ASHA: Blast From The Past

Review: Sherry Jones, The Jewel of Medina: A Novel. New York: Beaufort Books, 2008. 372 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8253-0518-4.

Historical fiction occupies an uneasy space between documented history and literary imagination. The best examples illuminate the past without claiming to replace it; the weakest blur the line between evidence and invention until readers can no longer distinguish one from the other. Sherry Jones’s The Jewel of Medina belongs to the former category only in part. It is an engaging novel, vividly written and emotionally compelling, but it also raises important historiographical questions about the representation of one of the most influential women in Islamic history, ʿĀʾishah bint Abī Bakr. I read it first years back when a copy of this book was gifted to me by my late brother in law, Late Professor Rizwan Husain, who retired from the Department of English, Aligarh Muslim University. However, I found time to re-read it now after my own retirement and, here is my review of the book.

Long before it appeared in print in 2008, The Jewel of Medina became an international controversy. Random House withdrew the novel before publication after concerns that it might provoke violent reactions, although it was eventually published by Beaufort Books. Ironically, much of the outrage came from people who had never read the work itself. Once the controversy subsides, however, the novel deserves to be judged on literary and historical grounds.

Jones makes her intentions clear from the outset. She explicitly describes the work as fiction and notes that while historical figures are retained, the dialogue and much of the narrative are products of the author’s imagination. The publisher likewise presents the book as the story of Aishah, who ‘must rely on her wits, her courage, and even her sword’ to establish herself within the emerging Muslim community, portraying it simultaneously as ‘a love story, a history lesson, and a coming-of-age tale’. This declaration is important. Jones never claims to have written a biography. She has written a historical novel, and it should first be evaluated as such.

As literature, The Jewel of Medina succeeds remarkably well. Jones recreates seventh-century Arabia with considerable narrative energy. The landscapes of Mecca and Medina, caravan routes, tribal rivalries and domestic life are rendered in language that is accessible without becoming simplistic. Her prose is cinematic, and her descriptions frequently immerse the reader in the atmosphere of the Hijaz.

The novel begins dramatically with the Affair of the Slander (ḥadīth al-ifk), placing the reader immediately inside Aishah’s emotional world as accusations concerning her return with Ṣafwān ibn al-Muʿaṭṭal spread through Medina. Jones transforms the incident into a psychological drama in which suspicion, fear, jealousy and political intrigue unfold simultaneously. The opening is effective precisely because it begins not with theology but with crisis.

Throughout the narrative Jones presents Aishah as intelligent, outspoken, adventurous and fiercely independent. In the Author’s Note, she describes her heroine as ‘an outspoken… influential political advisor… warrior… religious scholar’, emphasising her determination to shape her own destiny. This portrait undoubtedly appeals to modern readers. Yet it also reveals the novel’s central limitation.

Jones’s Aishah is, in many respects, a distinctly twenty-first-century woman inhabiting a seventh-century world. Her concerns, emotional vocabulary and understanding of individual freedom often resemble those of a modern feminist protagonist more than those emerging naturally from the earliest Arabic sources. The historical Aishah was certainly remarkable, but she lived within a social, political and religious universe profoundly different from our own. Jones sometimes allows contemporary values to reshape that universe rather than permitting the historical context to define her heroine.

The contrast becomes especially clear when one reads the novel alongside the most important scholarly studies of Aishah. Nabia Abbott’s classic Aishah: The Beloved of Mohammed (1942) remains the foundational biographical reconstruction, grounded in careful sifting of early Arabic sources. Denise Spellberg’s Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past (1994) offers a sophisticated analysis of how medieval Muslim historians constructed Aishah’s legacy for their own purposes. And Sayyid Murtada ‘Askari’s The Role of Aishah in the History of Islam (published in Arabic in the 1960s and translated into Persian and English) represents a sharply critical Shi’i perspective, arguing that many traditions attributed to Aishah were fabricated to serve political ends.

Abbott, a pioneering scholar of Islamic studies and the first woman professor at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, brought remarkable methodological rigour to her work. Her purpose differs fundamentally from Jones’s. She argues that Aishah deserves study not merely because she was Muhammad’s favourite wife, but because after his death she remained an influential figure in the political and intellectual life of the early Muslim community for almost half a century. Her concern is historical reconstruction rather than literary recreation. More importantly, Abbott explains her method with exemplary clarity. She recognises that the early Islamic traditions contain sectarian interpolation, political propaganda and legendary accretions, but insists that critical historical scholarship enables the careful historian to distinguish ‘the true from the false and the probable from the improbable’. This methodological discipline underlies her entire biography.

Spellberg’s work, published more than fifty years after Abbott’s, takes a different approach. Where Abbott sought to recover the historical Aishah, Spellberg examines how medieval Muslim scholars, almost exclusively men, shaped Aishah’s memory to serve evolving communal identities. As Spellberg writes in her introduction, ‘it is about the construction and presentation of ʿAʾisha bint Abi Bakr’s historical persona by a select group of medieval Muslim men who shaped the memory and meaning of her life for their fellow believers. It is their story not hers, for she is the object not the subject of their written remembrance and evocation.’ Spellberg demonstrates that Aishah’s legacy became a battleground for Sunni and Shiʿi definitions of legitimate authority, proper female behaviour, and communal identity. Her analysis reveals that the ‘real’ Aishah is ultimately unrecoverable; what we have instead is a series of layered interpretations, each reflecting the concerns of its own time.

‘Askari’s work represents a distinctly Shi’i scholarly tradition, one that approaches Aishah’s traditions with profound scepticism. He argues that many of the traditions attributed to her, especially those praising Abu Bakr and ‘Umar or justifying the order of the caliphate, were fabrications designed to legitimise the early caliphs at the expense of ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib. ‘Askari’s method involves tracing the chains of transmission (isnād) of Aishah’s traditions and subjecting them to rigorous historical criticism. His conclusion is stark: Aishah’s historical persona, as preserved in Sunni sources, is a construct shaped by political expediency and sectarian polemic. While his work is avowedly partisan, it represents an important counterpoint to the Sunni scholarly tradition and reminds us that Aishah’s legacy has never been a neutral subject of historical inquiry.

Jones proceeds differently from all three scholars. Where Abbott pauses before uncertain evidence, Spellberg scrutinises the motives of medieval narrators, and ‘Askari rejects entire bodies of tradition as fabricated, Jones fills the gaps with imagination. Such imaginative reconstruction is entirely legitimate in fiction, but readers unfamiliar with early Islamic history may mistake invention for historical probability.

The difference appears vividly in their treatment of Aishah’s childhood. Jones depicts her as a rebellious tomboy, racing through Mecca with a wooden sword, longing for unrestricted freedom and already resisting the constraints imposed upon girls. Abbott’s reconstruction is based closely upon the classical Arabic traditions. She likewise portrays Aishah as lively and energetic, but emphasises her delight in dolls, games and childhood companions. She carefully reproduces traditions describing Muhammad watching her play, joining children’s games, allowing her to observe public entertainments, and defending her childish pleasures even against Abu Bakr’s objections. Abbott’s Aishah is unmistakably a child of seventh-century Arabia; Jones’s often resembles a modern adolescent struggling against patriarchy.

Spellberg adds yet another dimension to this comparison. She demonstrates that Aishah’s childhood, like every other aspect of her life, was subject to selective memory and reinterpretation. The traditions that emphasise her youth at marriage, for instance, served to underscore her virginity and thus her special status among Muhammad’s wives. But these same traditions also rendered her vulnerable – a young bride whose word could be doubted, whose innocence required divine vindication. Spellberg shows that ‘Aishah’s age is a major preoccupation’ in the early sources, with variations that suggest later sectarian agendas rather than reliable historical reporting.

‘Askari, for his part, argues that the traditions about Aishah’s childhood and marriage are among the most suspect. He notes that Aishah was only a child when she entered the Prophet’s household, yet she is credited with transmitting thousands of traditions about matters she could scarcely have witnessed. For ‘Askari, this discrepancy is evidence that later narrators attributed their own views to Aishah, using her prestigious name to lend authority to their political and theological positions. This is a powerful reminder that even the most seemingly biographical details in the early sources may serve ideological rather than documentary purposes.

The marriage itself illustrates another methodological divergence. Abbott records the traditional reports concerning Aishah’s age without either apology or sensationalism. She notes that the early sources express no surprise at the disparity in age between bride and groom because such arrangements belonged to the social conventions of their own time. Jones, while retaining the traditional chronology, continually interprets the relationship through modern emotional categories. The marriage becomes above all a romance, whereas Abbott situates it within the political, social and familial structures of early Islam.

Indeed, Abbott repeatedly emphasises the political dimensions of marriage alliances in the formative Muslim community. She demonstrates how marriages involving Abu Bakr, ʿUmar, ʿUthmān and the Prophet strengthened emerging political relationships and consolidated communal leadership. Even the marriage of Ḥafṣah is analysed primarily as a political alliance rather than merely a domestic episode. Jones certainly acknowledges politics, but emotional relationships remain the principal engine of her narrative.

Spellberg extends this political analysis considerably. She argues that Aishah’s marriage was not merely a personal union but a divine arrangement, one that was subsequently deployed to legitimise Abu Bakr’s succession. The traditions in which Gabriel presents Aishah’s likeness to Muhammad, Spellberg shows, served to portray her selection as heavenly ordained, thereby indirectly sanctioning her father’s later political role. But this same divine imprimatur made Aishah a target for Shiʿi polemic, which rejected both her father’s caliphate and her own exalted status.

Perhaps nowhere is the difference more striking than in the treatment of the Affair of the Slander. Jones constructs the episode as an extended psychological novel. Safwan becomes a figure around whom emotional ambiguity revolves. Internal monologues, imagined conversations and romantic tension drive the narrative. Abbott, by contrast, approaches the same episode through the earliest Arabic sources, carefully distinguishing between variant traditions while resisting the temptation to invent motives or emotional states unsupported by the evidence.

Spellberg’s treatment of the same episode reveals its profound sectarian significance. She shows that the accusation of adultery became a prism for Sunni-Shiʿi differences. Sunni Muslims embraced Aishah’s divine vindication as recorded in the Qur’an, celebrating her as al-mubarraʾa, ‘the vindicated’. Shiʿi Muslims, however, rejected this interpretation entirely. Some argued that the relevant Qur’anic verses referred not to Aishah but to Muhammad’s concubine Maryam the Copt; others maintained that Aishah herself had slandered Maryam. As Spellberg observes, ‘Shiʿi Muslims accepted the accusation of adultery made against ʿAʾisha, but not her divine exoneration from the charges.’ This meant that Aishah’s reputation remained permanently vulnerable. She could be termed by Shiʿi sources both an adulteress and a liar – accusations that struck not only at her personally but at the entire Sunni edifice of communal memory and authority.

