I believe the number 14 is associated with Lord Ram so this is a fortuitous comment (7, 14, 1,400). I have’t written as much since the Comments have been on fire so it becomes a little difficult to write on new topics but I’m 66 posts (65 after this one) from my 1,000th post on BP.
After the jump Omar’s interesting take on whether the Mughal’s were colonisers.
They were undeniably colonizers.
‘somebody’ downvoted your comment. I mean, what even is the controversy about this? They came from Uzbekistan, literally exported thousands of Indians as slaves, figured out it was far more lucrative to squat and rule kaffirs right here. It is what it is, without any retrospective ‘moral’ judgement.
Why do simple facts have to be denied?
It is laughable to split hairs over conquest versus colonization. First they conquered, then they colonized. Amazing that simple facts are being denied.
Facts don’t care about feelings, but “somebody’s” feelings were hurt by the facts 🙂
I guess the question is really about, do we use entirely the same frameworks to interpret them as we do to the British, or the Kushans or whoever? Also, there could be room for thinking that Mughals are arguably not colonists in Punjab, but very much so by the time they reach Orissa.
Settler colonialism is only possible in very specific circumstances where the state has an excess of wealth it can use to impose an outside population on a given geography. In most cases this only occurs at the margins of the empire because doing so close to it’s heartland is often too disruptive and expensive. We can discuss at which stage of their empire did the Mughals began actively colonising parts of India but saying they weren’t colonists in a specific region is a vacuous statement like saying “I didn’t practice beastiality with that specific goat therefore I must be exonerated of beastiality.”.
I didn’t know they were on trial. The Punjab vs Orissa example was not about chronology of being conquered, but about culture and territorial distance to Khorasan and beyond. Peshawar and northwest Punjab are not so far from Samarkhand and Bukhara, relative to how far they are from Orissa (let alone the south). Theres a reason that from the Achaemenids, Macedonians, Sassanians , Kushanas, Ghaznavids to Durranis, this region has been part of the their frontier. There’s some cultural geographic logic worth exploring. Persianate culture in the northern subcontinent isn’t an arbitrary intrusion. If anything a lot of customs, including veiling, that they share with central asia and Iran are likely substratic pre-Islam.
As per usual excellent comments.
The Mughals were colonisers in some places and not in other ..
My mind, “blown.”
Thanks girmit such lovely comments . Dispassionate, factual but also insightful interpretations..
That’s a nuanced argument indeed but even though they lost steam just due to geography, it was a malevolent intent, degree of which varied.
The Sassanians, Kushanas etc etc got absorbed voluntarily. I doubt the same can be said about the Mughals who despite inter-marrying, did not identify with nor assimilate with the locals. They still saw themselves as far superior than the lot they lorded over.
Perhaps some aspect of this may be attributable to the fact that the Islamic invasion of India and the British colonialization are fairly recent historical events with high trauma associated with them.
I think it is fair to say that the impression of conquest and colonialization especially by the Mughals and to a lesser extent the British has a very negative connotation.
To say distance and geography matters in whether or not a certain region was colonized is blindly obvious.
When Ghazni invaded Hindustan, the hindus were “scattered like atoms in the sand” and ran away to places are far away as “Srinagar and Varanasi”
Had Ghazni had the wealth to go as far out as Varanasi etc, he have would have done so and looted, slaughtered there as well. Instead, given the constraints, he chose to establish base in Lahore, which was much closer to Ghazni in Afghanistan. Obviously the customs etc of central asia and iran would now reflect in such places given that Mahmud of Ghazni wanted to specifically establish a persianite state in Punjab with Lahore as its base.
In that way, can we also call the Turkic tribes (Ottoman, Safavid, Timurid) colonizers of SE Europe, the Levant , Anatolia, and Persia in addition to Hindustan?
Many in these places may call them conquerors which is more apt than colonisers as much of the above empires political, economic and social base was in the areas they conquered not the places they came from.
+1
The conquest of what is modern day Turkey is written in infidel blood and slavery. The difference is that the infidel genocide was more successful. India….was simply way too populous to pull this off, and the roots of ‘Dharma’ too entrenched.
The genocide that have happened in modern day turkey have all happened in the last 200 years.
Outside of times of conquest, most of the converts to Islam are a result of assimilation to Turkish identity due to persistence of ottoman rule and those who rejected islam, and paid the jizya were largely left alone, as seen in the large population of christians and jews thst were present until the 20th century.
Slavery was a huge part of their success though.
+1
Yes I think that’s a stretch
Just for debate, what exactly was the view of the common Hindu to the mughal rule?
Which mughal ruler is remembered as making the lives of praja different.??
