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, 2026July 8, 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.

Romila Thapar and the collapse of the ‘eminent’ Marxist monopoly – Utpal Kumar

May 30, 2026VOI

The real challenge before Indian historiography today is not the existence of competing narratives, but the treatment of one ideological school as the sole custodian of intellectual legitimacy while dismissing all dissent as ignorance. – Utpal Kumar ‘

Sometimes the crisis of Indian historiography can be captured through a single viral clip.

In the video, eminent historian Romila Thapar confidently claims that Patanjali described the relationship between Brahmins and Sramanas as being like that between a snake and a mongoose. It is a striking image, perfectly suited to the Marxist interpretation of ancient Bharat as a perpetual battlefield of social conflict. There is, however, one problem: the passage does not exist in Patanjali’s Mahabhashya. As author Nityananda Mishra explains in the viral clip, Patanjali refers to Sramanas and Brahmins together only once, and even there the snake-mongoose analogy is absent. Interestingly, the same claim had appeared in Thapar’s earlier works, including Interpreting Early India (1992) and Cultural Pasts (2000).

This incident is important not merely because it reveals the truth about a disputed quotation. It is important because it raises uncomfortable questions about the authority exercised by certain schools of Indian historiography and the reluctance within parts of academia to subject “eminent” historians to the same scrutiny they routinely apply to others.

For decades, a relatively small ideological circle dominated the country’s historical discourse. Their influence rested not merely on scholarship, but also on institutional power. They wrote textbooks, controlled college and university departments, influenced media narratives, and determined who truly qualified to be a “serious” historian. Those who questioned them were dismissed as communal, revivalist, unscientific, or simply “unqualified”. The irony, of course, is that many of these guardians of “scientific history” were themselves shielded from the most elementary standards of scrutiny.

That immunity is now gone.

Romila Thapar’s recent memoir, Just Being, reflects this anxiety. She laments the growing influence of what she calls “non-historians” in shaping public understandings of the past and argues that official support is increasingly going towards narratives different from those produced by “professionally trained historians”.

“Until a decade or two ago,” Thapar writes, “historical scholarship was not interfered with by unqualified people. That situation has now changed. The perception of history that is being popularised and has official backing is distinct from that which is being researched by scholars. The two are moving in opposite directions. The danger is that the latter may be nullified by the official support given to the former.”

The complaint reveals a deeper unease. After all, the first time since Independence, Marxist historiography in the country no longer enjoys uncontested intellectual authority. It is this erosion of monopoly, more than disagreement itself, that seems to have generated such anxiety, if not anger.

If one looks back, the country’s “eminent” historians evaded intellectual accountability for most of the post-Independence era. In fact, the only time they were put in the dock—quite literally—was when they went to the Allahabad High Court as “expert witnesses” in the Ram Janmabhoomi case. The Ayodhya case was unusual because it compelled our “professionally trained” historians to leave classrooms and seminar halls to enter a courtroom, where claims had to withstand cross-examination rather than ideological consensus. As author Arvind Singh writes in India’s Rogue Historians, the Ram Janmabhoomi dispute was “perhaps the only instance where Marxist historiography was weighed on jurisprudence”.

The results were devastating. One after another, “expert witnesses” collapsed under cross-examination. Behind the intimidating academic reputations lay conjecture, second-hand assumptions, ideological certainties, and in some cases startling unfamiliarity with the very primary evidence on which they claimed expertise.

One striking example was Prof Suresh Chandra Mishra, who appeared before the court as an expert witness and epigraphist. Prof Mishra initially claimed that inscriptions found at the disputed structure were written in Arabic. Later, he revised the statement and said they were in Persian. Eventually, under cross-examination, he admitted that he knew neither Persian nor Arabic. The contradiction was devastating because epigraphic expertise necessarily depends upon linguistic competence.

The matter became even more awkward when Prof. Mishra claimed he had compared the inscriptions with passages from the Baburnama, which he said he carried inside the disputed premises. When he was cornered by the other side, which argued that one was not allowed to carry anything inside, he changed his statement again, saying he had relied on memory to compare the inscriptions after coming out of the site. Justice Sudhir Agarwal dryly noted this “wonderful memory”, particularly given Mishra’s admission that he knew “neither Persian nor Arabic”.

Then came archaeologist Suraj Bhan, another prominent figure of the academic establishment. His credentials appeared impressive in public debates, but under oath the limitations became apparent. Despite holding degrees involving Sanskrit, he admitted he could neither read nor speak the language. Justice Agarwal observed that Bhan “has not read the text of the inscriptions as published in different books from time to time and had no occasion to compare them”, and that parts of his testimony rested on “pure conjecture and surmise”.

Similarly, Prof. Suvira Jaiswal reportedly acknowledged that, despite appearing as an “expert witness” in the Ayodhya case, she had not read key primary sources such as the Baburnama. Another star expert witness, Prof. Shirin Musavi, reportedly stated that she had never personally visited Ayodhya to examine the disputed structure; she believed such examination was unnecessary for a historian.

