India’s beating heart is not just a geography - it’s a grammar. And no region has shaped that grammar more deeply than the Hindi-speaking belt. Encompassing over 38.2 per cent of India’s landmass and housing 42.2 per cent of its population, the Indo-Gangetic plains have long dictated the country’s idea of religion, politics, culture, food, fashion, and even identity. It is from this terrain, stretching across Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan, that Ghazala Wahab begins her relentless excavation in ‘The Hindi Heartland’ (Aleph Books).
But this isn’t a textbook chronicle. Wahab’s history breathes, bleeds, and confronts. She doesn’t just revisit India’s past - she re-reads it, edits it, and lays bare its faultlines. The result is an audacious work that straddles archival detail and emotional resonance, stitching together a region’s evolution from medieval pluralism to present-day polarisation.

Razia’s Ramparts, Shah Jahan’s Splendour

Wahab’s narrative details Razia Sultan, not as a historical footnote but as an icon of rhetorical brilliance. Her rooftop appeal to the masses - delivered in purdah yet charged with assertiveness - is framed as a political masterstroke. Razia did not just wield power; she choreographed it. Wahab spotlights her as a symbol of layered strategy: spiritual deference fused with sovereign command.
Later rulers, however, often relied more on spectacle than substance. Wahab’s treatment of Shah Jahan is as architectural as it is political. His elevated jharokha - literally and metaphorically-distanced him from his subjects. His legacy, embodied by the Taj Mahal, is unpacked not as a tomb of love but as a monument to imperial assertion.
Wahab contrasts it with Humayun’s modest dome, suggesting that royal grief evolved into grandeur, sidelining military readiness and innovation.
And that neglect had consequences. Under Shah Jahan, decentralisation of weapon production allowed saltpetre - an essential gunpowder component - to leak into peasant hands. Wahab marks this as the beginning of technological slippage: when art trumped arms, and empires became museums of themselves.

Swords, Stanzas, and Sovereigns

Wahab’s portrait of Babur is drenched in contradiction. His confrontation with Rana Sangha is not just territorial - it’s ideological. Babur invokes Islam, even as Muslim allies fight alongside the Sangha. His internal conflict - between poetic despair and political ambition - is rendered with a cinematic tension that makes the reader ask: does identity become a shield when strategy falters?
The Khalji regime, by contrast, is treated with analytical sharpness. Wahab dives into its surveillance apparatus, grain price reforms, and expansionist methods, highlighting how governance extended into the private sphere.
Quoting Richard Eaton, she provocatively likens Khalji’s network of spies to proto-reporters, suggesting that information was power long before modern media made headlines.

Sher Shah’s Roads to Jahangir’s Gardens

Sher Shah Suri, Wahab argues, was rehabilitated by colonial historians to frame the Mughals as ‘outsiders’. By portraying Sher Shah as a native foil to imperial incursion, the British rewrote historiography to justify their own rule.
Wahab exposes this as a strategic narrative ploy - one that still underpins contemporary identity politics.
Her treatment of Akbar is poetic and textured. Illiterate but philosophically agile, Akbar emerges as a bridge between worlds: Rajput cradles, Persian texts, Turkish lullabies, and Shia rituals shaped his plural vision. Wahab insists that Sulh-e-kul-Akbar’s policy of universal tolerance was not an abstract edict but a lived ethos.
Jahangir, often dismissed for passivity, is given emotional rehabilitation. Wahab reads his Jesuit debates in Lahore, his botanical obsessions, and his literary leanings not as weakness, but as an alternative imperial imagination - one rooted in introspection rather than expansion.
She asks: Has history misread him because he wrote with feeling rather than conquest?

