In A Troubling Empire, Edward Luce reviews Eraly’s The Mughal Throne: The Saga of India’s Great Emperors:
One of the most striking aspects of modern India is that almost all its major cities were founded either by Islamic or European imperialists. Nationalists of various stripes are acutely sensitive to this and have renamed Bombay as Mumbai, Madras as Chennai and Calcutta as Kolkata. Even so, no amount of nominal revisionism can alter the fact that many of India’s most visible monuments were bequeathed by imperial invaders. Of these, perhaps the grandest architectural legacy is that of the Mughal dynasty.A group of Hindu youth activists recently graffitied the Taj Mahal, the most impressive of Mughal buildings, and there have been many such disturbing incidents. Abraham Eraly is one of the many who are deeply concerned that historical revisionism shows no signs of abating in India. From this, he correctly concludes that India’s identity as a nation state is still in the process of being settled.
“In every other major civilisation the past has died so that the future could be born,” he writes. “But India seems to be killing the future so that the past can live on.” The central Hindu nationalist thesis is this: India flowered under a golden age of Hindu civilisation that was systematically destroyed, first by the various Islamic invasions between the 11th and 17th centuries, and then by the British colonial period that lasted until 1947. Finally, after more than 50 years of independence, India has a Hindu nationalist government that can correct the distortions of history. Or, if you take Eraly’s view, a standpoint which is “snared in self-delusions, fighting quixotic battles with the spectres of the past”.
Here’s the part of the book that sounds like fun though:
Instead, Eraly treats us to what another partisan school of history would describe as an “Orientalist” narrative of the kings and concubines of Mughaldom. For those seeking thrills in the emperor’s harem or horror in the fratricidal and parricidal battles of succession, such material is abundant. There are endless accounts of battlefield victories and defeats with the attendant elephant charges and last-minute changes of loyalty. Eunuchs and dancing girls conspire and carouse throughout.