Despite the hype, Akbar was not tolerant at all. Like most Muslim kings in India, he was heavy-handed towards Hindus but was also towards Shia Muslim [1]. He ordered numerous massacre of Hindus (e.g. massacre in Garha in 1560 AD[2], order to weight Janeu - a cotton thread worn by hindus - of killed Hindus which weighed 200kg [3], rewarded Abd al-Qadir Badauni with gold coins who soak his Islamic beard in Hindu infidel blood [4]), had many Hindu temples razed/looted and destroyed, among many other things. Despite many facts, AFAICT, India is only country which portrays its invaders and looters as heroes.

[1] ’Akbar and His India’ by Irfan Habib [2] The SAGE Encyclopedia of War: Social Science Perspectives edited by Paul Joseph [3] Emperors of the Peacock Throne: The Saga of the Great Mughals By Abraham Eraly [4] Source: The Legacy of Jihad:Islamic Holy War & the Fate of Non-Muslims edited by Andrew G. Bostom

Nations are usually built on lies. Most countries would likely fall apart if they were completely truthful about their histories.

In India's case, the whitewashing of Mughal rule was a necessity because there are still a substantial number of Muslims living in India, and painting their ancestors - the Mughals - as barbaric invaders would likely lead to violence (especially when seen in the context of the Partition violence).

At this point, India has to confront a hard question: does it continue believing the old lies, or does it accept the harsher reality? If we go with the latter, can you be confident that the country will survive in its present form?

I'm not sure of the answer. The mature position would be to understand that the violence and religious persecution happened, but since that's in the past, we can't really change anything about it. Punishing the present does not undo the sins of the ancestors.

But I'm not convinced that most people will take the mature position.

Your point is very well taken.

Empire making and keeping is inherently violent, but the current trend seems to be trying to make the case that Hindu emperors achieved what they achieved with peace, rainbows and divine fairness (and some old Hindu science of flying machines, plastic surgery between humans and elephant heads. All lost because of outside invasion). Pushing this point of view has been the national agenda in the current political situation.

If nothing else, it's a gross oversimplification of history - a basic "us vs them" narration. When in reality, alliances were driven more by political necessity than by religion. There were Hindu generals in Mughal armies, just as there were Muslim commanders in the Maratha armies.

If you trace the Mughal family tree, you'll also find that someone like Shah Jahan was 75% Indian by blood (Hindu Rajput grandmom, Hindu Rajput mom). Make of that what you will.

Agreed. Even the notion that the British took India from the Mughals is quite a laughable notion. Mughals were a shadow of themselves at that time. India was taken from the Marathas, not the Mughals.

An aside, are you aware of significant artifacts (more than hill top forts) institutions that the Marathas left behind. I would be quite interested in knowing about them. With the subject matter so politically charged it is hard to have levelheaded conversations on it.

There is various degrees of violence. In Indian context Kings fought each other to grab kingdoms but that did not translate into general massacre of public for their religious beliefs until Islam arrived.Of course this comes from my little knowledge of Indian History so I will be happy to learn more.

> some old Hindu science of flying machines, plastic surgery between humans and elephant heads. All lost because of outside invasion).

I do not subscribe to this nationalistic view. But then a lot of knowledge from India did get appropriated and lost. Take the example of Fibonacci series. Europe didn't adopt decimal numerals until 16th century and yet Fibonacci was able to invent his series?? No, he himself wrote I learned this from Indian and I am merely translating it. Yet it's called Fibonacci series with no attribution to its origin.[1]

Nalanda reportedly had 10k students, 2000 teachers, and 9 million books. When Khilji destroyed it, library burned for 3 months as reported by the historian of the destroyer himself so saying nothing was lost is just not real.[2]

[1] Liber Abaci

[2] Tabaqat-i Nasiri - Minhaj-i-Siraj

> Yet it's called Fibonacci series with no attribution to its origin.[1]

I gather that you are not trained as a mathematician.