‘Askari’s treatment of the same episode is even more critical. He points to what he sees as inconsistencies and anachronisms in the traditional account, arguing that the story of the slander was embellished over time to serve partisan ends. He notes that the narrative relies entirely on Aishah’s own testimony, a testimony that, in his view, is inherently suspect given her later political alignment with those who opposed ‘Ali. For ‘Askari, the Affair of the Slander is not a story of divine vindication but a carefully constructed piece of propaganda designed to establish Aishah’s innocence and, by extension, the legitimacy of her father’s caliphate.

Jones is nevertheless careful to acknowledge historical uncertainty. She reminds readers that many aspects of early Islamic history remain disputed, including Aishah’s age and later sectarian evaluations of her relationship with Muhammad. This admission is commendable. Yet she frequently converts historical uncertainty into literary licence. Where the evidence is silent, the novel often substitutes psychological plausibility for documentary support.

The novel is also deeply influenced by modern feminist interpretation. Its concluding pages argue explicitly that Muhammad intended women to enjoy greater freedom, but that subsequent generations of men deprived them of those rights. Aishah herself becomes the voice through whom this argument is expressed. This is an intellectually respectable interpretative position and reflects one current within contemporary Islamic feminist scholarship. However, it remains precisely that: an interpretation. Early Islamic history is considerably more complex than the novel sometimes suggests. The development of Islamic law, political authority and gender relations cannot be reduced to a simple narrative of prophetic liberation followed by male suppression.

Spellberg’s work is particularly valuable here because it shows how Aishah’s legacy was used by medieval scholars to define proper female behaviour, often in ways that restricted women’s public roles. She demonstrates that both Sunni and Shiʿi authors, despite their profound disagreements about Aishah’s character, converged on a shared conclusion: her participation in the first civil war demonstrated the dangers of female political involvement. As one tradition cited by Spellberg has it, ‘Men perish if they obey women.’ The historical Aishah, whatever her own motivations, became a cautionary tale. Spellberg writes that ‘the manipulation of ʿAʾisha’s example provided a platform for debate about her role in politics. Although Sunni and Shiʿi authors disagreed about the essential nature of ʿAʾisha’s persona, they found significant similarities in the derivative, negative rules which her singular example implied for all Muslim women in the matter of political participation.’

‘Askari would go further. He argues that Aishah’s political involvement was not merely misguided but actively destructive, a product of her jealousy, ambition and hatred of ‘Ali. His account of Aishah’s role in the rebellion against ‘Uthman and the Battle of the Camel is unremittingly hostile. He portrays her as a scheming intriguer who manipulated events to serve her own interests and those of her family. While this interpretation is clearly partisan, it reflects a tradition of Shi’i scholarship that has deeply influenced how many Muslims understand Aishah’s legacy.

Nor does Jones sufficiently convey Aishah’s extraordinary intellectual legacy. Historical tradition remembers her not only as the Prophet’s beloved wife but also as one of the foremost transmitters of hadith, an important legal authority, a participant in the first civil war, an adviser to successive caliphs, and one of the principal architects of early Islamic memory. Abbott consistently foregrounds these dimensions of her career, whereas Jones, understandably for a novelist, gives greater prominence to romance and domestic emotion.

Spellberg’s analysis of Aishah’s role in hadith transmission is especially illuminating. She observes that Aishah is credited with transmitting thousands of traditions, far more than any other woman in early Islam. Yet Spellberg also emphasises that ‘Aishah could not control her final contribution to the communal record of the Islamic community. Aishah might be the first link in many oral chains of authority, but no tradition ever rested on her word alone. Her memory and observations were at the mercy of those who came after her.’ This insight is crucial: the historical Aishah, however remarkable, was ultimately shaped by male scholars who selected, preserved and interpreted her words according to their own priorities.

This is not to diminish the literary achievement of The Jewel of Medina. On the contrary, the novel deserves praise for introducing a broad readership to one of Islam’s most remarkable women. Its prose is graceful, its pacing assured and its central character unforgettable. Jones succeeds in making Aishah emotionally accessible in ways that academic biographies rarely attempt. Yet precisely because the novel is so persuasive, it should not be mistaken for biography.

Readers seeking to understand the historical Aishah should accompany Jones with Nabia Abbott’s Aishah: The Beloved of Mohammed, Denise Spellberg’s Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past, and Sayyid Murtada ‘Askari’s The Role of Aishah in the History of Islam. They should also consult the early Arabic sources: Ibn Saʿd’s Ṭabaqāt al-Kubrā, al-Ṭabarī’s Tārīkh, al-Dhahabī’s Siyar Aʿlām al-Nubalāʾ, Ibn Ḥajar’s Al-Iṣābah, and al-Zarkashī’s Al-Ijābah. These works reveal an Aishah who was not only beloved, but intellectually formidable, politically influential and indispensable to understanding the formative decades of Islamic civilisation.

Ultimately, The Jewel of Medina succeeds best when read as historical imagination rather than historical reconstruction. Sherry Jones has written an engaging and often moving novel that restores Aishah to the centre of a popular narrative. Nabia Abbott, by contrast, reminds us that the real Aishah needs little embellishment. Denise Spellberg shows that even that ‘real’ Aishah is ultimately a product of interpretation, a palimpsest of competing voices, each seeking to claim her for their own vision of the past. And ‘Askari demonstrates that the contest over Aishah’s legacy continues to this day, with profound implications for how Muslims understand their own history. The historical woman, recovered patiently from the complex and sometimes contradictory Arabic sources, remains every bit as fascinating as the fictional heroine. Indeed, if anything, history presents us with a figure whose achievements surpass even the most accomplished literary invention.

Works Consulted:

• Abbott, Nabia. Aishah: The Beloved of Mohammed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942. The classic, foundational Western biography that seeks to reconstruct the historical ʿĀʾishah through a careful critical analysis of early Arabic sources.
• Spellberg, Denise A. Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of ʿAʾisha bint Abi Bakr. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. A seminal work that does not attempt a biography but instead analyzes how medieval Muslim scholars (primarily men) constructed and debated ʿĀʾishah’s legacy for their own political and sectarian purposes.
• ʿAskari, Sayyid Murtada. The Role of Aishah in the History of Islam. Vol. 1. Translated by ʿAla ad-Din Pazargadi. A critical Shiʿi scholarly work that subjects the traditions attributed to ʿĀʾishah to rigorous historical criticism, arguing that many were fabricated to serve political ends.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Najmul Hoda, for those unacquainted, is an Indian Police Service officer, an Urdu writer and scholar, and a man of many parts. He is also, it appears, the latest authority on what historians should and should not do. Who better to instruct the discipline on its proper limits than a policeman who once wrote that Indian Muslims must “rewrite their victim mindset”? After all, if you want to understand the complexities of historical evidence and public duty, who better than a serving IPS officer who moonlights as a literary critic?

Hoda’s thoughtful review of Shaan Kashyap’s Who Owns the Past? raises questions that go considerably beyond the merits of a single book. At its heart lies an argument about the place of the professional historian in the Indian republic. Should historians confine themselves to archives, classrooms and scholarly journals, leaving disputes over the past to politicians, religious organisations and the courts? Or does historical expertise carry with it a responsibility to intervene when assertions about the past are employed to legitimise political action in the present?

The review appears attracted to the first proposition, or at least to a considerably more restrained conception of the historian’s public role. That is where one must disagree.

The Politics Has Already Occurred

There is, to begin with, something misleading in the apparently even-handed proposition that historians became “political actors” once they entered controversies concerning textbooks, communalism or Ayodhya. The observation is formally correct but historically inadequate. It removes from consideration the circumstances that compelled historians to intervene in the first place.

When a political movement makes a claim about the past, mobilises people around that claim and seeks to transform the material landscape on its basis, the historian cannot be accused of politicising history merely because he or she asks whether the historical claim is supported by evidence. The politics has already occurred. The historian has entered a field that politics has invaded.

What a relief it must be to live in a world where politics and history never mix until irresponsible historians barge in with their inconvenient questions. Hoda offers us this comforting vision: a republic where scholars would have remained noble, untouched creatures of the archive, if only they hadn’t developed the unfortunate habit of opening their mouths whenever someone started demolishing mosques or rewriting textbooks.

Let us pause to salute the extraordinary self-restraint Hoda seems to admire. There stand our professional historians, surrounded by political movements making apocalyptic claims about the sixteenth century, politicians thundering about medieval temple destructions, crowds gathering with pickaxes, and what do our historians do? They have the audacity to ask: “Where is the evidence?” The sheer cheek of it.

The Category Mistake That Wasn’t

The centrepiece of Hoda’s argument, borrowed from Majid Hayat Siddiqi, is that historians made a “category mistake” by entering political controversies as historians rather than as ordinary citizens. Because, you see, historical evidence is always mediated by interpretation. Therefore, historians have no more authority to speak on the past than, say, a politician who has never read a primary source or a television anchor who has never seen an archive.

This is ingenious reasoning. By this logic, a cardiologist should not be consulted about a heart attack because medical diagnosis is also mediated by interpretation. A structural engineer should stay quiet when a building collapses because load-bearing calculations are, after all, a matter of professional consensus. And an archaeologist who has spent decades excavating a site should presumably defer to a priest who has spent decades reading scripture, because both are simply offering interpretations.

The false modesty here is breathtaking. It masquerades as intellectual humility – oh, we historians are so limited, so constrained by our methods, so unable to speak with certainty – while actually serving a deeply conservative purpose: silence the experts so that anyone with a microphone and a grievance can claim equal authority over the past.

Ayodhya: The Historian’s Original Sin

Consider Ayodhya. A political movement spends years claiming that a sixteenth-century mosque was built on the ruins of a temple marking Rama’s birthplace. It mobilises millions around this claim. It organises a rath yatra across the country. It finally demolishes the structure with the complicity of state authorities.

And according to the logic Hoda finds persuasive, the historian’s error was to say: “Let us examine the evidence.”

Not the demolition. Not the mobilisation. Not the violence. The historian’s intervention.

This is what passes for sophisticated critique in certain circles. The historian who asks for inscriptions, for archaeological strata, for contemporary chronicles, for documentary evidence, is the one who has “politicised” history. Never mind that the entire dispute was already political. Never mind that faith had already been weaponised. The crime is not the weaponisation; the crime is the refusal to accept that faith, once weaponised, can no longer be questioned.

One almost expects the next step: that historians should apologise for existing.

