerged as a benevolent engine of prosperity. Rather, in all those literatures, they appear a vast apparatus of extraction. Historian Tapan Raychaudhuri, in State and the Economy: The Mughal Empire, described it in stark terms:

“The Mughal state was an insatiable Leviathan”.

The essays collected in The Cambridge Economic History of India, edited by Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib, repeatedly underline the same point. The state appropriated an enormous share of the agricultural surplus, leaving little room for capital formation among the peasantry. In the same seminal work, it tells us that the extraction of wealth was not confined to taxation, courtly extravagance, or the export of treasure abroad. Even commerce itself was frequently bent towards serving the private interests of the ruling elite. Historians Habib and Raychaudhuri note that imperial intervention in trade often resembled organised extortion rather than economic governance.

A striking example occurred in 1640-41 when Shah Jahan and his powerful noble Asaf Khan invested 1,00,000 rupiah in cloth at Ahmedabad for export to Mocha. To secure their profits, weavers and dyers were ordered not to work for anyone else until imperial orders had been fulfilled. What should have been a free market was effectively transformed into a monopoly enforced by state power.

Habib and Raychaudhuri further point to the activities of Shaista Khan and Prince Azimushshan in Bengal. Their involvement in trade, they argue, amounted to “virtual extortion organised as commerce”. Merchants were compelled to buy and sell on terms dictated by powerful officials. Shaista Khan extended monopolistic control over commodities such as salt, saltpetre, beeswax, and even fodder. Under such conditions, trade ceased to be a voluntary exchange and became an instrument of extraction.

The consequences extended beyond immediate losses. Productive capital that could have expanded industry, irrigation, infrastructure, or enterprise was increasingly diverted into private hoards. Habib describes treasure accumulation as one of the most wasteful economic practices of the Timurid ruling class. Citing De Laet, he notes that Akbar’s treasury was estimated at an astonishing 522.4 million florins. Shaista Khan alone was believed to have accumulated wealth worth 38 crore rupiah during his tenure in Bengal. Numerous nobles left fortunes ranging between 30 lakh and 1 crore rupiah at their deaths.

The tragedy becomes even sharper when one asks what was done with this wealth. Angus Maddison noted that irrigation under the Timurids remained remarkably limited. In his words, “… But in the context of the economy as a whole, these were unimportant and probably did not cover more than 5% of the cultivated land of India”. For a predominantly agrarian civilisation, this was not a minor administrative lapse. It was a failure with consequences measured in poverty, insecurity, and stagnant productivity.

As I conclude this essay, constrained only by space and not by evidence, one question remains. The issue is not whether the Timurid court glittered. It did. The issue is who paid for that glitter. Every jewel on a throne, every gift to foreign lands, every overflowing treasury was ultimately financed by Indian peasants, artisans, merchants, and farmers. A civilisation does not become poor because it lacks wealth. It becomes poor when wealth is extracted instead of invested. The greatest myth is not that the Timurids made India rich. It is that India’s inherited wealth is mistaken for their achievement. – India Today, 8 June 2026

› Aabhas Maldahiyar is an author, architect and historian. This is the last essay of a three-part series.

2 – If Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb was harmony, why does Kashi’s Nandi still wait? – Aabhas Maldahiyar

June 21, 2026June 26, 2026VOI

If Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb is to be discussed honestly, it must be remembered in its entirety: the courtly festivals and the conquered fortresses, the poetry and the pyres, the celebrations and the massacres. For history ceases to be history when it remembers only the flowers floating upon the river and forgets the ashes carried by its waters. – Aabhas Maldahiyar

Some myths are so beautiful that people stop asking whether they are true.

As I sat down to write the second part of my series on the Timurids, a dynasty still persistently and wrongly called the Mughals, a WhatsApp message arrived carrying a recent Scroll article claiming that Jahangir sought to reconcile Vedanta with Islam. I read it carefully and could only smile. The reason for that smile will become clear soon enough.

This essay concerns one of the most fashionable phrases in modern Indian historiography: Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb. It is invoked as a golden age when faiths embraced, cultures mingled, and the wounds of conquest dissolved into a shared civilisation. Curiously, this renewed celebration arrives alongside the 500th anniversary of the First Battle of Panipat (1526), remembered as the foundation of an empire but seldom as one of the earliest recorded instances of an invading army using Indian villagers as human shields.

The expression Ganga-Jamuni traditionally referred to mixtures and alloys, gold and silver, copper and brass, even mixed grains and lentils. Only in the twentieth century was tehzeeb attached to the phrase, transforming it into a symbol of a supposedly syncretic culture associated with the Sultanate, Timurid, and Nawabi eras.

Yet before we surrender ourselves to the romance of this narrative, a question must be asked: was Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb truly a confluence of rivers, or has history draped the wounds of conquest in the silk robes of nostalgia?

For even today, one of its most enduring monuments stands in Kashi. Nandi still waits for his Shiva, his gaze fixed upon the spot where the sanctum once stood. Centuries have passed, Timurids have crumbled, yet the faithful bull continues his silent vigil, looking towards what later generations were taught to call a fountain.

Perhaps that is the most fitting metaphor for Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb itself.

A civilisation watched temples fall, sacred spaces transformed, and memories renamed. Then it was told that this was harmony. That conquest was accommodation. That loss was synthesis.

And so, before celebrating the flowers floating upon the river, it may be worth asking what became of the ashes carried beneath its waters.

My concern in this essay is only with the Samarkandis, as I prefer to call the Timurids for reasons explained in the earlier essay, and whether this celebrated Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb truly existed in their realm.

Let us go back to that WhatsApp message, and begin with our lover boy Salim, better known as Jahangir, whose interactions with the Vedantic philosopher Jadrup Gosain were highlighted in the Scroll article as evidence of syncretism. But can a handful of meetings really sustain such a sweeping claim?

According to the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, Jahangir met Jadrup only a few times. During these encounters, he interpreted aspects of Vedanta through an Islamic lens and even remarked that Vedanta contained many ideas similar to Islam. That observation itself suggests he misunderstood Vedanta largely, filtering it through familiar categories rather than engaging with it on its own terms.

Yet let us leave aside what Jahangir understood or misunderstood about Vedanta. The Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri reveals a more telling reality. For all his fondness for wine, conversation, and occasional reflections on virtue, a Hindu daughter could enter a Muslim household only after abandoning her gods and embracing Shari’a. Conversion was the price of admission to the emperor’s notion of “harmony”.

If she refused, her fate would be different. She could be reduced to the status of a concubine, a silent presence in the imperial harem, her faith and dignity sacrificed at the altar of accommodation. Such arrangements may be described as coexistence, but they rested upon a hierarchy where adjustment flowed in only one direction.

But the idea of a Muslim daughter crossing the threshold of a Hindu home? Astaghfirullah! A blasphemy so grave that it invited not acceptance, but punishment. Jahangir himself thundered in the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri:

“They ally themselves with Hindus, and both give and take girls. Taking them is good, but giving them, Allah forbid! I gave an order that, hereafter, they should not do such things, and whoever was guilty of them, should be capitally punished.”

This, then, was the Timurid model of coexistence. Hindu women could be absorbed into Muslim households, but the reverse was treated as an affront to both religion and empire. Muslim honour was a fortress; Hindu society, a field open to penetration.

To portray Jahangir as inherently syncretic on the basis of a few philosophical conversations is a scam. Intellectual curiosity toward another tradition does not erase the larger pattern of conduct reflected in imperial decrees and court records.

And what of the supposedly benevolent Shah Jahan? He, too, walked in the footsteps of his father. This brings us to the curious case of Dalpat.

In the 10th year of his reign, a man named Dalpat of Sirhind married a Muslim woman named Zinab, renamed her Ganga, and raised their children as Hindus. Worse still, from the imperial perspective, he reconverted one Muslim boy and six Muslim girls to Hinduism.

Shah Jahan’s response was swift and unforgiving. Dalpat’s wife and children were separated from him, and he was presented with a choice that was often imitated as justice in medieval chronicles: embrace Islam or embrace death. Dalpat chose the sword over surrender, becoming the offering at the altar of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb.

But why stop at regulating marriages? Shah Jahan, never one for half-measures, decreed that apostasy itself was a capital crime. Conversion from Hinduism was celebrated as a triumph of faith; conversion away from Islam invited the executioner’s blade. The road into Islam was open and the road out of it led to the scaffold.

When his son Shuja assumed the governorship of Kabul, he carried this orthodoxy beyond the Indus. The domains of Sankar—ruler of the land—were subdued by force. Sixteen of his sons and dependents were converted, contributing to a reported tally of more than five thousand new adherents. Temples were transformed into mosques, and those who attempted to return to their former faith found little mercy awaiting them.

