The fake history juggernaut trundles on |
The BJP-Sangh project to rewrite medieval Indian history has turned NCERT textbooks into an ideological battlefield. The most recent focus of this bigoted enterprise is the ‘Ghaznavid Invasions’, most famously under Mahmud of Ghazni. And its chosen first victim the newly released Class 7 NCERT social science textbook, titled Exploring Society, India and Beyond.
Introduced with a cautionary preface on history’s ‘darker periods’, the book expands its treatment of said invasions, casting Mahmud of Ghazni foremost as a religious zealot. Mahmud, in this characterisation, is seen as a ruthless iconoclast determined to ‘spread his version of Islam to non-Muslim parts of the world’. The retelling relies on court chroniclers like Al-Utbi and Al-Biruni to underline Mahmud’s alleged obsession with slaughtering ‘infidels’ and storming temples—especially Somnath.
This is a dramatic departure from the earlier NCERT (National Council of Educational Research and Training) edition, which covered Mahmud of Ghazni in a brief paragraph (remember this is a Class 7 textbook), noting that his 17 opportunistic raids in the subcontinent were primarily aimed at looting the wealth of these temples.
Confronting uncomfortable histories is a legitimate pedagogical aim. But this project is not pedagogical; it’s political—and the aim, once again, is to reduce the complexity of underlying motivations to a Hindu–Muslim binary that serious historiography has long rejected. Eminent scholars like Mohammad Habib, Satish Chandra and Romila Thapar have repeatedly demonstrated that Mahmud’s incursions were driven less by religious piety than by the fiscal imperatives of sustaining a volatile Central Asian empire.
While making all these new additions and foregrounding a different set of motivations for the raids, what the textbook fails to register is that the plundering of temples and their ‘desecration’ was not always religiously motivated, and the practice long predated the arrival of Turks from Central Asia.
In early medieval India, temples were not merely religious centres but repositories of royal........