India, not a nation of losers

(Pragyata, Nov 2022) You Hindus have never done anything noteworthy, let alone brave or creative, that the foreigners who forever kept coming to subdue you, could have admired. Or at least that is the message Hindu readers, cinema-goers and schoolchildren get to consume. It is time to correct this negative self-image, as numerous observers muse, but the historians willing and able to transmute this pious intention into cold print haven’t been forthcoming in appreciable numbers. Communal history That is where a new generation of historians is stepping in. Foremost among them is Vikram Sampath, who made his name with a two-volume biography of Hindutva ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. His newest book, Bravehearts of Bharat, is about a series of freedom fighters that might as well have included Savarkar, but stops short at India’s formal passing into the status of British colony in 1858. It starts with Lalitaditya of Kashmir, who confronted among others Junayd al-Murri, successor as Arab governor to India’s first Muslim invader, Mohammed bin Qasim, but also Tibetans, pre-Islamic Turks; and ends with Begum Hazrat Mahal of Awadh, who fought the British. Note the large proportion of women among these fierce warriors, six of the fifteen whose story is narrated here. Moreover, two of them were Muslim: Chand Bibi of Ahmednagar, who fought against Akbar, and Begum Hazrat Mahal of Awadh, who took part in the Mutiny, now increasingly called (after Savarkar) the “First War of Independence”. This term has passed into the Congressite version of history in that it showcases a Hindu-Muslim unity against the British, as against the “communal” (Savarkarite!) emphasis on Hindu-Muslim conflict. The reader won’t notice any religiously partisan attitude in the description of their lives by the historian whom the Left has dubbed “Savarkar’s apologist”. Nonetheless, here and there the sheer facts of history will make the reader draw his own conclusions. Thus, most readers will know the defection in 1565 of the Muslim units of the Vijayanagar force in the battle of Talikota against a Muslim coalition, which transmuted an assured victory into a lethal defeat for the last remaining Hindu empire. Even for them it may be news that this was a repetitive behaviour pattern, e.g. in 712, “about 500 Arabs who were in [king of Sindh] Dahar’s army (…) deserted Dahar as they were reluctant to attack their co-religionists”. (p.12-13) Therefore, skeptics will doubt Sampath’s generous (or Congressite) characterization of Hazrat Mahal’s motive for engaging in the revolt of 1857: after the Indians’ defeat against the British she gained asylum in Nepal and had a “Hindustani Masjid” built there, “named in honour of the country she so dearly loved”. (p.320) Freedom Fighters like Savarkar and their purported heirs in Congress and other secularist circles like to affirm the patriotic motive, but this conceals that the Mutiny was a kind of mutual deception in which the Hindus sought to bring back the Maratha empire while the Muslims sought to re-establish the Moghul empire, which had never ceased to see itself as a foreign occupying force in a country that its founder Babar had cursed, and that was administered in a foreign language till the last. Everybody develops an attachment to his cradle-land, but was it this that motivated Hazrat Mahal, or was it zeal for the remains of a Muslim empire now dissolved by the British infidels? The one does not exclude the other. Martyrdom and victory The list of bravehearts was not selected for their martyrdom, though a few also tasted that. Thus, Banda Singh Bahadur, who pioneered Sikh military endeavour through the Khalsa founded by Guru Govind Singh but was at last captured and tortured to death by Moghul troops; or Rani Abbakka who ended up being captured by the Portuguese and dying in captivity, but was selected here for the more impressive list of defeats she had first inflicted on them. Most heroes here are spectacular and perpetual winners, such as Rajaraja and Rajendra Cola, or Lachit Barphukan. Of the Colas you have at least heard the name, and perhaps even that their policy was uniquely expansionist in that they conquered Eastern India and much of Southeast Asia, a counterpoint to the usual narrative that the Hindus never colonized foreign territories (mouthed both by pooh-poohers of Hindu valour and by Gandhi-style Hindu apologists). For details about their career, you can now turn to the accomplished historian Vikram Sampath, virtually the first to deal with this episode since KA Nilakanth Sastri’s History of South India (1955). But just as spectacular and certainly newer is his chronicle of Lachit Barphukan’s achievements. Indian schoolkids and grown-ups have been led to believe that until Shivaji in the late 17th century, Hindus had been totally helpless against the Muslim invaders. If you look at historical maps, the speed and magnitude of their conquering advances is no doubt impressive. Yet they were not infinite, sometimes because natural hurdles came in the way (thus, they failed to conquer Nepal), but often because Hindu resistance stopped them. That neither the Delhi Sultanate nor the Moghul Empire ever included Assam, was not for lack of trying. The champion of this successful resistance by the Ahom dynasty was Lachit Barpukhan (locally pronounced Borphukan), whose name deserves a similar aura as that of Shivaji (of whom he was a contemporary) or Peshwa Bajirao. He defeated the Moghul invasion force repeatedly, most spectacularly in the battle of Saraighat of 1671. Though the Ahoms ultimately fell due to an invasion, after six centuries, it was one from Burma (just like the Colas, the Buddhists too broke the stereotype with their foreign conquests), but the attempts at conquest from the Muslim-held Ganga plain were all fruitless. Nationalism The perspective of this book is clearly nationalist. More than the reader of his Savarkar biography will expect, Sampath does not hesitate to highlight episodes of Hindu-Muslim cooperation, not just against external enemy like the British but also against co-religionists. Secularists will hail this as proof that religion doesn’t matter, but history shows that Muslims at some point remember their religious duty vis-à-vis others whereas Hindus remain trusting of others until it is too late. To name the best-known examples: Jayachandra of Kannauj thought he could use an alliance with Mohammed Ghori against his rival Prithviraj Chauhan of Delhi, but after the victory over Prithviraj he ended up defeated by Ghori too; and Mahatma Gandhi imagined he could enlist the Caliphate movement into the Freedom Movement but only triggered the Moplah jihad against the Hindus of Kerala. That is why I see a need here to repeat that “nationalism is a misstatement of Hindu concerns”. Then again, the identification with India is at least a part of Hinduness. In Savarkar’s Hindu-nationalist (“Hindutva”) definition, a Hindu sees India not only as his Holyland (as a Western Hare Krishna might also do), but also as his Fatherland. For them, unlike for Muslims or Christians, India is not an area of expansion, a colony, but since forever their cradle. The Israeli historian Yoram Hazony shows in his dissident book The Virtue of Nationalism (2018) that nationalism was a great step forwards in the human evolution from a purely local viewpoint to an identification with a larger community mostly consisting of people you don’t personally know; and in India’s case, who fall outside your primary community: your caste. That is why Savarkar was a activist against caste. So from a viewpoint of social justice, this much-maligned ideology is not without its merits. It was one of the pillars of the French Revolution: the “brotherhood” pillar next to “liberty” and “equality”. So it may be a good thing if Indians, including Muslims, are reminded of their common nationhood. And of the virtues it produced, including bravery. Vikram Sampath: Bravehearts of Bharat. Vignettes from Indian History. Viking/Penguin Random House, Delhi 2022, 334 pp., Rs.799.