The rebellion of Jujhar Singh, Bundela ruler of Orchha, followed a similar pattern. Post defeat, his sons and grandsons were recast under new identities as Imam Quli and Ali Quli. His eldest son, Udai Bhan, refused conversion and chose death instead. A younger brother, still a child, too was absorbed into Islam. The women of the household, confronting the realities of conquest, chose self-immolation over captivity.

The conquest of Beglana—around present-day Dhule and Nashik districts in Maharashtra—unfolded at the same rhythm. Naharji’s son was renamed Daulatmand after his conversion, while Nasrat Jang forcibly converted a Brahmin boy, only to be repaid with a dagger in the darkness, a final act of resistance from one who had lost everything else.

Even when armies rested, the coercive power of the state remained active. Blasphemy became a crime carrying the gravest consequences. Hindus accused of insulting the Quran were executed. A Brahmin named Ghhaila, a qanungo of Berar, met the same fate for remarks deemed offensive to the Prophet.

Let us now turn to perhaps the most famous of all supposed symbols of this cultural synthesis: the legend of Jodha Bai.

The story has become so deeply embedded in popular imagination that many accept it as unquestioned fact. Yet the historical foundations are remarkably fragile. Neither the Ain-i-Akbari nor the Akbarnama of Abu’l-Fazl mentions a Rajput queen named Jodha Bai. The name emerges much later in the writings of James Tod, whose Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan often blended folklore, bardic tradition, and historical reconstruction.

The legal framework of the empire rested firmly upon Shari’a. A formal nikah with a non-Muslim woman required her acceptance of Islam. This was not a matter of sentiment but of law. No woman, regardless of lineage or political importance, could attain the status of Malika-e-Hindustan without first entering the fold of Islam.

The woman later identified as Jodha Bai appears in the sources as Mariam-uz-Zamani. Before her marriage to Akbar, she entered Islam and thereafter lived under her Islamic title. Her burial was conducted according to Islamic rites, and her tomb near Sikandra stands as a monument to the identity under which she lived and died.

More broadly, no Hindu princess who entered the Timurid zenana is known to have retained her public Hindu identity. These unions were rarely romantic tales of civilisational fusion, as Bollywood and intellectuals often tried to present. They were political arrangements shaped by the realities of theological power.

So desperate has the search for Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb become that some now seek its reflection even in the life of Aurangzeb. The usual defence follows: Hindu nobles in his court, Hindu generals in his armies, and occasional grants to temples.

Yes, Aurangzeb employed a number of Hindus in his administration for certain periods. But that fact, by itself, proves very little. Empires are not sustained by ideology alone; they are sustained by revenue, manpower, and political necessity. Even the most intolerant regimes in history have often relied upon members of the very communities they discriminated against. Do check the case of Hitler.

The notion that even a bigoted medieval autocrat like Aurangzeb would govern a vast empire populated overwhelmingly by kafirs (as he repeatedly described non-Muslims) without strategically accommodating at least a section of them, defies both logic and statecraft. Yet, as his reign matured, its court grew increasingly dominated by Muslim elites, many of them foreign-born, further distancing the ruling establishment from the people and land it governed.

One of the most frequently cited examples of his supposed tolerance is the famous farman issued to Abul Hasan, the faujdar of Varanasi, on 28 February 1659. In this order, Aurangzeb directed that old temples should not be demolished, while simultaneously prohibiting the construction of new ones. This document is routinely displayed as evidence of a tolerant and inclusive monarch—yet another ruler representing Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb. Yet a closer look at the circumstances surrounding it reveals something rather different.

The year was 1659. Aurangzeb had only recently secured the Timurid throne after a brutal war of succession. Dara Shukoh had been defeated, and on 5 January 1659, at Khajwa, Aurangzeb crushed another rival, his brother Shuja. The defeated prince fled eastward towards Kashi.

At that moment, Kashi was not merely a sacred city. It was a strategically important centre whose population could potentially provide shelter, intelligence, or sympathy to a fleeing claimant to the throne. Barely weeks after Khajwa came the famous farman.

The message behind it was unmistakable: pacify the local Hindu population, prevent any alignment with Shuja, and tighten the net around a dangerous rival.

Sir Jadunath Sarkar saw through the political calculations with characteristic clarity. Referring to this order, he wrote that the farman “had been issued during Aurangzeb’s struggle with Shuja just by way of a political move to win, for the time being, the good will and co-operation of the Hindus for capturing Shuja and had nothing to do with his spirit of toleration”.

The document itself raises an obvious question. If Aurangzeb’s purpose was genuine religious tolerance, why did he simultaneously forbid the construction of new temples? A ruler committed to syncretism does not merely preserve existing shrines while preventing future ones from being built. Such a policy speaks of a calculated restraint.

The chronology, too, tells a lot. The Battle of Khajwa took place on 5 January 1659. The farman followed on 28 February 1659. The two events are separated by barely 54 days. This is not a distant and speculative connection of the kind sometimes invoked to explain away temple demolitions years after the fact. Here the political context and the imperial order stand virtually side by side.

And if one seeks testimony from someone outside modern ideological battles, consider the words of the Italian traveller Niccolao Manucci, who spent much of his life in India and observed the Timurid world from close quarters. In Storia do Mogor he wrote:

“The latter [Aurangzeb], rid of a rajah [Raja Jai Singh] whose influence might have been dangerous to his kingdom, declared that very hour an open war against Hinduism. He sent orders at once for the destruction of the fine temple called Lalta, in the neighbourhood of Dihli. He also ordered every viceroy and governor to destroy all the temples within his jurisdiction.”

Whether one accepts every detail of Manucci’s account or not, it remains difficult to reconcile such descriptions with the modern portrayal of Aurangzeb as a misunderstood apostle of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb.

Indeed, this is the fundamental problem with many contemporary attempts to rehabilitate him and others. Every act of temple destruction is explained away as political necessity, yet every temporary act of restraint is celebrated as evidence of tolerance. Political context is eagerly invoked when it softens his image, but quietly ignored when it exposes the limits of his supposed pluralism. Read together, Aurangzeb’s farmans, the Fatawa-e-Alamgiri, the Maasir-i-Alamgiri, court newsletters, and contemporary testimonies reveal a ruler who repeatedly viewed Hindu institutions through the prism of Islamic supremacy, occasionally tempering ideology only when political expediency demanded it.

And perhaps that is where the larger question of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb must be confronted. If this celebrated ideal truly represented a relationship of mutual respect and cultural reciprocity, why must its defenders rely so heavily on exceptions while treating episodes of persecution, coercion, and destruction as inconvenient footnotes?

Before taking leave of Aurangzeb, one final irony deserves mention. It was under his reign that music itself was officially banished from the imperial court. The ruler who is today enlisted as evidence of composite culture presided over one of the most severe assaults on a tradition that had long enriched the cultural life of Hindustan.

And before I bring this essay on Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb to a close, allow me to leave you with a chilling anecdote.

Whenever the phrase is invoked, we are shown paintings of Akbar or Jahangir celebrating Holi. These scenes are endlessly reproduced as proof of a harmonious age where cultures merged like the waters of the Ganga and Yamuna. Yet there exists another Holi from the Timurid era, one that seldom finds a place in these romantic narratives.

The year was 1568. Akbar had laid siege to Chittor for four relentless months. Following the fall of Jaimal, the eve of Holi witnessed hundreds of Rajput women and girls entering the flames of jauhar, choosing death over slavery to mlecchas (as addressed by Indians back then). Then came the morning of Holi itself. Contemporary accounts record the massacre of roughly 30,000 civilians after the fort fell. Akbar celebrated it as a triumph of Islam over the kafirs.

For whenever I hear of the Holi supposedly shared between the Timurids and their subjects, my mind does not wander to painted miniatures of emperors playing with colours. It returns instead to Chittor. To the smoke rising from jauhar pyres. To the cries of a city facing annihilation. To a Holi where the red that covered the land did not come from gulal, but from blood.

If Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb is to be discussed honestly, it must be remembered in its entirety: the courtly festivals and the conquered fortresses, the poetry and the pyres, the celebrations and the massacres. For history ceases to be history when it remembers only the flowers floating upon the river and forgets the ashes carried by its waters.

In memory of those ashes, and the countless brave men and women who became them, I now rest my keyboard. – India Today, 1 June 2026

› Aabhas Maldahiyar is an author, architect and historian.

