In an exclusive interview for the Brighter Kashmir, author Aabhas K. Maldahiyar in conversation with Muhmmad Daanish speaks about challenges the romanticised narrative of Ganga-Jamuni Teḥzib.

Maldahiyar argues that what is often portrayed as cultural harmony masks a deeper history of asymmetry and erasure.
Drawing from legal texts, chronicles, and lived experiences, Maldahiyar dismantles the myth of syncretism to reveal a one-way flow of power.

You’ve described this volume as a torchbearer for historical truth. What compelled you to revisit Babur’s legacy in such unvarnished terms?

Because too long have we in India been offered lullabies in place of history. Our textbooks, our cinema, and even our academic narratives polished Babur into a curious exile, a connoisseur of gardens, a reluctant invader who brought “Persianate refinement.” But when I sat with the Persian recension of the Baburnāma—commissioned by Akbar’s own court—I saw a very different man emerge.
Babur was no tentative adventurer. He was a Ghāzī in his own words, sanctifying his campaigns as jihād against “idol-worshippers.” He compared the destruction of temples to his renunciation of wine vessels—both acts of purification. This is not romantic melancholy; this is theological conviction.
So, I felt compelled to strip away the varnish. Babur II had to be a torch that burns through this fog of syncretic propaganda and illuminates the scaffolding beneath: coercion draped as culture, brutality rebranded as benevolent.

Volume 1 gave us the poet and exile. Volume 2 gives us the Ghāzī. Was this contrast always part of your vision, or did it emerge through your translation work?
It emerged in the text itself. In Volume I, Babur is a fugitive—dreaming of Samarkand, writing verses of longing, lamenting betrayals of kin. He is still the boy-king of Ferghana, sensitive, insecure, craving legitimacy.
But by the time his armies thunder into Hindūstān, the tone hardens. He writes of Bajaur not as mere conquest but as divine retribution—calling its inhabitants “enemies of Islam” and proudly noting their massacre. Over 3,000 men were slain, women and children enslaved, and Babur presents this not as necessity but as piety.
So yes, the contrast was always there, latent. But it crystallised only when I wrestled with the Persian words themselves. The exile’s sigh becomes the Ghazi’s roar.

You challenge the popular memory of Jodha Bai and highlight the conversion of Hindu princesses before entering the Timurid zenāna. What does this tell us about the nature of imperial assimilation under Babur and his successors?

It tells us there was no assimilation in the true sense. There was only absorption after obliteration. A Hindu princess could not enter the Timurid harem as herself. She was renamed, circumcised into faith, stripped of the gods of her fathers.
When popular memory imagines “Jodha” walking proudly into Akbar’s court as Hindu consort, it ignores this reality: every Hindu princess was Islamised before union. Their very entry was an erasure, a symbolic conquest.
Thus, the zenana itself became a political theatre. The princess’s presence was not honour to her people but submission of her lineage. It was a message: your daughters are ours, your gods silenced, your bloodline annexed.

You write that their wombs became battlegrounds. Could you elaborate on how lineage and faith were weaponised in the imperial project?

The womb is the silent frontier of the empire. When the likes of Akbar married a Rajput princess, the children born were no longer heirs of Rajputana—they were Timurid princes. Their names carried Qur’anic resonance, their upbringing steeped in Islam.
So, the womb became a battlefield where lineages were severed. Rajput blood was drawn into Timurid veins, but only after being rebranded. These children were not bridges of synthesis—they were trophies of conquest.
Love was conquest. Marriage was subjugation. And the child born was proof of a lineage broken, its Hindu memory forever diluted.

You argue that cultural accommodation under the Timurids was strategic, not pluralistic. How do you respond to defenders of the Ganga–Jamunī Teḥzīb narrative who see it as genuine syncretism ?