Much is made by the Hindu right wing about Fibonacci series. Before I explain, a minor correction, your comment makes it seem Fibonacci invented or claimed to have invent it. He did neither, he cited Indian publications describing the series.

Now back to the main point, hardly any mathematical result is named after the mathematician who invented the said concept, let alone first studied it. Consider Dirac delta functions. It was not invented by Dirac and neither is it even a function. Consider Taylor series, Taylor was not the first to come up with that series. Look up Stiglers law that describes the phenomenon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy True to its character, Stigler was not the first to observe this.

Its quite rare to have names correctly attributed in math's. Usually the name goes to the one who popularized the notion, the one who got the notion the maximum number of eyeballs and ears.

But no, that's not what you will be get from the Hindu right. What you will get are stories about "our rightful place was taken away from us by conspiracy".

Everywhere it is known that democracy started in Greece. Vaishali was a democracy much before that. That does not mean there is a conspiracy to do Hindu's under. A lot of it is just lack of knowledge and us not being in the forefront of human and modern civilizational accomplishments.

Tell me about one modern civilization scale accomplishment that came out of India recently that has changed the world. Artificial Satellite in space, not us. Humans in space, Moon -- not us. Computers -- not us. One computer language -- not us. Superconductors -- not us. Internet -- not us. When you lose that spot you lose the attention. No one is going to pay any heed to the fact that yeah democracy came to Vaishali before it came to Athens. They will listen even less because its the same folks who claim that Hindus had nuclear weapons during Mahabharat times, who talk about some truly genuine and notable historical facts.

> > some old Hindu science of flying machines, plastic surgery between humans and elephant heads. All lost because of outside invasion).

> I do not subscribe to this nationalistic view

Our prime minister does.

Of course I am not a mathematician or a historian and we digressed a lot into Indian history.

I was merely refuting the premise of this Pakistani propaganda article that Akbar was tolerant. By contrasting between Akbar's ordering of beheading of 30k non combatants with Maha Rana Pratap returning his enemy Rahim's family back to him safely I hoped to demonstrate that Akbar wasn't tolerant even for his time. I believe you are from India so you would know both stories especially of Rahim.

On the subject of attributions you do know chain of custody for Dirac's function? Secondly if democracy can be attributed to Athens then why not Vaishali? They both are dead and harmless. Indians are not going to claims royalties from rest of the world for running democracies. Why deny attribution where it is due and makes sense? Anyways we can keep that aside.

What if I tell you this cultural appropriation is going on as we speak. I hope you know that Yoga and Bhratnatyam are actively rebranded as Christian Yoga[1] and Christian Bhratnatyam[2]. This appropriation should be accepted just because India is not as advanced as compared to the first world countries?

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/theconversation.com/amp/can-yog...

[2] https://www.hinduhumanrights.info/bharatanatyam-and-the-art-...

I hear what you are saying but don't agree that "let's brush it under carpet" approach would be a mature one. My assessment is that current religious problems in India exist because there was no closure on hindu-muslim issues which started with Mughals and ended with partition. No political or religious leader addressed this issue with genuine concern and acknowledgement of history. Instead, all (including Gandhi to current politicians) took ostrich approach to deny the rift with slogans of unity, while pressurizing Hindus to forget-and-forgive since it appeals more to Hindus. This eventually gave rise to "pseudo-secularism" in India which is essentially anti-Hindu but pro-Islam stance. It is my opinion that due to this, distrust between Hindus and Muslims still lingers on and always will. Better approach would have been a proper closure of all the violence, conversions, atrocities, etc of past and then focus on moving on. And finally, mature approach would have been to figure out what is proper closure?

> a substantial number of Muslims living in India, and painting their ancestors - the Mughals - as barbaric invaders.

I'd like a source for Mughal ancestry of Muslims. It looks like you're passing of opinion as facts here.

Thanks for your comment.

> In India's case, the whitewashing of Mughal rule was a necessity because there are still a substantial number of Muslims living in India ....