1 – The Samarkand Syndrome: Why Babur and family never became ‘us’ – Aabhas Maldahiyar

June 21, 2026June 23, 2026VOI

Five centuries after the First Battle of Panipat (1526), Bharat finds itself revisiting the establishment of the Timurid Gurkhaniya Empire, though often under the historically imprecise label of “Mughal“. The battle itself has left behind celebrated images of gunpowder, cannons, and a transformed military landscape. Yet some legacies remain less discussed. Among them was Babur’s use of villages around Panipat as protective buffers (human shields) during his campaign, an aspect that rarely enters popular memory. But this is not the subject I intend to pursue here.

What concerns me instead is a larger historical assumption that has gradually hardened into conventional wisdom: that the Timurids eventually became Indians, that the dynasty which arrived from Central Asia dissolved itself completely into the soil of Hindustan and came to see India as its unquestioned homeland. The passage of time has made this notion appear almost self-evident.

This essay seeks to question that narrative. For beneath the marble splendour of Agra and the imperial grandeur of Delhi lay another inheritance, one that continued to look northward beyond the Hindu Kush, toward Samarkand, Balkh, and the ancestral landscapes of Timurid memory. To understand whether the Timurids truly became “us”, it is perhaps best to begin with the words of the dynasty’s founder himself.

So, I begin with Babur’s initial reflection on Hindustan:

Hindustan is a country of few charms. Its people have no good looks; of social intercourse, paying and receiving visits; there is none; none of genius and capacity; none of manners; in handicraft and work, there is no form or symmetry, method or quality; there are no good horses, no good dogs, no grapes, musk-melons or first-rate fruits, no ice or cold water, no good bread or cooked food in the bzrs, no hot-baths, no colleges, no candles, torches or candlesticks.

While he cries folly for India, he goes on to say this for Samarkand:

Samarkand, for nearly 140 years, had been the capital of our dynasty. An alien and of what stamp! An Azbeg foe, had taken possession of it! It had slipped from our hands; God gave it again! Plundered and ravaged, our own returned to us.

Indeed, Hindustan did not appear even as a consolation prize for Samarkand—the land Babur regarded as home. Babur himself lays out the reasons with striking clarity in the Baburnama for why he turned toward Hindustan:

1. To fulfil the ambition associated with his forefather Timur and establish Timurid authority in Hindustan under an Islamic political order.

2. Although Kabul was the first place where he assumed the title of Padshah, it generated limited revenue; Hindustan, in his own description, promised abundant wealth, plentiful labour, and a land rich in gold and silver.

3. He had effectively been pushed out of his Central Asian homeland, with his arch-rival Shaibani Khan steadily closing every path back. Thus, despite his enduring longing for Samarkand, the road home had gradually ceased to exist.

For Babur, Hindustan was not the destination of nostalgia; it was the destination of necessity, ambition, and opportunity. Samarkand remained the horizon of memory, while Hindustan became the terrain of survival and empire.

Carrying the old thread of longing across generations, Akbar’s chronicler Abu’l Fazl hints that a powerful attachment to Central Asia flowed through Timurid veins. In his words, even Timur, after devastating India, is described as having been “impelled by the love of his native land”. This was not merely an emotion confined to one ruler. It became an inherited memory, an ancestral pull that echoed through successive Timurid emperors.

As the dream of Central Asia often appeared brighter than its practical rewards, the corridor between Hindustan and the northwest remained a living artery, a strategic passage that the Timurids sought to preserve under their influence and control. Both Babur and Abu’l Fazl emphasise this reality in their respective writings by representing it as a pathway leading toward memory, legitimacy, and the geography of origin itself.

The argument becomes even more visible when one turns to Timurid writings produced after Babur. Their own words frequently reveal that Central Asia continued to occupy the position of “home” in the Timurid imagination. They use the term wilayat (one’s own province or homeland) repeatedly, tying Balkh and Transoxiana into an enduring sense of belonging. This language creates the impression that Hindustan, despite becoming the seat of imperial power, was often seen as an extension of an older world rather than its replacement.

The Maasir al-Umara by Samsam ud Daula Shah Nawaz Khan, a biographical work on Muslim and Hindu officers serving Timurid rulers in India from 1500 to around 1780, refers to Khwaja Abdullah Ahrari of Samarkand as belonging to the wilayat. This detail deserves attention. Shah Nawaz Khan was a courtier of Qamar ud Din Khan, Asif Jah I, the first Nizam of Hyderabad. Had Hindustan been fully internalised as the unquestioned homeland by the eighteenth century, it is difficult to explain why a courtier writing in the Deccan would continue to describe Samarkand as wilayat. The persistence of such terminology suggests that the older geography of belonging had not entirely faded.

The Maasir-i-Alamgiri provides many more such records. Mir Shihab ud Din Siddiqi, a courtier of Aurangzeb born in Bukhara, is described as someone who came from wilayat. The same text states that Khwaja Baha al-Din, the great-grandson of Subhan Quli of Balkh, had arrived from his homeland (az wilayat rasida). Equally, revealing is the manner in which Subhan Quli himself is described as wali (governor) of Balkh in this text. The importance lies in what such language reveals about political imagination. Even though Subhan Quli functioned in practical terms as ruler of Balkh, the vocabulary employed in Aurangzeb’s court framed him as a governor rather than an independent sovereign. Such terminology appears to preserve an older Timurid conception in which regions like Balkh and Transoxiana remained part of an inherited political and emotional universe:

The sword had lost its reach, but memory had not surrendered its territory.

Jahangir’s Tuzuk refers to Wali Muhammad as wali-yi-Turan, while the Padshahnama similarly describes the Uzbek ruler Imam Quli as wali-yi-Turan or “Governor of Turan”. Such language reflects a deeper political imagination and a carefully preserved imperial myth that Uzbek-held lands still existed, at least symbolically, within the orbit of Timurid grandeur and inherited claims.

When the dust of Panipat had barely settled in 1526, Babur distributed the fruits of his victory not merely within India but across the lands of memory. Gifts travelled northward to relatives in Central Asia, to Iran, and to holy men in Samarkand, Khurasan, and the Hejaz. Russian scholar A.A. Semenov sees in these gestures a heart still tied to its homeland, a ruler reluctant to call India home before reclaiming the lands of his ancestors. In a later letter, Babur instructed Humayun that all his subjects in India should aid the effort of reconquest of the homeland.

Seeing an opportunity in the Safavid seizure of Khurasan from the Uzbeks, Babur directed Humayun toward Balkh, Hisar, Samarkand, or Herat, “whichever side favours fortune”. Hisar was intended as Humayun’s province, Balkh for Kamran, and Samarkand as the restored Timurid capital. In 1528, as Humayun marched with forty thousand men toward Samarkand, Babur asked him to wait, assuring him that they would return to their “hereditary kingdoms” (wilayat-i-mawruthi) once Hindustan had been firmly secured.

Humayun failed to recover Central Asia, and soon lost India itself. One cannot help but wonder whether, had fortune favoured him, his gaze would have turned eastward toward India or northward toward his ancestral lands. Even during exile in Iran, his thoughts repeatedly returned to conquest and restoration. To secure Shah Tahmasp’s support, the Timurids surrendered Qandahar to the Safavids. Yet after reaching Kabul in 1549 with Safavid assistance, Humayun unexpectedly turned toward Balkh rather than India. Perhaps the pull of Central Asia still tugged harder than the possession of Hindustan, though Kamran’s betrayal ended that dream before it could take shape.

When Akbar ascended the throne in 1556, his early years were consumed by the struggle to secure his hold over India. Surrounded by rebellions and instability, he had little space to openly pursue his dreams of Turan. In time, the possibility narrowed further as the powerful Uzbek ruler Abdullah Khan consolidated Central Asia and placed the ancestral lands of the Timurids beyond easy reach. Yet Abu’l Fazl suggests that Akbar’s ambitions had not disappeared, only fallen into dormancy, remarking that “the time of the appearance of designs was in the future”.

When the Badakhshani Timurids, Sulayman and Ibrahim, ventured toward Balkh, Abu’l Fazl dismissed their efforts as premature, implying that such a harvest belonged to Akbar alone. On another occasion, Akbar even turned away the envoys of Abdullah Khan because he still entertained thoughts of recovering his ancestral territories. Abu’l Fazl portrays this vision as an echo of Babur’s strategy: India was first to be firmly secured, and only then would the Timurid banner advance toward Turan. As he writes, “Should the wide country of India be civilised by means of obedient vassals, (Akbar) would proceed to Turan…”

A point worth noting here, though beyond the immediate scope of this essay, is that Akbar too appears to have framed his role in terms of a civilising mission, much like later European imperial thought. Abu’l Fazl’s language suggests that Hindustan was never a homeland, but rather as a vast realm to be disciplined, ordered, and brought under the mould of Timurid statecraft with headquarters seated somewhere else (Samarkand).