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Open Letter to Audrey Truschke

(In late 2020, I promised women’s rights campaigner Prof. Madhu Kishwar a contribution to her debate on Audrey Truschke’s work denying Aurangzeb’s anti-Hindu atrocities and temple destructions, which in that stage of the polemic focused on the specific insults she suffered as a woman. But this half-finished Open Letter got lost in my pile of unfinished writings; sorry to all concerned. After my finally sending it in, her website manushi.in published it on 29 August 2022.) Dear Audrey Truschke, Welcome to the club. Welcome among those who bear the consequences of uttering their opinions. In a paper posted on academia.edu.vom, published in the Woke magazine The Revealer (14 July 2020), you tell us of your own suffering at the hands of Hindu male Twitterati. It is called Hate Male, a rather predictable pun on Hate Mail. About what happens at your own Twitter account I don’t know much, as you have excluded me from it, exclusively because of my unwelcome opinions (i.e. not because of foul language), but I do know through numerous other channels that you are indeed hated in Hindu circles. Ever since your whitewash of the rock-solid and first-hand evidence of Aurangzeb’s numerous temple destructions (Aurangzeb: the Man and the Myth, Viking/Penguin, Gurgaon 2017), and additionally your recent denial of the rock-solid evidence for Islam’s extermination of Buddhism in South Asia, you are now among the proverbial hate figures for Hindu activists, up there with Wendy Doniger, Michael Witzel and Sheldon Pollock. The effect is not limited to the people who have actually read your book: they are only few and hardly overlap with those who send you hate mail and other criticism. But all of them know a few of your tweets, a quicker way to get to know your thoughts. So they know that you have tried to make Sita call Rama a “misogynistic pig”. They also know that when challenged, you attributed this to the American Sanskritist Robert Goldman’s Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa translation. Goldman himself, though not a friend of political Hinduism, had to intervene and rebuke your self-serving claim, clarifying that he had neither used the slur “pig” nor the anachronism “misogynistic”. You will understand that neither your lie about the Ramayana nor your heartfelt insult to Rama endears you to the Hindus. Your victimhood Then again, don't complain too much about that atrocious victimhood of yours. Compare your situation with the world around you: at the present rate of exclusion for dissidents, with even Nobel Prize winners sacked from their posts for wrongthink, you are very fortunate to have a secure US university chair and the support from your institution. Your enemies are not among the power-wielders whose actions have consequences for your career; they only consist of people you already looked down on, and who have no power to hurt you in any way. They only have foul but impotent words to trade, not good enough for turning your colleagues against you, let alone force your employer to sack you or all other employers to shun you. Even their so-called “death threats” are but verbal outbursts, ten a penny, not the kind of warning that would be given by a genuine revenge killer who means business. There are quite a few people who face direr consequences for what they have said. The Satanic Verses affair in 1989 with death threats against Salman Rushdie and effective assaults on his translators and supporters (including a non-lethal knife attack on a Nobel Prize winner, Naguib Mahfouz), assaults on the Danish Mohammed cartoonists and the massacre of the Charlie Hebdo editorial board in 2015 showed that the West is not immune from the repression against candid freethinkers. But the problem is far more tangible in the erstwhile Third World. Assuming you are not racist, you won’t look down on those cases just because the “offending” writers weren’t white, right? Recent murders of dissident writers took place in Bangladesh, Nigeria, India and other countries. On Krishna Janmasthami, a Muslim thought it funny to lampoon Krishna in a cartoon, bad in taste but not illegal. (This part you may not find in the general media, where an iron rule is that reporting of Hindu-Muslim confrontations must hide away any Muslim initiative and only start when Hindus react, as if a history of WW2 were to start on D-Day with the Anglo-American “aggression” against Nazi-defended Europe.) A Dalit Hindu reacted in a civilized way: not with rioting but with a counter-cartoon, viz. on Mohammed. Since the local Muslim grievance brigade couldn’t find the ad hoc cartoonist at once, they hit him in the next best way: they attacked the house of his relatives, including a Congress MLA, and set it on fire. To top it all, as punishment for being the target of a murder attempt, not the criminal attackers but the “offending” Hindu was arrested and jailed for “triggering” violence, and in the secularist media he was denounced and lampooned rather than becoming the beneficiary of solidarity. Now if all that had happened to you, with your family home set on fire and you yourself rewarded with jail time, then you would be in a position to complain. So, before you start drama-queening and throwing allegations around, I suggest you imagine going through his ordeal. What a privilege, merely having to imagine it. [Postscript 27 August 2022: the last three months have seen seven Jihadi murders of Hindus who had merely tweeted their support for Nupur Sharma, ex-BJP spokeswoman who had been sacked by the Islam-appeasing BJP for truthfully quoting Islamic scripture. This was the implementation of an Urdu slogan faithfully summarizing Islamic law: Gustāx-i-rasūl kī ek hī sazā: sar tan se judā, “Insulting the Prophet has only one punishment: separating head from trunk”. Time to face up to your privilege that you don’t have to face such fate.] Yours is a luxury problem, and your fury about it will come across as quite pubescent among those who have suffered real exclusion, real cancel culture, real death threats, and in some cases actual attempts on their lives, failed or successful. Thus, you end your paper waxing indignant about having to censor your acknowledgments section in order to protect your informers from reprisals by vigilantes. Well, for thirty years now it’s been a routine for me to consider whom to acknowledge, as I have found out that your Hindu-bashing tribe is very vindictive and unforgiving of dissidence, and this not through impotent tweets (or through the ephemeral blackfacing of a victim you mention, an informer of James Laine’s anti-hagiography Shivaji), but through very consequential exclusions, seconded by a non-committed but intimidated and therefore compliant bourgeoisie. Why they have an aversion for you But alright, let’s commiserate: it is no fun being the target of hate mail. Before evaluating it as morally wrong, or at least contrary to the gentlemanly behaviour that I was taught, let us first note that for a Hindu nationalist, it is also strategically wrong. Your camp can get away with all kinds of misbehaviour, for you will always be shielded by the establishment and the mainstream media. Hindus, by contrast, are in the middle of an uphill battle; they cannot afford mistakes, or anything that could be used against them. It is also very counterproductive: instead of a debate on your Aurangzeb thesis, which for their camp is eminently winnable, they have only provoked a wave of renewed indignation against Hindu nationalism, especially after the public has absorbed your version of their position. Whereas the Aurangzeb skeptics merely uphold an eminently reasonable account confirmed already by prominent historians like Jadunath Sarkar and RC Majumdar, now they find themselves criminalized in the dominant account as ill-behaved trolls. So, hate mail. This is, of course, assuming that it is genuine. Those who follow the news closely, know by now that the most conspicuous hate crimes are self-inflicted and fake. Those who follow it only vaguely are taken in by the initial scandal: front-page news and the ensuing, grimly serious panel discussions to burn the indignation against the alleged hate group into the minds of the audience. But when the truth next comes out, it is only a little article tucked away on page 13, if at all that. Some of the hate mail you cite, esp. your opening shot with a Holocaust photograph, is just too good to be true. In contemporary Western culture, Adolf Hitler is the hate figure par excellence, without competition, and so haters on both sides have their discourse full of him. But that is mostly to paint their enemies with the Hitler brush (so-called Godwins), and thus criminalize them as deeply as possible, as indeed you yourself try to do here and on other occasions; but not to identify themselves with him. And then of all the hateful things a Hindu could have thought up against you, your critic would have chosen to identify himself with Hitler and you with his victims? I hope you don’t mind some skepticism here. But then again, it is not altogether impossible: there are indeed some rare Hindu conspiracy thinkers who used to think up their own stories but who, ever since the internet, are swallowing Western intrigues about the 9/11 false flag operation (which actually exonerates Aurangzeb’s religion as the culprit), the illuminati-controlled “deep state”, or indeed “the Zionist world conspiracy”. So, lacking any more direct evidence, I will assume for now that your story is true. But it remains a strange aspect of your story that this troll called you a Jew. There are some Hindus who know of your Jewish descent, if only because you yourself regularly bring it up. Among American white Christians, with their vicarious guilt trip, it would immunize you from criticism (though not among your woke African-American and Muslim companions, many of whom are brazenly anti-Semitic themselves), and we know how sensitive you are to criticism. But most Hindus situate you in another group, and unlike the Jews, this is a group all of them do mistrust: the Christian missionaries. Indeed, in a Twitter debate about you, someone cursorily called you a Jew, and someone else restated the Hindu consensus: “She is not a Jew at all. Through marriage she belongs to a Baptist missionary family.” The subtlety of ethnic Jewry being distinct from religious Judaism, so that there are Jewish-born Christians, is lost on most Hindus. For them, your ethnic provenance is not important (though you wish you could have blamed their “hate” on that), but your