In 'Babur: The Quest for Hindustan', Aabhas K. Maldahiyar carries on with his ambitious revaluation of the medieval Indian past with a book that is provocative and yet as meticulously researched.

This second volume of his life story of the first Mughal emperor transcends the fatalistic exile of Volume I to show us Babur as a Ghazi, a warrior of Islam whose imperial aspiration could not exist apart from religious orthodoxy.
Maldahiyar can call this volume a torchbearer of historical truth, and the title is not an empty boast. Based on his personal direct translation of the Persian Baburnama and other primary manuscripts, he subverts long-standing prejudices about the legacy of Babur, providing the reader with an unvarnished, unromantic, unapologetically revisionist portrait of the man.

The difference between the poet and the conquering warrior, as Maldahiyar points out, was not a conscious choice, a literary device, but a revelation which was uncovered in the process of his translation.

Even the words of Babur--so frequently diluted in previous translations--tell the story of a ruler whose aesthetic sensibilities were in no greater tension with a most ideological conception of conquest.

The opening of this volume, namely, the campaign in Bajaur, preconditions a narrative in which, after all, it is as much about civilisational assertion as it is territorial expansion.

The most emphatic intervention that the book makes is its questioning of the mainstream memory of Jodha Bai and the romanticised narratives of Hindu-Muslim marital alliances. Maldahiyar points out the conversion of Hindu princesses before being incorporated into the Timurid zenana, citing how their wombs were battlegrounds - places whereby lineage and religion were weaponised to cement imperial authority.

He writes: "Love was conquest, marriage was subjugation," and he asks historians to reconsider these alliances based on power, as opposed to poetry.

This is a criticism of the larger historical interpretation of cultural syncretism. Maldahiyar holds that accommodation under the Timurids was a strategic rather than a pluralistic one.

The Ganga-Jamuni Tehzib, he argues, is one of those mythical embroideries that bind into a noose--a history that conceals the forceful process of imperial assimilation. To the champions of this syncretic ideal, Maldahiyar is a challenge: distinguish between performance and principle, between toleration and tactical necessity.

His examination of the Babri Masjid and Shri Rama Mandir dispute is also without mercy. Instead of putting the focus on Babur or Mir Baqi, Maldahiyar changes the perspective to the architecture of conquest itself as a symbol.
He demands evidentiary specificity and uses such documents as the chronicles of Badauni and letters of Humayun to differentiate between imperial symbolism and real destroyers. This methodological rigour helps him to rise above polemics and get into the field of historical accountability.

In one of the most startling scenes of the book, Maldahiyar uses the term imperial indifference to cover the failure of Humayun to take action when the siege of Chittor took place as a political prudence.

The legend of Rakhis that portrays Humayun as a knightly saviour is destroyed by him, instead, as an indicator of the cultural desire to find nobility in an otherwise savage story.

His analysis of the correspondence of Humayun with Bahadur Shah discloses a subordination of allegiances-faith above friendship- hinting at the Timurid diplomacy as ruled by creed rather than expediency.

Another line, which runs through the book, is legal framing. With reference to the Hidaya, Maldahiyar demonstrates the exclusion of Hindu polities from Muslim international equity and the wars against them as jihad and a ruler as a ghazi.

He is making parallels with the other examples of situations in which religious orthodoxy was deployed to justify political violence, and he asks the readers to learn to make the difference between zeal and ambition. The promotion of conquest to a religious obligation, he argues, was not accidental- it was not systemic.

Akbar, who is hailed as a liberal reformist, is not an exception. According to Badauni, Maldahiyar criticises how Akbar treated women in which is an idea of Mughal reformism.

The zenana, he opines, was not an arena of synthesis of cultures but of controlled assimilation. His criticism is not a mere moral one, but structural, based on the structure of the empire.

All along, Maldahiyar adheres to cutting through what he refers to as the fog of assumption. The most significant blind spot of modern Indian historiography, he sees, is the unwillingness of historiography to address the ideological scaffolding of historiography. It is not only about Babur that he wrote--it is about the writing of history, the recollection of history, and the repossession of history.

The use of primary sources, Bada`uni, the letters of Humayun and the Persian Baburnama gives the book depth and credibility, and creates interpretation challenges as well.

Maldahiyar admits it is not easy to read these books without being sucked into the ideological haze, but insists that the ability to face unpleasant facts is the only way to deal with historical integrity.

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