Akbar’s own words also reveal that these ideas had not vanished. In 1577, responding to Uzbek mockery regarding Qandahar’s loss to the Safavid “outsiders” (biganaha), he replied that Timurid lands had hardly fared better under Uzbek control. A decade later, in 1587, Abu’l Fazl wrote to the Timurid ambassador in Bukhara that “His Majesty has turned his attention to the conquest of Turan”, though Akbar remained willing to set aside even broader ambitions if peace with Abdullah Khan could be secured.

Jahangir, too, bequeaths a testament to this ancestral pull. In his memoirs, he confesses that his father Akbar never let slip the dream of Transoxiana, and that he, Jahangir, nursed two intentions:

One, that inasmuch as the conquest of Transoxiana was always in the pure mind of my revered father, though every time he determined on it, things occurred to prevent it. If this business (of getting Kafir rulers to submit) could be settled, and this danger dismissed from my mind, I would leave Parviz in Hindustan, and in reliance on Allah, myself start for my hereditary territories.

In the lofty cadence of his memoirs, he proclaims with customary grandeur:

As I had made up my exalted mind to the conquest of Transoxiana, which was the hereditary kingdom of my ancestors, I desired to free the face of Hindustan from the rubbish of the factious and rebellious, and leaving one of my sons in that country, to go myself with a valiant army in due array, with elephants of mountainous dignity and of lightning speed, and taking ample treasure with me, to undertake the conquest of my ancestral dominions.

After this brief expression of imperial ambition, Jahangir’s Tuzuk falls strangely silent. The subject of Central Asia scarcely returns. Historian R.C. Verma argues that this diplomatic lull until 1621 reflected Jahangir’s continued desire to reclaim his ancestral lands. His gaze remained fixed on Samarkand even if his throne stood in Lahore. Yet the silence may not have been one-sided, for Imam Quli Khan of Bukhara had earlier suspended relations after a perceived slight.

The estrangement was eventually softened, perhaps through the influence of Nur Jahan. M. Athar Ali suggests that in 1621, Imam Quli’s mother initiated reconciliation with the Timurid court. The growing Safavid threat likely compelled both Bukhara and Hindustan toward cooperation, allowing political necessity to outweigh wounded pride.

Even in the later years of his reign, Jahangir’s interest in Central Asia remained alive. In conversations with Mutribi Samarqandi, he displayed a persistent curiosity about the affairs of the region. This interest was not merely sentimental. At Nur Jahan’s urging, Mir Baraka, a Bukharan in Timurid service, was sent to restore ties with Imam Quli and carry imperial respects to the Juybari shaikhs. Baraka remained in Central Asia until 1627 and returned with Abd al-Rahim Khwaja, whose arrival Jahangir valued enough to delay his journey to Kashmir.

Jahangir died soon afterward, but the thread remained unbroken. Shah Jahan ensured continuity by dispatching Hakim Haziq to Bukhara with gifts for the shaikhs, preserving a connection that was political on the surface but still carried the echoes of an older Timurid attachment to their ancestral world.

Shah Jahan’s longing too for the ancestral world of Turan was a deeply rooted aspiration. The imperial chronicles, clothed in the language of diplomacy, describe cordial relations with the Uzbeks during the first decade of his reign. Beneath this calm surface, however, lingered unresolved resentment. Nazr Muhammad’s (ruler of Balkh and Badhakshan) attempted siege of Kabul during the succession disturbances of 1629 had not been forgotten. Shah Jahan waited patiently for circumstances to shift, while continuing to send generous sums and support to allies in Mawarannahr, quietly nurturing influence beyond the Hindu Kush.

The first clear indication of his intentions appears in a letter written in 1640 by Hasan Khan Shamlu, the Safavid governor of Herat. Responding to a communication from the Timurid court, he referred to subtle hints about recovering the mulk-i-mawruthi, the “hereditary dominions”, and the gurkhana-yi-ajdad-i-izam, the resting place of imperial ancestors. Hasan records that Shah Jahan intended to return that very year to Kabul and would send one of his sons ahead to secure Balkh and Badakhshan.

Hasan sought reassurance that the campaign was directed toward Turan and not Khurasan. For the Safavids, the Uzbeks represented a constant strategic threat, and the possibility of Timurid intervention carried significance beyond diplomacy. In another letter, Hasan urged Asaf Khan to specify the date of the proposed march toward Turkistan so that Safavid and Timurid forces might move together and strike at Uzbek power.

Events, however, unfolded differently. The campaign materialised only five years later, and without Safavid participation.

The imperial records of Shah Jahan’s Balkh campaign leave little ambiguity regarding its purpose. They do not portray it as an ordinary military expedition or a search for territorial gain. Instead, they connect it directly to Shah Jahan’s desire to recover what were repeatedly described as his inherited lands. The roots of this ambition are traced back to the period following Jahangir’s death, when Nazr Muhammad’s actions at Kabul first revived in him a desire for Balkh and Badakhshan, not merely as strategic territories, but as lands bound to memory, ancestry, and dynastic inheritance.

The Timurid chronicle (Shah Jahannama) states:

From the time of the last Emperor Jahangir’s death, when Nazr Muhammad Khan had vainly attempted to seize Kabul, the mighty soul of the world-subduing monarch had been bent upon the countries of Balkh and Badakhshan, which were properly his hereditary dominions.

The chronicles attribute this 15-year delay to “impediments of state”, a phrase that conceals the relentless burdens of empire. Foremost among these was the grinding struggle in the Deccan, where the Shia Sultanates and rising Maratha power steadily consumed imperial resources. What began as a challenge would eventually tighten around the Timurid state and dominate the closing years of Aurangzeb’s reign.

According to A. Ansari, Shah Jahan viewed Qandahar as a political keystone. Recovering it from the Safavids would signal to both the Ottomans and the Uzbeks that Timurid ambitions looked beyond Persia and toward the ancestral lands across the Hindu Kush. Only then could a march toward Balkh acquire strategic credibility. R.C. Verma argues that although internal tensions between Nazr Muhammad and Imam Quli may have tempted Timurid intervention, the larger geopolitical situation, particularly tensions with the Safavids after the struggle over Qandahar, made a major invasion difficult.

Yet Hasan Khan’s correspondence suggests that in 1640 Safavid cooperation was actively offered, which disappeared with his death and Shah Safi’s renewed focus on Qandahar.

What is most striking is that even the humiliation of abandoning Balkh after scarcely two years did not extinguish Timurid aspirations. Aurangzeb himself had commanded imperial forces there and had witnessed the limits of such dreams more clearly than most. Yet even he, austere in temperament and hardened by campaigns, never entirely abandoned the pull of the ancestral horizon. In a letter to his son, the Crown Prince Muazzam, he entrusted that flame to another bearer:

If a father is unable to finish a work, the son must carry it to completion. … This mortal creature harbours a wish unfulfilled. It was the desire of Shah Jahan that I should dispatch one of his grandsons to those lands—with a grand army and the instruments of war.

Even as Aurangzeb’s attention increasingly turned toward the Marathas and the Deccan Sultanates, traces in his words and actions suggest that Turan never entirely faded from the Timurid imagination. The ancestral lands remained a distant echo at the edge of the empire, a memory not fully surrendered. The continuing references to mulk-i-mawruthi (hereditary dominions) and gurkhana-yi-ajdad-i-izam (the resting place of great ancestors) indicate that the symbolic and dynastic pull of Central Asia endured, even when military realities made reconquest increasingly impractical.

Italian traveller and scholar, Manucci observed that Aurangzeb still cherished thoughts of conquest of ancestral lands, and this sentiment appears to find support in subtle diplomatic gestures. One such example was the conferring of sarapa or robes of honour upon the ambassadors of Subhan Quli. Such honours were generally reserved for dependents and subordinate rulers. Though wrapped in the language of courtly etiquette, the act carried an imperial undertone, suggesting a symbolic assertion of superiority and perhaps reflecting an older Timurid conception of authority over the Uzbek world.

Aurangzeb also maintained links with the religious and intellectual networks of Central Asia. He preserved ties with scholars and Sufi figures from Balkh, including Abd al Ghaffar Dihbidi, and displayed interest in the educational institutions of Samarkand. French physician and traveller Bernier’s observations indicate that Central Asia occupied a place in the Timurid imagination beyond simple territorial ambition. It functioned as a source of legitimacy, memory, lineage, and continuity.

