ZH version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
71% Positive
Analyzed from 2925 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#india#history#mughals#more#mughal#indian#empire#west#western#china
Discussion (45 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
>The Mughal position was again fortified with a ditch and wagons linked by chains and the matchlockmen, placed in the front of the force, ‘broke the ranks of the pagan army with matchlocks and guns like their hearts’; they were black and covered with smoke. The Mughals had only about 12,000 troops at Kanua, whereas the Rajputs, allegedly, had 80,000 cavalry and 500 elephants
Digging the ditch during the battle is a typical and signature Persian war technique.
Not trying to be pedantic but the more correct word to use here is probably trench. The trench is called Khandaq in Persian and Arabic, the latter most probably a borrowed word from the former.
The main idea is to pre-emptively dig a trench beforeva battle just enough to prevent the enemies cavalry horses from jumping across.
It's succesfully used by early Islamic force against the much larger Meccan Quraish army including their allies during the famous Khandaq war in defending Yathrib (now Madinah) [1]. The idea was suggested by Salman al-Farisi, a Persian companian of Muhammad [2].
Fun facts, Mughals palace households were mainly speaking Persian language, and the Hindi/Urdu language is heavily influenced by the Persian moreso than Arab.
[1] Battle of the Trench:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Trench
[2] Salman the Persian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_the_Persian
The Deccan Sultanates and Vijayanagara were more relevant to world history in the 16th Century India. The wonders of Bijapur, Golconda and Hampi would put 16th CE Delhi to shame.
- the monuments are obvious points; the Taj Mahal is probably one of the few buildings that the average Western person has heard of
- there is more of a connection, or appears to be, with other empires that Westerners are more familiar with. For example, the Mughals were functionally descendants of the Mongols (indeed the word itself came from it). They also were roughly contemporaneous with the Ottomans during key historical periods, so their categorization as a “gunpowder empire” along with Iran is a known thing.
The prestige languages of all three of these empires was also highly Persianized, which maybe made them more accessible to the West, which was familiar with the Arabic alphabet and Islamic civilization for a longer period than with India. IIRC a lot of foundational Indian works weren’t really translated from Sanskrit to western languages until the mid 1800s.
That is how I myself started reading more about the Mughals: via being interested in the Ottomans.
- And finally there are a number of unique Mughal figures that have managed to become well-known in the West. Akbar, Shah Jahan, etc. I’m sure there were equally interesting people from other Indian empires but they don’t seem to be talked about as much.
Mughals never ruled India for more than 200-300 years, and were challenged by many regional players including Maratha's.
India has far more to offer beyond Taj, and I would say if not more equally interesting architectural marvels like Kailasa temple.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kailasa_Temple,_Ellora
> few dynasties were comparable to the vastness of Mughals
The Mauryas perhaps ruled a much larger area than Mughals. Khalji, Tughlaqs, Satvahanas, and Marathas also ruled over vast landscapes, but they are not much known outside India.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maratha_Empire#/media/File:Ind...
Part of the reason is that -- in the popular Western imagining -- India really refers to the Gangetic plain. Any book on India mainly attributes Gangetic culture to 'India' whole completely ignoring the south, west, east and north east all of which have unique cultural traits.
As someone of Indian ethnicity, this was extremely confusing to me because when we read about Indian history in books and people would ask me, I would literally have no idea. My particular ethnic group lived along the coast of the western ghats and greatly valued the ocean and seafaring... Almost completely the opposite of the Gangetic peoples. This bias is prevalent everywhere because, despite these individual cultures having enough population to be a country in their own right. They are marginalized by popular history.
Maybe, the fate of Europe and that of India would have been different if he hadn't that day.
And this is OP's point.
Most "India History" in the West has an extremely colonial British bias which only concentrated on Delhi and unpartitioned Punjab.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_of_the_Grand_Mughal_Fl...
But it seems like India was not ruled by Indians (Hindus?) even before European colonization. Aren’t these previous Mughal rulers and the people before them also colonizers then, if they weren’t indigenous Indians / Hindus? Why aren’t they also discussed that way? When did Indians rule India then - was it in the first millennium?
To me, this is all basically outside of the public’s common knowledge and focus in the West.