The False Equivalence of Textbook Interventions

The review’s treatment of textbook controversies is equally instructive. Hoda approves of Kashyap’s discovery that textbook controversies didn’t begin with the BJP in 1977. Indeed, Kerala had them earlier. Christians objected to representations of Jesus. Sikhs protested about the Gurus. Everybody, it turns out, demanded textbook changes.

The conclusion Hoda seems to draw? Everyone is equally guilty. Everyone politicised history. Therefore, no one is really guilty. It’s all just politics, all the way down. How wonderfully symmetrical. How satisfyingly balanced.

Notice what this argument does not do. It does not ask whether some interventions were more systematic than others. It does not ask whether some governments imposed changes through institutional pressure while others responded to grassroots mobilisation. It does not ask whether some demands were based on evidence while others were based on faith. It does not ask whether some changes affected one state textbook while others sought to transform the national curriculum.

No, no. That would be fussy. That would be looking for distinctions where none are required. The point, apparently, is to achieve a kind of moral equivalence by chronological proximity. If everyone has attempted to influence textbooks at some point, then no one can claim the higher ground.

It is a marvellous argument. It is also, to borrow a phrase, a category mistake. But let us not get pedantic.

The Disappearing Institution

And then there is the AMU episode. Irfan Habib complains about criminalisation and academic decline. He is assaulted. He is suspended before any inquiry. Intellectuals defend him. The review, following Kashyap, suggests that Habib won the battle but AMU lost the war, because the defence of the historian allegedly distracted attention from the institution’s problems.

One struggles to find words adequate to the absurdity of this logic.

So the intellectuals who defended a scholar from physical assault and administrative victimisation are now to be blamed for not simultaneously solving the structural problems of a university? They were expected, presumably, to mobilise for Habib’s safety and also reform AMU’s admissions policy, regulate its hostels, address its governance crisis, and perhaps settle its funding disputes, all in the same press release.

It is the most demanding critique of intellectual activism ever formulated. If you defend a colleague from a beating, you have apparently forfeited the right to discuss institutional reform. If you sign a petition, you cannot also write a paper on university governance. If you fight for academic freedom, you are somehow preventing the institution from recovering.

One imagines the ideal historian under this dispensation: someone who, upon learning of a colleague’s assault, would say, “Yes, but have we considered the administrative challenges of the institution as a whole?” and then go back to the archive, satisfied that neutrality had been preserved.

The Myth of the Contaminated Field

Underlying all this is a curious nostalgia for a time when history was pure, uncontaminated by politics, when historians simply wrote their monographs and nobody bothered them about the past. The tragedy, according to this view, is that secular historians allowed themselves to become associated with the state, and now everyone suspects them of being part of the establishment.

How odd. How very odd.

Because what actually happened was that a colonial historiography – deeply communal in its structures, explicitly hierarchical in its assumptions – was challenged by historians who believed that evidence, method, and critical inquiry could produce a more adequate understanding of India’s past. They did not simply parrot a state ideology. They produced scholarship that was genuinely new: economic histories of Mughal India, social histories of early India, analyses of colonialism that did not simply reproduce nationalist pieties, studies of caste and class that went beyond dynastic chronicles.

And the response? The response is that they became too powerful, too influential, too … monopolistic. As if intellectual influence were something to be dismantled rather than earned. As if the answer to powerful scholarship were not better scholarship but the dissolution of the very idea that some scholarship is better than others.

The False Heroism of the Withdrawn

The oddest part of the review’s argument is its implicit heroisation of the historian who does not intervene.

Here is a discipline that has produced some of the most consequential intellectuals of modern India. Historians who shaped the understanding of the republic. Historians who testified before courts. Historians who were summoned by governments. Historians whose arguments were debated in newspapers, in political rallies, in legislative assemblies.

And we are asked to believe that their greatest virtue would have been a dignified silence.

Consider what that silence would have meant in Ayodhya. Consider what it would have meant in the textbook controversies. Consider what it would have meant when the Constitution’s vision of a secular republic was being challenged by claims about an ancient Hindu civilisation, a Muslim despotism, and an essentially communal Indian past.

The historians who spoke did not always win. They were sometimes wrong. They sometimes overreached. Their scholarship has been revised, corrected, and in some cases superseded. That is how knowledge progresses.

But to suggest that their error lay in speaking at all, that is not a critique. It is a counsel of despair.

The Unbearable Lightness of Neutrality

At the end of the review, Hoda endorses the proposition that history is not an inheritance but an argument. It is a fine sentiment. Everyone can agree on it. It allows everyone to feel virtuous without committing to anything.

But the proposition is incomplete. An argument implies a method. An argument implies standards. An argument implies that some participants have actually done the work of examining evidence while others have simply asserted their beliefs.

To say that history is an argument is not to say that every argument is history. That distinction is not mere pedantry. It is the entire point of the discipline.

The historian who enters public debate is not claiming ownership of the past. The historian is claiming that the past can be known, if imperfectly, through the application of method and the examination of evidence. That is a modest claim. It is also an indispensable one.

In a republic where the past is increasingly invoked to justify every political project, where historical claims are repeated until they acquire the force of fact, where monuments are destroyed and textbooks are rewritten without reference to evidence, the historian who remains silent is not being neutral. The historian who remains silent is being complicit.

The Sad and Hilarious Spectacle

And yet, the truly remarkable spectacle is not Hoda’s review itself, but the reverence with which some historians are sharing it. Yes, you read that correctly. Professional historians, people who have spent decades in archives, who have built careers on the careful evaluation of evidence, are circulating this critique as if it were a revelation. As if an IPS officer lecturing historians on their “category mistakes” were some profound new insight, rather than a deeply ironic case of the pot calling the kettle black.

It is, quite frankly, both sad and hilarious. Sad, because it reveals a peculiar insecurity within the profession, a willingness to genuflect before any critic, no matter how ill-equipped, who confirms their own self-doubt about public intervention. Hilarious, because the very historians who spent the Ayodhya years insisting on the primacy of evidence are now sharing a review that suggests they should have stayed silent. One imagines them nodding sagely at Hoda’s argument, perhaps murmuring, “Yes, yes, we should have just let the demolition happen. Much more dignified.”

The logic, if it can be called that, is breathtaking. Hoda, following the book’s author, suggests that the error of the Ayodhya historians was to believe that historical evidence could settle a political dispute. The fact that the dispute was already political, that the evidence was being mobilised by one side to justify the destruction of a mosque, apparently does not matter. The crime is not the weaponisation of history; the crime is the refusal to accept that weaponised faith cannot be questioned. It is a prescription for professional suicide dressed up as intellectual humility.

One can only marvel at the spectacle of some historians falling over themselves to endorse a critique that essentially tells them to shut up and leave the past to the politicians, the priests, and the policemen. Perhaps they find it refreshing. Perhaps they are simply tired. But the rest of us, who still believe that evidence matters, that expertise has a place in public life, and that silence in the face of falsehood is not neutrality but complicity, can only watch in disbelief.

The Historian’s Duty

The historian has no right to own the past. But the historian does have a duty to defend the procedures by which we know it.

And in a republic increasingly crowded with those who claim certainty about history without submitting themselves to the discipline of historical evidence, that duty has rarely been more important. The next time a monument is demolished or a textbook is rewritten, we will know whom to thank for the historians’ newfound commitment to restraint.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

The enthusiasm with which much of India’s Hindutva ecosystem celebrates Israel’s assault upon Gaza cannot be explained by strategic partnership alone. It springs from ideological recognition: in the militarised ethnonationalism of the Israeli state, the Hindu Right sees an image of the country it wishes India to become. Israel offers a model of a religiously defined nation-state that combines electoral democracy for the dominant community with occupation and political exclusion for others. Gaza fascinates because it appears to show what a state can do once it has designated an entire population a security problem.

This admiration has translated into tangible policy. India has become the world’s top importer of Israeli weaponry, with Israeli drones and missiles reportedly deployed in operations against Pakistan. But the emulation goes deeper than arms. The Indian government has purchased ‘Blue Wolf‘ tracking software from Israel, a surveillance tool originally deployed in the West Bank to monitor Palestinians, and has reportedly installed it in Kashmir to track and control local voices. Israeli surveillance systems from companies like Cognyte and Septier have been installed on subsea cable landing stations across India, allowing security agencies to access the personal data and communications of 1.4 billion citizens. The Pegasus spyware scandal further revealed how Israeli technology was allegedly used to hack the phones of Indian journalists, opposition leaders and activists.

The occupation of Kashmir increasingly resembles Israel’s settler-colonial project in the West Bank, with both states applying brutal methods in occupied territories. Indian officials and academics have publicly stated that the Israeli ‘model’ should be replicated in Kashmir. This ideological kinship is reflected in policy: India has abandoned its earlier support for Palestine, abstaining from UN votes calling for investigations into Israeli atrocities and saying almost nothing about the genocide in Gaza. At home, the government has demolished hundreds of Muslim family homes in campaigns that human rights groups have likened to Zionist tactics, using bulldozers as weapons of collective punishment. The Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens exemplify this ideological shift toward an ethnic state, systematically marginalising religious minorities.

The ideological affinity rests on a shared narrative of permanent siege, where a numerical majority imagines itself as a besieged minority, with victimhood mobilised to immunise contemporary power from moral scrutiny. In this political imagination, Gaza is a demonstration that a modern state need not apologise for using overwhelming force; the blockade becomes an example of population management, and the destruction of homes becomes counter-terrorism. The phrase “Israel-style response” conveys freedom from legal inhibition and humanitarian concern – the fantasy of a state that strikes first and treats criticism as collaboration with terrorism. Hindutva admirers of Israel repeat a simple script: Hamas attacked on 7 October 2023, so Israel possesses an unlimited right to continue destroying Gaza. Everything before that date – occupation, blockade, settlement expansion and the deliberate fragmentation of Palestinian politics – is erased.

The scale of Gaza’s destruction is now undeniable: residential districts, hospitals, schools and water systems have been reduced to rubble, with the Palestinian death toll above 70,000 by mid-2026. In September 2025, a UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel had committed genocide; in June 2026, it stated that authorities continued to commit such crimes. Yet sections of Indian social media respond to each new image of death with celebration or denial. Gaza has become another vocabulary through which Indian Muslims are abused; anti-Muslim hate-speech incidents invoking the conflict rose sharply, with Palestinians and Indian Muslims merged into a single imagined enemy. Israeli flags appeared in anti-Muslim demonstrations, and calls for the destruction of Gaza were accompanied by warnings that Indian Muslims might face a similar future. The foreign war became a stage for domestic intimidation.