These were the historians who were supported and patronised, often openly, by the country’s leading historians led by Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma, D.N. Jha and Irfan Habib, among others. It is interesting that while these second-rank historians took the lead in supporting the Babri Masjid cause, the top historians avoided doing so. They knew the pitfalls of their historiography. They knew it would not withstand cross-questioning. They were also not used to being questioned in public.

The case exposes a contradiction at the heart of elite academic discourse in the country. Historians who insist upon methodological rigour and denounce dissenters as “non-historians” were themselves, in a case as significant as Ayodhya, found relying on assumptions, ideological predispositions, or incomplete engagement with primary evidence.

The larger issue, however, is not that historians can make mistakes. Genuine scholarship always leaves room for error, revision and correction. The real problem is the culture of intellectual insulation that protected certain historians from sustained scrutiny for decades. Within academic and media ecosystems, their assertions were often treated as settled truth. Critical examination was discouraged because it threatened the ideological consensus that dominated post-Independence intellectual life.

The real challenge before Indian historiography today is not the existence of competing narratives. A confident civilisation can accommodate disagreements. The danger lies instead in treating one ideological school as the sole custodian of intellectual legitimacy while dismissing all dissent as ignorance.

Ironically, as Romila Thapar’s memoir itself suggests, the decline of intellectual monopolies often produces resentment. Much of the current anxiety and anger directed at “non-historians” appears rooted less in questions of qualification than in the loss of cultural and institutional control.

History does not—and cannot—belong permanently to any ideological priesthood. – Firstpost, 25 May 2026

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

Michel Danino: The quiet giant of our time – Sandeep Balakrishna

March 15, 2026May 23, 2026VOI

Prof. Michel Danino has actually rescued the NCERT by lifting it out of the morass into which the Leftist establishment had sunk it. … The reforms to history textbooks under Danino’s leadership were long overdue and are in the right direction. – Sandeep Balakrishna

Michel Danino, in many ways, is reminiscent of the gurus of the ancient Indian parampara. Unassuming and quiet, yet a powerhouse of scholarship, which is matched only by his dignity and unimpeachable intellectual integrity.

I have had the immense fortune of learning from him for nearly two decades. On the several occasions I have met him, the experience has always been enriching, fruitful and, above all, ennobling.

In fact, if at all I have managed to contribute in any meaningful way in the area of Bharatavarsha’s history and cultural heritage, I owe a huge debt of gratitude—which I cannot repay—to Danino’s stellar body of work.

The areas of his scholarly investigations are daunting even for professional scholars—exposing the bogus Aryan Invasion Theory, tracing the trajectory of the Saraswati River, archaeology, ancient Indian knowledge traditions, nuances of the Puranas and epics, prehistoric studies, Harappan art and town planning, marine archaeology….

From a larger perspective, Danino has created a substantial and qualitative scholarly legacy in his own lifetime and continues quietly on his chosen path away from the public glare, away from any temptations of celebrity.

I speak from personal experience.

The distinguished positions he has held—most notably as Visiting Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Gandhinagar and, lately, as Chairperson of the NCERT—are not only entirely deserving but reflective of his eminence.

The Supreme Court, which took suo motu cognisance of a chapter on judicial corruption in an eighth-standard NCERT textbook, has meted out rather high-handed treatment to Danino.

In many ways, it is a tacit admission of its ignorance of his distinction.

There are legions of students and scholars who literally venerate Danino.

Without exaggeration, Danino—a Frenchman by birth and an Indian citizen for over three decades—is one of the finest cultural patriots of India.

He is deeply anchored in the philosophy and ideals of Sri Aurobindo, one of twentieth-century India’s greatest mystic-saints.

To put this in context, Danino has actually rescued the NCERT by lifting it out of the morass into which the Leftist establishment had sunk it.

Arun Shourie’s Eminent Historians, a classic exposé of the NCERT (apart from the Humanities department of the HRD ministry), is perhaps the most devastating critique of this morass to date.

But the late scholar N.S. Rajaram supplies an even more stunning data point that Shourie’s book does not contain.

He mentions how Nurul Hasan—Indira Gandhi’s favourite Education Minister—ran the NCERT like a czar and the consequences thereof.

“NIEPA is a particularly influential body that administers and oversees educational policy in India.

NCERT controls textbooks and other materials that are used in schools and colleges in India…

Through his control of these two powerful bodies, Nurul Hasan became the education czar in India…

A single example should help give an idea of the dangers of this centralised feudal educational policy.

For over 20 years, H.S. Khan—Nurul Hasan’s favourite—headed the history and sociology division of the NCERT.

He is known to hold the view that India became civilised only through the introduction of Islam.

This, incidentally, is also the official Pakistani line…

This is taking the Aryan invasion idea a giant step backwards…

In 1986, on Khan’s initiative, textbook writers in all the states were directed to change the version of history to accord with the anti-Hindu model.”

Yet not one court back then took umbrage at these flagrant distortions of history done at the behest of sitting ministers and high-ranking bureaucrats.