There are substantial level of German living in Germany, let's not teach them about Nazis? Interpreted other way you are advocating appeasement of people who already have superiority complex due to their religious beliefs.

History should be taught as it is? No lies. If Marathas were the aggressive towards Punjab and Bengal, teach it.

> I'm not sure of the answer .... ancestors.

How will you achieve that if you whitewash. Mature position requires understanding the past and then moving on.

You have to see things in context. The "whitewashing" happened at the dawn of independence. We'd just come off a massive human rights disaster in the form of the partition. Religious tensions were simmering. The country was broke. "Truthful" (though that's a loaded term in itself) would have ruptured the foundations of the country.

We do indeed need to have this conversation as a nation. But I don't think we're ready yet. We're still too poor and desperate. Poor and desperate people rarely make mature, rational decisions, especially about topics as emotionally charged as religion.

> History should be taught as it is? No lies.

Not going to happen. History is always written by the victorious and in a way that is more flattering towards the victorious. The way we think of Hitler nowadays, we would be thinking the same of Churchill if WWII went the other way.

https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/rethinking-churchill-...

What we can do instead is to tech people to read history well aware of this bias and mentally correct for it.

As I said,

> quite tolerant for the time

Compared to most contemporaries, he was certainly tolerant of pluralism. Compared to today, of course not, but that should be obvious.

> AFAICT, India is only country which portrays its invaders and looters as heroes.

The US still widely observes Columbus Day, despite it being a celebration of, “...the greatest waves of genocide of the American Indians known in history.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Day#Opposition_to_Col...

I’m sure there are many other countries with similarly strained relationships to their “heroes”.

He is hated by both Hindu and Muslim extremists. I take that as a complement. His tolerance should be judged in context. One should not judge him on the basis of his early reign, when he was under influence of Bairam Khan. Remember he was barely teen when he ascended the throne. He abolished religious taxes on Hindus, employed them in high positions and patronised other religions like Sikhism. A lot of critics pick his early reign. By that token even Ashoka should not be venerated.

His creation of his own religion might be the reason that tensions still exist in that region or maybe its just people. Interestingly, he was a brilliant commander even though people call him illiterate, he preferred his own way of studying which meant understanding topics at his own pace instead of cramming. Just shows us how only education has nothing to do with being tolerant or being brilliant.

Tensions mostly exist in the region because of colonialism and the poorly-managed independence of India and subsequently of Pakistan. If, nonetheless, you wanted to pin the blame for modern religious issues in South Asia on a Mughal, it would probably be Aurangzeb, Akbar’s great-grandson, who was definitely not tolerant.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurangzeb

Its funny how you mentioned only India and Pakistan and completely forgot about Bangladesh. There were three entities that came out of that partition, not two. These tensions are mostly man-made and not even related to independence, its mostly about India's claim that the two countries should be united and the people living there are similar to them while on the other hand Pakistan claims, they are different, Factually speaking, the Western part of Pakistan is more similar to Afghanistan and Iran, the Northern to China and only the East has some similarities with Northern India, not even the whole. Then there is Kashmir, should we blame that on the poorly-managed independence too? What about the province of Hyderabad or cities of Junagadh? Did the rulers there wanted to join India? It's not a competition about who is tolerant or not, its more about how to play this tolerance game so that they can rule easily and sadly only the common man suffers.

Well, I couldn’t include the entire history of India in a HN comment. I didn’t include Bangladesh as the initial question was related to regional tensions and Indian-Bangladeshi relations are pretty good, as compared to Indian-Pakistani ones.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh–India_relations

I also said mostly which most commenters seem to be missing. In any case, I only made the comment to point out Aurangzeb, not engage in a debate on British India.

Fair enough but there is no "mostly" and Bangladesh used to be part of Pakistan before its independence so I am not sure how well relations actually are.

The British did not create the tensions between Muslims and Hindus in the Indian subcontinent. They papered over them for a long time but the big question of who’s going to be in charge once they left was not one they were in a position to dictate the answer to.

https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2019/03/01/the-blood-on-brown...