The attraction to Israel extends from the bomb to the database, admiring not only the capacity to destroy an enemy but to classify, monitor and immobilise one. This alignment represents a profound departure from India’s anti-colonial inheritance. India voted against the partition of Palestine in 1947, recognised the PLO in 1974 and supported Palestinian self-determination within its opposition to colonialism. Hindutva has reversed that moral lens, identifying not with the colonised but with the technologically superior occupying power. At the centre of both ideologies lies demographic anxiety – the fear of losing control makes birth rates and citizenship matters of national security. Both promise democracy while insisting the state must permanently belong to one community.

The Hindutva supporter loves Israel instrumentally, as the enemy of the enemy. The Palestinian becomes a substitute Indian Muslim; Gaza becomes an imaginary Kashmir. This is not solidarity with Israelis as human beings but with an apparatus of domination – the wall, the missile and the checkpoint. India can maintain relations with Israel while condemning occupation and collective punishment, but strategic cooperation does not require moral surrender. What India cannot do without diminishing itself is exchange its anti-colonial inheritance for applause from an embassy. For a temporary sense of military masculinity, it risks sacrificing moral authority accumulated across generations.

When the slogans have disappeared and the triumphant videos have been deleted, the record will remain: the names of the dead, the destroyed hospitals, the displaced children, and the people thousands of kilometres away who cheered. They were warned by international courts, by UN investigators, by Israeli dissidents. But the Zionist dream had given Hindutva a picture of its desired future, and it was too intoxicated by the spectacle of domination to notice that it was applauding not security, not patriotism, not civilisation, but the destruction of all three.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

As the Chehlum of Imam Husain falls on 4th August in India, we present this essay before you as a reminder of a shared heritage that transcends religious boundaries. The fortieth day of mourning, known as Chehlum or Arba’een, commemorates the endurance of Imam Husain’s message and the steadfastness of his companions. It is an occasion that, as the following pages demonstrate, was once observed across communities, honoured by Hindu rulers, artisans, and citizens alike within the Maratha dominions. What follows is an exploration of this remarkable tradition.

“The Hindoos have already begun to sing their Hohlee songs; and the Moosulmans to prepare their Taziyas for the Moohurrum; these two most opposite festivals happening this year to fall together.”

• Thomas Duer Broughton, Letters Written in a Mahratta Camp (1813)

The Myth of Religious Exclusivism

One of the most enduring myths propagated in modern times is that the Marathas represented an exclusively Hindu political power fundamentally opposed to Islamic religious traditions. This interpretation owes far more to nineteenth and twentieth-century communal historiography than to the historical record itself. The Marathas undoubtedly fought many Muslim rulers, just as they fought Hindu rulers, Rajputs, Jats, the forces of Mysore, the Nizam, and even fellow Maratha houses. Their conflicts were political struggles over territory, revenue, and sovereignty rather than wars against Islam as a religion. If one looks beyond later ideological narratives and turns instead to contemporary accounts, administrative records, and local traditions, a very different picture emerges. Among the most striking examples of this shared cultural world is the widespread observance of Muharram within the Maratha dominions.

The memory of Imam Husain had travelled far beyond the confines of Shi’i communities long before the rise of the Maratha Confederacy. Through Persian literature, Sufi traditions, Deccani court culture, and centuries of interaction between Hindus and Muslims, the tragedy of Karbala had acquired a universal moral significance. Husain came to symbolise steadfastness in the face of oppression, sacrifice for truth, and the refusal to compromise with tyranny. These ideals resonated deeply within the political culture of eighteenth-century India, irrespective of religious affiliation (Rizvi 1986, I: 234-237).

The Maratha state itself emerged in a Deccan that had for centuries been shaped by Persianate political culture. The Bahmani Sultanate and its successor states had already introduced Persian administration, courtly etiquette, architecture, literature, and religious ceremonies into the region. When the Marathas expanded their authority under the Peshwas, Scindias, Holkars, Gaekwads, and Bhonsles, they inherited much of this administrative and cultural world. Persian continued to be widely employed in diplomacy and revenue administration. Muslim soldiers, scribes, artillerymen, and nobles remained integral to the functioning of Maratha governments. It is therefore hardly surprising that Muharram also found an honoured place within their domains (Wink 1990, 45-48; Gordon 1993, 88-92).

Perhaps no contemporary observer has left a more vivid description of Muharram among the Marathas than Thomas Duer Broughton, who accompanied the British Resident to the camp of Daulat Rao Scindia during 1809. His Letters Written in a Mahratta Camp constitute one of the finest eyewitness accounts of everyday life in a major Maratha army. Although writing from the perspective of a British officer unfamiliar with many Indian customs, his observations remain invaluable precisely because they record what he personally witnessed.

One of the most revealing passages occurs while describing the approach of the festival. Broughton writes:

“The Hindoos have already begun to sing their Hohlee songs; and the Moosulmans to prepare their Taziyas for the Moohurrum; these two most opposite festivals happening this year to fall together.” (Broughton 1813, 114)

This apparently simple observation carries profound historical significance. It shows that within Scindia’s predominantly Maratha camp, preparations for Holi and Muharram proceeded simultaneously without any sense of contradiction. Hindu celebrations and Muslim mourning occupied the same social space. The construction of taziyas was sufficiently widespread for Broughton to regard it as one of the defining activities of the camp, while Holi preparations continued alongside them. Rather than competing festivals, they formed part of the shared annual rhythm of life.

Equally significant is Broughton’s description of the commencement of Muharram itself. Although the sounds disturbed his sleep, his annoyance has preserved for historians a remarkably detailed account of the ceremonies:

“The ceremonies of the Moohurrum are commenced, and we are annoyed from the close to the break of day with the discordant noises of drums, trumpets, and matchlocks, mixed with the beating of breasts, loud sobbing, and half frantic exclamations of the devout Moslems about us.” (Broughton 1813, 144)

Modern readers can easily recognise in this description the essential features of the Muharram commemorations that continue to this day. The rhythmic beating of the breast (matam), collective lamentation, the sounding of drums, ceremonial firing of matchlocks, and processional mourning all formed part of the observances. Significantly, these ceremonies unfolded within the encampment of one of the principal Maratha rulers of India, not within an isolated Shi’i enclave.

Broughton later describes the procession itself in greater detail. Participants moved in measured formation while brandishing naked swords, repeatedly invoking the sacred names of Muhammad, Ali, and Husain:

“…calling out the names of Moohumed, Alee, and Hoosen.” (Broughton 1813, 145)

This was not merely an act of private devotion. It was a public performance of memory, courage, and mourning conducted before the entire camp. The accompanying illustration in the volume, entitled “Procession of the Taziya,” confirms that Broughton regarded the taziya procession as one of the characteristic spectacles of Maratha India. As Pinault has observed, such processions represented a fusion of devotional intensity and public spectacle that defined Muharram observance throughout the subcontinent (Pinault 2001, 67-70).

These observations demolish the modern assumption that Muharram belonged exclusively to Muslim society. In the world witnessed by Broughton, Muharram formed part of the broader public culture of the Maratha state. Hindu and Muslim artisans alike prepared the taziyas. Soldiers of different faiths witnessed or participated in the ceremonies. The state neither suppressed nor discouraged the commemorations. Instead, they unfolded naturally alongside Hindu festivals within the same political community.

Broughton’s testimony is all the more valuable because it predates the rigid communal classifications that would later emerge under colonial administration. He observed India before the census began assigning people to sharply demarcated religious categories and before nineteenth-century polemics hardened cultural boundaries. His account therefore preserves something of the older, shared world in which Muharram could be simultaneously an Islamic commemoration and a civic festival participated in by diverse communities (Jones 2012, 21-25).

Independent Witnesses and Convergent Testimony

Thomas Duer Broughton’s observations do not stand in isolation. During the first half of the nineteenth century, a succession of British travellers, administrators, and missionaries independently recorded remarkably similar scenes from different parts of India. Although they wrote from differing perspectives and often misunderstood the theological significance of what they witnessed, their narratives consistently reveal that Muharram had become one of the great public festivals of the subcontinent, attracting participation from Muslims and Hindus alike. In many instances, this participation was especially visible within the territories ruled by the Maratha states.

Among the earliest of these observers was Bishop Reginald Heber, who travelled extensively through India between 1824 and 1826. His Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India repeatedly remarks upon the extraordinary popularity of Muharram. Heber was struck not only by the scale of the processions but also by the involvement of Hindus in their organisation. Writing as an Anglican bishop, he naturally viewed many of the ceremonies through Protestant eyes, often comparing them to Catholic processions or medieval pageantry. Yet beneath these comparisons lies invaluable testimony that Muharram had become an occasion shared across religious communities.

Heber repeatedly noticed that Hindu artisans were responsible for constructing the elaborate taziyas, while Hindu spectators crowded the streets to watch the processions. In several towns he found Hindu chiefs making contributions towards the expenses of the ceremonies. Such patronage did not indicate conversion to Islam. Rather, it reflected a conception of kingship in which rulers were expected to support the principal public festivals of all their subjects (Heber 1828, II: 174-178). This ideal of sovereign impartiality had characterised the Mughal Empire and was inherited by many successor states, including the Marathas.

The same phenomenon appears even more vividly in the writings of Fanny Parks, whose Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque remains one of the richest descriptions of everyday life in nineteenth-century India. Unlike many male travellers, Parks delighted in observing festivals, domestic customs, and urban spectacles. Muharram fascinated her. She described brilliantly decorated taziyas carried through crowded streets amid beating drums, standards, horses, elephants, musicians, and mourners.

What impressed Parks most was the diversity of those participating. She repeatedly observed Hindus joining the crowds, assisting in the construction of taziyas, making offerings, and accompanying the processions. To her, Muharram appeared less as an exclusively Islamic observance than as one of the great civic festivals of Indian towns. The festival brought together craftsmen, merchants, nobles, soldiers, women observing from balconies, children following the processions, and entire neighbourhoods united in a common spectacle (Parks 1850, I: 314-318).

Parks also noticed that many of the finest taziyas were works of remarkable artistic craftsmanship. Bamboo, paper, coloured glass, silver foil, painted wood, mirrors, and embroidered fabrics were transformed into elaborate replicas of the mausoleums at Karbala. Their construction required the labour of carpenters, painters, metalworkers, and paper craftsmen, many of whom were Hindus. Thus Muharram became not merely a religious ceremony but also an annual flowering of Indian artistic traditions.

Another important witness is Emma Roberts, whose writings on India combine careful observation with literary elegance. Roberts likewise emphasised the magnificence of Muharram processions and the participation of people belonging to different faiths. She observed that entire cities appeared transformed during the first ten days of Muharram. Streets were illuminated, temporary structures erected, and neighbourhoods organised around their respective taziyas.