subscribing to the missionary project is. Your actual religious adherence is unknown to me, but among Hindus, you ought to know you are reputed to be part of the Christian missionary lobby. Hindus often are not very clear about these Western denominational issues, e.g. Wendy Doniger was also often accused of Christian missionary links even after she had clarified that she is Jewish. Unlike your ethnic origins, with which Hindus have no quarrel (as Israeli ambassadors to India keep repeating: “the only country where the Jews were never persecuted”), your religious adherence amounts for them to a declaration of war. What have the Baptist missionaries done in the Northeast and other parts of India? Simple: they have destroyed the native religion to make way for Christianity. This is, of course, the obverse side of the coin in which all Christian missionaries take pride and which they gladly communicate to their home sponsors: that they have turned a village or a community Christian. [Postscript 27 August 2022: Once in the business of history denial, you have chosen to extend it to your own tribe, the Christian missionaries and their atrocities against Hindus e.g. “After whitewashing Aurangzeb, Audrey Truschke moves on to downplay the Portuguese Inquisition of Goa and atrocities committed against Hindus”, OpIndia, 6 August 2022] As our king Clovis was told by his baptism father upon his conversion from Paganism to Christianity in 496: “Burn what you worshiped and worship what you burned.” (This was actually Christian self-flattery playing at victimhood, viz. implying that the Pagans had tried to destroy Christianity the way Christianity had been busy destroying Paganism: though not true, this was a common psychological mechanism, viz. projection.) Similarly, Christian missionaries have gone to India to burn every sign of Hinduism: in the past literally, today figuratively, but at any rate to destroy the native religion and replace it with their own. This is really a declaration of war issued by the Christian camp, no way around it, and nothing even-handed about it. If the natives react, as the Odisha tribals did after the murder of the conversion-hindering Swami Lakshmanada and his four assistents in 2008, this is not “hate” but self-defence. But let us return to your Hitler anecdote, where we have assumed for now that what you claim is true. Even then there is not only what you say but also what you hide. Having had a ringside view of the Aurangzeb debate and the rhetorical habits of the Hindu nationalists for thirty years, I know it is a hundred times more common in this debate to hear Hitler mentioned to a very different effect than the one you bring up. The Hindu activists don’t equate themselves to Hitler, as you would like us to retain; on the contrary, they denounce Aurangzeb as a proto-Hitler, and consequently his whitewashers as Holocaust deniers avant la lettre. You do your best to keep your American audience in the dark about this well-attested fact, but in India, the likening of the Muslim atrocities on Hindus to the Holocaust is very common, and so is the likening of Aurangzeb to Hitler. Imagine one of your colleagues defending Hitler in all seriousness, and the indignation you would feel; well, that is what you look like to numerous Hindus. You allege that “Aurangzeb serves as a dog whistle for Hindu nationalists who invoke him to rile up anti-Muslim sentiments and violence”. The name Hitler definitely serves as a dog whistle in many situations, viz. as a call to hate every “new Hitler” of the moment. The hatred against Saddam Hussein or Moammar al-Qadhafi was powered by the indignation about Adolf Hitler’s crimes and it justified invasions, occupations and mass bombings; any doubt about these disastrous policies was derided as a “new Munich”. The regular likening of Narendra Modi to Hitler by the Indian and American Left is not so innocent either. When you regularly make Nazi comparisons, it is to spew hatred and add the extra force of the Nazi reference to it. But the fact that you are a certified hater doesn’t annul Hitler’s crimes; the Holocaust did take place. While your use of that historical reference is malafide, it nonetheless refers to real events. Likewise, whatever motives you ascribe to the Hindus, the reference to Aurangzeb's crimes is and remains correct. And denying them is like denying the Nazi crimes. You are a negationist. Why you don’t convince them To be sure, Aurangzeb was not all bad. By saying that, I break ranks with these numerous Hindus who tend to lose all nuance when his name is dropped. About Aurangzeb’s character, not much negative can be said. Alright, he dethroned his father and killed his elder brother, but so many rulers have done similar things (e.g. the Buddhist emperor Ashoka also killed his brother and many other relatives, generals and ministers to grab the throne for himself) that we will look the other way for now. But unlike his hedonistic and drug-addicted father and grandfather, he was a pious and ascetic man, qualities which Hindus tend to applaud. He chided his father for wasting tax-payers’ money on what Aldous Huxley was to call the “expensive vulgarity” of the Taj Mahal, and gave the good example by earning his own living with making skull-caps and calligraphing copies of the Quran. He also did charity, even in his last will, for his hunger-stricken subjects, or at least the Muslims among them. He was to his own mind a do-gooder in the good sense of the term. Far too often, Hindus attack his character as the reason for his thousandfold temple destructions and his atrocities against the Sikh Gurus. But there is no reason for personalizing the issue, not in the demonizing sense nor in the psychobabble sense of: “Oh, what a paradox: he was a pious man, but also a bigot.” No, his asceticism and his bigotry were not contrasting tendencies, they could be traced to one and the same trait: his commitment to his religion. If that religion had been Hinduism, a pious man like he would still have been inclined to tyaj, to renunciation, but he would have had no reason for intolerance. By contrast, now that his religion was Islam, which e.g. encouraged the inter-Muslim charity that he practised, he was also bigoted and actively intolerant against Unbelievers, at least as soon as he “got religion”. I support attempts by historians to question the received wisdom: historiography in practice is an ongoing revision of the past. You could for example distinguish between different phases of Aurangzeb’s life. In his last years (he died at 91) he had become frail, introspective and full of doubts about his own record; gone was his self-righteousness. Not that he had started feeling for the Hindus, but he repented an unforeseen consequence of his anti-Infidel policies: they had provoked rebellions and thus shaken a hitherto stable Muslim empire. Even towards the Hindus, he was no longer as fierce as he used to be: his invitation to Guru Govind Singh for talks at the court, if not a trap, was more conciliatory than what he had done to the Guru in earlier years (cfr. infra). So there is nothing wrong in principle with your second look at Aurangzeb’s record. Only, an inspection of the data fails to support your whitewash. These unflattering data have not gone away ever since historians Jadunath Sarkar and RC Majumdar drew their less Aurangzeb-friendly conclusions. The Hindu reaction Some of your fans ask why, 4 years after the Aurangzeb publication, no scholarly refutation has been written yet. My position is that, in spite of the reasons that follow, a booklet in refutation is worth being written as a source of ready reference. It need not be bulky for, contrary to what your friends assume, there is little hard evidence in your book, nor even attempts thereto. It is mostly bluff about how generous Aurangzeb was, and exercises in avoiding the extant hard evidence of the opposite. Nor are your rhetorical tricks very sophisticated: whoever has followed the earlier Ayodhya debate can see through this standard secularist rhetoric right away. Admittedly, many of your critics are equally unsophisticated. Yet there is a simple remedy for this problem. Hotheads are not leaders: militant types, instead of staging their own impotent and counterproductive verbal attacks on you and your ideological tribe, would rather have rallied around their champion,-- if there had been one. That champion in this case is whoever takes the trouble of refuting your thesis in a counter-book, full of proper quotes and references. This is what Vishal Agarwal did against Wendy Doniger’s unjustly famous book The Hindus, An Alternative History: write an equally hefty counter-book detailing Doniger’s numerous errors of fact and symptoms of bias: The New Stereotypes Of Hindus In Western Indology (CreateSpace 2015). Hindu historians qualified to refute your work are just not sufficiently impressed with it, having seen variations on it before. I am not going to do it either, because in my life I don’t want to spend much time anymore on a simple topic like Islam. Everything about its theology and a lot about its history has already been said (partly by me), I leave it to a younger generation of historians to earn their spurs by filling the gaps remaining in Islamic history, before graduating to more interesting topics in their turn. Scanning your book, genuine historians soon notice that its claim of giving a fresh look into primary sources and thus overturning the extant consensus on Aurangzeb’s fanaticism is only bluff. They know that primary sources attest thousands of demolitions and now see only rhetoric in your book that cannot possibly be a match for them. There is no more direct documentary evidence than Aurangzeb’s own firmāns (decrees) for temple demolitions, and no more direct evidence in archaeology than the extant temple ruins resulting from these firmans. Your bluff cannot possibly overrule them. Thus, of Saqi Mustaid Khan’s chronicle Ma’asīr-i Ālamgīrī, you randomly claim “a noted tendency to exaggerate the number of temples demolished by Aurangzeb” (p.108), but you carefully hide that number, which is thousands upon thousands, since it is so extremely different from your own “at most a few dozen” (p.100) or even “just over a dozen” (p.107, following Richard Eaton); readers might get suspicious about your cavalier treatment of primary sources. So, a few publications refuting your thesis have finally seen the light of day. VS Bhatnagar’s book Emperor Aurangzeb and Destruction of Temples, Conversions and Jizya (Literary Circle, Jaipur 2017) was written before your name became a household name in India, and