From the time Dr. J.S. Rajput, Director, National Council for Research and Education Training (NCERT) declared, over a year ago, that all primers in all subjects would be revised and modernized, a concerted campaign of hysterical and apoplectic criticism has been mounted against the decision to update the history textbooks. Even before the commissioning of the new books, historians and writers with known left leanings began attributing motives to the then unknown writers. For the past one year, there has hardly been a day when some diatribe or other has not appeared in some newspaper or magazine. SAHMAT, which is basically supposed to be a street theatre group, has been in the forefront of the media hype on the issue.
It is possible that NCERT aroused misgivings in some quarters with its near-simultaneous decision to advise schools not to teach certain portions of the old history books on grounds that the Jat, Jain and Sikh communities had taken offence to some portions. The decision was redundant as new textbooks were being commissioned, and the concerns of the said communities, to the extent that these were academically valid, could have been accommodated in the new books. Thus the old authors felt publicly humiliated, and their ideological allies seized the occasion to mount a campaign against the ‘saffronisation’ of history.
As was only to be expected in this climate, NCERT’s new history books came into a hostile world, and received tremendous flak for purported errors, all of which were gleefully highlighted in the media. Yet one book – Medieval India for Class Eleven by Dr. Meenakshi Jain – met with deafening silence for nearly seven months. Yet the factually correct and non-rhetorical narrative deviated too sharply from Left perspectives to be allowed to get clean away. Fellow travellers have discretely informed me that there has been intense pressure on Left historians to condemn this account, and hence, under the aegis of the Left-dominated Indian History Congress (IHC), an Index of Errors of all the new books has been compiled. The section on Medieval India is presented under the signature of Prof. Irfan Habib.
There can be little doubt that Prof. Habib’s name has been used because of his richly deserved reputation as a formidable scholar. Yet it is equally undeniable that he ranks among the school of intellectuals who deny legitimacy to the Hindu civilizational ethos and its natural place at the core of national life. This school has sought to keep civilizational issues out of history books and to whitewash the remembered horrors of the medieval era.
NCERT’s new book on Medieval India has given them a rude shock. Although the author (Jain) has relied solely upon the published works of renowned historians in India and abroad, the unambiguous narrative has upset the stalwarts of the Indian History Congress, who protest that “the dark corners of the medieval era” have been brought into the full light of day, without any mitigating shadows. In all honesty, this should cause neither surprise nor dismay as the epoch had few redeeming features (and these have been mentioned wherever they occur). It behoved Prof. Habib and his friends to accept the truth gracefully.
Unfortunately, being long addicted to occupying the commanding heights of Indian historiography, they tried to browbeat NCERT by willy-nilly challenging virtually every fact in the book, with little concern for veracity and intellectual honesty. The result has been devastating for the credibility of the IHC as an institution, as the NCERT author had relied extensively upon the published research of these very Left historians, besides other standard works, in the discipline. This is because school books are not written on the basis of original research, but are only a summation of established work in the discipline!
IHC’s poorly-researched Index of Errors (Medieval India section) therefore, brings the intellectual credibility of Prof. Irfan Habib and his Left-leaning fellow academicians into serious disrepute. Some telling examples reveal how far intellectual integrity has been sacrificed at the altar of political ideology. For instance, the Index of Errors rebukes the author for claiming that Indian peasants suffered unparalleled exploitation under the Delhi Sultanate. But it was Irfan Habib who postulated that: “To begin with, the new conquerors and rulers…were of a different faith (Islam) from that of their predecessors… their principal achievements lay in a great systematization of agrarian exploitation and an immense concentration of the resources so obtained” [“The Social Distribution of Landed Property in Pre‑British India,” Ed. R.S. Sharma and V. Jha, Indian Society: Historical Probings, PPH, 1974, p. 287].
The IHC challenges the claim that Sultan Iltutmish settled two thousand Turkish soldiers in the Doab to fortify his political and financial position. However, Prof. Mohammad Habib (father of Irfan Habib) asserted: “…Iltutmish was the first to realize the economic potentialities of the Doab. By setting two thousand Turkish soldiers there, he secured for the Turkish state the financial and administrative control of one of the most prosperous regions of northern India” [A Comprehensive History of India, ed. Mohammad Habib and K.A. Nizami, PPH, 1970, p. 227].
The NCERT authors’ critique of Balban as a weak ruler drew a strong reaction from IHC. But here again, it was M. Habib and K.A. Nizami who averred: “Balban, his officers and his army… proved themselves extraordinarily inefficient and clumsy” (ibid, p. 292) and “…it took Balban six years or more to crush the rebellion of Tughril and a riffraff of two hundred thousand had to be enlisted at Awadh to strengthen the regular army. Balban did not challenge any of the great Hindu rais… his officers failed against the raids of frontier Mongol officers… both in the civil and the military field Balban and his governing class had been tried and found wanting” (ibid, p. 303). The iconoclasm attributed to Sultan Alauddin Khalji is also a direct quotation from Habib and Nizami.
The IHC’s contention that there is no proof that Sher Shah extracted jaziya from his Hindu subjects is simply ridiculous. This has been stated even in Prof. Satish Chandra’s (now replaced) NCERT textbook, who has been taught in schools for over three decades: “Jizyah continued to be collected from the Hindus, while his nobility was drawn almost exclusively from the Afghans” [p. 150]. Surely historical facts cannot be changed to suit every political convenience!