Queens, Mystics & Broken Thrones

Nur Jahan’s vilification, Wahab suggests, served to sanitise Shah Jahan’s rise. Strong women in power, she argues, are often reframed as threats to masculine legitimacy. In contrast, Shah Jahan’s style-over-substance reign becomes a cautionary tale in leadership aesthetics.
The succession drama between Dara Shukoh and Aurangzeb is the book’s emotional high point. Wahab paints Dara not as a failed prince, but as a mystic torn between faiths. His Upanishadic explorations, courtly charm, and syncretic philosophy clashed fatally with ulema orthodoxy.
His trial for apostasy, public humiliation, and burial in Humayun’s tomb are treated with poetic gravitas - his legacy not erased, but enshrined in defeat.
Aurangzeb, by contrast, is cast as misunderstood. Wahab rejects the ‘tyrant’ tag, pointing to his inclusion of Hindu nobles, pragmatic temple policy, and administrative rigour. She labels him India’s last true imperial administrator, torn between conviction and calculation.
Sibling espionage - Roshanara’s secret alliances, Jahanara’s moral appeals - are framed not just as familial discord but as a metaphor for power’s personal toll.

Sabres and Sovereignty

Rajput codes of honour, defined by sacrifice and lineage, are contrasted with Maratha pragmatism. Wahab illustrates how Maratha chieftains regularly switched allegiances - not out of disloyalty, but survival.
She dissects Shivaji’s coronation dilemma, highlighting his need to fabricate genealogy to bypass caste constraints - a political invention that reveals how kingship often depended on storytelling.
Sadashivrao Bhau’s military dominance versus Shah Alam II’s symbolic rule is explored as inversion, where power no longer matched title.
Wahab suggests the Marathas didn’t just defy, they redefined governance through guerrilla logic and administrative ambition.

Company, and Stolen Throne

Wahab’s account of Siraj-ud-Daulah is blunt and devastating. His betrayal by Mir Jafar and the subsequent Battle of Plassey mark the shift from empire to exploitation.
Wahab argues that Siraj wasn’t just defeated militarily; he was cornered by a merchant-military alliance that rewrote the rules of statecraft.
This moment, she suggests, became the blueprint for colonial conquest: win over insiders, install symbolic leadership, and weaponise law as control. Siraj’s fall wasn’t a tactical error – it was a warning.

Script of Subjugation

Post-1757, Wahab argues, the British didn’t just conquer, they reprogrammed. From Zamindari settlements that turned peasants into tenants, to legal overhauls that replaced Mughal-era jurisprudence, the colonial project was one of systemic subjugation.
Even religious identities were reshaped: Hinduism was ‘Vedicised’, Islam was ‘purified’, and plurality was labelled primitive. Wahab asks: How does one narrate such loss without reducing it to accounting?
The British used tools like cow protection, festival processions, and communal legislation to ignite friction. Riots weren’t accidents; they were mechanisms designed to divide, distract, and destabilise

Broken lands, Fractured Minds

As the book moves into the 20th century, Wahab dissects the emotional trauma of Partition. Not just as a border, but a breakdown of memory.
Mohammad Habib’s 1947 plea - “India has always been one and indivisible” - is quoted with aching resonance.
Wahab doesn’t flinch from the present. She critiques Hindutva’s historiographic project, where figures like Dara are rebranded as soft, Hindu-friendly Mughal avatars, and Aurangzeb as an Islamist foil.
Syncretism, she insists, isn’t about merging rituals - but respecting difference. And it’s this respect that is vanishing. Even language is co-opted.
The rise of Hindi at the cost of Hindustani reflects ideological choices, not linguistic evolution. Wahab warns: When diversity becomes discomfort, identity.

Tailpiece

Wahab’s reflections on the Hindi heartland offer a deeply unsettling portrait of a region once revered for its composite culture, now riven by insecurities and ideological fracture.
Wahab lays bare the paradox of a Hindu majority governed by its own fears, nurtured through political engineering, religious nationalism, and the erosion of social pluralism. Drawing from Pew data and interweaving voices like Apoorvanand and Roop Rekha Verma, she maps the descent from Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb to sectarian suspicion.
Wahab doesn’t romanticise coexistence; she dissects its fragility, its rituals, and the caste dynamics that complicate religious identity. Her prose is precise, unsparing, yet animated by a quiet hope that collective grace might still reclaim the region’s lost legacy.
The idea that secularism is a “desperate necessity” for minorities and merely a “lifestyle” for the majority is a brutal, honest indictment, and one that compels reflection on what India chooses to forget.

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