The reforms to history textbooks under Danino’s leadership were long overdue and are in the right direction.

Yet the Supreme Court has taken severe objection to one solitary chapter dealing with judicial corruption and has used its power disproportionately against a widely respected scholar and academic.

Its wording is troubling, to say the least.

“… We have no reason to doubt that Professor Michel Danino, along with Ms Diwakar and Mr Alok Prasanna Kumar, either does not have reasonable knowledge about the Indian judiciary or they deliberately and knowingly misrepresented the facts in order to project a negative image of the Indian judiciary….

There is no reason why such persons should be associated in any manner with the preparation of curriculum or finalisation of textbooks….

We direct the Government of India and all states/UTs/universities etc. to disassociate the three of them forthwith and not assign any responsibility involving public funds.”

Since my own schooldays, there have been any number of chapters in textbooks dealing with political and bureaucratic corruption.

Yet, as far as I can remember, there were no cases or punitive court actions against their authors.

To state the obvious, judicial corruption is a reality.

One is reminded of the recent case of Justice Yashwant Varma, which sent nationwide shockwaves and led to impeachment proceedings against him.

Omitting the mention of uncomfortable truths—judicial corruption in this case—will not make them disappear.

One is tempted to use the cliché that truth is stranger than fiction, but this issue is perhaps one of the clearest signs of the times we live in.

Or rather, an illustration of a timeless truth of history beautifully captured in the Mahabharata:

sulabhāḥ puruṣā rājan satataṃ priyavādinaḥ |
apriyasya tu pathyasya vaktā śrotā ca durlabhaḥ ||

“O King, it is easy to find people who always say pleasant things.

But it is extremely rare to find someone who speaks the unpleasant but beneficial truth, and even rarer to find someone willing to listen to it.” – News18, 13 March 2026

› Sandeep Balakrishna is an author, editor, columnist, public intellectual and an independent researcher. He is the founder and chief editor of The Dharm a Dispatch .

See also

Sita Ram Goel’s letter to Romila Thapar – Sandeep Balakrishna

February 23, 2026February 23, 2026VOI

Sita Ram Goel’s letter in 1991 to Romila Thapar rebuffs her and her gang’s phoney claims that Muslim invaders and rulers did not destroy Hindu temples and forcibly convert Hindus to Islam. – Sandeep Balakrishna

The first thing about Left-Liberals is the fact that they’re bullies and miraculously transform themselves as victims the moment someone stands up to them. A defining character-trait of a bully is a complete absence of manners and decency. Even a brief perusal of the “works” of the likes of Ram “perfumed” Guha, (late) Girish Karnad, (late) U.R. Anantha Murthy, T.M. Krishna, et al reveals this fact. Needless, they all took their lessons from that arch-bully Nawab Nehru. A little known fact of Nehru’s career as a wily politician is that when challenged, he would beat a temporary retreat, then go behind the scenes and write flowery, flattering letters in honeyed language to persuade his opponent to “please let me have my way just this once.” Those were vastly different times and Nehru got away with his perfidy. However, once he was confident that his authority as prime minister and party supremo was unchallengeable, he bared his fangs and hunted down and finished off the same opponent with a zealotry matched only by a medieval sultan.

This is the exact playbook that the Nehruvian history establishment followed under the leadership of Czarina Romila Thapar. And like Nawab Nehru, her gang either expelled or finished off the careers of all scholars and historians who did not toe the Communist line. Yet, there were undaunted men and women who were not only not afraid of their bullying but actually stood up to them and punched back twice as hard. In the political realm, the indomitable Chakravarthy Rajagopalachari ensured that Tamil Nadu would never have a Congress government. In the realm of history writing, doughty fighters like Sita Ram Goel, Arun Shourie, Koenraad Elst, David Frawley, and Meenakshi Jain led the fight from the front at great personal cost. It took a long time, but truth prevailed: names like Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, Bipan Chandra, and D.N. Jha have deservedly become obscenities and swearwords. Think about it: would you like to be called “Romila Thapar?”

Of these Sita Ram Goel was the master-boxer who did not give the dictionary meaning of say, “charlatan” as “a person falsely claiming to have a special knowledge or skill.” He simply uttered the word, “charlatan.” And provided us a great model at calling out charlatanism:

1. Suffer them not

2. Confront them head on

3. Be independent

4. Watch them squirm and then lose their ground when they start abusing and defaming you personally

5. The final stage: when they play victim

Recent history shows that all of these have rung true in real life. One cite scores of instances of this in Sita Ram Goel’s writings but a letter that he wrote to Romila Thapar in 1991 serves as a superb illustration of this model. In it, Goel rebuffs Romila Thapar and her gang’s phoney claims that Muslim invaders and rulers did not destroy Hindu temples and forcibly convert Hindus, to say the least. By itself, the letter is an exemplary work that combines solid historical scholarship, adherence to truth, and fearlessness in confronting an opponent armed with formidable political and institutional power.