Even if the Timurids of Hindustan never regained the lands of their forefathers, their language and actions reveal a recurring nostalgia. Babur’s inheritance was not merely territorial. It was also emotional and ideological. For rulers like Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb, the story of Central Asia remained unfinished. This attachment also found expression in their concern for ancestral memory itself. As descendants of Timur, the emperors of Hindustan assumed responsibility, whether from genuine sentiment or dynastic obligation, for preserving the monuments of their lineage. Foremost among these stood the Gur-i-Amir in Samarkand, Timur’s mausoleum. More than a structure of stone, it was a monument of dynastic memory and a surviving fragment of a world they regarded as ancestral.

One revealing instance appears in the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri. During the embassy of Mir Baraka to Bukhara in 1621, the mission extended beyond diplomacy with Imam Quli Khan. Jahangir instructed that gold be delivered for the maintenance of the mausoleum. The act carried significance beyond charity. It represented a conscious reaffirmation of lineage and ancestral connection.

Decades later, Aurangzeb continued the same tradition. Though his Balkh campaign had failed, and his focus had shifted to the Deccan, reports from Sayyid Oghlan of Central Asia moved him deeply. Learning that the Gur-i-Amir, Timur’s mausoleum in Samarkand, had fallen into neglect, he ordered a daily grant of twelve rupees for its restoration, declaring it to be made “on behalf of the souls of our ancestors”. The gesture is striking. From a ruler who pursued vigorous campaigns against temples in Hindustan, his concern for preserving the shrine of his ancestral lineage reveals much about the hierarchy of memory and attachment that still shaped Timurid consciousness.

Aurangzeb’s connection with Central Asia also extended into the intellectual sphere. His court remained deeply influenced by the traditions of Bukhara and Samarkand. He elevated Mulla Auz to the office of imperial censor, while the Fatawa-i-Alamgiri drew heavily upon Hanafi scholarship from Transoxiana. In 1675, he even commissioned a copy of Bahr al-Asrar, seeking not merely a chronicle of rulers but another glimpse into the world of his ancestors.

The empire had shifted southward, but memory had not entirely followed. Through stone, scholarship, diplomacy, and remembrance, the Timurids of Hindustan remained tethered to their ancestral winds. However, their vast dominion across India, their imagination continued to drift beyond the Hindu Kush, toward the orchards of Transoxiana and the blue domes of Samarkand.

Hindustan gave the Timurids empire, wealth, and power, but Samarkand remained home, lost which they could never get back. India became the stage upon which their grandeur unfolded, while their emotional compass repeatedly pointed beyond the Hindu Kush toward the orchards, graves, and memories of Central Asia. They extracted wealth from Hindustan, destroyed temples, imposed impossible taxes upon Indians, but their imagination never ceased searching for a road back to their ancestral world. This was not passing nostalgia. It was the Timurid condition itself: Indian crowns upon their heads, Samarkand in their hearts.

In the next essay of this series, I will turn to another narrative often accepted without scrutiny: Ganga Jamuni Tehzeeb and the realities that lie beneath its popular telling. – India Today, 25 May 2026

› Aabhas Maldahiyar is an author, architect and historian.

Why are we afraid of an ancient ‘Dancing Girl’ figurine? – Utpal Kumar

June 19, 2026June 19, 2026VOI

It’s time we learnt to look at the “Dancing Girl” without the borrowed gaze of Victorian morality, colonial prejudice and Islamist discomfort. … The real controversy is not about a Mohenjo-daro figurine. It is about whether Indians can see their civilisation through their own eyes. – Utpal Kumar

Historian Upinder Singh makes a striking observation in her book, Ancient India: “If the second-century BCE Chanda Yakshi were magically transported from Bharhut to 21st-century Delhi and brought to life, she would smile in disbelief. She would also be told to cover up.”

That fate has finally caught up with Mohenjo-daro’s iconic “Dancing Girl”.

In a recent Class IX NCERT textbook, the bronze figurine’s nude torso was digitally covered up. Following criticism, the original image was restored. Curiously, the Class VI textbook continues to carry the uncensored image. Apparently, NCERT believes 14-year-olds are more vulnerable to moral corruption than 11-year-olds.

The episode is more than a bureaucratic blunder. It reveals something deeper: how colonial assumptions, Victorian morality and Islamist sensibilities continue to shape how Indians view their own civilisation.

The first problem begins with the name itself: “Dancing Girl”. Why “dancing”? Just because she appears to be dancing? Or, is it because she is nude? If posture alone is the criterion, countless Yakshis adorning temples and viharas across the country would qualify as “dancing girls”.

The iconic figurine was discovered by British archaeologist Ernest Mackay during excavations at the ancient Indus Valley site of Mohenjo-daro, in present-day Sindh, Pakistan, in 1926. It was, however, John Marshall who called it the “Dancing Girl”, as it gave “a vivid impression of the young aboriginal nautch girl” in a “half-impudent posture”.

No evidence was found, or indeed given, to support the claim. The interpretation rests entirely on the conjecture of the British archaeologist whose Victorian sensibilities refused to see a nude woman as anything other than a “dancing girl”. And, like good subjects of a colony, we accepted it as gospel truth. Even a century later, Marshall’s conjecture survives as accepted fact.

Just imagine: had literary traditions not survived, many Yakshis found on numerous ancient Hindu and Jain temples and Buddhist viharas too might have been reduced to “nautch girls” by modern interpreters. Imagine, further, that human civilisation as we know it today ceases to exist almost instantly without any trace of literature and, 2,000 years from now, extraterrestrials excavate sites across the subcontinent. They would find countless statues of a man in well-tailored Western attire holding a book, pointing a finger in a particular direction. They might conclude that he belonged to the ruling elite or an upper caste. The man, of course, turns out to be Dr. B.R. Ambedkar.

Absurd? Certainly. But not entirely different from the logic used to label a 4,500-year-old Harappan figurine a “Dancing Girl”.

The second lesson is even more revealing.

The “Dancing Girl” embodies the fundamental difference between Bharat and Pakistan. It is a compelling symbol illustrating why Bharat remains a liberal democracy rooted in dharma, while Pakistan became a den of global jihad with the aspiration of becoming a citadel of political Islam.

History is instructive. When Pakistan emerged from a combination of Islamist fervour, British treachery and the Congress leadership’s rush for power and privilege, its leadership laid claim to the Harappan civilisation. After all, most Indus Valley sites excavated till then lay within Pakistan’s borders, making them the rightful custodians of the Harappan legacy.

Bharat refused, and a compromise was reached whereby Harappan artefacts were equally divided between the two nations. Pakistan was given the option of choosing either the famous “Priest King” or the iconic “Dancing Girl”. Pakistan reportedly chose the “Priest King”. The reason was simple. While the newly-carved Islamic nation was uncomfortable claiming a nude female figure as a national symbol, the narrative around the “Priest King” suited the sensibilities of Pakistan, which was to be dominated by priests (ulema) and kings (the military).

Anyway, the Pakistani claim over Harappa was, and has always been, bogus. A country that finds its civilisational anchor not in Harappa but in Islam and has no problem officially calling Mohammad bin Qasim, the Arab general who first attacked Sindh in 712 AD, the “first citizen of Pakistan”, could have nothing but distaste for the pre-Islamic roots of the land. It has embraced the Islamist conquerors over the civilisation that once flowered along the banks of the Indus. But then this is hardly surprising. As V.S. Naipaul observes in Beyond Belief: “To the convert his land is of no religious or historical importance; its relics are of no account, only the sands of Arabia are sacred.”

Against this backdrop, what is harder to understand is why Bharat increasingly seems eager to make the same choice. The NCERT episode is troubling not because an iconic statue was tampered with, but because it reflects an inability to view our past through our own civilisational lens.

Altered Dancing Girl

This brings us to the central issue: nudity.

For the Victorian mind, nudity was a moral problem. For political Islam, it remains an existential dilemma. For civilisational Bharat, however, it was neither. This does not mean Bharat celebrated unrestrained sensuality. Nor does it mean every form of desire was equally valued. What it means is that the civilisation recognised multiple legitimate pursuits of life. The notions of Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha were not contradictions; they were complementary aims.

This explains why even highly ascetic traditions such as Jainism found space for Yakshinis in their literature and temple structures. In Ancient India, Prof. Upinder Singh writes: “In Jainism, devotion to a goddess cannot lead to enlightenment, but it can help in attaining worldly goals such as prosperity, power and even victory in philosophical debates. So, although they were not the main focus of worship, goddesses did have a strong presence, endowing the austere atmosphere of Jaina temples with beauty and warmth.”

The Indic tradition rarely sought to erase what it disapproved of. It sought to contextualise, rank and transcend. Vatsyayana, whose authorship of the Kamasutra never came between his acceptance in the Sanatana tradition as a Rishi, understood this perfectly. He argued that Kama, like food, is necessary for life. Its excesses should be guarded against, but its existence cannot be denied. For him, Kama, “like food, is a means for the body’s sustenance. It is also a fruit of Dharma and Artha. Its shortcomings should be taken into account, but will one not eat food because there are beggars who need it, or not sow seeds because beasts may eat the crop?”