published almost simultaneously with your book. It doesn’t address your specific claims, it addresses Aurangzeb’s record that you make claims about. And from Aurangzeb’s own Court Chronicles, it cites many more temple destructions than you would even acknowledge as possible. It wipes your book away without even mentioning it. A long list of certified temple destructions and other acts of persecution was promptly given by Dimple Kaul and TrueIndology: “Aurangzebs tyranny and bigotry cannot be whitewashed. A counterview”, First Post, 6 May 2017. You had no answer. Therefore you were challenged on Twitter on historical specifics by TrueIndology. So you blocked him, then claimed that he had run away from the debate, and took the worn-out pose of pulling academic rank. Like a sophomore and unlike an accomplished scholar, you avoided the actual controversy by merely boasting about your having (and he not having) an academic post. A real scholar would have developed a healthy skepticism of his colleagues’ pretences and of his own knowledge’s limitations. You added insult to injury by alleging that he did not have the academic level to meet you in the debate from which you had blocked him. Details in “Five cases where TrueIndology exposed Audrey Truschke”, MyVoice/OpIndia, 18 April 2018. Not about the evidence itself but about your highly colonial attitude during the debate, Pawan Pandey wrote: “Dr. Audrey Truschke, western Indologists and their hidden motives”, First Post, 23 September 2020. In your woke circles this ought to carry some weight. It is indeed remarkable that the heralds of “decolonization” evince a completely colonial attitude to Hindus who take their own decolonization seriously. Busy-body, know-it-all, telling them what is best for themselves, even teaching them how to decolonize. Among Western Indologists, you, maybe not as a controversial person (“many of my colleagues associate me with public controversy, and I must now contend with my reputation as a troublemaker.”), but at least as an anti-Hindu campaigner, enjoyed a lot of sympathy, the guaranteed reward for any position that irritates Hindus. But even there no one could help you with supportive documents that simply weren’t to be found in the Aurangzeb files. [Postscript, 27 August 2022: Specifically in reaction to your work are: • François Gautier: “Why the fascination for Aurangzeb ? », Sangam channel, 2020; plus the Aurangzeb exhibitions at his Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Museum in Pune. • “Aurangzeb destroyed thousands of Hindu temples; no, he didn’t rebuild any”, MyIndiaMyGlory, 15 January 2021. • Neeraj Atri: “Aurangzeb: Sufi or tyrant”, Sangam channel, 15 April 1921. • Aabhas Maldahiyar: “Audrey Truschke, stop glorifying killers of Hindus”, Australia Today, 5 August 2021. • Aditya Kuvalekar (Prof., Univ. Essex): interview on Aurangzeb by Arihant Pawariya, Vaad channel, 28 August 2021. • Sandeep Balakrishna: “How Acharya Jadunath Sarkar wrote the majestic volumes of the History of Aurangzeb”, Dharma Dispatch, 23 April, 2022. • Sandeep Balakrishna: “Here it is: a ready reckoner of Aurangzeb’s industrial-scale temple destructions. A partial list of Hindu temples destroyed by the Mughal king Aurangzeb”, Dharma Dispatch, 23 May 2022. • Saurabh D Lohogaonkar: Whitewashing Tyrant, Distorting Narrative, EvencePub, Delhi, July 2022. • Saurabh D Lohogaonkar: “Whitewashing tyrant, distorting narrative”, Sangam channel, July 2022. • Saurabh D Lohogaonkar: “‘Aurangzeb – Whitewashing Tyrant, Distorting Narrative’: New book debunks distortions around the Mughal tyrant Aurangzeb”, OpIndia, 7 August 2022.] The Dhimma Seeing through your twisting of history doesn’t even require a thorough investigation of primary sources, the distortions can be of a general nature, immediately recognizable, e.g.: “Beginning in 1669, Aurangzeb levied the jizya on most non-Muslims in the empire in lieu of military service”. (p.88) This is a very common refrain among apologists: that non-Muslims were not really discriminated against, since Muslims had to render military service just as non-Muslims had to pay jizya. No, serving in the army was prized, because it meant being part of the ruling group, and gave access to the spoils of war. Often it also wasn’t mandatory military service but volunteer armies, with the common characteristic of excluding non-Muslims. In many societies, bearing arms is a privilege of the in-group, forbidden to oppressed groups. Later, Muslim regimes also induced non-Muslims into their armies, most notably the Christian-born Jannissaries in the Ottoman empire, but only after converting and indoctrinating them. Your attempt to whitewash this exclusion of non-Muslims from the army is not so innocent, certainly not for a historian. Under the Dhimma rules for non-Muslims, a non-negotiable rule was that it was forbidden to them to bear arms: this was not a favour to them, a relief from military service, but an element of their exclusion from power. Yours is a projection of modern equations, with conscripts unable to hope for more than to come home alive from the war, therefore trying to dodge the draft, whereas Islamic law provided the soldiers with the right to plunder. As you certainly know (though the trolls besieging you may not), the projection of modern states of affairs onto an ancient world where they didn’t obtain, is the cardinal sin in historiography. Let me remind you: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” Anyway, the importance of this passage is that you yourself indicate a cut-off year, 1669. Until then, Aurangzeb largely abided by the compromise instituted by Akbar: the Moghul empire would be a Muslim empire, but less Muslim than empire, avoiding sources of fractiousness such as an all too open oppression that would provoke revolts. It had been decided on because Akbar wanted to get ethnic and sectarian lobbies within the Muslim ruling class off his back by attracting Hindu cooperation, and had more or less been continued by Jahangir and Shah Jahan. They profited from it, for instead of suppressing rebellions they could invest in the economy and in luxuries. Initially, Aurangzeb also continued this policy, and when he later strayed from it, aggrieved parties would remind him of it. But by 1669, he “got religion”, started to observe the Islamic rules more strictly, and therefore got harsher on the Pagans and their idolatry. As proof of his non-fanaticism, you cite a firman from 1659 prohibiting his men from further harassing the Brahmins of Benares. True, but that was still the period of Akbar’s compromise, not yet affected by Aurangzeb’s later Islamic radicalization. It cannot serve as refutation of his later iconoclastic commands. You write about this early period, when Aurangzeb resolved to walk in the footsteps of his “great ancestors”: “In Aurangzeb’s eyes Islamic teachings and the Mughal tradition enjoined him to protect Hindu temples, pilgrimage destinations, and holy men.” (p.102) It is only in your own words that the Moghul practice of turning a blind eye to the flourishing of idolatry, the single worst sin according to Islam, is “Islamic”; you never manage to quote any Moghul as saying this. And indeed, tolerating Hindu practices was part of Akbar’s compromise, not of Islamic teachings; orthodox figures like Ahmad al-Sirhindi saw through it and condemned it. But it was a success formula, it allowed for a peaceful prosperous empire, so Akbar’s successors didn’t really question it, until Aurangzeb did, not provoked by anything the Hindus had done, but convinced by Islamic teachings that wouldn’t be side-lined forever. At the end of his life, Aurangzeb also admitted the mistake which you try so hard to deny, viz. his anti-Hindu policies. This was not because he had suddenly developed pro-Hindu feelings, but because he realized that he had thereby provoked rebellions and thus destabilized a hitherto successful Muslim empire. On balance, he had rendered a disservice to Islam, not because he had disobeyed Islam (as apologists would like us to conclude, arguing that negative features like terrorism and iconoclasm “aren’t the real Islam”) but because in the real world, Islam has to co-exist with other forces, which ended up punishing a too principled loyalty to Islamic precepts. The Sikh Gurus and Aurangzeb Another significant fact about your Aurangzeb book that your more literate critics have noticed, is the absence of any mention of the Sikh Gurus contemporaneous with him: Guru Tegh Bahadur and Guru Govind Singh. When you ask common Hindus what the name Aurangzeb means to them, it is usually two things: his massive destruction of temples, among which they will notably mention the Krishna Janmabhumi and the Kashi Vishvanath, and his cruelty to the Gurus. He had Guru Tegh Bahadur tortured to death for his refusal to convert to Islam, and he had all four of Guru Govind Singh’s sons killed. Your cosy presentation is simply irreconcilable with what the Gurus suffered at Aurangzeb’s hands. But maybe you mean that those narrations, so inconvenient to your own thesis, are untrue? Your name as a bold historian, without fear of controversy, would really have been made if you had chosen to refute these common narratives about the Gurus, and succeeded in doing so convincingly. It would have made you even more hated, but if your refutation were true, the historians’ admiration would have been assured. However, that is not what you chose to do. Instead, your entire Aurangzeb book does not mention the Gurus at all. It mentions the Sikhs as such, the Sikh rebellions and Ranjit Singh’s kingdom, but strangely not those among them who had to deal directly with Aurangzeb. You can only make your thesis persuasive by being very selective in the primary material you consider: you simply leave out what doesn’t suit you. Very indirectly, though, you do mention Govind Singh. On p.152, you thank Heidi Pauwels (whom I personally knew in the 1980s when we were students at Leuven University) for organizing “the panels on Aurangzeb at the 2014 European Association for South-Asian Studies Conference, held in Zürich, Switzerland”. I attended those panels. They discussed several Hindi poets as writing in praise of Aurangzeb. Of course, many Soviet poets wrote in praise of Josef Stalin, and they’d better. (Your own case can be be compared with the foreign poets like Louis Aragon who, under no compulsion but through ideological blindness, equally wrote in praise of Stalin.) But their crowning exhibit in Aurangzeb’s favour was Guru Govind Singh’s letter to him, the Zafar Nama. In spite of its name, “victory letter”, this letter