> Since I am not Pakistani I did not know what the “Two-Nation Theory” (TNT) was before I ran the Brown Pundits weblog. Basically, this is the idea that the Indian subcontinent has within it two religious nations, the Hindu and Muslim. This is not a theological assertion as much as an ethno-sectarian one. The founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was not a devout Muslim. His personal mores were more that of an upper-class Brit (he enjoyed his whiskey). But, his ethnocultural identity was clearly that of an upper-class Muslim. As a lawyer, he defended a man who killed a Hindu who the man believed had blasphemed against Islam. Jinnah’s defense was motivated by his communal loyalty. Even if he himself was not pious, the offense was against the Muslim nation, and he stood with the Muslim nation.

...

> If you had asked me at a younger age my unconsidered opinion would have been that India should have stayed united to avert the bloodiness of the partition, whose death toll is estimated from the hundreds of thousands to millions. But upon further reflection and thought, I think the TNT captures the essential fact that the Muslim upper-class of Northern India would never be able to reconcile itself well with secondary status within the state, and, with ~25% of the population being Muslim, would always have a huge vote bank so that they could not be ignored. Perhaps a confessional state with a divided balance of power such as Lebanon could have been attempted, but I doubt the Lebanese solution would scale to a polity which covered the whole Indian subcontinent. A more feasible scenario might be a confederation.

> The British did not create the tensions between Muslims and Hindus in the Indian subcontinent.

You will have a hard time justifying that.

Please stop using throwaway accounts in ways that break the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. It will eventually get your main account banned as well.

I'm sorry, but I don't really understand your comment. Certainly history has been filled with violent conquest, but the question was about contemporary religious tensions in South Asia, most of which are traceable to British colonialism and the breakup of India and Pakistan. But yes, religious tensions have existed between peoples for millennia. I am actually working on a startup to help alleviate this problem, so it's something I'm intimately familiar with.

Your narrative is also rather misleading; Islam has been in India since just after Muhammad and many early Muslims were traders, not conquering armies. "Islamic colonization" is a meaningless phrase here, as most of the "conquest" was done by Central Asian tribes with non-religious motives. It's pretty easy to draw a line from the Mongols to the Mughals (after all, Mughal is a Persian-Arabic derivation of Mongol) and the Mongols certainly weren't on a religious crusade.

Otherwise, it is an immensely complex story and situation and one-line summary rebuttals aren't exactly helpful. I'm not an expert on Indian history, but to paint it as a straightforward narrative is unquestionably false.

Wrong, India survived because Hindus fought very hard. Entire Arabia, Iraq, and Persia fell within 30 years. Yet Islam couldn't reach even central India until 13th century not because invaders were tolerant. It was because they met resistance. Read [1] and watch [2]

[1]https://archive.org/details/HeroicHinduResistanceToMuslimInv...

[2] https://youtu.be/9HfPzUr-IKw

How could religion that died +-with him 400 years ago and nobody worships anymore could have any effect on tensions these days? People even today are often primitive when it comes to handling their emotions, generally easy to manipulate and so on. Those are more sources of issues

what information makes you believe he was tolerant?

Well, I said tolerant for the time. His entire Wikipedia article indicates a pretty serious commitment to pluralism and tolerance, especially compared to his contemporaries (and even his descendents.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akbar#Religious_policy

> Wikipedia isn't a reliable source anymore. They seems to have become a Islamist and left propaganda machine

I do think that needs some stronger sourcing. It is one thing to argue that certain wiki articles have some bias or the other, but a categorical claim that it is an Islamist and left propaganda machine seems rather bizarre at first cut.

At the moment these claims seem to be supported by some random tweets?

Wikipedia article for Siege of Chittorgarh (1567–1568)[1] to quote:

>> Rising pillars of smoke soon signalled the rite of jauhar as the Rajputs killed their families and prepared to die in a supreme sacrifice. In a day filled with hand-to-hand struggles until virtually all the defenders died. The Mughal troops slaughtered another 20-25,000 ordinary persons, inhabitants of the town and peasants from the surrounding area on the grounds that they had actively helped in the resistance.