That insight captures the essence of the Indic worldview: restraint without puritanism, freedom without licence, and acceptance without celebration.

The real controversy, therefore, is not about a Mohenjo-daro figurine. It is about whether Indians can see their civilisation through their own eyes. Exactly a hundred years ago, the “Dancing Girl” was discovered. And for a century, we accepted the colonial categorisation of the Harappan figurine by calling her a nautch girl. Today, we are willing to clothe her to satisfy our “modern” sensibilities. In the process, both Bharat’s history and its civilisational understanding get compromised.

It’s time we learnt to look at the “Dancing Girl” without the borrowed gaze of Victorian morality, colonial prejudice and Islamist discomfort. – Firstpost, 18 June 2026

› Utpal Kumar is the author of the book, ‘Eminent Distorians: Twists and Truths in Bharat’s History’.

The Problem of Islamism – Sita Ram Goel

June 18, 2026VOI

What we mean by Islamism is a self-righteous psychology and a closed cultural attitude which make it impossible for Muslim converts to coexist peacefully and with dignity with other people. – Sita Ram Goel

The most malevolent of these residues is Islamism, the residue of the Muslim invasion of India spread over several centuries. Its basic tenets are ultimately derived from the teachings of Islam which has so far succeeded in sealing itself off from every shade of empiricism, rationalism, universalism, humanism and liberalism, the hallmarks of Hindu as well as modern Western culture. But in the context of India where Islam failed in its mission of lasting conquest and total conversion, these tenets have acquired a singularly sinister and subversive character.

Let it be clear that the reference here is not at all to our Muslim brethren who are our own flesh and blood, except for that microscopic minority which takes pride in the purity of its Arab, Persian or Turkish descent.[1] Instead of being the proponents of Islamism, the Muslims of India are its victims whom it is trying to use as vehicles of its poisonous virulence. The vast majority of Indian Muslims were converted to Islam by force or allurements. But the conversion did not help them socially or culturally as their status today in India’s Muslim society should amply prove. The Muslims of India, therefore, have to be freed from rather than accused of Islamism.

What we mean by Islamism is a self-righteous psychology and a closed cultural attitude which make it impossible for its converts to coexist peacefully and with dignity with other people. There are many Hindus who share several tenets of Islamism. On the other hand, there are many Muslims who are frightened by Islamism and who would gladly join the mainstream of Indian nationalism if they are freed from the whiphand which a minority of theologians, politicians and hooligans has come to wield in their community.

Those who want to know Islamism first-hand and in full measure are referred to Shaikh Sir Mohammed Iqbal’s two long poems which he wrote quite early in his career, and which earned for him the title of Allama among the adherents of this cult. These are the Shikwa and the Jawab-i-Shikwah which Mr. Khushwant Singh has recently published in an English translation.

The Shikwa ends by summing up that “naghma hindi hai tau kya, lai tau hijazi hai miri”, that is, “no matter if my idiom is Indian, my spirit is that of Hijaz”. Hijaz is that part of Arabia in which Mecca and Medina are situated.

The Jawab-i-Shikwah ends on a still more strident note. Allah announces to the Allama His supreme message for mankind in the following words: “kî wafã tûne muhammad se tau ham tere hain”, that is, “if you are faithful to Muhammad, I shall be faithful to you.”

Now, there are many Muslims in India who have never heard the name of Iqbal or listened to his muse. And there are many Hindus whose admiration for Iqbal is immeasurable. No, Islamism does not refer to any particular section of Indian society. It refers to that intellectual-or unintellectual-attitude which awards the monopoly of truth and virtue to a particular prophet, and consigns all knowledge to the pages of a particular book.

Taking our cue from Allama Iqbal and his lesser cohorts like Altaf Hussain Hali, we can safely summarise the credo of Islamism in the following five fundamentals:

1. That Indian society before the advent of Islam was living in utter spiritual, moral and cultural darkness (jahiliya) like pre-Islamic Arabia;

2. That Islam brought to India the only true religion, the only authentic moral values, the only humane culture, and the only progressive social order;

3. That this civilizing mission of Islam in India could not be completed, as in many other lands of Asia and Africa, due to the intervention of the wily British who cheated Islam of its empire in India, mostly by means of fraud;

4. That while the creation of Pakistan has been a triumph and consolidation of the power of Islam, west of the Ravi and east of the Hooghly, the conquest of India by Islam remains an unfinished task;

5. That Islam has a right to use all means, including force, to convert this Dãrul-harb of an India into a Dãrul-Islam, so that a Hakûmat-i-Ilãhiyah could liquidate all traces of jãhilîya and impose the law and culture of Islam.

There are many Hindus like the late Pandit Sunderlal who fully accept the first two fundamentals of Islamism. It is a different matter that their logic fails them at this stage and they do not proceed to the next three fundamentals which follow irrevocably. And there have been many Muslims like the late Rafi Ahmed Kidwai and Justice M.C. Chagla who rejects these fundamentals as repugnant.

Having thus outlined its version of past Indian history, and the apocalypse towards which future Indian history should be forced to travel, Islamism has evolved a strategy in which the Muslims of India are envisaged as a base and an arsenal. Some salient features of this strategy can be outlined as follows:

1. The Muslims of India, particularly the Muslim intelligentsia, should be sealed off from every shade of rationalism, universalism, humanism and liberalism, and an army of mullahs and maulvis trained in the tenets of Islam should be let loose to brainwash and keep them along the right track;

2. Every Muslim who does not accept Islamism or dares criticize it or stands for the mainstream of Indian nationalism, away from and above religious differences, should be denounced as a renegade and a legitimate victim for murderous Muslim mobs;

3. The Muslims should be encouraged to air as many grievances as can be invented, and try to pass off as a down-trodden minority, oppressed, exploited and treated as second class citizens by the “brute” Hindu majority;

4. These contrived grievances of the Muslims should be used to convert the Muslim community into a compact vote-bank which can function as a balancing factor in as many electoral constituencies as possible, and which can blackmail all non-Islamist political parties to accommodate Muslim candidates or include the maximum measure of concessions to the Muslim community in their election manifestos;

5. The Muslims should be made to agitate for India’s support to all international Islamic causes, right or wrong, legitimate or illegitimate, so that their attention is kept constantly diverted from demands of their own economic, social and cultural condition;

6. The Muslims should be progressively persuaded and prepared to stage street riots on the slightest pretext, be it a stray pig, or music before a mosque, or Urdu, or the minority character of the Aligarh Muslim University, or a purely personal fracas between toughs belonging to two communities, or the bombing of al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem by an Austrian adventurer, or the hanging of Z.A. Bhutto by President Zia of Pakistan, or the capture of the Kaaba by some disgruntled faction in Saudi Arabian politics, or some other similar event in the Islamic world at large;

7. The frequent riots should be used to frighten the Muslims who should then be coaxed to create, consolidate and extend exclusive Muslim enclaves which can be stocked with arms and ammunition, imported or otherwise.

The seven-fold strategy is aimed at the Muslims in India who are to be brainwashed, blackmailed, frightened and forced into the fold of Islamism. Another side of the same strategy has been worked out to neutralise, paralyse and blacken or pamper different sections of Hindu society so that the road is cleared for the forward march of Islamism. Some salient features of this secondary strategy can be outlined as follows:

1. The concept of Secularism which is enshrined in the Constitution of India and which has become the most sacred slogan for all our political parties should be distorted, misinterpreted and misused to the maximum to block out the least little expression of Hindu culture in the state apparatus and public life of India;

2. The terms “communal” and “communalism” which have become terms of abuse in India’s political parlance, should be carefully cultivated and more and more mystified to malign all those organisations, institutions and parties which do not serve Islamism, directly and/or indirectly;

3. The accusation of being fascists and anti-secularists should be hurled at all those individuals and organisations who question the exclusive claims of Islam and its culture, who know and tell the truth about Islamic scripture and history, and who see through the Muslim game of grievances;

4. All praise and support should be extended to those Hindus who go out of their way to champion Islamic causes, national and international, and who see in Islam and its culture those higher values which Islamism claims for them;

5. All available platforms should be used to defeat and frustrate the emergence of a genuine and positive Indian nationalism by always harping on India’s multi-racial, multi-religious, multi-language, multi-national, and multi-cultural character.