Roberts particularly remarks upon the atmosphere of solemnity that accompanied the principal processions. Even non-Muslim spectators treated the ceremonies with respect. Hindu princes and wealthy merchants frequently sponsored taziyas, not because they had abandoned their own religious identities, but because Imam Husain had come to represent ideals admired across religious boundaries. Courage, loyalty, honour, sacrifice, and resistance to injustice were virtues that transcended sectarian divisions (Roberts 1835, II: 87-91).

The observations of Colonel William Henry Sleeman provide further confirmation. Best remembered for his campaigns against the Thugs, Sleeman spent many years travelling through Central India, Bundelkhand, Malwa, and territories closely associated with the Maratha confederacy. His Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official contains numerous references to Muharram as a festival shared by Muslims and Hindus.

Sleeman repeatedly notes that Rajputs, Marathas, Bundelas, and other Hindu communities joined Muharram processions or maintained hereditary taziyas. In some places entire villages contributed towards their construction. Elsewhere Hindu landholders regarded patronage of Muharram as an established custom inherited from previous generations. These practices had become so deeply rooted that neither participants nor observers appear to have considered them unusual (Sleeman 1844, II: 245-249).

Taken together, the testimonies of Broughton, Heber, Parks, Roberts, and Sleeman are remarkably consistent despite being entirely independent of one another. They travelled through different regions, belonged to different professions, and wrote for different audiences. Yet each records essentially the same phenomenon: Muharram in nineteenth-century India had become a public commemoration in which participation frequently crossed religious boundaries.

These contemporary observations find powerful corroboration in the painstaking research of Saiyid Sibtul Hasan. His Urdu work Hindu Qaum Aur Azadari remains one of the most valuable documentary studies of Hindu participation in Muharram. Drawing upon local histories, archival records, family traditions, newspapers, and oral testimonies, Sibtul Hasan demonstrates that participation by Hindus was neither accidental nor confined to isolated localities. Rather, it constituted a widespread historical phenomenon extending across large parts of the Indian subcontinent (Sibtul Hasan 1979, 45-67).

Of particular relevance is his discussion of the Maratha states. Sibtul Hasan records numerous examples of Maratha rulers, sardars, and officials extending patronage to Muharram observances. In Gwalior, Indore, Nagpur, Baroda, and other centres, Hindu nobles contributed financially towards taziyas, alams, sabeels, and majalis. Certain Brahmin and Maratha families became hereditary custodians of particular taziyas, preserving these traditions across successive generations. In several localities, participation in Muharram came to be regarded as an expression of local identity rather than merely of religious affiliation (Sibtul Hasan 1979, 112-118).

This evidence compels us to rethink the conventional understanding of Maratha political culture. The Maratha rulers inherited a world shaped by centuries of interaction between Sanskritic, Persianate, and regional traditions. Their courts employed Persian secretaries, Muslim commanders, Deccani nobles, and Hindu ministers simultaneously. Their armies contained soldiers drawn from virtually every religious community. Their capitals were inhabited by diverse populations whose public festivals naturally reflected this plural society (Gordon 1993, 156-160).

Consequently, Muharram flourished not despite Maratha rule but within it. The patronage extended to the commemoration of Imam Husain formed part of a broader political ethic in which rulers demonstrated legitimacy by protecting the religious practices of all their subjects. Such patronage neither diminished the Hindu identity of the Maratha rulers nor altered the Islamic character of Muharram. Instead, it reflected an older Indian understanding that public rituals could simultaneously express religious devotion, civic identity, and political legitimacy.

Indeed, one may go further. For many Marathas, Imam Husain represented ideals that resonated deeply with their own martial ethos. His refusal to submit to tyranny, his steadfastness in adversity, and his willingness to sacrifice everything for honour possessed an appeal extending far beyond doctrinal boundaries. It was these universal ethical qualities, rather than theological considerations, that enabled the memory of Karbala to enter the moral imagination of so many non-Muslim communities (Halder 2023, 78-82).

The Cultural Language of Early Modern India

If the testimony of nineteenth-century travellers establishes that Muharram flourished within the Maratha dominions, the larger historical question still remains. Why did a predominantly Hindu political elite embrace the public commemoration of the grandson of the Prophet? The answer lies not in religious conversion or theological convergence, but in the ethical, political, and cultural language through which early modern India understood kingship, heroism, and justice.

Long before the rise of the Marathas, the memory of Karbala had escaped the confines of sectarian devotion. Persian poets had transformed Imam Husain into the supreme exemplar of moral courage. Sufi saints interpreted his martyrdom as the highest manifestation of self-sacrifice in the path of God. In the Deccan, where Persian, Arabic, Marathi, Dakhni Urdu, Kannada, and Telugu traditions interacted for centuries, Karbala acquired an even broader cultural resonance. By the seventeenth century, Muharram was already being observed not merely by Shi’i dynasties such as the Qutb Shahis of Golconda, but also in regions ruled by Sunni sovereigns and in towns inhabited by diverse religious communities (Rizvi 1986, I: 198-203).

The Marathas emerged from precisely this cultural environment. Shivaji himself was born into the political world of the Deccan Sultanates. His father, Shahaji Bhonsle, served both the Ahmadnagar Nizam Shahis and the Bijapur Adil Shahis. Maratha nobles, cavalry commanders, revenue officials, diplomats, and soldiers spent generations working within Indo-Persian administrative systems. Persian remained the language of diplomacy and high administration throughout much of the eighteenth century, even in many Maratha states. Consequently, the ethical vocabulary associated with Imam Husain was already deeply embedded in the political culture inherited by the Marathas (Laine 2003, 45-50; Eaton 2005, 141-146).

It is therefore misleading to imagine the Maratha state as representing a purely Sanskritic or exclusively Hindu polity. Rather, it was a composite state whose institutions reflected centuries of interaction between indigenous and Persianate traditions. The observance of Muharram belonged naturally within this wider political culture.

Another reason for the popularity of Muharram among the Marathas lay in the character of Imam Husain himself. His story appealed to values cherished by every martial society. He confronted overwhelming military power without abandoning principle. He preferred death to dishonour. He refused to acknowledge an unjust ruler merely for the sake of political survival. His companions remained loyal despite certain defeat. Such ideals possessed an obvious attraction for communities whose own historical memory celebrated courage, fidelity, and sacrifice.

The Maratha conception of mardangi, heroic manliness expressed through honour, endurance, and loyalty, found a natural counterpart in the Karbala narrative. The battlefield of Karbala became a universal symbol of resistance rather than exclusively a theological event. This explains why Hindu poets, Rajput chiefs, Sikh writers, and later even Indian nationalists would all invoke Imam Husain without any sense of contradiction (Halder 2023, 92-97).

Saiyid Sibtul Hasan’s Hindu Qaum Aur Azadari illustrates this process through numerous examples drawn from Maharashtra, Malwa, Bundelkhand, and the Deccan. Hindu rulers endowed alams, financed sabeels, maintained hereditary taziyas, and protected Muharram processions. In many towns, Hindu artisans became renowned for constructing the finest taziyas, while Maratha nobles regarded contributions towards Muharram as part of their customary obligations towards the communities under their protection. These practices were not isolated acts of generosity but expressions of a political culture that viewed public patronage of religious ceremonies as a responsibility of kingship (Sibtul Hasan 1979, 134-139).

Indeed, the position of the Scindias is especially instructive. Although the dynasty traced its legitimacy to Maratha military success, its court at Gwalior retained many features inherited from Mughal political culture. Persian poets flourished there, Muslim nobles occupied important offices, and Muharram received official encouragement. It was within this environment that Thomas Duer Broughton witnessed Muslims preparing their taziyas while Hindus simultaneously celebrated Holi. The coexistence of the two festivals was not accidental. It reflected the composite character of the state itself.

The Holkars of Indore likewise ruled over a population of extraordinary diversity. Their armies included Afghans, Rajputs, Marathas, Muslims, Rohillas, Arabs, and numerous other communities. Muharram naturally became one of the shared ceremonial occasions through which this heterogeneous society expressed collective identity. Similar patterns can be observed in Nagpur under the Bhonsles and in Baroda under the Gaekwads, where Muharram remained firmly embedded within local civic traditions throughout the nineteenth century (Gordon 1993, 178-182).

The taziya itself deserves particular attention. Although originating as a symbolic representation of the mausoleum of Imam Husain at Karbala, in India it evolved into a remarkable work of popular art. Built from bamboo, wood, paper, mica, coloured glass, mirrors, silver foil, and embroidered textiles, each taziya represented the combined labour of entire neighbourhoods. Hindu carpenters, Muslim painters, goldsmiths, bamboo workers, paper craftsmen, and textile artisans all contributed to its construction. In many places the most celebrated taziyas were produced by Hindu families who had inherited the craft over generations. Thus the taziya became not merely an object of devotion but also an embodiment of India’s shared artistic traditions (Pinault 2001, 154-158).

This civic character of Muharram impressed virtually every nineteenth-century observer. Fanny Parks marvelled at the artistic splendour of the taziyas and the immense crowds accompanying them. Emma Roberts emphasised the participation of people belonging to different faiths. Bishop Heber recognised the support extended by Hindu rulers towards the ceremonies. Sleeman encountered hereditary Hindu custodians of taziyas in central India. Independently, each of these observers documented the same historical reality: Muharram had become woven into the fabric of Indian public life.

Unfortunately, this older composite tradition gradually came under increasing pressure during the nineteenth century. Colonial administrators, influenced by European notions of fixed religious identities, sought to classify Indian society into discrete and mutually exclusive communities. The decennial census, legal codification of personal laws, and ethnographic surveys encouraged people to identify themselves primarily through religion. Festivals that had long functioned as shared civic institutions increasingly came to be interpreted as exclusively Hindu or exclusively Muslim (Jones 2012, 34-38).

The growth of competitive communal politics during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries further accelerated this process. Reform movements within both Hinduism and Islam often criticised inherited popular customs as religiously impure. Some Muslim reformers denounced taziyas, alams, and public mourning as innovations lacking scriptural authority. Certain Hindu organisations, meanwhile, discouraged participation in Muharram on the grounds that it belonged to another religion. Practices that earlier generations had regarded as natural expressions of neighbourhood solidarity were now viewed with suspicion (Sibtul Hasan 1979, 187-192).

Yet these later developments should not obscure the historical reality preserved in earlier sources. The cumulative testimony of Broughton, Heber, Parks, Roberts, Sleeman, and Saiyid Sibtul Hasan reveals an India in which the memory of Imam Husain transcended sectarian boundaries. For the Marathas, participation in Muharram did not imply any dilution of their own religious identity. Rather, it reflected an older civilisational ethos that recognised moral greatness wherever it appeared and honoured sacrifice irrespective of communal affiliation.