Pakistan and Afghanistan have little to minorities or even the memory of past left, but that's mostly what happens with cultural imperialism. There were Hindus / Bhuddist or Zorastrian in those areas, now there are none. Infact India have more Zorastrians than modern day Iran, many fled to India around 16th Century escaping similar cultural imperialism.
Secondly, cuisine. At least one seminal Indian cookbook I owned had a section devoted to Mughal dishes and explaining how the Empire influenced the culture insofar as what people were permitted to eat, and what foods/ingredients were made available. The Muslim Mughal diet contrasts with the Hindu dishes, and the seafood of the coasts and Goa presents another dimension.
South Asia Studies in the West needs its John K Fairbanks, but that will not happen. Most India scholars who are decent end up returning to India where policymaking roles abound.
It was the same with how China Studies was treated in the West until the last 5 years - barely 15 years ago all China was in the western zeitgeist was Mao, the Great Wall, pollution, poverty, and ill-paid migrant workers.
> The Deccan Sultanates and Vijayanagara were more relevant to world history in the 16th Century India
It's not an either/or situation. There were a whole gamut of states all equally important.
What I'm positing is that the crux of the issue with the Western crop of South Asia is that it is hagiographic in nature, not quantitative.
My argument is an institutionalist and political economy approach to studying historical and contemporary South Asia solves most of the problem.
This was what John Fairbanks argued back in the 20th century that China studies needed to be quantitative and testable in nature, as he was an Intel officer posted in China during WW2. This was not the mainstream view on China studies and China history in the west until the late 2010s.
That said, anyone with this muscle isn't going to teach history in the West in 2026 unlike those who did something similar for China in the 1980s-2000s who made a new generation of China scholars who returned to China.
There is a new generation of India scholars who specialize in this (a number of whom trained under economists like Arvind Subramanian, Raghuram Rajan, etc) but most of these scholars either return to India to take positions at INIs and are thus not visible to Western academia) or (and this is the more common route) end up in the Policy space as the newer crop of IAS, NITI Aayog staffers, World Bank or IMF staffers, India-specific VC/PE, or India specific think tanks.
Edit: can't reply
> why is the academic work being done in Indian institutions so inaccessible in the US and the rest of the anglosphere
Because they publish in Economics journals and work on Political Economy, not "History". This is what the best South Asia scholars in America (eg. Subramanian, Varshney, Rajan) do as well.
It's the same with China scholars - the best ones are economists and are quantitative in nature.
Turns out the skills needed to understand the political economy of the Bengal Subah or the incentive structures of coinage reform in Qing China are also useful to craft economic policy for contemporary countries.
Why work in underfunded and frankly low impact history when you can actually affect change (and make good money and a career) in the various applications of Econ.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Read that and you’ll get the context.
Imagine a similar description of conquest by, say, the Christian Spaniards in the Americas. The noble conquests of the brave Hernan Cortés, in similarly flowery language. Imagine the shouts of protest against... well, there is no nedd to imagine since those protests are commonplace.
The Islamic conquest and colonisation of the middle- and far-east is one of the more bloody episodes in history rife with all the vices for which western colonisers are constantly blamed. Slavery was and in some places still is commonplace but the same voices which proclaim the vices of the west are silent or point at the virtues of others who were and sometimes still are guilty of the same. Why is that?
He was just a Chagatai raider who somehow ended up the ruler of a principality.
The actual empire was built by Akbar and Shah Jahan.
Political Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism only arose in South Asia in 19th century with the collapse of the Mughal, Maratha, and Sikh Empires and early British attempts at mass Christian conversion which led to political religious movements arise in the late 19th century.
My reaction is not so much targeted at this specific example - religious (Islamic) conquest - but towards the lack of criticism of non-Western conquest and colonisation.
People should be free to criticize all of these events as they see fit.
Not to mention the ignorance in this thread of the basic fact that Muslim empires kept attacking and supplanting each other in South Asia, culminating in the Mughal defeat of another Muslim empire, which is exactly what this article describes. But instead of actually reading it, you'd rather bring naked biases and caricatures to the table.
Is that what you read in my comment? Because that is not what I wrote. People sympathise with those who are similar to them. Europeans sympathise with Ukrainians, Muslims with Palestinians, Abrahamics with other Abrahamics. How you got from that to your "Abrahamic bad", I can't even fathom.