The government is at war with the Mughals

Ashraf Engineer

September 20, 2025

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to All Indians Matter. I am Ashraf Engineer.

Years after coming to power, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government declared war on the Mughals and other Muslim rulers of the past. It has done so over the past few years by slowly erasing or pushing them to the margins in school textbooks. The Delhi Sultanate has all but disappeared from the books and while some references to Mughal rule have remained, its milestones and cultural contributions have faded.

It’s tough to understand how school students will make sense of India without knowing of the long-lasting Mughal rule and its enduring impact on Indian art, architecture, language and food.

SIGNATURE TUNE

Between the early 16th and mid-18th century, much of the Indian subcontinent was dominated by the Mughals. It was, by all accounts, a powerful empire that was in its time also the world’s richest. Although it crumbled ultimately as all such empires do and then finally fell to the British, the India of today continues to bear the Mughal imprint on its society and culture.

It was the Mughals who unified much of South Asia and on every Independence Day, the prime minister addresses the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort – which was built by the Mughals. Their influence can be seen in India’s administrative practices, clothes, architecture, art and speech. For instance, can you imagine Hindustani music without the sitar or the tabla? Or a menu at a restaurant serving Indian cuisine that does not have biryani or tandoori chicken?

Most North Indian languages have words that are Persian or have Persian roots. Persian was the court language of the Mughals.

Despite this, the government has undertaken a drive to erase the Mughals from national consciousness. Other than the changes in school syllabi, a tourism brochure omitted the Taj Mahal – the best known monument in India and among the best known in the world. Some Hindutva supporters have even called for it to be demolished, claiming it used to be a temple.

But how can you deny fact: Mughal culture grew deep roots in India and in fact was as Indian as anything else?

To understand this, let’s take a brief look at history. Since the early 13th century, a series of dynasties collectively known as the Delhi Sultanate dominated North India. The last of them, the Lodhis, were defeated by Babur who led his army through the Khyber Pass into the Indo-Gangetic plain. There was a good economic reason for his venture: controlling access to trade routes connecting Delhi and Lahore with Kabul and Central Asia. For centuries, Indian goods had used this trade route.

Building on this victory, Babur established the foundation of the Mughal empire.

He died only four years after reaching India and it was his son Humayun who began to establish Mughal legitimacy on Indian soil. Among the many ways was greeting the morning sun while seated in a raised pavilion and showing himself to his subjects. This was an ancient practice followed by Indian rajas that equated the ruler with what was considered divine.

The Mughals became fully Indianised during the long reign of Humayun’s son Akbar. Contrary to the Delhi Sultanate policy of battling the Rajputs, Akbar absorbed them into his empire. Several Rajput kings accepted the arrangement of retaining their rule while also being appointed to high positions in Akbar’s court. Over time, a kinship was born between Mughals and Rajputs that superseded religion.

The court turned multi-ethnic and women gained great importance too. Rajput women could now become wives of the emperor and their children were eligible for the throne. Akbar’s son Jahangir, for instance, was half Rajput. Jahangir himself married royal Rajput women, one of whom, Jagat Gosain, became the mother of his successor Shah Jahan. This made Shah Jahan three-quarters Rajput.

It should be no surprise then that the presence and influence of Rajput women in the court meant that their own children were imparted their culture. There was an intermingling of Indian and Mughal sensibilities, which also showed as I said in art, architecture, language and food.

Like other Indian emperors, which the Mughals now were, they engaged with Sanskrit literary traditions and had Brahmin scholars in their courts. Akbar, for example, commissioned Persian translations of the Mahabharata and Ramayana, thus incorporating Indian thought into Mughal statecraft. Such fusion was also observed in medicine. The Mughals’ Yunani medical tradition was Indianised after its fusion with Ayurvedic works and the use of Indian plants in medicine.

However, by the mid-19th century, the East India Company controlled much of the subcontinent with the Mughal ruler Bahadur Shah Zafar being reduced to a prisoner in the Red Fort. When the 1857 revolution began, the mutineers rode hard to Delhi and acknowledged Bahadur Shah Zafar as the emperor. Even in this state, the Mughal dynasty was seen as India’s legitimate sovereign.

Despite this history, the culling of the Mughals from textbooks shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s in keeping with the ideology of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party or the BJP and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or the RSS. They seek to project India as a Hindu nation in which the presence of others, especially Muslims, is an intrusion.

So, textbooks must be culled of all Muslim influence and legacy in India. Mughals and Muslim rulers must be viewed as cruel invaders only.

This is also being seen in the renaming of places with Muslim names. So, Mustafabad became Saraswati Nagar, Allahabad is now Prayagraj, Ahmednagar was renamed Ahilyanagar… There are several such examples and many more will be proposed.

The BJP, formed in 1980 as the political arm of the RSS, has long considered Muslims to be second-class citizens. The RSS itself was founded in 1925 and modelled on fascist groups such as Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts in Italy. Modi is a lifelong member of the RSS and he was chief minister of Gujarat in 2002 when India’s worst communal riots since Partition, leaving at least 1,000, mainly Muslims, dead, broke out there.

The RSS, incidentally, has often been accused of colluding with the British and the government has been criticised for downplaying Raj brutality following renovations at the Jallianwala Bagh memorial. It was at Jallianwala Bagh that British troops surrounded peaceful protestors and fired at them, killing hundreds.

Even Mahatma Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram has not been spared. The BJP government in Gujarat is “renovating” historic structures there. Critics have said it undermines Gandhi’s legacy and will turn the site into a theme park of sorts.

As I said, the BJP’s revision of textbooks shouldn’t surprise us. To create a Hindu Rashtra out of a secular nation, it needs to create fake historical narratives or delete anything that proves its ideology is flimsy. Rewriting history gives it the legitimacy it needs.

And it’s not just about recreating the past but controlling the future. The BJP and RSS want an all-powerful state and an obedient population. So, there is already a significant shrinking of rights and capture of institutions. The BJP projects the government and Modi as the state itself and any opposition to it is therefore termed anti-national. So, instead of the government being accountable to citizens, citizens must be accountable to Modi and the BJP.

For this to happen, the past must change. Without that, the present can’t be viewed the way the BJP and the RSS want it to. And neither can the future be shaped in their vision.

Thank you all for listening. Please visit allindiansmatter.in for more columns and audio podcasts. You can follow me on Twitter at @AshrafEngineer and @AllIndiansCount. Search for the All Indians Matter page on Facebook. On Instagram, the handle is @AllIndiansMatter. Email me at editor@allindiansmatter.in. Catch you again soon.