The story of the Marathas and Muharram therefore compels historians to abandon simplistic narratives that reduce early modern India to a perpetual conflict between monolithic religious communities. Instead, it reveals a society in which political rivalry coexisted with cultural exchange, where Hindu rulers patronised Islamic commemorations, Muslim artisans contributed to Hindu festivals, and the martyr of Karbala became a symbol of justice revered far beyond the boundaries of Islam (Eaton 2005, 267-271; Wink 1990, 156-160).

Remembering a Composite Civilisation

The history of the Marathas and Muharram invites us to reconsider one of the fundamental assumptions that has shaped modern interpretations of Indian history. Too often the eighteenth century has been portrayed as an age of relentless religious conflict in which Hindu and Muslim identities became the principal determinants of political action. Such an interpretation owes more to the ideological preoccupations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than to the evidence preserved in contemporary sources. The Maratha experience demonstrates that political rivalry and cultural exchange frequently coexisted, and that participation in one another’s religious traditions formed an accepted part of public life.

The observance of Muharram within the Maratha dominions illustrates this reality with exceptional clarity. From the camps of Daulat Rao Scindia to the streets of Indore, Gwalior, Nagpur, Baroda, and numerous smaller towns, the commemoration of Imam Husain attracted the patronage of Hindu rulers, the craftsmanship of Hindu artisans, the participation of Hindu soldiers, and the respect of Hindu spectators. None of these practices appear to have been regarded as extraordinary by contemporaries. Rather, they belonged to the normal rhythm of civic life.

Thomas Duer Broughton unknowingly captured this composite civilisation in a single sentence when he observed that Hindus were singing Holi songs while Muslims were simultaneously preparing their taziyas. His remark is valuable precisely because it is so matter-of-fact. He did not present this coexistence as remarkable. It simply reflected the India that he encountered in 1809. Likewise, his description of matam, lamentation, processions, and the repeated invocation of Muhammad, Ali, and Husain demonstrates that Muharram flourished openly within the camp of one of the principal Maratha rulers.

The independent testimony of Bishop Reginald Heber, Fanny Parks, Emma Roberts, and William Henry Sleeman strengthens this conclusion. Travelling through different regions over several decades, each witnessed Hindu participation in Muharram, Hindu patronage of taziyas, and the transformation of Ashura into a shared civic observance. When multiple observers, writing independently and often without knowledge of one another’s works, record essentially the same phenomenon, their evidence acquires considerable historical weight.

Saiyid Sibtul Hasan’s Hindu Qaum Aur Azadari provides the indispensable Indian perspective on this shared heritage. By assembling local histories, archival records, family traditions, and regional memories, he demonstrates that Hindu participation in Muharram was not confined to isolated anecdotes but constituted a widespread and enduring feature of Indian society. His work rescues from oblivion a historical reality that later communal narratives sought either to ignore or explain away. Particularly significant are the examples drawn from the Maratha states, where rulers, sardars, Brahmin families, artisans, and entire neighbourhoods contributed to the maintenance of taziyas, alams, sabeels, and majalis. These traditions survived not for years but, in many places, for centuries (Sibtul Hasan 1979, 203-208).

What explains this remarkable phenomenon? The answer ultimately lies in the universal appeal of Imam Husain himself. His stand at Karbala was understood not merely as an episode in early Islamic history but as the supreme illustration of fidelity to conscience. He refused political expediency when it demanded moral surrender. He chose martyrdom over submission. He transformed apparent military defeat into enduring ethical victory. Such values possess an appeal that transcends theology.

It is therefore unsurprising that Hindu rulers, Rajput warriors, Maratha chiefs, Sikh writers, Urdu poets, Bengali authors, and later Indian nationalists all found inspiration in Karbala. Imam Husain came to represent what Thomas Carlyle called the triumph of moral force over material power. In the Indian context, his memory became woven into a civilisational vocabulary of justice, sacrifice, honour, and resistance to oppression (Halder 2023, 112-116).

The Marathas understood this language. Their participation in Muharram was not an abandonment of their own faith but an affirmation of shared ethical ideals. They could celebrate the courage of Shivaji while mourning the martyrdom of Husain. They could patronise temples and support taziyas without perceiving any contradiction. Such actions reflected an older conception of kingship in which rulers protected and honoured the diverse religious traditions flourishing within their dominions.

The subsequent decline of this composite culture owes much to the changing intellectual climate of the nineteenth century. Colonial ethnography, census operations, and legal classifications increasingly divided Indians into rigid religious categories. Reform movements within different communities questioned inherited local customs, while communal politics encouraged exclusive rather than shared identities. Muharram, once a festival in which neighbourhoods of every faith participated, gradually came to be viewed through narrower sectarian lenses (Jones 2012, 156-161).

Yet history reminds us that these divisions are neither timeless nor inevitable. The India described by Broughton, Parks, Heber, Roberts, Sleeman, and documented by Saiyid Sibtul Hasan was an India in which the moral grandeur of Imam Husain belonged to the shared cultural inheritance of the subcontinent. Remembering that world does not diminish the distinctiveness of any religious tradition. Rather, it restores to Indian history one of its most remarkable characteristics: its extraordinary capacity to transform the memory of a seventh-century martyr into a universal language of justice recognised by people of every faith.

The story of the Marathas and Muharram is therefore more than an episode in regional history. It is a reminder that India’s civilisation has long been nourished by encounters rather than isolation, by participation rather than exclusion, and by the recognition that truth and moral courage can inspire reverence far beyond the boundaries of creed. In that sense, the annual mourning for Imam Husain within the Maratha states was not simply an act of religious devotion. It was an affirmation of a civilisational ideal in which ethical greatness belonged to all humanity.

As we observe the Chehlum of Imam Husain on 4th August, let us remember that his message of justice, sacrifice, and unwavering commitment to truth has resonated across centuries and communities. The Maratha participation in Muharram stands as a testament to the shared moral heritage that unites Indians beyond the narrow confines of creed, reminding us that the universal values for which Husain stood continue to inspire people of all faiths.

References and Reading List

Primary Sources

Broughton, Thomas Duer. Letters Written in a Mahratta Camp During the Year 1809. London: John Murray, 1813. [Constable’s Oriental Miscellany edition, 1892.]

Heber, Reginald. Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India, from Calcutta to Bombay, 1824-1825. 3 vols. London: John Murray, 1828.

Parks, Fanny. Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, during Four-and-Twenty Years in the East. 2 vols. London: Pelham Richardson, 1850.

Roberts, Emma. Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan, with Sketches of Anglo-Indian Society. 3 vols. London: W.H. Allen, 1835.

Sleeman, William Henry. Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official. 2 vols. London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1844.

Secondary Sources

Eaton, Richard M. A Social History of the Deccan, 1300-1761: Eight Indian Lives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Gordon, Stewart. The Marathas 1600-1818. The New Cambridge History of India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Halder, Epsita. Reclaiming Karbala: Nation, Islam and Literature of the Bengali Muslims. Abingdon: Routledge, 2023.

Hasan, Saiyid Sibtul. Hindu Qaum Aur Azadari [The Hindu Community and Muharram Commemoration]. Lucknow: Nami Press, 1979. [Urdu.]

Jones, Justin. Shi’a Islam in Colonial India: Religion, Community and Sectarianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Laine, James W. Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Pinault, David. Horse of Karbala: Muslim Devotional Life in India. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

Rizvi, Saiyid Athar Abbas. A Socio-Intellectual History of the Isna ‘Ashari Shi’is in India. 2 vols. Canberra: Australian National University, 1986.

Wink, André. Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World. Vol. 1: Early Medieval India and the Expansion of Islam, 7th-11th Centuries. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

If the earlier chapters of this memoir were about discovering history, this one is about discovering that becoming a historian was, in itself, a rather long historical process. One might even say it required the patience of a medieval scribe and the constitution of a Mughal revenue collector.

Those were the days when the academic system was very different. Admission was formally to the PhD programme, but the first stage was effectively an MPhil. One had to complete a substantial piece of research before being allowed to proceed seamlessly to doctoral work. It was not the neatly packaged coursework one encounters today, where students are handed reading lists like supermarket shopping catalogues. Under Professor Irfan Habib, the MPhil had already become a miniature PhD – which is to say, it was a PhD in miniature, but without the miniature expectations.

My assigned topic was Lower Bureaucracy under the Mughals.

To an unsuspecting student, the title sounded harmless enough. Little did I know that it meant months and years buried beneath manuscripts, Persian chronicles, archival documents, rotographs, photographs of manuscripts, and endless reels of microfilm. Those who have never used microfilm can never appreciate the peculiar form of torture it represented. After hours spent peering into the dimly lit machine, every passing pedestrian appeared to be made of blurred black and white images. I occasionally found myself wondering whether the entire world had been reduced to grainy negative strips, and whether I too might soon dissolve into celluloid.

Friends in other universities often remarked that the MPhil was merely a training exercise. Not in Aligarh. Professor Habib had converted it into a full-fledged exercise in original research based on primary sources. There was no escaping the archives. Every assertion had to be traced back to documentary evidence. Every conclusion had to be earned. You could not simply wave your hands and declare something to be ‘generally accepted’. You had to produce the exact folio, waqai or the akhbarat or the particular farman that proved your point, or else retreat in ignominy.

In retrospect I remain grateful for that uncompromising training, although at the time I confess I entertained less charitable thoughts. I occasionally wondered whether Professor Habib had been sent by some celestial authority to test the patience of aspiring historians, much as the Mughal emperors tested the patience of their karkhanas.

There was, however, one great consolation. Under the UGC regulations prevailing then, an MPhil qualified one to apply for a university lectureship. It was comforting to know that one might at least find employment before completing the seemingly endless PhD. This was rather like being told that one could start building a house before finishing the architectural drawings—slightly unorthodox, but reassuring.

The viva voce remains one of my most vivid memories which perhaps I can never forget.

Professor Harbans Mukhia had been invited as the external examiner, while Professor Habib sat beside him as my supervisor.

Naively, I imagined the examination would consist of questions directed at me.

How mistaken I was.

Within minutes the discussion had ceased to be about my dissertation. Instead it transformed into a spirited scholarly contest between the two distinguished historians. One would make a point. The other would disagree. References flew across the table like arrows at Panipat. Counter-arguments followed. Interpretations collided. Professor Habib’s face gradually turned crimson with intellectual excitement, while Professor Mukhia’s famous mane shook energetically as he defended his position. It was rather like watching two heavyweight champions spar, except the blows were delivered in Persian citations and the footwork consisted of academic footnotes.