is here and there quite toadyist in contents. Thus, in order to get away with his message of refusing the emperor’s invitation to the court (calculating the risk of a trap involved), the Guru had to also include some diplomatic flattery: six verses out of a hundred and eleven. So yes, he praises Aurangzeb a bit. But it takes an Islamophile Indologist to read this as a genuine expression of what Govind thought about Aurangzeb. Any normal human being would, when told of what had transpired between those two in real life, have concluded that very obviously, for the Guru, Aurangzeb was the most hated man in the world. This was, after all, the killer of his father and all his four sons. Temple destructions Aurangzeb gave “two orders to destroy the Somanatha temple in 1659 and 1706 (the existence of a second order suggests that the first was never carried out).” (p.107) In the first year he was not so fired up with anti-Infidel zeal yet. He did get it destroyed, though, even at the fag end of his life when he supposedly regretted his anti-Hindu policies. “In 1672 Aurangzeb issued an order recalling all endowed lands given to Hindus and reserving all such future land grants for Muslims, possibly as a concession to the ulama. If strictly enforced, this move would have been a significant blow to Hindu and Jain religious communities, but historical evidence suggests otherwise. The new policy on land grants lacked implementation, especially in the more far-flung areas of the kingdom.” (p.105) In those days, distances counted for something. Officials in far-flung areas calculated that they could get away with taking bribes in return for a blind eye to the continuation of idolatry. Thus, the Jagannath temple in Puri survived a commandment for demolition in exchange for a huge bribe to the Moghul Governor, and when Aurangzeb insisted, it was closed down but still not destroyed. Plus, a military crisis in the Deccan with the Marathas distracted his attention to more pressing matters. That Islamic policies were not fully carried out as decreed by Aurangzeb, does not mean that there is a milder Islam, nor that he had moments of increased tolerance, merely that there exist other factors in the world except ideology. To sum up, you admit that “Aurangzeb also oversaw temple desecrations” and that “there were probably more temples destroyed under Aurangzeb than we can confirm”, adding an estimate: “perhaps a few dozen in total?” (p.107) That’s not what the sources suggest, but for humorous purposes it’s a cute proposal. You really set a new record in apologetics by repeatedly asserting that Aurangzeb not only destroyed temple, but also protected many. From whom did they need protection? No one else is known to have raided Hindu temples under his reign than he or his lieutenants. Anyway, your reasoning is a great hint for trial lawyers: “Yes, Your Honour, the facts have been proven, my client did indeed commit these murders. But! Given the far larger number of people he left alive, all those people he could have murdered if he’d really had the murderer’s nature in him, you will consider his case benevolently.” The figures in historian Sita Ram Goel’s provisional list of nearly two thousand demolished temples in India (Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them, part 1, 1990) has been around for more than thirty years already, a standing challenge to your negationist school. No attempt is in evidence to falsify even a single one of all those straightforward claims, not in others’ work nor in yours. By contrast, your claims about Aurangzeb have been challenged, both before you made them, and after. The Ayodhya debate and Indology The success of genuine scholarship in the Ayodhya debate, with the humiliating implosion of the anti-temple “Eminent Historians” on the witness stand during the Ayodhya trial (documented by Meenakshi Jain in her two Ayodhya books, and by Anuradha Dutt and S. Kumar: The Restoration of Ayodhya, 2020, but if you only follow the media, which have kept the lid on this episode, you may not even know about it), has made Hindu activists more self-confident. Around 1990, their Eminences rode a very high horse, making Ayodhya into the last stronghold of secularism and themselves its brave defenders. They already bit the dust in the Government-organized scholars’ debate of 1991 but were secure in the knowledge that, thanks to their captive media’s monopoly on the bottle-neck of the information-flow from India, the India-watchers worldwide would never hear about it, and that the few possible exceptions would not be willing or able to strike a discordant note. In India they continued to dominate the opinion sphere for more than a decade, forcing the political class to toe their line. Yet, their bluff against the scholarly evidence brought together by the scholars (only one of whom was linked to the Sangh, archaeologist SP Gupta) in 1991, gradually added to later and grandly confirmed by the Court-ordered ASI excavations of 2003, was scrutinized by the UP High Court. On the witness stand, each of them (well, the really big names managed to avoid questioning) collapsed and had to admit that their anti-temple posturing was based on no evidence at all. This is what will happen to you too in an authoritative scrutiny of your claims in favour of Aurangzeb and belittling the central passion of his life, the uprooting of Idolatry. The significance of the Ayodhya debate for the larger job of Indology and India-watching has so far been cleverly hidden. Here was a situation where practically the entire professional class was loudly proclaiming that there had never been a temple, lambasting little me for peddling a “Hindutva concoction”, yet being proven collectively wrong. After the High Court verdict of 2010 confirming the temple, two American professors privately congratulated me at the next Annual Conference of the American Academy of Religion; but nobody publicly apologized for misinforming the public on the basis of mere hearsay in their principal field of expertise. You also prove to be a worthy representative of Western Indology with your introductory sketch of India’s political landscape: “The BJP, a Hindu nationalist party, has controlled India’s central government since May 2014, and they have pursued an aggressive agenda of transforming India from a secular democracy welcoming of all faiths into a fascist state meant for martial-minded Hindus alone. During the last six years, anti-Muslim violence has risen sharply, freedom of the press has declined ruinously, and universities have been subjected to relentless assaults. History is a primary battleground for Hindu nationalists who want to rewrite India’s diverse past to justify their present-day oppression and violence, and historians like me get in their way.” This is indeed representative for the counterfactual image of India spread abroad by India-watchers and the media in the West. It is simply not true that the BJP has made India less secular or democratic, let alone “fascist”. While anti-Hindu violence has indeed risen (even more in Bangladesh, Pakistan and marginally the USA), the figures show that there has been no rise in anti-Muslim violence, on the contrary. In Indira Gandhi’s time there were street riots with thousands of victims; the Kalistani violence in the 1980s and early 1990s killed many thousands of Hindus (rarely mentioned in overviews of Indian communalism), many more than the death toll in the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom by Congress secularists; Muslims committed an anti-Hindu pogrom in Godhra killing 59 Ayodhya pilgrims, thus triggering street riots killing some 200 Hindus and 900 Muslims. In recent street confrontations like over the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in 2019, such death toll had become unimaginable. The press is much freer than under Indira and continues its age-old number of attacking the Hindutva forces unfettered, then getting copied by the New York Times, the BBC and other media you take as Gospel. And no, the BJP had never rewritten the history textbooks. Indeed, HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar, a dyed-in-the-wool RSS man, declared on this question in 2018 that he was proud of never having changed a single chapter (“Not rewritten a single history chapter in 4 years: Javadekar”, India Today, 27 September 2018) ,-- an expression of the presently dominant ideology that your class hasn’t even noticed: BJP Secularism, distinctly focusing on burying its historical Hindu associations. This complete contrast between India’s reality and the fantasy world of the Indological analysis of the “communal” landscape could be laid at your door and summed up as mendaciousness, and that’s what many of your Hindu critics will certainly do. But I rather have the impression that, in spite of your self-flattery of being an attractor of controversy, you are essentially a herd animal merely swallowing and reproducing the dominant narrative peddled in your academic circles. Your performance as a university professor specialized in Indian communal episodes is dismal, but far from unique. To Hindu polemicists, I often have to point out that their view of the West suffers from anachronism, e.g. they explain the phenomenon of Hindu-bashing (with an infelicitous term: “Hinduphobia”) through the woke category of racism, flattering themselves as bold anti-colonial warriors. In reality, though racism was indeed very strong in the colonial period, anti-racism has meanwhile become the state religion in the West, and Hindu-bashing has other grounds than race. Proof: it does not extend to Indian Muslims or Christians, though they are of the same race. The reasons for Hindu-bashing are more complex than race, but lazy or conformistic minds will prefer the racial explanation. The India-watchers suffer from a similar anachronism. Numerous papers and books keep on appearing that explain the BJP’s policies in the 2020s through some quotes from RSS leader MS Golwalker’s book We, Our Nationhood Defined, written in 1938. In 1948 the police impounded all Hindutva publications (after the Mahatma murder), and Golwalkar himself forbade its republication afterwards. So 99,9% of Hindutva men have never read it (in publishing Golwalkar’s Collected Works in 2006, the RSS even left this book out, on the mendacious ground that Golwalkar had not been its writer), it is never quoted in BJP documents, yet your tribe pompously derives BJP policies from it. By contrast, the BJP’s real ideology, in which party members receive training, is called Integral Humanism (°1964). Because this sounds too