The danger is that we mistake oppression for harmony. The Ganga–Jamuni Teḥzib, as presented in post-independence historiography, suggests a gentle mingling of two streams—Hindu and Muslim—into one cultural river. But if you read the law books, the chronicles, the lived testimonies, the picture is starkly different.
A Hindu woman could be married into the Timurid fold—but only after erasure. A Hindu man marrying a Muslim woman? Capital punishment. That is not a river of syncretism; that is a canal with a dam, where flow was allowed only in one direction.
When we repeat this Teḥzib myth, we are not celebrating fusion—we are legitimising asymmetry. We are telling our children that conquest was coexistence, that erasure was exchange. The embroidery looks beautiful, but it tightens around the neck of historical truth like a noose. The danger of this myth is that it makes submission appear like partnership.
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Was tolerance under Babur a façade for control—or a necessary performance to maintain trade and stability?

It was both façade and necessity. Babur knew that absolute destruction would cripple his own coffers. Merchants had to trade, peasants had to till, and local nobility had to be appeased.
So tolerance was performed—but always with an iron condition: obedience. When submission was secure, tolerance was extended. When rebellion stirred, tolerance evaporated in smoke and fire.
Thus, “tolerance” was not conviction but convenience—a carefully staged performance to sustain an empire.

Your analysis of the Babri Masjid and Shri Rāma Mandir moves beyond the usual suspects. Why did you choose to shift the spotlight away from Babur and Mīr Bāqī?

Because both Babur and Mīr Bāqī have been ghosts of a forged narrative. The Baburnāma makes no mention of Ayodhyā. No contemporary sixteenth-century source records Babur razing a temple there. For two and a half centuries after 1528, there was silence. The earliest record of a mosque at the site traditionally believed by Hindus to be the birthplace of Shri Rāma comes from Jai Singh II – a Rajput noble in the Timurid court who purchased land and established a Jaisinghpura in the area surrounding the mosque in 1717 CE. Following which we have Joseph Tieffenthaler’s account in 1768.
What my research uncovered—through Persian chronicles, European travellers, and later Muslim testimonies—is that the destruction at Ayodhyā happened in Aurangzeb’s reign, around 1660, executed by his foster-brother and governor of Awadh, Fedā’ī Khān. He razed the Svargadvārī, Tretā-ka-Thākura, and Janma-sthāna temples, replacing them with mosques. The matter got complicated because Muslims created forged inscriptions to make the claim going as far as that to Babur. But the forgery was so cheap that even a new reader of Farsi like me was able to catch the flaws.
To remain trapped in Babur vs. Bāqī is to perpetuate a colonial-era deceit. As important it is to acknowledge the destruction, it is equally important to know who exactly did this.

You mention the need for evidentiary precision. What sources or methods helped you distinguish between imperial symbolism and actual agents of destruction?

When I speak of evidentiary precision, I am referring to a discipline of reading that refuses to blur metaphor into event or imperial symbolism into actual acts of destruction. Much of our historiography has been guilty of collapsing the two—relying on later chronicles, colonial translations, or popular memory—without returning to the ground of evidence itself.
To separate symbolism from agency, I turned first to the primary manuscripts: the Baburnama (Persian translations commissioned under Akbar), the Ain-i Akbari (Vol. 3, Jarrett/Phillott/Sarkar edition), and the Akbarnama (Vol. 2, Beveridge translation). Each was consulted with folio-by-folio scrutiny, for the act of destruction is often interpolated or silenced in translation. For example, in the case of Ayodhya, my work showed that it was not Babur himself but Fedai Khan under Aurangzeb’s order who was implicated in the destruction—something the standard narrative misses because of careless reliance on imperial rhetoric.
Second, I leaned on philological methods—learning Farsi of that era, comparing shifts in vocabulary across translations, and reading against the grain of courtly bombast. When a chronicler describes a mosque as a symbol of victory, that is not equivalent to a line in an administrative order for demolition. This distinction between poetic hyperbole and administrative act is what evidentiary precision demands.
Finally, I cross-verified with epigraphic and architectural evidence—inscriptions, foundation stones, Persian farmans—because built space often tells the story that rhetoric conceals. Where rhetoric glorifies “Islamic conquest,” inscriptions sometimes reveal hurried construction over pre-existing sites.
Thus, the sources and methods I employed—original manuscripts, linguistic accuracy, archival epigraphy, and architectural archaeology—together allowed me to distinguish between the imperial symbolism of power and the concrete agents of destruction.

You’ve relied on your own direct translation of the Persian Baburnāma. What did you discover in Babur’s own words that previous translations may have obscured or softened?

My decision to return to the Baburnāma in its original Persian form was precisely to cut through the haze of softened translation. One striking case is the way earlier translators rendered the word “kāfir” as “pagan.” At first glance it may seem a minor lexical choice, but it is in fact a profound distortion.
“Pagan” in the European imagination evokes something quaint, folkloric, even rustic—a neutral, almost romantic category. But when Babur uses “kāfir”, it is not neutral at all. It is a theological and legal term embedded in Islamic jurisprudence, denoting an unbeliever—someone outside the pale of Islam, marked for subjugation or elimination under the ideology of jihad. To render that as “pagan” is to blunt the edge of Babur’s own words, converting a term of religious hostility into a vague anthropological label.
This is just one example of many. Translators often polished Babur into a cultured adventurer, an aesthete who admired gardens and poetry, while sidestepping the bluntness with which he described Hindustan and its people. His descriptions of temples razed, idols defiled, and the use of “kāfir” for Hindus reveal a far sharper contempt than the romanticised “explorer-king” image would allow.
By working directly with the manuscript, and reading them alongside epigraphic and contemporary accounts—I could restore the unvarnished voice of Babur. What emerged was not a soft-focus empire builder but an Islamic warlord whose rhetoric of conquest was laced with theological denigration of the land he entered.
Thus, what earlier translations obscured—whether by design or by the polite evasions of colonial-era scholarship—was precisely the hostility encoded in the language itself. My own translations insist on restoring those edges, because it is only when Babur is read in his own words, without euphemism, that his role in the civilisational clash of Hindustan becomes visible.

Were there moments in the text where Babur’s tone or intent surprised you—perhaps revealing contradictions between the poet and the conqueror?

Yes, often—and those moments are precisely what make Babur such a compelling yet unsettling figure. Reading him in his own words, I was struck by the jarring oscillation between the refined poet and the ruthless Hindu Hating conqueror. In one passage he lingers with lyrical detail on the fragrance of Hindustan’s gardens, the taste of its fruits, the play of light on the Yamuna—yet in the very next, he coolly describes the destruction of temples and the slaughter of “kāfirs.”
This contradiction is not accidental; it is Babur’s nature. He could admire beauty, but only as long as it did not threaten the framework of his faith and power. What surprised me was not his cruelty—that I expected from a Timurid warlord—but the ease with which aesthetic sensitivity coexisted with theological hostility. A man who could compose verse with delicacy also spat contempt at the land’s people, marking them as kāfirs destined for conquest.
The contradiction, then, is not reconciliation but simultaneity: Babur was never either poet or conqueror—he was both at once, and his poetry did not soften his conquest, it ornamented it. That revelation was one of the most unsettling discoveries my translations brought to the surface.

You describe Humāyūn’s inaction during the siege of Chittor as “imperial indifference cloaked in political prudence.” What do you believe this moment reveals about his character and priorities as a ruler?

Humāyūn’s inaction during the siege of Chittor cannot be dismissed as mere hesitation or calculation; it was a deliberate choice. Though Bahadur Shah of Gujarat was his enemy, Humāyūn refrained from aiding the Rajputs because, at that moment, the conflict was framed as a Muslim ruler waging war against kāfirs. His silence was thus not neutrality but a subtle affirmation of religious fraternity over political rivalry.
This reveals much about his priorities as a ruler. It shows that the veneer of “prudence” was in fact imperial indifference shaped by sectarian solidarity. Humāyūn chose to safeguard the larger narrative of Islamic supremacy rather than intervene on behalf of supposed Hindustan’s defenders (as many historians wish to portray them as). His character, then, emerges as one deeply bound to the theological logic of jihad, even when it compromises his own political interests.
The moment at Chittor unmasks him: not as a ruler paralyzed by uncertainty, but as one who preferred the survival of an Islamic adversary over the strengthening of Hindu resistance. It is in such silences that Humāyūn’s true priorities are laid bare. (To Be Continued)

Email:---------------daanishinterview@gmail.com

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