Islamism did make some headway among the Muslims in Independent India mostly because the dominant section of Hindu intelligentsia partronised it for various reasons. The Congress politicians patronised it because they found out very soon that they were in a minority among the Hindus, and that they could survive in power only by combining a solid Muslim vote with whatever Hindu vote they could get. The Socialists went out of their way to patronise it partly because they harbour an anti-Hindu animus and partly in the hope of securing Muslim vote-a hope which has not as yet come anywhere near fulfilment. The Gandhians partronised it because they no more remembered that their great master, Mahatma Gandhi, was a Hindu with a profound faith in Sanãtana Dharma, and because they misunderstood his doctrine of non-violence towards all people, including the Muslims of India, as an endorsement of Islam. The Communists patronised it because they saw in it a powerful ally in their campaign against Hindu society which they viewed as their main enemy. The self-alienated Hindu intellectuals patronised it out of sheer animus towards Hindu society and culture which they were out to damn on any pretext. Extending patronage to Islamism thus became a pastime for all those who wanted to pass off as large-hearted liberals, progressives and secularists.

But in the absence of local resources and international patronage, the progress of Islamism in India was rather slow. Pakistan, which was its only patron abroad, could not provide much help beyond some hysteria in its mass media and propaganda in international political forums. The several wars which India was forced to fight with Pakistan to the disadvantage of the latter, also inhibited Islamism in India from acquiring the requisite degree of self-confidence.

The use of oil as a political weapon by Islamic countries and the influx of petro-dollars in plenty from several Arab countries, particularly Libya and Saudi Arabia, since the early 1970s, has given to Islamism in India a new glow of self-confidence in one sudden sweep. This influx of Arab money is a natural and inevitable phenomenon because, in the last analysis, Islamism is only another name for Arab imperialism which had, at one stage of its history, pillaged and populated with its own progeny many foreign lands and which even today keeps many non-Arab nations spiritually enslaved.

Islamism in India is now busy employing to the maximum advantage the Arab money which is pouring in through many channels and in increasing quantities. Some of these uses are very obvious to the eye. A few salient features of the new scenario can be listed as follows:

1. The rapid rise of a powerful press, mostly in Indian languages, and many publishing houses to propagate Islamism;

2. The generous funding of old and the founding of many new maktabs, madrasas and institutes for teaching Islam and training missionaries who are then employed at high salaries for purifying the faith of the Muslim flock and seeking new pastures for converts to Islam;

3. Buying of land and real estate all around in urban and rural areas by individual Muslims and Islamic institutions and organisations at whatever prices available;

4. Manufacturing and storing of arms in mosques, Muslim homes and localities and training of Muslim toughs;

5. Holding of frequent conferences, national and international, and taking out demonstrations in support of every Islamic cause;

6. Financing Muslim politics and inducing Muslim politicians to infiltrate and ingratiate themselves in every political party, and function from every public platform;

7. Bribing secularist Hindu intellectuals, scribes public workers and politicians, and buying them up for supporting Islamism, denigrating Hindu culture, and character-assassinating those who oppose Islamism;

8. Using the lure of money for winning converts to Islam from the weaker sections of Hindu society, particularly the Harijans.

The strategy is nothing new. The self-same strategy had been used by the Muslim League for the carving out of Pakistan. Only the aid and abetment which the British provided at one time have been replaced by the aid and abetment from Arab countries. And in the matter of a mere decade, Islamism in India has assumed the same menacing proportions as it had on the eve of Partition. The parallel should make us pause. – Extracted from Hindu Society Under Seige, 1996

Footnotes

1. See K.S. Lal, Indian Muslims: Who Are They, Voice of India, New Delhi, 1990.

The Problem of Christianism – Sita Ram Goel

June 16, 2026June 16, 2026VOI

It is impossible for me to reconcile myself to the idea of conversion after the style that goes on in India and elsewhere today. It is an error which is perhaps the greatest impediment to the world’s progress toward peace. Why should a Christian want to convert a Hindu to Christianity? Why should he not be satisfied if the Hindu is a good or godly man? – M.K. Gandhi

The British rule in India crystallised two residues—Christianism and Macaulayism.

Certain strains of Macaulayism developed what is euphemistically described as a “revolutionary temper” in the later stages of the British rule and joined hands with Communism after the Bolshevik victory in Russia. The whole of Communism, which is also hostile to Hindu society and culture, is not Macaulayism. Yet, if Macaulayism had not prepared the ideological ground, Communism could not have made the strides it did in this country.

We shall analyse Christianism first. It was the first to make itself felt forcefully at the onset of the British rule in India.

We, however, wish to make it clear at the very outset that Christianism in India does not refer to the Christians in this country. They are our own people who at a certain stage of our history went over to a foreign faith in an atmosphere created and exploited by Christianism. But although they have renounced their ancestral faith, they have, by and large, not shown any marked hostility towards Hindu society and culture. Nor have they so far served as vehicles of Christianism except in certain areas of the Northeast, notably Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland. Christianism in India is centered in the numerous Christian missions operating all over the country, particularly in the so-called tribal belts.

The eight fundamentals of Christianism in India may be summarised as follows:

1. That the Hindus have never had a Saviour whose historicity can be ascertained, with the possible exception of the Buddha;

2. That Jesus Christ whose historicity cannot be questioned has superseded all earlier Saviours of Hinduism—if they were Saviours at all and not disciples of Lucifer—and rendered superfluous all subsequent Hindu saints and sages;

3. That St. Thomas, an apostle of Jesus himself, was specially chosen by the Church to win India for his Master’s message;

4. That St. Thomas could not complete his mission in India because he met an untimely martyrdom at the hands of some Hindu, most probably Brahmin, heathens; [1]

5. That the converts made by St. Thomas, the first century Christians of the South, establish beyond doubt that Christianity is an ancient Indian religion and not a Western import as alleged by the Hindus;

6. That it is the sacred task of the Christian Church to complete the mission of St. Thomas and see to it that India becomes a Christian country, once and for all;

7. That if there is any thing good and wholesome in Hindu religion, it is not because Hindu saints and sages ever made any direct or conscious contact with Truth but because they merely stumbled upon some of it in the workings of Universal Nature which was preparing itself over a long time for the advent of Jesus Christ;

8. That no Hindu, even if he follows the Ten Commandments in letter and spirit and lives by the Sermon on the Mount, can ever hope to escape eternal hell-fire unless he has been baptised in a Christian church and administered the Christian sacraments.

These tenets have their source in the Christian religion which also, like Islam, is an extremely exclusive religion. [2] Christianity too claims for itself a monopoly of truth and virtue, swears by the only true God, the only true Saviour or the only Son of the only true God, the only true Revelation, the only true way of worship, and so on. It too has to its discredit a long and unrelieved record of wanton destruction of ancient religions and cultures and a large-scale killing of heathens. The annals of Europe, Asia Minor, North Africa and America, particularly Central and South America, provide harrowing details of this destruction and bloodshed.

We in this country do not associate Christianity with misdeeds similar to those of Islam because the British invaders who finally succeeded in capturing power in India did not allow the Christian crusaders to use state power, directly and in an uninhibited manner. They had perhaps become wiser by a reading of Muslim history in India and did not allow their religion to interfere with the business of building a stable empire. A more tenable explanation of this British refusal to patronise Christianity beyond the point of no return is the Renaissance in Europe which had considerably discredited this creed in its own homeland by the time British arms were triumphant in India.

But we did have a taste of the intrinsic spirit of Christian aggression in our first encounter with the missionaries who swarmed towards our shores in the wake of Western victories from the 16th century onwards. When the Portuguese seized Goa and adjoining territories the Catholic Church lost no time in setting up an Inquisition for the benefit of native converts who were likely to recant or relax in their faith. Francis Xavier, whom the Catholic Church hails as the Patron Saint of the East, expressed a deep satisfaction at the sight of six thousand dead Muslims whom the Portuguese had slaughtered. He also made forcible conversions, demolished Hindu temples, smashed Hindu idols, and inaugurated that anti-Brahmanism which has by now become the sine qua non of all progressive thought and politics in India.

The triumphal march of British arms in India in the second half of the 18th century convinced the Christian missionaries that British victories were due not to a superiority in the art of warfare but to the superiority of the Christian creed by which the British generals and soldiers swore. They immediately started pouring venom on Hindu religion, culture and society. No lie was vile enough in the service of Christian “truth”. No fraud was foul enough in the service of Christian “virtue”.