innocuous, it is never even mentioned in most of the expert literature on Hindutva; as if the Labour Party were discussed without mentioning socialism. More generally, we could say that academic and media talk about the BJP has at its core of truth the Hindu party founded by Shyam Prasad Mookerjee in 1951, the way it was until his death in 1953. Back then it still aimed for a Hindū Rāṣṭra, but the Hindu content of its politics soon started decreasing. When party leader Deendayal Upadhyaya launched Integral Humanism, this was a correct move, presenting a kind of modern translation of the Hindu concept Dharma; but its main value for new leaders like Nana Deshmukh and AB Vajpayee was that it didn’t contain the word “Hindu”. Former party president Balraj Madhok protested against the party’s socialist and Nehruvian drift, and was thrown out. In 1977 the party merged into the new Janata Party, and when it was reconstituted in 1980 as the Bharatiya Janata Party, it shed its Hindu roots and the goal of Hindū Rāṣṭra. Significantly, it added a green strip to the party flag, an act of Muslim appeasement, the very thing the Jan Sangh had chided the Congress Party for. Then what about the Ayodhya movement, Hindu par excellence? This movement had been started by politicians of the Hindū Mahāsabhā and the Congress Party, and Congress PM Rajiv Gandhi worked towards the building of a new temple. But in 1989 the Eminent Historians came out with an Ayodhya statement that gave cold feet to middle-of-the-road politicians, and for two years the BJP captured the issue, using it to win the 1989 and 1991 elections, and then dropping it. The truth of the relation between the BJP and Hindu agitation was laid out clearly by BJP Justice Minister Arun Jaitley to the American Ambassador in 2004, when he dismissed it as merely an electoral ploy, immediately shelved after the elections. That is why (with the exception of MM Joshi’s clumsy rewriting of the history textbooks in 2002) neither Vajpayee nor Narendra Modi have fulfilled any item of the Hindu agenda. The seeming exception of the abolition of Kashmir’s privileged status (Art. 370) was only possible because this was formally not a religious issue, never mentioning the words Hindu and Muslim. Moreover, on the ground little has changed, contrary to promises, and stray Hindus are still being murdered there. You can check on social media that Hindus express their criticism of, or anger at, the Modi Government for its persistent betrayal of the Hindu cause. The future The political power equation that facilitates the partisan anti-scholarly conduct of your camp will not last forever. One day it will become feasible to do academic research on the strange phenomenon that an entire academic and mediatic guild has systematically disinformed the public about the communal situation in India, consistently for decades. Your own whitewash of Aurangzeb will serve as a significant piece of evidence. But don’t worry. It’ll take some more time (the BJP is not working on it), so you’ll have enjoyed your career and all the perks of your office. Nobody will be interested anymore in the yellowed pages of your negationist books. The dissertation about the India-watchers’ collective decades-spanning disinformation campaign will be read by the jury members and the fresh PhD’s mother, and then gather dust. After all, this is what has already happened: the false claim that the Ayodhya temple was a Hindutva concoction got exploded, yet the entire guild that ought to have been reduced to blushing and apologizing, managed to keep the news of its massive failure out of the information circuit. Conversely, the few of us who were proven right, will never be compensated for the slander, boycotts and cancelings we suffered. And speaking for myself, I also don’t believe in the retributive karma theory: no punishment in the next life for the negationists, no reward for those who held on to the historical truth against all odds. We’ll have to be satisfied with Benedict de Spinoza’s dictum: “Virtue is its own reward.” I certainly wouldn’t want to be in your shoes right now. But let’s not dramatize it. As an ex-Christian, I join you in your Christian belief in conversion. You can leave your negationism behind, it’s easy. From a sinner against the principles of historiography, you can redeem yourself. There will be lots of joy in heaven.
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“I am not aware of any governmental interest in correcting distorted history”

Koenraad Elst: “I am not aware of any governmental interest in correcting distorted history” (interview by Surajit Dasgupta- 5 June, 2016, Swarajya) 5 In this exclusive e-mail interview with Swarajya’s National Affairs Editor Surajit Dasgupta, the Belgian Indologist and writer calls the bluff of leftist historians while urging Indian students of history to pursue the subject with more rigour and scientific temper. Excerpts: While Swarajya has published articles exposing how Marxist historians hound peers who disagree with them out of academic institutions, we have got news from different sources that you are finding it difficult to get employed even in Belgium. What precisely is the objection of your detractors? I do not wish to offer much detail here. Firstly, I am not privileged to know the details of decision-making instances that lead to my own exclusion. Even when sending an official “regret letter”, they would not give in writing the real reason behind their decision (as anyone experienced with job applications knows). Secondly, even though no law was broken, going into this still has the character of an allegation, and that requires proof. Some cases of deliberate exclusion or disinvitation were simply obvious, but my standards of proof are higher than that. So, I just want to close this chapter. Let’s not bother, everybody has his problems, and these career hurdles are mine. In fact, I have had quite a bit of luck in my life, including help from individual Hindus whenever the need arose (air tickets paid, hospitality etc), so any fussing about this boycott against me would be disproportionate. Let’s just assume I missed those opportunities because I was not good enough. Or karma, whatever. The topic in general is important, though. The Leftist dominance of the Humanities departments in India, often amounting to total control, results from the wilful and systematic “ethnic cleansing” (to borrow Madhu Kishwar’s term) of any young scholar suspected of pro-Hindu sympathies. Exceptions are the people who entered on the strength of ideologically neutral work, or of initially toeing the line, but coming out with pro-Hindu convictions only after getting tenure. This cleansing of enemies stems from the old Marxist mentality: a war psychology, treating everyone with a different opinion as an enemy inviting merciless destruction; and a boundless self-righteousness rooted in the belief of being on the forward side of history. Marxism is waning even in India, but that attitude is still rife among the anti-Hindu forces, both in India and among Western India-watchers. You refer to Indian Marxist historians sarcastically as “eminent historians”. Why that particular term? “Eminent historians” is what they call one another, and what their fans call them. When they don’t have an answer to an opponent’s arguments, they pompously dismiss him as not having enough “eminence”. So when Arun Shourie wrote about some abuses in this sector, he called his book Eminent Historians. It is also a pun on an old book about prominent colonial age personalities, Eminent Victorians. “Eminence” in this case refers to their position and relative glory. The Communists always made sure to confer position and prestige, as opposed to the Sangh Parivar, which fawns over people with position but doesn’t realize that those people have only acquired their position by toeing the anti-Hindu line. In a way, you have to concede that the Left has honestly fought for its power position. But half their battle was already won by the Hindu side’s complete absence from the battlefield. One example of the Sangh’s ineptness at playing this game. In 2002, the supposedly Hindu government of A.B. Vajpayee founded the Chair for Indic Studies in Oxford. The media cried ‘saffronization’. However, the clueless time servers at the head of the BJP nominated a known and proven opponent of Hindu nationalism, Sanjay Subrahmaniam, who thus became the poster boy for ‘saffronization’. This way, they hoped to achieve their highest ambition in life: a pat on the shoulder from the secularists. That pat on the shoulder, already begged for so many times, remained elusive, but the tangible result was that they had conferred even more prestige on an “eminent historian”, all while denying it to their own scholars. What would you tell your peers who say that the “Out of India” Theory (OIT) is a fringe theory? Of course it is a fringe theory, at least internationally, where the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) is still the official paradigm. In India, though, it has the support of most archaeologists, who fail to find a trace of this Aryan influx and instead find cultural continuity. As for the situation abroad: most scholars assume the invasionist paradigm, but only very few also argue in an informed manner for the invasionist theory, not many more than those who argue against it. But anyway, this ‘fringe’ aspect doesn’t impress me at all. When Copernicus put the sun rather than the earth at the centre of the solar system, he was in a minority of one, very ‘fringe’ indeed; but he won the day. What is the evidence against the Aryan Invasion Theory? First of all: there is no evidence in its favour. Archaeologists have spent a century of well-funded excavations looking for a trace, any trace, of the Aryans moving into India. Even the invasionists concede that “as yet” no such thing has been found. The new genetic evidence, while still immature, generally goes in favour of emigrations from India and, while leaving room for immigrations too, is emphatically failing to pinpoint an invasion coinciding in time with the hypothetical Aryan invasion. Meanwhile, the written record clearly points to an emigration scenario. That the Iranians lived in India and had to leave westwards is reported in the Rig Veda, a text thoroughly analysed and shown to support an “Aryan emigration” by Shrikant Talageri. It can equally be deduced from the Avesta. Even earlier migrations are mentioned in the Puranas. These are of course very mixed and unreliable as a source of history, but it is a bad historian who discards them altogether. Their