Reading Babur: The Quest for Hindustan by Aabhas Maldahiyar is an excruciating experience that will test tolerance levels to the utmost. It begins with some florid verses on Rajput bangles that burned like blades, which is every bit as awful as it sounds, glorifying Jauhar, where women burned on the altar of male ego: “To the Rajputi womb, so fierce, so wide, that bore no child for comfort or pride… To the wrists, the wombs, the war-torn soil—to the hands that chose fire over spoil.” You wouldn’t think it possible, but it gets progressively worse, since Maldahiyar’s prose is even more execrable.
The author makes it clear that he wishes to expose Timurid rule for what it was, without the colonial-era bias that has, in his view, fed lies to clueless Indians in the guise of history: “The romanticised sauce of Ganga Jamuni Tehzib often overflows its historical vessel, drowning reason under tales of imagined harmony and fabricated tales of Hindu-Muslim marital alliances. Yet, when the varnish of poetic exaggeration is stripped away, the hard stone of historical reality remains cold and unyielding.” The reader is assured that the Mughals were invaders and conquerors without a single redeeming trait, whose sole aim was to rape and loot ‘Hindustan’ while decimating Hindus with jihadist fervour.
Lest this reeks of alarming bias and Islamophobia, Maldahiyar takes pains to establish his own credentials as a historian, stating “…with scholarly clarity that the entire narrative presented in this work is rooted primarily in my own direct translation of the Baburnama (Persian version), allowing the emperor’s own words—untampered by later translations—to serve as the primary witness to his life and deeds.” This statement notwithstanding, the narrative is soaked in prejudice and littered with repetitive reams of rabble-rousing rhetoric that is both contradictory and incoherent.
Babur is harshly criticised for being too much of a religious fanatic committed to rooting out the kafirs and infidels. Yet, in nearly every other page amidst the tediously trotted-out information dump, the reader is told that Babur, in direct violation of Islamic principles, indulged in inebriants and intoxicants at interminable wine and arak parties, and was a drunken sot who also exhibited homosexual tendencies. Cue gasps of horror!
Likewise, ignoring the many factors that shaped Akbar—often hailed as a tolerant and progressive ruler—Maldahiyar writes with salacious glee: “…under Akbar’s rule, if a young woman was found unveiled in a public place—a mere act of showing her face to the open air—she would be condemned to the degrading profession of prostitution. The same brutal sentence awaited those women who dared lie to their husbands, or, worse still, raise their voices in a quarrel. Such was the lofty pedestal of female dignity under the so-called enlightened rule of the Timurids.” Busy bewailing the brutality and chains that bound women during Mughal rule, he remains blithely unaware of his own sexism and penchant for policing women’s bodies with outdated male notions of honour—ideas that have brutalised and victimised women long after the Mughals were relegated to the pages of a distant past.
Accusing all historians and scholars, except himself, of romanticising the Mughals—whom he calls jihadists, idol-destroyers, killers of kafirs, and perpetrators of genocide—Maldahiyar proceeds to rewrite Rajput history with sickly levels of schmaltz.
His account of Rana Sangha exonerates the Rajput ruler from sending an invitation to Babur to bring about the fall of Lodi, insisting instead that it was Babur who sent an envoy seeking Sangha’s aid, which the latter agreed to. He admits that Sangha later reneged on this deal, glossing over the man’s tendency to break promises and make poor decisions, choosing instead to lionise his valour and honour—traits he swears are typical of Rajputs—while ignoring their long history of internal treachery, from Prithviraj Chauhan’s disputed betrayal by Jaichand that led to Ghori’s triumph at the second battle of Tarain.
It may be said that the book’s blurb is deceptive. This is not a historical account that brings to life the triumphs and tribulations of a legendary figure. Rather, it is a poison pen that seeks to spew hatred and intolerance, all to distract readers from the present, where politicians of every hue are conniving to outdo the Mughals and the British in despoiling this nation.