Here are some excerpts included in the appendix of his monumental, two-volume work, Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them, Vol. 1, Appendex 4.

Excerpts from Sita Ram Goel’s Letter to Romila Thapar

We return to the Marxist professors…

We have cited from eighty histories written by Muslims over a period of more than one thousand years. We have also cited several Islamic inscriptions which confirm what the historians say. The citations show how Hindu temples continued to be destroyed over a vast area and for a long time. We have added no editorial comments and given no communal twist to the events that took place. All along, we have kept to the actual language used by the Muslim historians.

We wonder if the professors will dismiss as a mere listing of dates the evidence we have presented. What we expect from the professors is that they will come forward with historical analysis and interpretations so that the destruction of Hindu temples mentioned in the Muslim narratives gets explained in terms of economic or political or any other non-religious motives.

We stick to our position, namely, that it is the theology of Islam which offers the only straight-forward and satisfactory explanation of why Muslim conquerors and rulers did what they did to Hindu places of worship. We have provided full facts about that theology, as also about the history of how it took its final shape. It would be most welcome if the professors come out with their comments on the character and meaning of this theology. In fact, we look forward to a Marxist explanation of it. What were the concrete material conditions and objective historical forces which gave rise to this theology in Arabia at that time?

Next, we refer to the second point which the professors had made in their letter to The Times of India [sometime in August 1986]. They had said that acts of intolerance have been committed by followers of all religions. … We do not share their philosophy of separating the Buddhists, the Jains and the Animists from the Hindus. But we agree to use their terms for the time being and request them to produce:

1. A list of epigraphs which record the destruction of Buddhist and Jain monuments and Animist shrines by any Hindu, at any time;

2. Citations from Hindu literary sources describing destruction of Buddhist and Jain monuments and Animist shrines by any Hindu, at any time;

3. The Hindu theology which says or even suggests that non-Hindu places of worship should be destroyed or desecrated or plundered, or which hails such acts as pious or meritorious;

4. A list of Hindu kings or commanders whom Hindus have hailed as heroes for desecrating or destroying or converting into Hindu places of worship any Buddhist or Jain monuments or Animist shrines;

5. A list of Buddhist and Jain monuments and Animist shrines which have been desecrated or destroyed or converted into Hindu places of worship in the remote or the recent past;

6. The names and places of Hindu monuments which stand on the sites occupied earlier by Buddhist or Jain monuments or Animist shrines, or which have materials from the latter embedded in their masonry;

7. Names of Buddhist, Jain and Animist leaders or organizations who have claimed that such and such Hindu monuments are usurpations, and demanded their restoration to the original occupants;

8. Names of Hindu leaders and organizations who have resisted any demand made by Buddhists or Jains or Animists for restoration of the latter’s places of worship, or called for legislation which will maintain the status quo, or cried “Hinduism in danger,” or staged street riots in support of their usurpations.

We think that this sort of concrete evidence alone can decide the question of the limits to the logic of restoration of religious sites…

If the professors fail to come out with answers to questions posed by us, and to present the evidence in support of their statements, we shall be forced to conclude that far from being serious academicians, they are cynical politicians hawking ad hoc or plausible explanations in the service of a party line. In fact, we shall be justified in saying that they are … Stalinists. Stalinism … is an exercise in suppressio veri suggestio falsi in pursuit of a particular end. – The Dharma Dispatch, 16 March 2020

What Mahmud of Ghazni did must not be forgotten – Reshmi Dasgupta

January 7, 2026February 17, 2026VOI 1 Comment

What happened during this week 1,000 years ago was not a one-off assault by a greedy Central Asian despot who just incidentally happened to be Muslim. Mahmud’s destruction of Somnath set off a millennium-long assault on it by men who definitely had one thing in common apart from Islam: an animus towards the Jyotirlinga. – Reshmi Dasgupta

From January 6 to 9, 1026, the army of Mahmud of Ghazni lay siege to the wondrous temple of Somnath near the port city of Veraval. The defenders of the fortified shrine eventually could not repel the troops of the Central Asian invader and Somnath was captured. It was Mahmud’s 16th raid on India and loot was not the only target. Contemporary sources mention that Hindu merchants offered more money if he spared the idol; he refused and struck the first blow.

For that act, Mahmud earned the title “Butshikan” or idol-breaker, from an admiring Islamic world and his renown for the desecration of Somnath and other major Hindu temples in India persisted for centuries. Sultan Sikandar Shah earned the same Butshikan title in the 14th century for destroying temples in Kashmir in pursuance of the precepts of the Sufi preacher Mir Mohammad Hamadani. Even 600 years later, Aurangzeb appreciated Mahmud’s Islamic fervour.

It is inevitable that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s commemoration of the 1000th anniversary of the first destruction (as opposed to the misleading word “sacking” commonly used for the violent actions of Mahmud of Ghazni) of the Somnath temple will be countered with supposed “proof” of either “Arab” heroism or Hindu perfidy or both. It is now almost an article of faith among certain sections in India and abroad that Mahmud was more maligned than malevolent.