It now appears that Akbar’s image was cleaned and white washed by the alighar school historians and congress gratefully accepted it.
On the contrary preindependence rulers of Mysore are still praised today by common folks.
A Jain merchant’s diary of daily life under Mughal rulers Akbar, Jahangir & Shah Jahan
Apparently many were quite shocked.
The news of his death reached Jaunpur.
The people, bereft of their emperor, felt orphaned and helpless.
For Banarasi himself, the news was like ‘a blow upon the heart’. He fainted in shock, cutting his head open on the stone floor of the courtyard, which ‘turned red with his blood’. Given that the governor who had caused so much grief to the people was a noble in Akbar’s administration, it is unusual to find this reaction. Nor can Banarasi be accused of flattering Akbar since the latter died thirty-six years before this account was written. Moreover, he mentioned the passing of Jahangir in a matter-of-fact manner, without emotion.
Indians are making movies about the Sambhaji valorizing him 300 years after his death…
While Sambhaji’s son was then doing a pilgrimage to Aurangzeb’s tomb to gain Mughal blessings..
Modern Hindutva narrative is so comedic sometimes.
Admin Note: Q calm the language pls.
Sir this entire topic was elaborated on threadbare by far greater people than some of the superficial individuals on this blog who claim to know something on this topic. For example, Ambedkar spoke about the entire history of India starting with the original maps drawn by Chinese scholars in India. He went on to Map the entire history of Islam, Mughals, colonizers, Conquerers ( whatever bullshit that difference is ), then finally went on to map this history to the state of Hindu-Muslim relations in his time.
He provided citations for everything with remarkable detail. He also goes on to say: ” Both Gandhi and Jinnah consider this book to be the authority on this topic, That is enough for me and I don’t care about other people’s opinions”.
Asking for a debate on this topic here is asking for trouble because some low level Pakistani troll will say something racist or Hinduphobic just for the sake of it. If not that, some uninformed individual will copy paste something obscure and pass that off as evidence to support his own version of the gospel truth.
Indian history is written by Jokers. Romila Thapar is considered a historian despite her blatant lies and prejudiced agenda. Meanwhile Sitaram Goel is a virtual unknown despite being an impartial, objective intellectual and historian par excellence
Yes, I would say that.
Probably excluding Hindustan as extracts by mughals were not shipped back to their original home land.
In all other cases money and other resources used to come over to Istanbul.
A. They took the looted riches back to their native lands.
B. They took back slaves. Ref: Q’s comment on pay ten guna lagaan before we allow slaves across the hindukush 🙂
C. They deliberately changed the political, religious, economic landscape of the subcontinent for their own gain, not to mention the geography.
In summary, textbook colonization.
+ 1
By this logic, the Sintastha/Andronovo Aryans were the biggest “colonizers of India. Infact they not just colonized Indians, they changed the genetic makeup of Indians through rape, imposed their religion (now known as the Hindu religion) and even their languages. Infact this dominance was so complete and so total, that within a few centuries, even the most rural of villages were speaking Aryan derived languages. Their descendants, not wanting to mix with the locals further and mix bloodlines, instituted the caste system that was so complete that it froze the genetics of tens of millions of people who for over 2,000 years.
In order to cope with these facts, Hindutva ideology tried to develop the ‘Out of India’ theory which does not paint their religion, language and culture as foriegn derived just like Islam. However modern genetics just confirmed what linguists knew a century ago.
Any attempt to portray Mughals as ”colonizer” along British lines is basically an attempt to try to portray Indian Muslims as ”outsiders” which sets the eventual justification for killing them, or worse – trying to make them into the new untouchable caste in their oppressive caste system.
Well the Mughals made it really easy to type cast themselves as outsiders when most of their upper crust were quite literally foreigners (Gokturks, Turks, Abyssianians, etc) who preferred foreign soldiers. Most of the Mughal nobility was of non-Indian origin with little to no Indian Muslim representation in their ranks. They were literally referred to as ‘Turks’ by the Marathas. The Mughals were clearly worse than the Brits in this case because the settler colonialism was much more obvious in comparison. Delhi was clearly a Muslim colonized city for example which affects it’s character even today. If a state was of a similar character to the Mughals today it would be an apartheid slave state worse than Pakistan or Apartheid South Africa.
erm worst than the British? seriously?
Yes, given the scale of harmful intent and achievement.
oh yes
To the nail, every item looks like a hammer.
Admin Note: BB calm the language pls.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yU-KQ2iv7YY
Iqbal/History of Arai/Culture/History of Arain
Hahaha …
must have been a great comment 🙂