The low annual growth rate of the Indian population between the years 1600 – 1800, pegged at 0.14%, has also been subjected to quibbling by the IHC. Alas, Irfan Habib declaimed loudly only two decades ago: “…the population during the Mughal period did not remain stable though the compound rate of growth, 0.14% per annum, was hardly spectacular and was much lower than the rate attained during the nineteenth century” [The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. I, Orient Longman, 1982, p. 167, ed. Tapan Raychaudhari and Irfan Habib). Are we to conclude that Prof. Habib is now disowning his own ‘politically incorrect’ scholarship?
At the popular level, decades of silent censorship have eliminated the medieval slave trade in India from history. Yet this was a thriving trade and rivalled the early Arab and later European trade from Africa; and hence deserves equal attention and documentation. It would be quite inappropriate to negate this atrocity from the annals of world history, as Indian historians have been wont to do, especially since the UN-sponsored Durban Conference has now taken official cognizance of such historical atrocities and related forms of discrimination.
The IHC claims that the flourishing market in human beings actually declined under the Mughals; which is a gross violation of truth. The noted historian Dirk Kolff (Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy. The ethnohistory of a military labour market in Hindustan, 1450‑1850, Cambridge University Press, 1990) has stated unambiguously: “There is irrefutable evidence for the enslavement and deportation of thousands and thousands of peasants by the Mughal aristocracy. Many of these were sold to countries to the west of India. The trade had flourished before 1400, when Multan was a considerable slave market, but it was continued after that, with Kabul as the main entrepot” (p. 10); “In these deportations, Jehangir also had a share” (p. 11); and “The Emperor Shahjahan also used to have offenders against the state transported beyond the river Indus to be ‘exchanged for Pathan dogs’.” He concludes: “Anyway, it is clear that, in the 1660s, Indian supply of and Persian demand for slaves was still considerable.”
Another denial is that the Mughals settled Afghans in areas of insurgence. But Kolff (ibid, p. 13) insists: “Forced migrations were part of a deliberate policy in this area… Whereas Rajputs in Western Hindustan were exterminated and deported as slaves beyond the Indus, Afghans were deported towards the east and settled in areas notorious for Rajput turbulence. The Dilzak Afghans, for instance, completely disappeared from their native land as a result of intense military enrolment in India, but also because Jehangir deported a large number of them and ‘distributed’ them all over Hindustan and the Deccan.’ Afghans seem to have been especially in demand to deal with Rajputs…”
Indeed, each and every objection of the IHC can be disproved as false and motivated. The Index of Errors refutes the NCERT author’s contention that Guru Gobind Singh was a devotee of Goddess Chandi. But the renowned historian, J.S. Grewal, quotes the Guru as explicitly declaiming: “Having created Durga, O God, You destroyed the demons. From You alone did Rama receive His power to slay Rawana with his arrows. From You alone did Krishna receive His power to seize Kansa by the hair and to dash him on the ground” [The Sikhs of the Punjab, The New Cambridge History of India, Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 76]. The IHC challenges the contention that Guru Gobind Singh was murdered by an Afghan, possibly connected with the Emperor Aurangzeb. Grewal, however, is unequivocal: “…he was stabbed and badly wounded by an Afghan, connected with either Wazir Khan or an imperial officer” [ibid, p. 79].
The IHC has been quite graceless, refuting even innocuous facts with the sole intention of showing the writer in poor light. Thus it claims that Alauddin Hasan, founder of the Bahmani kingdom, was not an Afghan. Yet the (new replaced) NCERT textbook of Prof. Satish Chandra it is stated: “Its founder was Alauddin Hasan, an Afghan adventurer” [p. 89].
Even the fact that the famous Iron Pillar was brought to Delhi from Mathura has been challenged. Yet the historian Percy Brown asserted: “…And in front of the centre of the sanctuary was erected the famous Iron Pillar, but deprived of its crowing figure of Garuda, this remarkable example of indigenous craftsmanship having been torn from its original setting near Muttra (Mathura) where it has already stood for over 600 years” [Indian Architecture. Islamic Period, Taraporevala’s, 1956, p. 10].
Finally, the IHC denies that Sufism and orthodox Islam converged in India in the twelfth century as a result of the efforts of al-Ghazali and others. Obviously, this is part of an attempt to perpetuate the untenable claim that Sufism was part of the Bhakti stream and served to build bridges with the Hindus, giving rise to what Marxists fondly describe as India’s ‘composite culture.’ Aziz Ahmad, however, stated most emphatically that: “In India, because of the challenge and the risk of disintegration into Hindu mysticism, Sufism took special care to resolve its differences with orthodoxy… in India…Islam was propagated mainly by Sufis with a firm emphasis on the observance of the tenets of the sharia” [Studies In Islamic Culture In The Indian Environment, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1964, p. 131].
This is not to insist that there are no errata in the book. Muhammad Ghur should correctly be called Muhammad of Ghur and Muhammad Ghazni designated Muhammad of Ghazni. Bakhtiyar Khalji has been described as a slave when he was a free man, and the historian who commented adversely on Muhammad bin Tughlaq was Badauni, not Barani. But to quibble that the Dastur-ul Amal-i Alamgiri was not an official document when it was a compilation of official documents, shows how contrived the whole exercise is. None of these points merited listing in an Index of Errors; they could have been faxed to the NCERT Director for rectification in his next reprint.
Written for a special issue, Hindu Renaissance, 15 October 2003