The Invented Invader: Mughal History, Polarization, and the War Over India's Past (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798185265352)

Preface
The past is never dead. It is not even past.
- a sentence so often borrowed it has become common property
This is a book about a quarrel. Not the quarrel between the Mughals and their enemies four hundred years ago, though that quarrel will fill many of these pages, but the quarrel happening now, in our own decade, over what those four hundred years are permitted to mean. It is a quarrel conducted in textbooks and on television, in courtrooms and on the granite of street signs, in the dark rivers of forwarded messages that run through a billion telephones every night. Its subject is dead. Its stakes are entirely of the present.
I want to be honest at the outset about the difficulty of the thing I am attempting, because the difficulty is the whole point. It would be easy to write a book that defended the Mughals against their detractors. It would be just as easy, and in today's market considerably more profitable, to write a book that prosecuted them. What is hard, and what I have tried to do, is to write a book that refuses both the prosecution and the defence and asks a stranger question instead: how did a vanished empire become a live wire in the politics of the world's largest democracy, and what is being done to the historical record in the process?
The phrase that gives this book its provocation - the falsification of Mughal contributions by people who call themselves nationalists - needs unpacking before we go a step further, because it could be misread as a slogan, and a slogan is the last thing I want to offer. Falsification, as I use it, does not mean the simple telling of lies, though there are plenty of those. It means something more insidious: the bending of a true and complicated record into a false and simple shape. It is the art of the half-truth, the selective fact, the accurate detail deployed to license an inaccurate conclusion. The most effective distortions of Mughal history are not fabrications. They are facts with the context surgically removed.
And the nationalists. I do not put the word in scare-quotes to sneer at love of country, which is among the most ordinary and decent of human attachments. I put pressure on the word because the people who have appointed themselves the guardians of the Indian nation's wounded memory have arrogated to themselves the right to decide who belongs to that nation and who is a permanent intruder within it. Their nationalism is real, but it is a nationalism of a particular and narrow kind, and one of the ways it does its work is by rewriting six centuries of the subcontinent's past into a single, unbroken story of Hindu humiliation at Muslim hands. That story is not history. It is, as we shall see, a colonial invention wearing a saffron coat. To call it a falsification is not name-calling. It is description.
But here is where the book complicates its own argument, and where I ask for the reader's patience. The people rewriting Mughal history today did not invent the bad habits they exploit. They inherited them. For most of the twentieth century, a rival camp - secular, nationalist in a different idiom, broadly associated with the long ascendancy of Jawaharlal Nehru and the historians who flourished under it - produced its own distortions of the Mughal past. Where the new revisionists turn every Muslim ruler into a fanatic, the older establishment too often turned Akbar into a kind of secular saint, airbrushed the violence out of the record, and treated awkward facts about temple destruction or discriminatory taxation as embarrassments to be managed rather than evidence to be examined.

Author: Rickbed Nandi
ISBN-13: 9798185265352
Publisher: Independently Published
Language: English
Published: 07/02/2026
Pages: 288
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.77lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.72d