— John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire[8]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Chittorgarh_(1567%E2%....

I have updated my comment to include the original sources. I included the tweets because I first I learned from them.

Did you look at the details in those tweets? They further refer to original source material.

> > Wikipedia isn't a reliable source anymore. They seems to have become a Islamist and left propaganda machine

> I do think that needs some stronger sourcing.

Academic study, showing leftist bias: https://hbr.org/2014/12/wikipedia-is-more-biased-than-britan...

> Greenstein and Zhu borrowed this taxonomy of partisan terms and counted their use in pairs of Wikipedia and Britannica articles on the same subject. They calculated bias as the absolute difference between the number of Democratic terms and the number of Republican ones. For example, if an article contained 10 terms associated with Democrats and only three associated with Republicans, its bias score would be seven.

> They found that Wikipedia is significantly more biased than Britannica by this measure, and a bit more left-leaning.

And a co-founder’s perspective: https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

> Wikipedia’s “NPOV” is dead.

> Academic study, showing leftist bias

says rightwing mouthpieces.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm always open to discussion, but if you're going to present a counter-narrative, you'll need stronger sources than some random tweets.

And, as I have said a few times now: he was tolerant for the times. Virtually every political leader in the history of the world has committed things that today, we'd consider crimes against humanity. That shouldn't stop us from finding some light in a sea of darkness. Otherwise, the holier-than-thou spiral has no end.

You can independently google story of Rahim. You don't need me for that.

Sacking of Chittod and subsequent killing of all the population is recorded in Akbar Nama by his own historians.

I am surprised you are running a startup in this domain and you don't know these trivias from Indian history.

Given Kieferski's qualification "tolerant the times" I dont see that he is egregiously wrong. Emperor Ashoka who is considered kindness personified had Kalinga butchered among other places -- till his empire was big enough that more campaigns and conquests were unnecessary. At that point he turned the peaceful Buddhist.

Ashoka never turned pacifist. He got converted in 4th year of his reign and Kalinga war was waged in his 8th year. He waged wars and prosecuted Jains and Ajivikas. Sources are Buddhist text Mahavamsa and Divyavadana so should be considered accurate.

Before Islamic invasion started, Hindu India had a rich history of religious tolerance with Ashoka as an exception yet he finds place in our history books and other great kings don't. Some example of tolerance from an era when killing people for their faith was normal in rest of the world.

When Zoroastrians were prosecuted in Persia by Islam, they found refuge in India. Today's India's biggest conglomerate TATA Group is run by a Zoroastrianian family.[1]

When a ship full of prosecuted Polish Jews Children touched the shores of Gujarat after refused entry by many state as they feared Nazis. Maharaj Digvijaysinhji Ranjitsinhji Jadeja took them in. Some of those kids are still alive.[2]

[1] https://www.tata.com/

[2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-the-indian-oskar-schindler...

You are very right about Jewish settlements in India, but the history goes far far far older, centuries older than you indicate.

Jewish settlements in India (in Kerala, for example) are far older than European settlements. India hosts one of the oldest synagogues. They are very pretty visit if you get a chance.

The so called 'anti-Semitism' (that ought to be called anti-jewish) was an European thing. In India they enjoyed great goodwill and still do.

Uhh, ashoka wasn't called kind and peaceful for his kalinga conquest, but how he transformed afterwards.

Unless you also think of nelson mandela as a terrorist?

> Uhh, ashoka wasn't called kind and peaceful for his kalinga conquest, but how he transformed afterwards.

Yes exactly. Perhaps I did not write my comment well enough. Its debatable whether he actually became a non-violent pacifist out of remorse or whether most of the empire building was complete and he no longer had aspirations for more territory. Kalinga was important for its ports that Maurya empire needed more of.