core, later fancifully embellished, consists in dynastic lists. Keeping that ancestral information was the proper job of court poets, and they devised mnemotechnical tricks to transmit it for many generations. In this case, it too does convey a basic scenario of indigenousness and emigration. Finally, there is the linguistic evidence. Many Indians believe the hearsay that it has somehow proven the invasion. It hasn’t. But permit me to forego discussing those data: too technical for an interview. Of late, the Marxist historians have revised ‘invasion’ to ‘migration’. They say that there might not have been a war when the so-called Aryans arrived here, but they have no doubt that the ancestors of today’s North Indians, especially the upper castes, by and large migrated from Central Asia into India. In other words, the Marxists say that we Indians were originally not Indians—invasion or no invasion. Does this ‘revision’ satisfy you? Exasperated at not finding a visible trace of this invasion, conformist scholars have theorized an alternative that doesn’t require such visible remains: a migration under the radar. Often, when they try to give details, they still mean a military invasion rather than a gradual migration, since they bring in the military advantage of horses and chariots to explain how such a large and civilized Harappan population could be overrun by a handful of outsiders. But even if they genuinely mean a migration, it still amounts to the same scenario as an invasion, that the Vedic Aryans came from abroad and the natives took over the language and religion of the intruders. So, anyone who thinks that the migration theory is a breakthrough away from the invasion theory really shows he doesn’t understand the issue. ‘Migration’ effectively means ‘invasion’ but avoids the burden of proof that the more dramatic term ‘invasion’ implies. To be sure, it doesn’t much matter who came from where. The so-called Adivasis (a British term coined circa 1930) or ‘natives’ of Nagalim in the North East have settled in their present habitat only a thousand years ago; which is fairly recent by Indian standards. So, ironically, they are genuine ‘immigrants’ or ‘invaders’, yet no Indian begrudges them their place inside India. Many countries have an immigration or conquest of their present territory as a proud part of their national myth: Madagascar, Romania, the Siberian part of Russia, Hungary, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, etc. If the Indo-Aryans, or indeed the Dravidians (theorized to have come from Iran or even Central Asia), had really immigrated, that would then have been a pre-Vedic event, at least 3,500 years ago, and that time span ought to have been enough for integration into the national mainstream. So this ‘homeland’ debate ought to have been a non-issue, only of interest to ivory tower scholars. But different non- or anti-Hindu forces decided to politicize it. Abroad, these were the British colonialists, white supremacists in the US and Europe, and among them the Nazis, who considered the AIT as a cornerstone and eloquent illustration of their worldview. Inside India, first of all the Christian missionaries, followed by the non-Brahmin movement, the Dravidianists, Nehruvians and Ambedkarites, followed in turn by their western supporters. The AIT was used to break up Indian unity and pit upper castes against lower castes, non-tribals against tribals, and North Indians against South Indians. After this massive politicization, the partisans of Indian unity finally decided to give some feeble support to the fledgling Out of India (OIT) theory. Yet, scholars rejecting the OIT because of its alleged political use have no qualms about espousing the AIT, politicized since far longer, in many more countries, and not as a pastime of a few historians but as the basis for government policies. On the one hand, the unaffiliated or apolitical Indian student loves your theories; your passages are quoted widely in debates on ancient Indian history. On the other, you do not seem to get along well with the so-called right wing historians of this country either. You have written a blog against them. Well, I have nothing but good to say about some Indian researchers, both naturalized ones like Michel Danino and natives like Meenakshi Jain or Shrikant Talageri. But then, there are others too. Certainly the name P.N. Oak rings a bell? In the second half of last century, he spread all these theories that the Taj Mahal was a Shiva temple; that the Kaaba was built by Vikramaditya as a Shiva temple; that the Vatican (originally the Roman “Poets’ Hill”) is really “Veda-Vatika”; that my mother tongue, Dutch, is the language of the Daityas (demons), etc. The bad thing is that numerous Hindus have run away with these stories, and even some NRI surgeons and engineers of my acquaintance believe in diluted versions of the same. In a less extreme manner, this disdain for historical method is widespread among traditionalist Hindu “history rewriters”. They frequently put out claims that would make legitimate historians shudder. Many of these rewriters thought that with Narendra Modi’s accession to power, their time had come. I know, for instance, that many of them sent in proposals to the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR). None of these was accepted because they ignored the elementary rules of scholarship. Any student writing a thesis knows that before you can develop your own hypothesis, you first have to survey the field and assess what previous scholars have found or theorized. But these traditionalist history rewriters just don’t bother about the rest of the world, they are satisfied to have convinced themselves. Their horizon is not larger than an internet list of like-minded people. In itself, it is not a problem. People can learn. Unfortunately, they are too smug to do that. They actively misinform Hindus by claiming that the Aryan Invasion Theory has long been discarded. They also do a lot of harm to the bona fide historians with whom they get juxtaposed. So it is true that I have lost patience with them. Since the Modi government came to power in 2014, has there been an effort to revise the depiction of Indian history in academic curricula, which, many in India believe, is politically motivated? Has the Indian government approached you with the request of being a part of any such initiative? No, there has been no request at all. However, I myself have sent in an application to the ICHR, but that has run into technical difficulties, mainly to do with my foreign passport. So, the situation is and remains that institutionally, I have nothing to do with the Indian history scene. The version of history taught by the Nehruvians was politically motivated. The feeble Hindu attempt to counterbalance this (‘saffronization’) circa 2002 was confused and largely incompetent. Humbled by that experience, the BJP today is not even trying to impose its own version. Contrary to the Nehruvians’ hue and cry, allegations about the BJP’s interference in history teaching or more generally in academe are simply not true. We are only talking of changing some lines in the textbooks, and even that seems a Himalayan effort to the BJP. Yet, what is really needed is a far more thorough overhaul. Except for some scholars without any power, nobody is even thinking about this very-needed long-term job. “Many Hindu ‘history rewriters’ put out claims that would make legitimate historians shudder. Like the Taj Mahal was a Hindu temple.” “Many Hindu ‘history rewriters’ put out claims that would make legitimate historians shudder. Like the Taj Mahal was a Hindu temple.” Could the reason be that RSS-affiliated historians and you are not particularly fond of each other and this government is influenced by the Sangh? Sangh-affiliated historians would not need me to arrive at their positions or to devise a policy if called upon to do so by the present government. But again, I am not aware of any governmental interest in correcting the distorted history propagated by the Nehruvians. I would welcome it if it happened, but so far the BJP, still begging to be recognized as ‘secular’, only has its eye on ‘development’. I am happy to report that there are some as-yet-insignificant private initiatives, though. Once they achieve results, there will be more to say on them. Would you say or agree that the Indian government, regardless of the political party that runs it, would be uncomfortable appointing or commissioning an academic who is perceived as being anti-Muslim? Certainly. Though it never had any problem with anti-Hindu candidates to even the highest post. Does the genesis of your problem with anti-left historians in India lie in the fact that on the issue of Babri Masjid, if you do not agree with the left, you do not agree with the right wing either? On Ayodhya, there has never been a conflict with any non-Left historian. To be sure, I have my disagreements on some minor points, but they have never been the object of a controversy. So, no, on Ayodhya, I may have minor and friendly differences of opinion with ‘right-wing’ historians, but no serious quarrel. In that debate, the longstanding quarrel has been with the “eminent historians”, their supporters in media and politics, and their foreign dupes. They were on the wrong side of the history debate all along, and it is time they concede it. In the case of the “eminent historians”, it is also time for the surviving ones to own up to their responsibility for the whole conflict. The then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, was on course towards a peaceful settlement, allotting the site to the Hindus and buying the militant Muslim leadership off with some typically Congressite horse trading. Not too principled, but at least with the virtue of avoiding bloodshed. It is the shrill and mendacious declaration of the “eminent historians” in 1989, amplified by all the vocal secularists, that made the politicians back off. Not only have they falsely alleged that no Rama temple ever stood on the contentious site, their more fundamental lie was to bring in history at all. Ayodhya belongs to the Hindus not because it was their pilgrimage site a thousand years ago, nor because of ‘revenge’ for a temple destruction effected 800 or 500 years ago, but because it is a Hindu sacred site today. No Muslim ever cares to go to Ayodhya, and in spite of being egged on by the “eminent historians”, enough Muslim leaders have expressed their willingness to leave the site to the Hindus. This whole controversy was unnecessary, but for the Nehruvians’ pathetic nomination of the Babri Masjid as the