T he latest revision of India’s NCERT syllabus seeks to erase the Mughals from our collective memory. What is being presented as “curricular rationalisation” is, in fact, a brazen attempt to rewrite history in the image of a narrow, sectarian ideology. The Mughals were not an accidental dynasty. For over three centuries, they shaped India’s politics, economy, art, architecture, administration, and plural traditions. To delete their contributions is to deny students the right to know their own layered history.
The Mughal Century must be acknowledged as “A Golden Era of Learning and Exchange”. The Mughal dynasty (1526–1857) was not merely a reign of monarchs. It represented one of the most remarkable periods of South Asian history, where local traditions fused with Persian, Central Asian, and Islamic influences to produce a unique, syncretic culture.
Akbar’s Sulh-i Kul (Peace with All): Historian Irfan Habib reminds us that Akbar “pioneered the idea of a secular state” by abolishing the jizya tax on non-Muslims and welcoming scholars of all faiths to his court. The Ibadat Khana debates in Fatehpur Sikri, where Hindus, Muslims, Jains, Parsis, and Jesuit priests exchanged ideas, reflected an intellectual cosmopolitanism far ahead of its time.
Shah Jahan and the Flourishing of Arts: From the Taj Mahal to the Red Fort, Mughal architecture remains India’s most enduring aesthetic legacy. Ebba Koch, in her classic study Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology (2001), notes that Mughal architecture was a deliberate political project—monuments built not just for beauty but to embody pluralism and sovereignty.
Aurangzeb, the Misunderstood Sovereign: Demonised by colonial historians and Hindutva polemicists alike, Aurangzeb was a complex figure. Audrey Truschke’s Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth (2017) challenges simplistic portrayals, noting that he expanded the empire to its greatest extent, patronised Hindu temples, and employed more Hindus in his administration than any other Mughal ruler. His Fatawa-i-Alamgiri, a massive compendium of Islamic law, stands as a testament to his intellectual rigour and administrative drive.
As historian Shireen Moosvi shows in The Economy of the Mughal Empire (1987), India under the Mughals accounted for nearly a quarter of the world’s GDP. Their revenue system was sophisticated, their roads and caravanserais facilitated commerce, and Indian textiles dominated global trade markets. Economy and global trade prospered as almost never before.
The fact of coexistence and its deep links to the social fabric have important lessons to absorb. The Mughals governed not by suppression alone but by accommodation. Satish Chandra notes in Medieval India (1999) that “no other empire of its time achieved such levels of integration between diverse communities.” Rajput nobles rose to high ranks in the Mughal court; Maratha chieftains negotiated and fought with them in equal measure; Sikh Gurus had evolving relations with Mughal rulers, sometimes cooperative and sometimes conflictual. The empire was not flawless, but it was plural—a reflection of India’s composite society.
In Kashmir, Mughal rule brought major transformations. Akbar annexed the Valley in 1586, integrating it into the larger polity. Jahangir, enchanted by Kashmir, famously said: “If there is a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this.” He adorned the Valley with Mughal gardens, caravan routes, and cultural exchanges that endure today. Their patronage of Kashmiri crafts and Sufi shrines left an indelible mark on the region’s history.
The denigration of the Mughals began with British colonialism. One could baptise it ‘Colonial Hatred, Post-Colonial Amnesia’. To justify conquest, colonial historians painted them as despots and contrasted “Oriental decadence” with British modernity. As historian Shahid Amin has argued, the colonial archive deliberately exaggerated Mughal “decline” to make the British appear as India’s saviours.
Hindutva ideologues today have inherited this prejudice, but twisted it further by weaponising history to demonise Muslims and fracture the shared heritage of Indians. By erasing the Mughals from textbooks, they aim to present India as an exclusively Hindu civilisational state. This is not history. It is propaganda.
To tamper with history is to tamper with truth. It brings with it the peril of historical amnesia. Young Indians will grow up deprived of knowledge about one of the most formative epochs of the subcontinent. They will know little of the architectural genius that produced the Taj Mahal, the debates that shaped Akbar’s court, the textile wealth that drove global trade, or the syncretic traditions of music and poetry nurtured under Mughal patronage.
The erasure of the Mughals is not about the past. The present is not excluded. It legitimises majoritarian politics, fuels communal hatred, and denies India its plural soul. There are lessons, of course, and when people speak of learning from them, they have in mind, I think, two ways of applying past experience: one is to enable us to avoid past mistakes and to manage better in similar circumstances next time; the other is to enable us to anticipate a future course of events. To manage better next time is within our means; to anticipate does not seem to be.
Ranjan Solomon via email