As has been often pointed out in recent times, the assertions of the high priestess of the secular camp Romila Thapar on the destruction of Somnath lack basis in actual facts even if delivered with withering condescension in impeccable upper class accented English. But there are plenty of willing believers in Thapar’s argument that Mahmud was not communal—merely venal—and that his destruction of the magnificent Shiva lingam at Somnath was incidental.

Indeed, the PM calling the repeated rebuilding of Somnath after each brutal destruction and plunder a symbol of the “unbreakable courage of countless children of Bharat Mata who protected our culture and civilisation” will be met with predictable counters. First, that “Arabs”—mainly traders who had settled in the area and married local women—died protecting Somnath from Mahmud’s marauders. Second, that there were many Hindus in Mahmud’s army.

There were indeed Hindus in Mahmud’s army, including battalion commanders, and he used them with varying effectiveness in campaigns on the subcontinent and even further north in Central Asia. But the phenomenon of mercenaries—soldiers of fortune who fight for the best paymaster—is well known. The presence of Hindus in his army cannot be taken to mean Mahmud was “secular” or that his actions were not intended to attack and diminish India’s majority faith.

There is no dependable account of Arabs dying while defending Somnath, but they could well have been miffed by their co-religionists from Ghazni disturbing their livelihoods. Arabs had all been Islamised by then although earlier traders and sailors may have adhered to pre-Islamic faiths including Christianity. So, it would be a stretch to imagine they would risk irking Allah by actually fighting alongside local Hindus kafirs to save Somnath from his holy warriors.

The Veraval Inscriptions (so named for the ancient port town next to the Somnath, which had a bustling mercantile trading business) dated to about 250 years after Mahmud’s destruction of the great Shiva lingam, highlight the dynamic between the two communities in the last millennium. The bilingual inscriptions from the reign of the Vaghela king Arjundev, records an agreement for the financing of the upkeep of a mosque at Somnath Patan built by a resident of Hormuz.

Curiously, the longer Sanskrit inscription lists the Hindu king and hierarchy but mendaciously describes the lord of the mosque as Vishwanatha and Shunyarupa and even calls Prophet Mohammed a “prabodhak” or preceptor. The Muslim shipowner donor from Hormuz Nuruddin Firoz is called a “dharmabandhav” of Sri Chhada who seems to be the mosque’s chief administrator. But in the shorter Arabic notation, there is no attempt to Indianise Allah or his Prophet.

The twin inscriptions seem to indicate that Hindu rulers bore no lasting animus against all Muslims—especially the Arab and Persian merchants from the Gulf—for the depredations of the Turkic invader from Ghazni 200 years before, and allowed them to set up mosques near the temple. But one sentence of the Arabic inscription points to the thinking of the Muslims even if they attempted to couch their initial outreach to the Hindus with seemingly syncretic gestures.

The Arabic inscription expresses the hope that Somnath will one day become a city of Islam, and that infidels and idols will eventually be banished from it. Why did the officials of the Vaghelas (the last Hindu kingdom of the region) allow that explicit expression of intent to pass unchallenged? Could they not read Arabic? Or were they persuaded, as indeed are some academics reading it 750 years later, that it was a “pro forma” statement and did not constitute a threat?In the event, though Somnath was revered enough for the 11th century Chalukya ruler Bhima I to rebuild it after Ghazni’s desecration, local inhabitants naively seemed to have borne no permanent suspicion of Muslims as the Veraval inscriptions two and a half centuries later seems to confirm. But a mere 35 years after those twin plaques were incised, the army of Delhi’s Sultan Alauddin Khilji under Ulugh Khan pillaged and destroyed Somnath yet again.

And that deed was approvingly chronicled by no less than the much-admired (even today) Persian poet Amir Khusro. In Khazain-ul-Futuh (Treasures of Victory), he gleefully wrote in 1310 (after Khilji’s armies attacked again in 1304 and annexed all of Gujarat):

“So the temple of Somnath was made to bow towards the Holy Mecca; and as the temple lowered its head and jumped into the sea, you may say that the building first said its prayers and then had a bath.”

He also added:

“It seemed as if the tongue of the imperial sword explained the meaning of the text: ‘So he (Abraham) broke them (the idols) into pieces except the chief of them, that haply they may return to it.’ A pagan country, the Mecca of the Infidels, now became the Medina of Islam. The followers of Abraham now acted as guides in place of the Brahman leaders. The robust-hearted true believers rigorously broke all idols and temples wherever they found them.”

Khusro also dispelled doubts about the intent of the Arabic Veraval inscription:

“Owing to the war, ‘takbir,’ and ‘shahadat’ was heard on every side; even the idols by their breaking affirmed the existence of God. In this ancient land of infidelity, the call to prayers rose so high that it was heard in Baghdad and Madain while the Khutba resounded in the dome of Abraham and over the water of Zamzam. The sword of Islam purified the land as the Sun purifies the earth.”

That Khusro described Somnath as the “Mecca of Infidels” underlines its primacy as a Hindu centre of worship, reiterating its pride of place as the first of the 12 Jyotirlingas listed in the Shiva Purana. So it is not surprising that every Muslim ruler thereafter who wanted to assert his religious cred and supremacy attacked Somnath, from Muzaffar Shah to Mahmud Begada to Aurangzeb. But it was restored, rebuilt, reconsecrated faithfully by Hindu rulers each time.

What is glossed over by apologists is that Somnath was not considerately left to resume worship. It was converted into a mosque by several Islamic attackers and then reconstructed repeatedly as a temple by Hindu monarchs. It was turned into a domed mosque by Aurangzeb in 1665. And the final rebuild happened in 1951, thanks to the determined efforts of Sardar Patel, KM Munshi and Dr Rajendra Prasad in the teeth of opposition from Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

In 1783, the formidable Maratha queen Ahilyabai Holkar had another Shiva temple constructed 200 metres from the original site of Somnath, whose added dome and minaret can be seen in late 19th century photographs now in the British Library. She had done the same three years earlier in Varanasi where the original Kashi Vishwanath temple had been mostly destroyed (only one wall left standing) and rebuilt as “Gyanvapi” mosque, also on Aurangzeb’s orders.

So, what happened during this week 1,000 years ago was not a one-off assault by a greedy Central Asian despot who just incidentally happened to be Muslim. Mahmud’s destruction of Somnath set off a millennium-long assault on it by men who definitely had one thing in common apart from Islam: an animus towards the Jyotirlinga. That it is standing proudly again is indeed a testament to the quiet determination and faith of the children of Bharat Mata, as PM Modi said. – News18, 7 January 2026

› Reshmi Dasgupta is a freelance writer formerly with the Times of India Group.

Somnath: A thousand years of unbroken faith – Narendra Modi

January 7, 2026January 9, 2026VOI 1 Comment

Somnath … hearing this word instils a sense of pride in our hearts and minds. It is the eternal proclamation of India’s soul. This majestic temple is situated on the western coast of India in Gujarat, at a place called Prabhas Patan. The Dwadasha Jyotirling Stotram mentions the 12 Jyotirlings across India. The stotram begins with “सौराष्ट्रे सोमनाथं च…” symbolising the civilisational and spiritual importance of Somnath as the first Jyotirling.

It is also said:

सोमलिङ्गं नरो दृष्ट्वा सर्वपापैः प्रमुच्यते ।

लभते फलं मनोवाञ्छितं मृतः स्वर्गं समाश्रयेत्॥

It means: Just the sight of Somnath Shivling ensures that a person is freed of sins, achieves their righteous desires and attains heaven after death.

Tragically, this very Somnath, which drew the reverence and prayers of millions, was attacked by foreign invaders, whose agenda was demolition, not devotion.

The year 2026 is significant for the Somnath Temple. It has been 1,000 years since the first attack on this great shrine. It was in January of 1026 that Mahmud of Ghazni attacked this temple, seeking to destroy a great symbol of faith and civilisation, through a violent and barbaric invasion.

Yet, one thousand years later, the temple stands as glorious as ever because of numerous efforts to restore Somnath to its grandeur. One such milestone completes 75 years in 2026. It was during a ceremony on May 11th 1951, in the presence of the then President of India, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, that the restored temple opened its doors to devotees.

The first invasion of Somnath a thousand years ago in 1026, the cruelty that was unleashed upon the people of the town and the devastation that was inflicted upon the shrine have been documented in great detail in various historical accounts. When you read them, the heart trembles. Each line carries the weight of grief, cruelty and a sorrow that refuses to fade with time.

Imagine the impact it had on Bharat and the morale of the people. After all, Somnath had great spiritual significance. It was also on the coast, giving strength to a society with great economic prowess, whose sea traders and seafarers carried tales of its grandeur far and wide.

Yet, I am proud to state unequivocally that the story of Somnath, a thousand years after the first attack, is not defined by destruction. It is defined by the unbreakable courage of crores of children of Bharat Mata.

The medieval barbarism that began a thousand years ago in 1026 went on to ‘inspire’ others to repeatedly attack Somnath. It was the start of an attempt to enslave our people and culture. But, each time the temple was attacked, we also had great men and women who stood up to defend it and even made the ultimate sacrifice. And every single time, generation after generation, the people of our great civilisation picked themselves up, rebuilt and rejuvenated the temple. It is our privilege to have been nurtured by the same soil that has nurtured greats like Ahilyabai Holkar, who made a noble attempt to ensure devotees can pray at Somnath.

In the 1890s, Swami Vivekananda visited Somnath and that experience moved him. He expressed his feelings during a lecture in Chennai in 1897 when he said:

“Some of these old temples of Southern India and those like Somnath of Gujarat will teach you volumes of wisdom, will give you a keener insight into the history of the race than any amount of books.

“Mark how these temples bear the marks of a hundred attacks and a hundred regenerations, continually destroyed and continually springing up out of the ruins, rejuvenated and strong as ever! That is the national mind, that is the national life-current. Follow it and it leads to glory. Give it up and you die; death will be the only result, annihilation, the only effect, the moment you step beyond that life current.”

The sacred duty of rebuilding the Somnath Temple after independence came to the able hands of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. A visit during Diwali time in 1947 moved him so much that he announced that the temple will be rebuilt there. Finally, on May 11th 1951, a grand temple in Somnath opened its doors to devotees and Dr. Rajendra Prasad was present there. The great Sardar Sahib was not alive to see this historic day, but the fulfilment of his dream stood tall before the nation.

The then Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, was not too enthused with this development. He did not want the Honourable President as well as Ministers to associate with this special event. He said that this event created a bad impression of India. But Dr. Rajendra Prasad stood firm and the rest is history. No mention of Somnath is complete without recalling the efforts of K.M. Munshi, who supported Sardar Patel very effectively. His works on Somnath, including the book, Somanatha: The Shrine Eternal, are extremely informative and educative.

Indeed, as the title of Munshiji’s book conveys, we are a civilisation that carries a sense of conviction about the eternity of spirit and of ideas. We firmly believe that that which is eternal is indestructible, as outlined in the famous Gita verse “नैनं छिन्दन्ति शस्त्राणि….” There can be no better example of our civilisation’s indomitable spirit than Somnath, which stands gloriously, overcoming odds and struggles.

It is this same spirit that is visible in our nation, one of the brightest spots of global growth, having overcome centuries of invasions and colonial loot. It is our value systems and the determination of our people that have made India the centre of global attention today. The world is seeing India with hope and optimism.

They want to invest in our innovative youngsters. Our art, culture, music and several festivals are going global. Yoga and Ayurveda are making a worldwide impact, boosting healthy living. Solutions to some of the most pressing global challenges are coming from India.

Since time immemorial, Somnath has brought together people from different walks of life. Centuries ago, Kalikal Sarvagna Hemchandracharya, a respected Jain monk, came to Somnath. It is said that after praying there, he recited a verse, “भवबीजाङ्करजनना रागाद्या: क्षयमुपगता यस्य।”. It means: “Salutations to That One in whom the seeds of worldly becoming are destroyed, in whom passion and all afflictions have withered away.” Today, Somnath holds the same ability to awaken something profound within the mind and soul.

A thousand years after the first attack in 1026, the sea at Somnath still roars with the same intensity as it did back then. The waves that wash the shores of Somnath tell a story. No matter what, just like the waves, it kept rising again and again.

The aggressors of the past are now dust in the wind, their names synonymous with destruction. They are footnotes in the annals of history, while Somnath stands bright, radiating far beyond the horizon, reminding us of the eternal spirit that remained undiminished by the attack of 1026. Somnath is a song of hope that tells us that while hate and fanaticism may have the power to destroy for a moment, faith and conviction in the power of goodness have the power to create for eternity.

If the Somnath Temple, which was attacked a thousand years ago and faced continuous attacks thereon, could rise again and again, then we can surely restore our great nation to the glory it embodied a thousand years ago before the invasions. With the blessings of Shree Somnath Mahadev, we move forward with a renewed resolve to build a Viksit Bharat, where civilisational wisdom guides us to work for the welfare of the whole world.

Jai Somnath! – The New Indian Express, 5 January 2026

› Narendra Modi is the Prime Minister of India and Chairman of the Shri Somnath Temple Trust.

Why are Indian historians in denial mode? – David Frawley

January 5, 2026VOI

It is time for deconstructionist historians to be deconstructed. Such historians, whose view of the world is purely outward, do not have the insight to appreciate India. … Their historical accounts reflect the attempt of a recent ruling elite to rewrite history in its own image—and to deny legitimacy for any other group, even if it requires denying the very existence of India before they assumed power! – Dr. David Frawley

India today is a strange country in that, uniquely among the nations of the world, it seems to be afraid of its own history.

If we study current historical accounts, particularly by India’s academic Left, the most important fact about the history of India is that there is no real history of India. This is because such scholars are unable to see the existence of any cohesive entity called India before 1947.

India as a real country in their view is attributed mainly to Jawaharlal Nehru and his followers after independence on a region that, though previously under the umbrella of British rule, was otherwise lacking in unity, continuity or perhaps even civilisational depth.

Such historians are happy to negate the history of their own country. Their accounts of India’s history are largely denials of any enduring country, civilisation or culture worthy of the name. Their history of India is one of foreign invasions, temporary or vanished empires, internal social divisions and conflicts, and a disparate and confused cultural diversity. They regard India as a melting pot or conglomeration of widely separated peoples and cultures coming together by the accident of geography that hardly constitutes any united country or national identity.

Unfortunately, such Indian historians, particularly with political alliances with Left historians in UK and US, are introducing their anti-India ideas into Western academia, which still does not understand India’s very different civilisational model.

Such studies forget that national identity is cultural, not simply political. India did not become a British state under British rule or an Islamic state under Muslim rule. The older Indian/Bharatiya culture continued.

These anti-India views are easily countered by a number of historical facts.

The first is that outside people and countries have long recognised a civilisation called India.

After Alexander the Great came to India in the fourth century BCE, the Greek historian Megasthenes wrote a book on the region called Indika, in which he noted an existing tradition in the country of 153 kings going back over 6,400 years. The Greeks overall lauded the civilisation of India.

Buddhist pilgrims in the ancient and medieval period, particularly from China, honoured India and its great culture during their travels. India’s cultural influence spread to Indonesia and Indochina in the East and into Central Asia, extending on a religious level to China and Japan.

The ancient Romans lost much of their wealth in a one-sided trade with India and the Europeans long sought the riches of India. Columbus, of course, found America by chance while looking for a more direct sea route to India.

Second, India, like many countries, has more than one name. The Indian Constitution says the “India that is Bharat”. Bharat is the main ancient name for the region going back to King Bharat, an ancient ruler long before Rama, Krishna or Buddha.

The Bharatas were the main people of the ancient Rig Veda, who ruled from the Sarasvati region. They eventually split into several groups, one of which, the Kurus, became dominant in late ancient times, as the main people of the Mahabharata.

Modern historians can more easily deny history to the name India than to Bharat and so ignore the other name of the country.

Third, India has probably the oldest, largest and most continuous literature of any civilisation. The Vedas with their many thousands of pages dwarf anything from the Middle East, Egypt or Greece of the ancient period.

Geography is an important topic in these texts. The Vedas speak of a land of seven rivers, Sapta Sindhu, extending to the ocean, of which the Sarasvati River was the most important. The Persians in their oldest Zend-Avesta remember the area as Hapta Hindu. Sindhu, Hindu and India are related terms.

The Ramayana, Mahabharata and Puranas outline a sacred geography of India/Bharat from Kailas in the north to Lanka in the south, Assam in the east to beyond the Indus in the west. Buddhist and Jain texts do the same, showing a common culture and geography.

Around this sacred geography, Indians built numerous temples and recognised numerous sacred sites, revealing this vast region and its cultural unity.

Along with these sacred sites are numerous festivals and pilgrimages. We see this in modern India, which has the largest tradition of pilgrimage in the world, notably the massive Kumbha Melas that bring in tens of millions of pilgrims. Pilgrims throughout India visit these sites, with South Indians commonly travelling as far as the Himalayan temples of the north. Festivals like Diwali are elaborately celebrated throughout the country.

Ancient Indian literature contains a calendar system still widely followed, the Panchanga. Indian calendars extend from historical time of thousands of years to cosmic time of billions of years.

Fourth, extensive new evidence of archaeology upholds the cultural continuity of the region. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) claims that in the Haryana/Kurukshetra/Sarasvati river area there is evidence of a continual development of agriculture and civilisation from 8000 BCE, extending through the Harappan urban era. This area hosts Rakhigarhi, the largest Harappan site, more extensive than Mohenjodaro or Harappa.

The Harappan Civilization—also called the Indus Valley or Saraswati Civilisation—is the largest and most uniform urban civilisation of the ancient world in the third millennium BCE. It ended with the drying up of the Sarasvati River around 1900 BCE, which the Geological Survey of India (GSI) has verified. The Vedas refer to the different stages of the Sarasvati river from an ocean-going stream to drying up in the desert, showing they resided on the river long before its termination.

Consistent with their negative line of thought, Leftist historians ignore this information or accuse archaeologists of political bias in their findings.

Lastly, but equally important, the independence movement drew inspiration from the older history of India/Bharat, with such revered figures as Swami Vivekananda, Lokmanya Tilak and Sri Aurobindo seeking to revive the ancient culture. Even Mahatma Gandhi’s mantra was Ram and his idea of India was Ram Rajya.

Not surprisingly, most of these independence leaders have been ignored by the same group of historians, who have made Nehru tower over them, with some afforded diminished roles and others forgotten altogether.

The Congress party, the main support for such historians, has since named every major institution or initiative in India possible after the three members of the Nehru family who became prime ministers. They have little regard for other Congress prime ministers like P.V. Narasimha Rao, whom they have also almost erased from history.

Yet at the same time today, India’s great culture and civilisation through Yoga, Vedanta, Buddhism, Sanskrit, Indian music and dance is once more influencing the entire world—expanding in spite of this historical denigration.

It is time for these deconstructionist historians to be deconstructed. Such historians, whose view of the world is purely outward, do not have the insight to appreciate India, because it is not a mere political formation but a vast spiritual culture.

Their historical accounts reflect the attempt of a recent ruling elite to rewrite history in its own image—and to deny legitimacy for any other group, even if it requires denying the very existence of India before they assumed power! – Vedanet, 30 June 2016

›This article originally appeared in Swarajya Magazine.

› Dr David Frawley (Pandit Vamadeva Shastri) is a Vedacharya and includes in his unusual wide scope of studies Ayurveda, Yoga, Vedic astrology, and Indian History.

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