last bulwark of secularism. If all the archaeological findings from Ayodhya are arranged chronologically, what story of the disputed plot of land does one find? Did a temple of Lord Rama stand there, which Babar’s general Mir Baqi demolished to build the mosque? Or, did Mir Baqi find ruins on the spot? That a Hindu temple was demolished by Muslim invaders is certain, on that we all agree. But there is less consensus around, or even awareness of, the fact that this happened several times: by Salar Masud Ghaznavi in 1030 (the rebuilt Rajput temple after this must be one of the excavated pillar bases), by Qutbuddin Aibak’s troops in 1193, and by Mir Baqi on Babar’s behalf in 1526. “The Ayodhya site should belong to the community that holds it sacred. Muslims do not, and the Rama worshippers do. Case closed.” “The Ayodhya site should belong to the community that holds it sacred. Muslims do not, and the Rama worshippers do. Case closed.” What it was that was replaced by Babar’s mosque is not fully clear. I speculate that in the rough and tumble of the collapsing Delhi Sultanate, Hindus had managed to take over the site and started worship there, even though the building they used was a mosque imposed on the site. That was exactly the situation in 1949-92, and I think it also applied towards 1526. Babar destroyed a Hindu pilgrimage centre, a Hindu presence at the site, but not the Rajput temple from the 11th century of which the foundations were excavated in 2003. Was the temple’s demolition just an odd event, or was it the necessary materialization of an ideology, repeated many times and in many places? When Mohammed Shahabuddin Ghori and his lieutenants conquered the entire Ganga basin in 1192-94, they destroyed every Hindu temple they could find. Only a few survived, and that is because they lay out of the way of the Muslim armies, in the (then) forest, notably in Khajuraho and in Bodh Gaya. But all the Buddhist universities, all the temples in Varanasi etc were destroyed. Ayodhya became a provincial capital of the Delhi Sultanate, and it is inconceivable that the Sultanate regime would have allowed a major temple to remain standing there. So, the narrative propagated by the Sangh Parivar, that Babar destroyed the 11th century temple, cannot be true, for that temple was no longer there. When Babar arrived on the scene, Hindus may have worshipped Rama in a makeshift temple, or in a mosque building provisionally used as a temple, but the main temple that used to be there had already been destroyed in 1193. See, Ayodhya’s history becomes more interesting once you discard the lies of the “eminent historians” as well as the naïve version of the Sangh Parivar. The controversial part lies herein, that the persistence of the temple all through the Sultanate period would have implied a certain tolerance even during the fiercest part of Muslim rule. In reality, the demolition of Rama’s birthplace temple was not an odd and single event, but a repeated event in application of a general theology of iconoclasm imposed by the Prophet. Was it a temple of Lord Vishnu rather? Or, were they quite a few temples of one or more deities built in different periods by different kings? In her 2013 book Rama and Ayodhya Prof Meenakshi Jain has detailed all the scholarly evidence and the debate around it, including the embarrassing collapse of the “eminent historian” case once they took the witness stand in Court. She shows that the Rama cult had already left traces more than 2,000 years ago. Attempts to make Rama worship a recent phenomenon were just part of the sabotage attempts by these historians. Also, the site of Ayodhya, though probably older, is at least beyond doubt since Vikramaditya in the first century BC. All indications are that the disputed site was already visited by pilgrims as Rama’s birthplace well before the Muslim conquest. So, this was a longstanding pilgrimage site for Rama. Against the utter simplicity of this scenario, anti-Hindu polemicists of various stripes have tried all kinds of diversionary tactics: saying that Rama was born elsewhere, or that the temple belonged to other cults. This Vishnu-but-not-his-incarnation-Rama theory, or the claim of a Shaiva or Buddhist origin, were some of those diversionary tactics; they are totally inauthentic and artificial. Alright, among historians we can discuss every possible hypothesis. But from the very relevant viewpoint of Islamic iconoclasm, all these distinctions don’t matter: all those sects were false, leading men astray, away from the one true religion, Islam, and therefore they all, and certainly their idols and idol houses, were to be destroyed. Whatever be the true story, which community do you believe has a greater right of ownership over that disputed site? The community that holds the site sacred. Muslims go through all this trouble to travel to faraway Mecca, why don’t they go on a cheap and easy pilgrimage to Ayodhya instead? It seems they have made their choice. So let us respect their choice, and also the choice of the Rama worshippers who do care for Ayodhya, by leaving the site to the latter. Case closed. Do you hate Muslims or Islam? No, I do not hate Muslims. They are people like ourselves. Having travelled in Pakistan and the Gulf states, I even dare say I feel good in Muslim environments. And if I desire the liberation of Muslims from Islam, that is precisely because I like them. Suppose you discover that a friend of yours still believes in fairy tales: wouldn’t you consider it your duty to set him straight and confront him with the true story, precisely because he is your friend? And I do not ‘hate’ Islam either. If a teacher uses his red pencil to cross out a grammatical mistake in a pupil’s homework, we do not say that he ‘hates’ the mistake. He simply notices very dispassionately that it is wrong. The use of the word ‘hate’ in this case stems from an attempt to distort the debate and misrepresent the argument by means of emotive language. The belief that someone heard the word of God, dictating the Quranic verses, is just one of the many irrational and mistaken beliefs that have plagued mankind since the beginning. I have been part of a massive walk-out from the Church. For intellectuals, the decisive reason was the dawning insight that Christian belief was irrational. But for the masses, it was mainly that it was no longer cool to be a believer. People started feeling embarrassed for still being associated with this untenable doctrine, and are none the worse for having left the beliefs they were brought up in. I wish Muslims a similar evolution, a similar liberation. I do not wish on them anything that I have not been through myself. How do you view the recent terrorist attack on Belgium? To what extent do you think is migration from Islamic countries responsible for terrorism on European soil? As Ché Guevara said, a guerrilla fighter is among the masses like a fish in the water. In this case, the jihad fighters had found safety and comfort in the Muslim community. So the demographic Islamization of some neighbourhoods i000n Brussels (due to our own silly policies) has indeed played a role. But I expect you to retort that there were also other factors, and that is true. How do you react to the Muslim refrain that the terrorists in their community are a creation of America and NATO’s flawed foreign policy and interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc? It is simply not true that Ghaznavi or Aurangzeb took to jihad and iconoclasm in reaction to British colonialism or American bombings. They were inspired by an older source—the Prophet’s precedent, Islam. However, it is true that many contemporary jihad fighters have indeed been fired up by a specific circumstance—western aggression against Muslim countries. Assenting to Quranic lessons about jihad is one thing, but actually volunteering for jihad it quite another. In most people, it needs a trigger. The illegal invasions of Iraq or Libya, or footage of an Afghan wedding bombed by American jets, provided such a trigger. I am very aware that being bombed is just as unpleasant for wedding guests in Kandahar as for commuters in Brussels or Mumbai. Right now, even little Belgium has five bomber planes in Iraq as part of the US-led war effort against IS. These bombers must already have killed, along with some jihad fighters, more civilians than were killed in the terrorist attacks in Brussels. In Belgium, I have drawn some attention with my defence of the Syria volunteers: young Muslims grown up in Brussels or Antwerp and going to fight for the Islamic State. Our politicians call them ‘monsters’, ‘crazy’ and other derogatory names, but in fact they are pious idealists. They may be misguided in their beliefs, and I daresay they are, but they do have the courage of their conviction. Without any pressure on them, they volunteer for putting their lives on the line in the Syrian desert. You cannot deny them bravery and self-sacrifice. The western invasions and bombings in Muslim countries have brought nothing but misery, and I have opposed them all along. What the Muslim world needs is not more civil wars, sectarian wars, foreign military interventions, which all serve to polarize the minds, to freeze them in existing antagonisms. What it needs is a thaw. Here again, I speak from my own experience: the post-war climate of peace and prosperity in Europe has allowed a genuine cultural revolution, an emancipation from the stranglehold of Christianity. The Muslim world will only evolve if it attains a modicum of peace and stability. Note that the military interventions have nothing to do with Islam criticism, nowadays slandered as ‘Islamophobia’. On the contrary. Without exception, all the politicians ordering interventions in Muslim countries have praised Islam, calling it “the religion of peace” that is being ‘misused’ by the terrorists. Not a single word of Islam criticism has ever crossed their lips. A legitimate Islam critic like the late historian Sita Ram Goel has never harmed a hair on the head of a Muslim. Islamophiles such as these politicians, by contrast, have killed many thousands of innocent Muslims. How would you advise Indians to fight terrorism? Security measures and repression are neither my field nor my favourite solution, but I understand that sometimes they are necessary. So I want to spare a moment to praise the men in uniform who risk their lives to provide safety. However, this approach won’t provide a lasting solution if it is not accompanied by a more fundamental ideological struggle. That is what I am working on.
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