An Embarrassing Exercise in Intolerance

 

Reading Babur: The Quest for Hindustan by Aabhas Maldahiyar is an excruciating experience that will test tolerance levels to the utmost. It begins with some florid verses on Rajputi bangles that burned like blades which is every bit as awful as it reads since it glorifies Jauhar where women burned on the altar of male egos with lines like ‘To the Rajputi womb, so fierce, so wide, That bore no child for comfort or pride…To the wrists, the wombs, the war-torn soil – To the hands that chose fire over spoil.’ You wouldn’t think it possible, but it gets progressively worse since his prose is even more execrable.

The author makes it clear he wishes to expose Timurid rule for what it was without the colonial era – bias that has fed lies to clueless Indians in the guise of history – ‘The romanticized sauce of Ganga Jamuni Tehzib often overflows its historical vessel, drowning reason under tales of imagined harmony and fabricated tales of Hindu – Muslim marital alliances. Yet, when the varnish of poetic exaggeration is stripped away, the hard stone of historical reality remains cold and unyielding.’ The reader is assured that the evil Mughals were invaders and conquerors who did not have a single redeeming trait between the lot of them and whose sole aim was to rape and loot ‘Hindustan’ while decimating Hindus with jihadist fervour. Lest this reeks of alarming levels of bias and Islamophobia, Maldahiyar takes pains to establish his own credentials as a historian stating ‘…with scholarly clarity that the entire narrative presented in this work is rooted primarily in my own direct translation of the Baburnama (Persian version), allowing the emperor’s own words – untampered by later translations – to serve as the primary witness to his life and deeds.’

This statement notwithstanding, the entire narrative is soaked with prejudice and littered with repetitious reams of rabble – rousing rhetoric that is every bit as contradictory as it is incoherent. Babur is harshly criticized for being too much of a religious fanatic committed to rooting out the kafirs and infidels but in every other page amidst the tediously trotted out information dump which makes for laborious reading the reader is informed that Babur in direct violation of Islamic tenets partook of inebriants and intoxicants at interminable wine/arak parties and was a drunken sot and a sickly one at that who also indulged his homosexual tendencies. Cue gasps of horror!  

Likewise, ignoring the many facts that led to Akbar, being hailed as a great ruler who was tolerant and progressive, he tells us with salacious glee ‘…under Akbar’s rule, if a young woman was found unveiled in a public place – a mere act of showing her face to the open air – she would be condemned to the degrading profession of prostitution. The same brutal sentence awaited those women who dared lie to their husbands, or, worse still, raised their voices in quarrel. Such was the lofty pedestal of female dignity under the so – called enlightened rule of the Timurids’. Busy as he is bewailing the brutality and chains that bound women during Mughal rule, he remains blithely unaware of his own sexism and penchant for policing women’s bodies with outdated male notions of honour that has led to women being brutalized and victimized to this day long after the mighty Mughals have been relegated to the pages of the distant past.

Accusing all historians and scholars save himself of romanticizing the Mughals who according to him were Jihadists, destroyers of idols, killers of kafirs, guilty of genocide, Maldahiyar then proceeds to rewrite the history of Rajputs with sickly levels of schmaltz. His account of Rana Sangha exonerates the Rajput ruler of sending an invitation to Babur to bring about the fall of Lodi, insisting that it was Babur who sent an envoy seeking his aid which Sangha agreed to. He admits that Sangha later reneged on this deal and glosses over the man’s tendency to repeatedly break promises and make bad decisions, choosing instead to lionize his valour and honour, which he swears is typical of Rajputs entirely ignoring that warlike race’s track record for treachery amidst their own ranks which predates Prithviraj Chauhan’s ignominious betrayal at the hands of Jaichand which led to Ghori’s triumph in the second battle of Tarain.

It may be said that this book’s blurb is deceptive. This is not quite a historical account and a narrative that brings to life the triumphs and tribulations of a legendary figure. Rather it is a poison pen missive that seeks to spew hatred and intolerance by the cowardly act of duelling with greats from the past with the view to distract from the present where politicians belonging to all parties are conniving to outdo the Mughals and the Brits when it comes to despoiling this nation.

This book review was originally published in TNIE Magazine