The Maharashtra government has revised its history textbooks for classes VII and IX. They have come up with a marvellous plan to exclude the Mughals. According to a Mumbai Mirror report, Akbar’s reign has been reduced to three lines to accomodate more from Shivaji’s Maratha Empire. We hope that the textbooks will also say that Shivaji was not a “Hindu” ruler of his kingdom, and employed Muslims soldiers. But what do we lose if we remove the Mughals from our shared history of the subcontinent? Two examples: one, from our day-day-day lives, and another from our shared cultural heritage.
If we choose to forget Akbar, we also forget these paintings which accompanied translations of Valmiki’s Sankrit Ramayana into Persian:
