Eaton's Error: India Isn't Rewriting History, It's Reclaiming Its Memory

It is not the objective of rulers to tell history as it happened, but to command it as it serves.

The memory of a people is the most precious and most dangerous of resources, precious when shaped by reason and national ambition, and dangerous when held captive by foreign tongues and alien sympathies.

A state that does not command its past will be commanded by it, often by those who wield the past like a dagger against the living body of the nation.

On the Utility of Memory and the Craft of Sovereignty

The essay by Richard M. Eaton laments what he calls a war on memory. He speaks of the Mughal Empire as a civilisational gift and of the present Indian government as a vandal of pluralism. But he forgets, or perhaps disdains to acknowledge, that sovereignty requires the crafting of myth no less than the drafting of law. Where power must be unified, contradictions must be erased; where a people must be awakened, sentiment must be purified.

In truth, what Eaton calls "erasure" is nothing more than the sovereign right of a people to reorder their historical memory by their aspirations. All empires rewrite history. The Mughals did. The British did. The secular elite of post-independence India did. Now, the nation reclaims what had been interrupted.

Let us not be deceived by the pomp of Persianate refinements or the elegance of fusion. Behind every syncretic monument stands a sovereign will. Behind every biryani and borrowed word, a court decree. Behind every act of patronage, a calculation of rule. The Mughals were not Indians. They became rulers of India, and they secured loyalty not by love, but by force. Their legitimacy did not come from the soil, but from conquest.

That some of their descendants married Rajput wives and adopted Indian customs does not change the logic of power. It only confirms it: assimilation is the strategy of the shrewd invader.

If the current rulers of India declare that certain monuments, names, and histories no longer serve the spirit of the nation, they must change them. There is no moral debt owed to the dead whose empires no longer exist. There is only duty to the living, and to the unborn generations whose sense of self will be shaped by what names the streets bear, what syllabi the schools teach, and what statues occupy the plazas.

The law of all states is to consolidate their legitimacy. This is not erasure, it is consolidation. And the scholar who protests it from the perch of his archive forgets that the people do not remember footnotes; they remember victory and humiliation, glory and betrayal.

India does not erase history. It claims the right to interpret it.

On the Illusion of Cultural Syncretism

Eaton's essay labours to establish the Mughal Empire not merely as a ruling dynasty but as the crucible of Indian identity, as if the essence of India was distilled not from its soil, but from the Persianate court. He extols the sitar and the sarod, the biryani and the Red Fort, the Urdu ghazal and the Taj Mahal, as if the presence of beauty is itself proof of belonging. This is the scholar's delusion: to confuse aesthetic elegance with political legitimacy.

Let us separate the two.

A ruler may build minarets and gardens, sponsor translations, and marry the daughters of conquered chieftains. These are acts of politics disguised as culture. They are strategies of assimilation, not declarations of kinship. The Mughals may have brought marble and metre, but they also brought cavalry and tax. Their empire was not a marriage; it was a reign.

What Eaton calls "syncretism" is often simply the softening of domination. When the sword is sheathed, poetry begins. Akbar, whose court scholars translated Sanskrit texts into Persian, was praised for tolerance. But what is tolerance if not the policy of a confident victor? Akbar could afford to patronise the Ramayana because he had no rival. The sword made way for the book. That is not harmony, it is hierarchy.

Even in his praise of "fusion," Eaton forgets a crucial principle of power: the fusion that does not serve the throne is discarded. Aurangzeb, whom the essay mourns as a misunderstood saint, reversed much of the syncretism of his forebears. He abolished music from the court. He levied the jizya. He razed temples. Was this also fusion? Or is the word only reserved for those Mughals who were convenient to the secular imagination?

Eaton speaks of Urdu, of gardens, of recipes and ragas, as if these alone justify imperial memory. But people do not choose their destiny through cuisine. No sovereign preserves a conqueror's legacy because he likes his spices. The test of syncretism is not what survives; it is what is remembered with pride. And no memory can be proud of submission.

What India confronts now is not the Mughal past, but the long shadow it cast over Indian self-conception. For too long, the political class spoke of the Mughals as though they were our ancestors. But they were not. They were our rulers. This distinction is not merely semantic; it is civilisational. To say that we were ruled is to admit our defeat. To pretend they were "ours" is to spiritualise our subjugation.

The sovereign state is not a museum. It is not obligated to keep every heirloom. It is not required to celebrate every dynasty that once sat on its throne. Just as Rome forgot the Etruscans, and France dethroned its Bourbons, India is choosing which legacies to honour and which to retire.

To reclaim history is not to lie. It is to choose.

On the Machinery of Narrative and the Architect of the Nation

History, for the sovereign, is not merely the domain of scholars; it is a weapon, a mirror, and a map. A weapon, because it sharpens the edge of identity; a mirror, because it reflects the will of the ruling class; a map, because it charts the boundaries of who we were, and therefore who we may become.

Richard Eaton's essay reveals, unwittingly, the central failing of the historian who confuses narrative with authority. He surveys the Mughal Empire as one might a museum exhibit, gilded, intricate, detached from consequence. He writes with the tone of a curator, not a commander. But states are not built by curators. They are built by those who control what enters the museum and what is buried in the ground.

The Indian state, in its present formation, is not merely altering names or removing chapters; it is constructing the intellectual foundations of a postcolonial nation. This project demands decisions, exclusions, and mythologies. All nations are built on selective memory. France remembers the storming of the Bastille but forgets the Vichy collaboration. America remembers the Founding Fathers but forgets the slaughter at Wounded Knee. A nation is not a ledger; it is a myth. And myths, to endure, must be simple.

Eaton laments the removal of Mughals from textbooks as if historical instruction were an exercise in balance. It is not. It is an act of statecraft. Textbooks are not written to inform; they are written to shape. The child in the classroom is not a historian in training. He is a citizen in formation. His sense of belonging is shaped not by footnotes but by symbols.

To teach a child that his golden age began with Babur is to hand his loyalty to the sword of a foreign prince. To show him Akbar's jharokha but not the blood spilt in Rajputana is to craft a memory built on aesthetic cowardice.

And what does Eaton offer in place of this realpolitik? Nostalgia. An aestheticised empire of gardens, ghazals, and gentility. But nostalgia is for the weak. The strong forge memories like iron, to fit the hilt of their future.

This is not to say that the Mughal Empire was not brilliant, sophisticated, or enduring. It was. But brilliance is not the measure of legitimacy. Alexander was brilliant. So was Caesar. But Greece does not genuflect to Macedon. Italy does not keep altars for Roman emperors. And India is not bound to enshrine the memory of a dynasty that saw itself as Persian, Central Asian, Timurid, anything but Indian.

The state that survives is the one that knows what to forget. The nation that rises is the one that selects its gods, its enemies, and its golden ages. To remember is not always a virtue. Often, it is an indulgence.

Eaton's world is one in which every fragment of the past must be preserved, studied, and celebrated. But the world of power is one in which the past must be wielded, shaped, and, when necessary, silenced. The Mughal Empire was a chapter in India's story. But the story belongs to India. Not to its former rulers. Not to their descendants. Not to those who find beauty in their domes and despair in their erasure.

The map is being redrawn. The names are changing. And with them, the mind of the nation.

On the Usefulness of Enemies and the Politics of Memory

A nation needs enemies. Not always to fight, but always to define. A person discovers their purpose not only through affection for what they love, but through clarity about what it is not. The art of governance requires this duality: the veneration of the self and the demonisation of the other. It is not cruelty, but necessity. The blade of identity is honed against the grindstone of opposition.

In Richard Eaton's essay, one finds a recurring panic at the rising antipathy toward the Mughal legacy. He sees the villainising of Aurangzeb, the renaming of Aurangabad, and the uprooting of Persianised nomenclature, and he calls this iconoclasm. He invokes alarm at the myth-making of a Hindu Rashtra, yet he forgets that the Mughals themselves mastered the same craft.

Did Babur not mythologise himself as a descendant of Timur and Genghis? Did Akbar not remake kingship through the sun-worship ritual of darshan, adopting symbols of raja and avatara? Did Aurangzeb not wield the cloak of piety to justify conquest? The Mughals, too, invented stories. But theirs were stories of Persianate supremacy draped in the language of sovereignty.

What Eaton mourns is not history but the loss of monopoly. For decades, a class of historians, born of colonial universities, educated in British models, fluent in Persianate romanticism, held the pen that wrote India's past. They built a canon where conquest was synthesis, where erasure was assimilation, where even brutality could be rewritten as aesthetic power. Now, the pen has changed hands. And they are afraid.

But this fear, too, serves a purpose. The presence of their unease signals something deeper: that the centre of gravity has shifted. Where once the Indian mind was ashamed to speak in Sanskrit but proud to quote Ghalib, now the current flows differently. Where once the ideal was Akbar's eclecticism, today it is Shivaji's defiance. The transformation is not arbitrary; it is strategic. Because memory, too, is a battlefield.

Let us speak plainly. Every sovereign must cultivate enemies. Not imaginary ones, but remembered ones. The Turkic invader, the Afghan raider, the imperial Persianate ruler, these are not phantoms. They are part of our soil's experience. The mutilation of temples, the burning of towns, the levying of jizya, the court protocols that placed Hindu princes at the feet of Muslim emperors, these are not fantasies. They are records.

And if a person chooses to recall these records not with affection, but with resistance, that too is history.

The Marathas rallied under Shivaji not because they hated poetry, but because they hungered for self-rule. The Sikhs opposed Mughal tyranny not because they were uncultured, but because they knew what it meant to live under the boot of autocracy. When Aurangzeb had Guru Tegh Bahadur beheaded, it was not a cultural disagreement; it was imperial policy. The redressal of such memories today is not bigotry. It is a long-delayed correction.

Enemies, of course, must be handled with art. The wise ruler does not whip the masses into blind hatred; that is the path of chaos. Instead, he crafts memory with precision. He distinguishes between those Muslims who fought for the soil and those who looted it. He honours the saints, the poets, the soldiers who bled for India, whilst refusing to genuflect to emperors who dreamt of empire, not nation. It is a politics of discernment, not of vengeance.

And here lies the failure of Eaton's account. He demands reverence where only understanding is due. He wants to preserve the image of the Mughal without interrogating its consequences. He seeks to protect a memory that India has outgrown. To remember is not to surrender. To study is not to sanctify. And to destroy symbols is not always to erase; it is often to liberate.

Let us therefore use our enemies wisely. Let the past instruct, not paralyse. Let it stoke purpose, not shame. Let the grave of Aurangzeb remind us not only of empire, but of resistance. Let the Red Fort remain, not as a monument to invaders, but as a throne from which new India declares its freedom.

We are not bound to admire the hands that once chained us, however delicate their touch. We are free to build anew.

On the Birth of Civilisation Through Assertion, Not Apology

A civilisation, if it is to live, must first refuse to kneel.

To reclaim history is to reclaim how people define themselves. It is not a mere academic exercise. It is a foundational act of self-respect. This is why every age rewrites its past, not to falsify, but to reinforce the moral logic of its future. The Rome that Augustus inherited was not the Rome of Romulus. The France of Napoleon had no use for the monarchy's sacred lineage.

And the India now taking shape, bold, unapologetic, intensely self-aware, is not the India imagined by Macaulay's textbooks or Eaton's lament.

Eaton's prose mourns the dismantling of Mughal grandeur; he calls it a siege on pluralism. But he misreads the moment. What is under siege is not history, but hegemony, the quiet monopoly of those who made Persian gardens into symbols of love, but ignored the blood in which those gardens were grown. What is being challenged is the moral asymmetry where conquest was aestheticised, and resistance was provincialised.

Why should the children of a wounded civilisation be forced to admire their old tormentors?

The Mughals did not arrive on Indian soil as seekers of dialogue. They came with armies, artillery, and ambition. Their legacy is not simply cuisine and calligraphy. It is also war, taxation, cultural domination, and an imperial worldview that placed a Persianised elite over a native majority. That this system gave rise to beauty does not erase the fact that it was built upon power.

Let us admire the domes and the manuscripts, yes. But let us not confuse ornament with virtue.

A civilisation must learn the distinction between what it absorbs and what it submits to. There is no shame in having inherited Persian words or Mughal dishes, so long as we know that our tongue is older, and our heart deeper. India's soul predates her invaders. It was not born in 1526, or even in 1947. It is born in fire altars, in forests, in mandalas, in the Upanishads and the Arthashastra. It is older than conquest. It is older than division. And it is not obligatory to remember politely.

To rename a city, to retell a battle, to dethrone a canon, these are not acts of erasure. They are the rituals of a civilisation rising from centuries of spiritual hypnosis. One does not revive a dharma by preserving the language of the conqueror. One does not inspire generations by hiding wounds beneath Persian silk.

India's new age will be written not in apology, but in assertion. It will remember its sages before its sultans. It will raise its youth on tales of resistance, not submission. And it will not blush when it speaks of its desire to be whole.

Eaton and his ilk call this dangerous. They fear that reclaiming identity will breed exclusion. But what they fail to grasp is this: India does not hate Muslims. It merely refuses to worship its conquerors. It honours saints and poets, soldiers and martyrs, but not emperors who believed India was theirs to rule by divine right. That refusal is not hatred. It is the first breath of liberty.

In truth, the future belongs not to those who apologise for their past, but to those who remake it with pride. If modern India is now selecting which legacies to honour and which to bury, it is only doing what every people must do when the fog of colonialism clears. It is taking back its mirror. It is polishing its face. And it is saying, finally, "We remember everything, and we will now choose."

A civilisation is not an archive. It is a weapon, a prayer, and a flame. If it burns a few old idols to light its path forward, so be it.