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Ridiculously tolerant Twitterati wants to #RemoveMughalsFromBooks

Trinaa Prasad | Updated on: 14 February 2017, 5:51 IST

Remove Mughals from school books, is the latest demand from the warboys of Twitter. The perpetually offended seek the instant removal of Mughal history from our school books because of the impact it had on life, and the religious choices of Hindus in the country back then. Our history books have always maintained that temples were looted, and people were coerced into converting to Islam. Some did so to avoid the Jazia tax, others to escape the rigidity of the caste system and the stigma that was attached to it.

The demand of reworking the history books didn't just come out of the blue. After HRD Minister Smriti Irani came into office, activist, author, and a retired teacher of one of the schools run by the RSS, Dinanath Batra wrote to her, asking for a revision in the way history books were written in India.

via GIPHY

According to a report in NDTV, in 2014 Batra met Irani for the same: "I met Smriti Irani and asked her to change the syllabus. These books are the work of Marx and Macaulay's sons (sic). The books are not rooted to the culture of the land. Why are there just two lines on Maharana Pratap and two pages on Akbar? Historians have made heroes of somebody like Aurangzeb."

Batra is the reason why most of us will never get a hand on a copy of historian Wendy Doniger's 'The Hindus: An Alternative History'. Because Batra's lawsuit forced Penguin to take the book off the Indian market.

But let's forget Batra for a minute here. The problem with this demand of blotting out a big chunk of Indian history before the glorious 200-year British rule, is - what else would you fill the years between 1556 to 1707 with?

How are we planning to explain the existence of the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort, Humanyun's Tomb, Qutub Minar, most of Fatehpur Sikri, Babri Masjid et al? What bubblewrap do we intend to use to cover up the advent of the Mughals, their rule, their architecture, and their general contribution to culture, society and religion?

On the positive side, the logic for #RemoveMughalsFromBooks is so wafer-thin, even Chetan Bhagat who till a few days ago was grappling with the concept of what historians do, cannot even with it.

The ones who don't like the Mughals one teeny bit.

The ones who want to understand why history must be censored:

The ones who prioritise better.

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Edited by Abha Srivastava

First published: 2 March 2016, 1:59 IST