I, meanwhile, sat silently between them like an accidental spectator who had wandered into the wrong room. I felt rather like the unfortunate clerk in a Mughal diwan who finds himself caught between two contending nobles, each demanding his allegiance.

Occasionally I would turn hopefully towards one, then towards the other, wondering whether someone might remember that I was actually the candidate. I even considered raising my hand, but thought better of it.

After what seemed an eternity- and I suspect the actual duration was considerably less than what my anxiety suggested – Professor Mukhia smiled and announced, “Congratulations. You are awarded the MPhil degree leading to the PhD.”

My immediate reaction was one of immense relief.

Not because I had passed.

Because my supervisor had finally won.

I had acquired the valuable academic skill of knowing when to remain silent and allow the senior scholars to resolve their differences. This, I later discovered, was a survival strategy that would serve me well in countless committee meetings.

The years that followed were devoted almost entirely to satisfying Professor Habib’s exacting standards. Material had to be collected, references checked, arguments refined and evidence expanded. It was rather like being a Mughal munshi who must verify every revenue record before submitting it to the diwan. During this period I also began presenting papers at the annual sessions of the Indian History Congress. Some found their way into publication, while others appeared in edited volumes. And some, I confess, vanished into that mysterious void where unpublished papers go to rest, occasionally haunting their authors at inconvenient moments.

Looking back, those years quietly laid the foundations of whatever confidence I later acquired as a researcher. They were the academic equivalent of learning to walk – painful, frequently humiliating, but ultimately necessary.

Then, sometime around 1985, Professor Habib summoned me to his chamber.

“I want you to work on urban housing at Akbar’s capital,” he said.

The proposal itself was fascinating. Fathpur Sikri had already begun exercising a strange attraction over me. Yet another puzzle had been occupying my mind – a puzzle that, I confess, had been irritating me for some time.

For years Professor Habib had entrusted me with taking groups to Fathpur Sikri. Sometimes they were participants in the Teachers’ Workshops organised by the Department. At other times they were visiting scholars from abroad or researchers passing through Aligarh. I had walked through the ruins so often that I almost knew every street, courtyard and building by instinct. I could have navigated the city blindfolded, or at least with one eye closed.

And almost invariably someone would stop before a wall and ask, “What do these strange marks carved on the stones signify?”

I always had an answer.

Unfortunately, it was rarely the correct one.

Like all confident young scholars, I possessed the remarkable ability of converting ignorance into plausible-sounding explanations. This is a skill that is not taught in any university curriculum but is, I suspect, unconsciously acquired by every postgraduate student within the first six months.

The visitors generally appeared satisfied. They would nod sagely, murmur something about ‘fascinating’, and move on to the next structure.

I was not.

The marks continued to haunt me. They appeared everywhere – on walls, on pillars, on lintels. They were not inscriptions in any conventional sense. They were symbols, signs, mysterious glyphs that seemed to say something but refused to speak. I found myself lying awake at night, staring at the ceiling and wondering what those marks might mean. This was not, I should add, a healthy development.

Eventually I confessed to Professor Habib that before taking up urban housing I wished to solve this particular mystery. I wanted to understand the masons’ marks and symbols scattered across the monuments of Fathpur Sikri.

To my delight he agreed.

That decision altered the course of my academic life. It was rather like setting out to investigate a minor footnote and discovering that the footnote contained an entire library.

My first sustained research on Akbar’s capital was therefore not on palaces, planning or imperial ideology, but on the humble marks left behind by anonymous craftsmen centuries earlier. I spent months crawling through ruins, squinting at stones, making rubbings, photographing symbols, and generally behaving in a manner that caused the local guides to regard me with deep suspicion. I suspect they thought I was either a spy or a madman. Possibly both.

Let me narrate an episode: One day while I was collecting and sketching the mason’s marks on my notebook at Akbar’s tomb at Sikandara, I heard a young voice “Mama, I am feeling so sorry for that guy! He is handsome, youthful but mad. Instead of looking at the monument, he is walking in circles with his head down!” I went to the child, smiled at her and told her that I was looking for such and such scrawling on the stone slabs. After some time I heard her call me: “Hey Man! Look here, those scratching are here too”.

Once that work was completed, I moved on to surveying the excavated residential structures of the city. This was archaeology of a different sort – not the digging kind, but the patient, systematic examination of what had already been uncovered. It required the eye of a detective, the patience of a saint, and the capacity to spend hours contemplating a broken wall without losing one’s sanity.

Without realising it, I had crossed an invisible frontier.

I was no longer merely reading about medieval history.

I was walking through it.

Every ruined wall became a document. Every foundation trench became a text. Every discarded fragment of pottery demanded to be read with the same care as a Persian manuscript. I found myself developing a new vocabulary, a new way of seeing, a new appreciation for the material remains of the past. It was rather like learning a new language, except this language was spoken in stone and mortar.

Those years were enriched enormously by Professor Habib’s Regional Teachers’ Workshops. Lasting nearly a fortnight, these workshops attracted scholars from universities across the country. Many who later emerged as some of India’s finest historians first crossed my path during those gatherings. For a young researcher they were an extraordinary education. The lectures were stimulating, the discussions often fierce, and the conversations over tea sometimes even more enlightening than the formal sessions. I learned as much from the gossip in the corridors as from the papers in the auditorium.

Looking back, those workshops created a generation of historians who remained connected through friendship as much as scholarship. We argued fiercely in the seminar rooms and drank chai together afterwards. We disagreed about interpretations but never about the importance of the enterprise. It was, I now realise, a golden age of academic camaraderie – the sort of thing that probably only exists in retrospect, but which felt real enough at the time.

Then came 1989.

For me it was the year in which history finally began paying a salary. This was, I should add, a welcome development, as my previous method of subsistence had involved eating less and hoping for the best.

In January the local Selection Committee selected both my friend Jawaid Akhtar and me for appointment as Lecturers. Curiously, both of us had also been selected for the post of Research Assistant.

This created a genuine dilemma – the sort of dilemma that only academia can produce, where one is offered two jobs and must choose between them, each with its own advantages and disadvantages.

One evening we found ourselves walking Professor Shireen Moosvi home from the Department, as we frequently did. Seizing the opportunity, we asked for her advice.

Jawaid spoke first.

“Madam, which post should I join?”

She replied without the slightest hesitation.

“The Research Assistant’s post is permanent. The lectureship is temporary. Join as Research Assistant.”

A perfectly sensible answer. Logical, prudent, the sort of advice one would expect from a wise and experienced academic.

Then, without missing a step, she turned towards me.

“Nadeem, don’t even think about it. Join as Lecturer. It is, after all, a teaching post. Don’t worry. This is a clear vacancy. You won’t be thrown out.”

Jawaid and I exchanged bewildered glances.

There we were, walking on either side of Professor Moosvi, both asking precisely the same question, and receiving two completely opposite pieces of advice.

To one she said, “Don’t join the lectureship.”

To the other she said, “Join the lectureship immediately.”

She had assessed not the posts, but the people.

It was one of those moments that only a truly perceptive teacher could produce. She had looked at us, weighed our temperaments, our capabilities, our likely futures, and had tailored her advice accordingly. It was rather like watching a chess grandmaster make two entirely different moves on two different boards, each perfectly suited to the position.

Jawaid and I walked on in bemused silence, each digesting our respective advice. I have often wondered what would have happened if we had asked the question on different days, or in different order. But such speculations are the stuff of counterfactual history, and I have long since learned to leave that to others.

On 10 February 1989 I formally joined the Department as a Lecturer.

I did not know it then, but that appointment marked the beginning of several journeys simultaneously.

It began my career as a teacher, a career that would see me standing in front of hundreds of students, occasionally making sense, frequently being asked questions I could not answer, and learning to say “That’s an excellent question, let me think about it” with sufficient gravitas to convince everyone that I actually knew the answer.

It strengthened my lifelong engagement with Fathpur Sikri, an engagement that would eventually produce books, articles, and a collection of anecdotes that grow taller with every telling.

It gradually drew me towards what would eventually become my second academic identity: that of a historian working through archaeology. This was not a planned development. It was rather like discovering that you have been speaking a second language all along without realising it.

In the years that followed, as I established myself within the Department, I had the privilege of introducing a specialised course on Medieval Archaeology. To the best of my knowledge, it remains one of the very few university courses in India devoted exclusively to that subject. I say ‘to the best of my knowledge’ because I have learned never to make absolute claims in academia—there is always someone who knows better.

The research too continued to evolve.

The work on Fathpur Sikri eventually resulted in my first major book on the city. Field explorations later took me far away into the abandoned settlements of the Jaisalmer region, where deserted villages opened yet another window onto India’s medieval past. There is something profoundly moving about walking through a village that has been empty for centuries – the silence, the crumbling walls, the sense of lives once lived and now vanished. It is rather like reading a history book in which every page has been torn out, but the shadows remain.

And after what often felt like an archaeological excavation of my own unfinished research, complete with layers of delay, periods of abandonment, and occasional discoveries, I finally submitted my long-delayed PhD on the Middle Classes. (Those who have followed this memoir will know that ‘long-delayed’ is something of an understatement, but I am trying to be charitable to myself.)

Its examiners represented three distinguished traditions of historical scholarship: Professor Satish Chandra, Professor Indu Banga and Professor Frank Perlin. I remember sitting through the viva and thinking that, unlike my MPhil examination, I was actually being asked questions. This was both reassuring and alarming, reassuring because I was clearly the subject of the examination, alarming because I had to answer.

Looking back now, I sometimes smile at how uncertain everything had seemed.

The student who once invented explanations for mysterious marks on the stones of Fathpur Sikri would spend decades trying to understand the city. The universe, it seems, has a sense of irony.

The bewildered candidate who watched two eminent historians debate across his MPhil viva would one day himself examine generations of research scholars. (I try to ensure that my own vivas are more interactive for the candidate, though I confess I occasionally find myself getting drawn into scholarly disputes that are, strictly speaking, irrelevant.)

And the young lecturer who walked into the Department on a February morning in 1989, uncertain of what lay ahead, had no inkling that the profession he had entered would soon cease to be merely a career.