An example will serve to illustrate the spiteful spirit of the Christian missionaries at that time. They spread a canard in India and abroad that many Hindus voluntarily rushed under the wheels of the great chariot during the annual rathayatra at Puri, and got themselves crushed to death in order to attain salvation. The great chariot, according to them, was always accompanied by droves of dancing girls who sang lascivious songs and made obscene gestures towards crowds on both sides of the broad street. The “great” William Wilberforce, who ruled the circle of Christian crusaders in Britain and who adamantly advocated the Christianization of India by an unstinted use of state power, demanded immediately that the temple of Jagannath be demolished to stop this “devil-dance” for good. The British Commissioner of Puri at that time saved the situation by writing a long letter to a liberal British MP in which he stated that he along with many other British civilians in the district had been a regular witness of the rathayatra for twenty years but had never witnessed a single victim under the wheels nor found anything immodest in the songs and symbolic gestures of the dancing girls. The English word “Juggernaut”, which according to the Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary means “any relentless destroying force”, is a living witness to the inventive imagination of the early Christian missionaries.

This campaign of calumny against everything Hindu continued till late in the 19th century. Swami Vivekanada was referring to this crude campaign when he cried with anguish in the Parliament of Religions at Chicago that “if we Hindus dig out all the dirt from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and throw it in your faces, it will be but a speck compared to what your missionaries have done to our religion and culture”.

Had not the Hindus come out in defence of their religion and culture, this missionary mischief would have multiplied by leaps and bounds. The Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj were the earliest expressions of this Hindu spirit of resistance. A notable contribution was made by the Theosophical Society whose founder, Madame Blavatsky, exposed the spiritual and moral claims of Christianity and whose chief apostle in India, Mrs. Annie Besant, inspired no small pride in the Hindu heritage. The Ramakrishna Mission also came to the rescue at a later stage. Mahatma Gandhi gave no quarter to Christian theology or to Jesus Christ as the only Son of God and Saviour of mankind. He had his own charming method of recommending Sermon on the Mount while showing compassion for the victims of the missionaries whom he described as “rice Christians”. [3]

Perhaps the main reason for the weakening of this malicious and mendacious campaign was the collapse of Christianity in its own homeland, the Western countries. The West had taken a decisive turn towards the scientific spirit. Meanwhile, the message of Hindu spirituality had also spread to the centres of learning in the West. The exponents of Hindu religion and culture like Ramakrishna Paramahansa, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Raman Maharshi, Rabindranath Tagore, Ananda Coomaraswami and Mahatma Gandhi were demonstrating by their words and deeds the profound promise which Hindu Dharma held for mankind. The missionaries had to change their methods.

The core of Christianism in India, however, remains intact. They now know that the fortress of Hindu society cannot be seized by a frontal assault. They are, therefore, busy in the backyards and have hidden themselves behind the smoke-screens of several theologies. Some of these covert methods can be listed as follows:

1. Training of more and more native missionaries in their far-flung, well-equipped and fabulously financed seminaries so that missionary work looks no more like an undertaking manned mostly by foreigners;

2. Hinduising the outer accoutrements of Christian priests, liturgy and sacraments in order to convince the Hindus that Christianity is not an imported creed, and that Christianism is not out to corrode Hindu culture;

3. Directing their powerful press and publishing houses not to attack Hindu religion and culture openly but to develop a scholarly and comparative critique of Hindu religion, culture and society, always to the ultimate disadvantage of the latter;

4. To establish and extend educational institutions which at least immunise the upper class Hindu children and youth against whatever Hindu ways still survive in their homes, wherever they do not succeed in attracting them towards Christianity;

5. To build and expand hospitals and undertake other social work in order to attract an all-round respect for the Christian spirit of social service, and neutralise as narrow bigotry any questioning of their missionary motives;

6. To open orphanages and homes for the handicapped where proselytization can proceed safely and unnoticed;

7. To concentrate on Hindu tribals who are removed from the main centres of Hindu population, so that there is no untoward publicity;

8. To take out promising candidates for conversion on prolonged tours of Western countries in order to impress upon them the wonders worked by Christian culture and civilization;

9. To encourage well-to-do and willing Christians in the West to adopt boys and girls from poor Indian families, send them to missionary schools and colleges, and provide them with monetary assistance till they are converted;

10. To finance and promote political campaigns for separate states, inside or outside the Union of India, in those areas where the Christian population has attained majority or dominance.

There are plenty of methods which the missionaries employ to harangue and/or hoodwink the unsuspecting Hindus. Some of these methods are pretty crude, especially those employed by the American missionaries who aim a loud and simplistic promise, “you also can be saved” or a sweet scolding, “don’t you want to save yourself?” through big advertisements in daily newspapers, regular radio broadcasts and door to door pedlars of salvation. The other methods are sophisticated and disguised as “Indian theology”. [4]

But what looms large at the back of all these methods is the mammoth finance which flows in freely from the coffers of the Christian churches and communities in Europe and America. An idea of the magnitude of this finance can be got from a recent incident which was widely reported in the daily press. An imaginative and enterprising but poor South Indian palmed off on a Christian missionary a lot of faked literary and archaeological evidence about the adventures of St. Thomas in South India against a cash payment of fifteen lakh rupees—a paltry sum in the total budget of the mission concerned. And there are hundreds of such missions in India.

The Statesman dated 17 August 1981 has published an interesting news item from Aachen in West Germany: The Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Mother Teresa, has asked her supporters to suspend charity donations, reports UNI-DPA. The German Section of the International Association of Friends of Mother Teresa which donated six million marks in 1980 is to be disbanded at the end of this year in response to the plea. Mother Teresa who won the prize in 1979 after years of work aiding the poorest of the poor called for a temporary halt to contributions “until we have used up what we have”. “I will then ask you again,” the founder of the Missionaries of Charity said in a circular. Excessive support of a single charity leading to the needs of thousands of others being forgotten was probably behind the request.”

Six million West German marks amount to approximately two and a half crores of rupees. The amounts contributed by other sections of the International Association of Friends of Mothers Teresa are most likely to total up to many times this sum. Mother Teresa is not in a position to use all the money that has already been given to her. So the torrent has been halted temporarily. It will start pouring again as soon as she gives the signal. And hers is only one of the “thousands of other charities”. One can well imagine the staggering finance at the disposal of Christianism in India.

The free flow of this Western wealth enables the missionaries to live in and have at their disposal palatial mansions in which their missions and seminaries are housed. Their vow of poverty never comes in the way of their having modern sanitation facilities, kitchens, communications and transport. They can travel not only over the length and breadth of this country but to the ends of the earth to attend conferences, congregations, seminars and symposia. Everywhere they go they can stay in similar sumptuous style. It is but human if the superiority of their style of living gets confused with the superiority of the Christian creed.

Recently some missionaries, particularly in the Catholic missions, have started talking a new language—the language of radicalism and revolution. It is not unoften that this language comes most easily to those who do not have to share the woes and wants of people with whom they commiserate. They make the best of both the worlds. Our Communist leaders are an excellent example of such synthetic radicalism.

The West has lost its fascination for the faith. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find men and women in the West who would take the holy orders and become wedded to vows of chastity, poverty and obedience. But the West does not mind parting with plenty of cash which its prosperity can spare with ease. Christianity is, therefore, making a bold bid to establish a safer haven in the East while the going is good.

India provides a particularly soft target. The Christian missions are welcome to open their purse strings in the Islamic and Communist countries of Asia. But the missions there are barred from winning new converts. Hindu India, drowned in poverty and suffering from cultural self-forgetfulness, is the only country in Asia which provides the quid pro quo. [5] – Extracted from Hindu Society Under Seige, 1996

Footnotes

1 See Ishwar Sharan, Myth of St. Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple, Voice of India, New Delhi, 1991.

2 See Sita Ram Goel, Papacy: Its Doctrine and History, Voice of India, New Delhi, 1986.

3 See Sita Ram Goel, History of Hindu-Christian Encounters, Voice of India, New Delhi, 1989.

4 See Catholic Ashrams: Adopting and Adapting Hindu Dharma, Voice of India, New Delhi, 1988.

5 See Ram Swarup, Cultural Self-Alienation and Some Problems Hinduism Faces, Voice of India, New Delhi, 1987.

VOICE OF INDIA

History Politics Science Religion

Author VOI

Shruti Philosophy: The Hinduism that stands forgotten – Acharya Prashant

India’s rise discredits China and the West – Minhaz Merchant

George Orwell: His war on totalitarianism, humbug, and sugar in tea – Preksha

India: The history they studied in boxes – Nick Collins

3 – Babur’s Sultanate: Parasite on an affluent civilisation? – Aabhas Maldahiyar

2 – If Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb was harmony, why does Kashi’s Nandi still wait? – Aabhas Maldahiyar

1 – The Samarkand Syndrome: Why Babur and family never became ‘us’ – Aabhas Maldahiyar

Why are we afraid of an ancient ‘Dancing Girl’ figurine? – Utpal Kumar

The Problem of Christianism – Sita Ram Goel

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: