Do mention the Mughals

Narendra Modi, the Indian PM, is censoring a great civilisation

david horspool

Narendra Modi seems to have been reading his Orwell.

You can imagine the Hindu Nationalist Indian Prime Minister underlining the slogan from Nineteen Eighty-Four ‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past’ – and nodding in agreement.

Thus the recent announcement that Indian history textbooks, under the direction of the government, have been reissued with some alarming cuts.

Previously, the editorialising had focused on softening the role of Hindu extremists in the assassination of Gandhi. It played down the remarkable fact that, after his death, communal violence actually decreased, as if the newly independent India had stared into the abyss of civil war and drawn back.

The latest interventions focused on the Mughals, the dynasty (we used to call them Moguls) who ruled India from the 16th to the 19th century. While reports that the Mughals have been ‘left out’ of the new curriculum are exaggerated, their historical role has been diminished.

This sounds like pretty bad history. It’s hard to overestimate the importance of the Mughal dynasty in India – and even in global terms. The descendants, via Babur, of the great Mongol conqueror Timur (made famous for English speakers in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great), the Muslim Mughals ruled a territory that stretched from Afghanistan to the Bay of Bengal.

Rulers such as Akbar (1542-1605) became fabulously wealthy through a combination of military strength, intelligence and political flexibility. It was to the Mughals that James I sent his first ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe. He was duly overwhelmed by the magnificence and munificence on show at their court.

The most famous relic of the Mughal age is the Taj Mahal, the monument to his wife from Akbar’s love-struck – and grief-stricken – grandson, Shah Jahan.

The idea of leaving all that out – or even allowing it to play second fiddle to a myth of Hindu purity – seems crazy.

The physical relics of the Mughals are impressive enough. As well as the Taj Mahal, there is Delhi’s Red Fort (another Shah Jahan commission) and Akbar’s lost city of Fatehpur Sikri, with one of the largest mosques in India.

Historian Sunil Khilnani compares it to a ‘tent encampment, except that animal skins and wood frames have been replaced with the permanence of stone and marble, carved with great skill by local craftsmen. It’s like touring the physical manifestation of a mind.’

But, just as important – and perhaps this is why Akbar and his successors get Modi and his lieutenants’ backs up – is the Mughals’ tolerance. Khilnani writes, ‘His [Akbar’s] reign is often used as a rebuttal to Hindu nationalist arguments that Muslim rule in India was an unremittingly dark age for Hindus, and as a reminder to conservative Muslims of Islam’s capacity for enlightened accommodation.’

Those two last words aren’t often applied to India’s current regime, which depends more on divide and rule.

British dealings with the Mughals underwent a complete reversal over a period of nearly 200 years. While Thomas Roe was a patronised petitioner at the court of Jahangir, the trade permissions he did negotiate were the beginning of British encroachment and eventual conquest. The British kept the

Mughals as nominal rulers, always preferring empire by proxy if possible.

But when Bahadur Shah got mixed up in the Indian Mutiny in 1857, he was removed to exile in Burma, and the great ruling dynasty ended.

Any British observer speaking up for keeping the Mughals in India’s story, it follows, is hardly an imperial apologist.

The Mughals’ interaction with the Europeans, and with Britain in particular, tells the whole sorry story of the humbling of a great power by a ruthless interloper. Not that the Mughals themselves would have complained, as that was how they had come to rule India, too. But to leave them out or reduce their impact is to falsify the whole narrative of Indian history.

You might think that one thing worse than politicians interfering in history is foreign journalists pontificating on other nations’ ways of teaching that history.

But I use the Mughal case as an egregious recent example of something we’re grimly familiar with here, too. If Indian ministers shouldn’t be rewriting their country’s history, nor should British ministers be doing the same at home.

I may have views about the reliability of critical race theory, for example, but I don’t want the arbiter of its use to be the Secretary of State for the Department for Business and Trade. I don’t want the Secretary of State for Education to rewrite the history curriculum as Our Island Story

And if there needs to be a conversation about ‘decolonising’ the curriculum, I’d rather academics, educators, parents and pupils had it, rather than being told what to think by politicians.

We don’t want to end up back with Orwell. He said his historical education was ‘a series of unrelated, unintelligible, but – in some way that was never explained to us – important facts’.

There’s more to history than that.