It had already become a way of life.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

On 1 August 2026, as we commemorate the birth centenary of Professor Rahi Masoom Reza (1926–1992), there is a curious irony that deserves reflection. The man who spent his entire life resisting labels has himself become imprisoned within a single cultural memory. For millions of Indians, Rahi survives chiefly as the writer of the television serial Mahabharat (1988–90), whose unforgettable opening invocation of Samay – “Time” – became etched into the consciousness of an entire generation:

“मैं समय हूँ…” I am Time…

Rahi Masoom Reza’s opening invocation presented Time (Samay) as the eternal witness to all of human history. It was sutradhar through whose eyes we view our past to understand what we are. Samay declared that it had seen empires rise and fall, kings and warriors come and go, and countless generations repeat the same struggles between justice and ambition, truth and falsehood. The Mahabharata, it was thus suggestsed was not merely the story of one ancient family but the story of humanity itself, for the conflicts of greed, power, duty, love and sacrifice recur in every age. The narration invited the viewer to see the epic not as distant mythology but as a timeless mirror in which every generation can recognise its own moral dilemmas.

For nearly two years, every Sunday morning at 9.30, India appeared to suspend itself. Streets fell silent. Public transport ran half empty. Shops opened late. Families, neighbours and friends gathered around television sets in villages and cities alike. Religious identity momentarily dissolved before a shared narrative that belonged to everyone. It is difficult today to explain to younger generations the extraordinary cultural phenomenon that Mahabharat became. There had been successful television serials before it, but none that united India in quite the same manner. That a Muslim scholar from Ghazipur should become the voice through which much of modern India rediscovered the Mahabharata remains one of the finest illustrations of India’s composite civilisation. For countless Indian Muslims too, the serial offered their first sustained encounter with one of the foundational epics of the subcontinent. It reminded them that the Mahabharata, like the Ramayana, was not the property of any single community. It belonged to the civilisational inheritance of everyone who called India home.

Yet therein lies the tragedy of memory. The overwhelming success of Mahabharat has obscured the larger literary personality of Rahi Masoom Reza. He deserves to be remembered not merely as the scriptwriter of an immensely popular television serial but as one of the most original Urdu poets of the twentieth century, an important Hindi novelist, a fearless public intellectual, a distinguished academic and among the finest dialogue writers Indian cinema has ever produced.

Rahi Masoom Reza was born on 1 August 1926 in Gangauli, a village in Ghazipur district of eastern Uttar Pradesh. The landscape of Purvanchal, with its mingling of Hindu and Muslim traditions, its dialects, festivals, shared memories and everyday coexistence, never left him. Even after migrating to Bombay and achieving fame in cinema, the soil of eastern Uttar Pradesh continued to nourish his imagination. His village became not merely a geographical location but a metaphor for India itself.

His education at Aligarh Muslim University shaped him profoundly. At Aligarh he completed his higher studies in Urdu and eventually earned his doctorate. He later joined the Department of Urdu as a lecturer. The intellectual atmosphere of Aligarh in the years immediately following Independence exposed him simultaneously to classical Persian and Urdu literature, modern literary criticism, Marxist thought, progressive literature and the complex debates surrounding nationalism, language and identity.

Although later generations often remember him as a novelist, Rahi first established himself as a poet. He published seven collections of Urdu poetry and was recognised by critics as one of the most distinctive poetic voices to emerge after Independence. His verse combined lyricism with political consciousness, tenderness with irony, and personal experience with historical reflection. Unlike poets who remained imprisoned within inherited conventions, Rahi continually experimented with language while retaining an unmistakably Indian sensibility. Among his poetic achievements, his long poem 1857 occupies a unique place. Rather than presenting the uprising merely as military history or nationalist mythology, he transformed it into a meditation upon memory, loss, betrayal and the making of modern India. The poem mourns not simply a defeated rebellion but the fragmentation of a civilisation whose composite culture had once flourished across north India. It remains one of the significant long poems in modern Urdu literature and alone would have secured him an honoured place in the Urdu canon.

Yet poetry was only one aspect of his creativity. His novels fundamentally altered modern Hindi fiction. The irony itself is striking. An Urdu scholar by training chose Hindi as the principal language of his novels, demonstrating that the division between Hindi and Urdu was largely political rather than cultural. His masterpiece, Aadha Gaon (Half a Village), published in 1966, remains one of the greatest novels produced in post-Independence India. Set in Gangauli during the final years of British rule and the trauma of Partition, it refuses simplistic narratives of communal conflict. Instead, it portrays a society whose shared relationships are slowly eroded by political developments imposed from outside. The novel captures the rhythms of rural life with extraordinary authenticity while exposing the tragic absurdity of identities that become hardened under the pressures of modern politics. Its language itself was revolutionary. Rahi allowed the speech of ordinary villagers to enter literature without apology. Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Urdu, Persian expressions and colloquial Hindi coexist naturally, reproducing the multilingual reality of north India rather than the artificial purity demanded by language ideologues.

His subsequent novels, including Topi Shukla, Os Ki Boond, Himmat Jaunpuri, Dil Ek Saada Kagaz and others, repeatedly explored questions of identity, belonging and secularism. In Topi Shukla, perhaps his most explicitly political novel, friendship becomes the prism through which the hypocrisies of post-Partition India are examined. It remains one of the sharpest literary critiques of communalism written in modern Indian literature. Throughout his writings, Rahi refused to accept that religious identity determined cultural identity. This conviction became the defining principle of his intellectual life.

Perhaps no episode illustrates this better than the controversy surrounding his authorship of Mahabharat. Some objected that a Muslim had been entrusted with writing dialogues for what they regarded as a sacred Hindu text. Rahi’s response has since become legendary. He reminded his critics that he was neither an Arab nor a Turk. He was an Indian. The Mahabharata belonged as much to him as to anyone else born in this land. It was part of his inheritance. That simple assertion represented something much larger than personal defence. It articulated an understanding of India rooted not in religious exclusivism but in shared civilisation. It rejected the notion that literature, history or culture could be partitioned according to faith.

His adaptation of the epic reflected precisely this understanding. Rather than reducing the Mahabharata to theological instruction, he presented it as an exploration of moral ambiguity, political power, human frailty and ethical responsibility. The dialogues retained a literary dignity while remaining accessible to millions of viewers. Characters were rendered psychologically complex rather than merely symbolic. The serial succeeded not because it preached religion but because it revealed humanity. His famous opening narration on Time itself possesses remarkable philosophical depth. Time appears not merely as chronology but as the ultimate witness before whom kings, empires, victories and defeats all pass away. In many respects, that meditation reflects the historical imagination of a novelist rather than the outlook of a television scriptwriter.

Bombay brought Rahi another arena in which to display his astonishing versatility. He wrote dialogues, screenplays and lyrics for numerous films over several decades. His association with filmmakers such as Gulzar, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, B. R. Chopra and others produced dialogues that combined literary elegance with everyday speech. Unlike many writers who regarded cinema as a compromise, Rahi treated popular culture with seriousness. He understood that films could communicate ideas to audiences vastly larger than literary journals ever could. Even while working within commercial cinema, he retained his unmistakable voice. His characters spoke like real people rather than literary abstractions. Humour, irony and emotional restraint characterised much of his writing. He possessed an extraordinary ear for spoken language.

Yet behind the celebrated public figure stood a deeply committed secular intellectual. Rahi consistently opposed every attempt to divide Indian society along communal lines. He criticised both Hindu and Muslim communalism with equal courage. He believed that India’s strength lay precisely in its shared cultural traditions and its capacity to absorb multiple histories into a common civilisation. His lifelong attachment to the Ganga became almost symbolic. He often described himself not in terms of religion but in relation to the river and the landscape that had shaped him. The Ganga represented continuity, memory and belonging beyond sectarian identities. In one of his most moving reflections, he wrote that if anyone asked who he was, the answer was simple: he was a son of the Ganga.

This profound attachment to place also explains why nostalgia never became sentimental in his writings. He mourned the disappearance of an older India not because he rejected modernity but because he feared the destruction of its composite social fabric. He recognised that villages were changing, languages were becoming standardised and identities increasingly politicised. Much of his fiction is therefore an attempt to preserve voices, memories and relationships before they disappeared.

As a teacher at Aligarh Muslim University, Rahi inspired students not merely through scholarship but through intellectual independence. He belonged to that generation of academics for whom literature was inseparable from public responsibility. Writers were expected not simply to entertain but to intervene in the moral life of society.

Today, more than three decades after his death, his concerns appear remarkably contemporary. Questions of identity, language, history and belonging continue to dominate public discourse. Attempts to claim exclusive ownership over India’s past have become increasingly frequent. In such a climate, Rahi Masoom Reza’s life offers an alternative vision of patriotism, one grounded not in exclusion but in cultural confidence. Remembering him only as the writer of Mahabharat therefore does him an injustice, even though that achievement remains monumental. He was far more than the creator of memorable television dialogues. He was among the finest Urdu poets of his generation. He transformed the Hindi novel through works of enduring significance. He enriched Indian cinema with language of rare literary quality. Above all, he embodied the composite civilisation that he celebrated throughout his life.

This remembrance is also personal to me. I was fortunate enough to meet him on a number of occasions with my father – a man of religion, to boot – and those encounters left an indelible impression upon a young mind. I remember the warmth of his presence, the quiet wit that sparkled in his conversation, and the complete absence of any pretension despite his towering achievements. He made you feel that literature was not a distant pursuit but a living, breathing engagement with the world. The Rahi I met was not the celebrated public figure alone but a man of deep affection, keen observation and an abiding faith in the essential goodness of ordinary people. He belonged to that rare breed of writers whose life and work were seamless.

It would also be remiss not to recall his elder brother, Moonis Raza (d.1994), who shared the same intellectual soil and was an eminent Indian academic administrator, geographer, and a founder-chairman of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). The third brother was Prof Mehdi Raza, (d.2015) who was the head and professor of geography at Aligarh. The Raza family of Gangauli produced not one but three sons of extraordinary calibre, each in his own way contributing to the nation’s life. The brothers remained close, and one can only wonder at the conversations that must have passed between the novelist who chronicled India’s soul, the geographer and the diplomat who represented India’s face to the world. Their shared inheritance – the same village, the same river, the same composite culture – nourished two distinct but equally remarkable careers.

On his centenary, the greatest tribute we can offer Professor Rahi Masoom Reza is to recover the whole writer. The poet who mourned the wounds of history. The novelist who chronicled the disintegration of rural India. The scholar who crossed linguistic frontiers with effortless ease. The screenwriter who brought an ancient epic alive for modern audiences. And the Indian who insisted that culture cannot be divided by religion because civilisation is always larger than faith. His Mahabharat gave India unforgettable words. He did to Mahabharata what Tulsi had done to Ramayana: brought it to the masses. His larger body of work gave India something even more precious: a language through which it could recognise itself. As we honour his memory, let us remember that the voice which once invoked Time itself now belongs to eternity – and yet, in his pages, he remains forever our contemporary, speaking to us across the decades with undiminished urgency and love.