Mughal hatred is a colonial construct
Today, I am not writing as a government employee or as a historian. Today, I am writing as a public intellectual, as someone who deeply believes in the idea of India, which celebrates different ideologies, different cultures, different opinions, different religions and which also does not let its people sleep hungry.
I am motivated to write this piece because there is no other way to celebrate the country. Today as we celebrate the 80th Independence Day, I just wanted to ask what is the idea of India that we are celebrating. We are definitely celebrating a country which thrives on diversity and syncretism.
Ours is a beautiful constitution. The constitution gives extraordinary promise of freedom, equality and dignity to every citizen, regardless of religion, language, caste, gender or region. The founding fathers did not envision an India where people would become the same; instead, they created a framework where differences could coexist and flourish.
Hence, I am writing from a place of optimism and hope. We have many reasons to be proud of this country, the roads are safe, the country is growing and flourishing, we are leaders in the international relations.
However, we are becoming increasingly reluctant to acknowledge our early modern past. The Mughals. The term is becoming a bad word in popular culture and movies like Chhava and Tanhaji are clearly not helping. The impact of such movies is enormous. The last nail in the coffin was when recently a Vice-Chancellor of one of the most prestigious university in the country clubbed Mughals with the British. The decolonial approach is necessary and very important but the understanding that the Mughals were also colonisers is a problematic thing.
The decolonial approach tries to establish that Indian civilization is an old civilization and we should take pride in our culture and we should not have a colonial approach towards looking at our past, that is absolutely true. But the colonizers were the British. Period.
This is not an apology for the Mughals. The Mughals were rulers, politicians, invaders. They had their own problems, they had their own flaws, but they were not equivalent to the British.
One very basic difference between the two is that even though Mughals also had a homeland which was not located in India, it was in Central Asia, but they were not sending taxes, money and resources from India to that particular location.
The British, however, had a home country and they used to send the money from the Indian territories and all their colonies to their home country. And it is on our money that the British claim to be one of the greatest civilizations. But as Dadabhai Naoroji has rightly written, they were the most un-British in their behaviour towards the Indians.
One can not even measure the amount of harm that the colonial rule has done to India. Harm is not just in terms of economic loss because of the British loot. But the communalism, the colonisation of the mind, the crippling of the thought are also colonial hangovers that we Indians are still carrying. Interestingly, the hatred towards the Mughals is also a colonial gift.
The Mughal Indian period, like the time period of the Mauryas or the Guptas was one of the golden ages of India. Today, Prime Minister Modi talked about how at least fifty Indian companies should be there in the Fortune 500 list, to identify the global impact of the nation.
This is a genuine dream but one should also remember that there was once a time when India was a global superpower, not just in the ancient Indian period when India was exporting ideas, culture, education and craft but also in the Mughal period. In the time of the Mughals, India was contributing almost 25% to the GDP of the entire world.
So, we were a golden bird. And the golden age of the Mughals was also an age of dissent. I would invoke Amartya Sen here and argue that Indians have always been argumentative. From the beginning of the civilization till today and that is the strength of this great democracy. I would just give one example from the Mughal period to highlight how the Indians continued to thrive in their very Indian way even in those “dark” times.
A poet by the name of Mirza Muhammad Niamat Khan, wrote a satirical piece about the son of Emperor Aurangzeb’s Wazir (Highest administrative official). The Wazir, petitioned that that the poet must be punished. To this, Emperor Aurangzeb replied that it was not proper to punish the poet, as punishing the poet would cause a greater disgrace, because then the poet would write things about Aurangzeb himself. Niamat Khan, earlier, had even written satirical pieces on Aurangzeb, and despite the Emperor increasing his reward, he had not stopped his comments.
Having this knowledge, I felt responsible to put it out for the people to read. So that they can form their own opinion on if the Mughals were colonisers or not.
The colonial legacy of villainizing the Mughals needs to be undone. Colonial understanding of our past needs to be questioned, needs to be countered. And the communal seed that has been sown in our hearts, in our lives by the British needs to be taken apart, needs to be called out.
Because the hatred towards the Mughals is a colonial construct.
(Author is a faculty of History at Aligarh Muslim University)
(The views expressed are personal to the author and do not represent Heritage Times)
