How Assam greats Lachit Barphukan and Mula Gabharu suffered collateral damage in NCERT’s Mughal text purge

Lachit Barphukan and Mula Gabharu bravely fought against the Mughals and earned their place in history. But little did they know that one day because of the very same Mughals, they would lose their place in the pages of history.

The bravery, grit and legends of Barphukan and Mula have all become ‘collateral damage’ in the National Council for Educational Research and Training’s (NCERT) exercise to remove Mughals from history.

In April this year, NCERT announced its decision to erase certain chapters on the Mughal Empire from Class 12 history textbooks. According to reports, NCERT has deleted chapters and topics related to ‘Kings and Chronicles; the Mughal Courts (C. 16th and 17th centuries)’ from history textbooks. The move came after a syllabus rationalization process that started in December 2021.

As per the new books following the rationalisation, Class 12 students will not study the history of the Mughal courts or wars.

This move attracted severe criticism from several quarters. Around 250 historians from India and abroad condemned the changes by issuing a joint statement. But the NCERT stood by its stance.

Since Ahom General Lachit Barphukan and Mula Gabharu earned their place in history by opposing the Mughals, they too found themselves erased from school books.

The state education board in Assam simply followed without much resistance.

“We have not received any instruction from the state government. But we follow the NCERT curriculum. If NCERT removes these chapters, we have nothing to do with it,” said Assam Higher Secondary Education (CAHSEC) secretary Pulak Patgiri said.

Barphukan, the great General of the Ahom kingdom of Assam, defeated the Mughals and halted their expansion into Assam in the second half of the 17th century. He is said to have been the reason the Ahom Kingdom trounced the Mughals in the Battle of Saraighat in 1671 AD in the face of overwhelming odds.

A naval war, the Battle of Saraighat was fought in 1671 between the Mughals, who were being led by the Kachwaha raja, Ram Singh I, and the Ahom Kingdom, led by Lachit Borphukan. The battle was fought on the Brahmaputra river at Saraighat, now in Guwahati, Assam, India.

On November 24 this year, the Assam government celebrated the 400th birth anniversary of Bir Lachit in the national capital with an aim to get him the recognition of a national hero who was able to resist the imperialist designs of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. Ironically, in less five months the same hero faces the threat of being forgotten forever after being removed from school text books.

Mula Gabharu, the daughter of the Ahom king, Supimphaa, and the wife of the Borgohain Phrasengmung, organised women warriors after her husband died in the battle against an invader sent by the Sultan of Bengal in 1532, Turbak. She is often referred to as the greatest heroine of Assam.

“Mughals established the biggest empire in the sub-continent, left remarkable monuments, initiated a revenue administration that spread even to the Ahom Kingdom. Muslim haters want to wish away the defeats of small Hindu kingdoms and the treacherous roles of some of the princes and their generals that enabled the Mughals to establish hegemony. Deletion of Mughal achievements will create huge problems in the teaching of the history of the country,” said Dr Apurba Kumar Baruah, former Dean of Social Sciences North-eastern Hill University (NEHU), Shillong.

“This attempt to try and forget Mughal heroes will make it impossible to teach children about the heroes such as Shivaji or even Bir Lachit. This is very sad,” Baruah added.
But Bir Lachit and Mula Gabharu aren’t the only casualties of the purging exercise.

“NCERT has also removed all references to the conspiracy that resulted in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, material on caste and social resistance movements. It completely deleted ‘federalism’, citizenship, nationalism and secularism from the texts,” Baruah told The Federal.

“The references to the Gujrat riots of 2002 have been deleted. The deletion of the contributions of personalities such as Maulana Azad proves the political intent. The aim is to remove all material that embarrasses the aspiring architects of ‘Hindu Rashtra’. The deletions distort the knowledge about Indian society. These changes if allowed to stay will produce half-baked students who will not only not know India but will also not understand some important ideas of our time like democracy, federalism and human rights. We must resist this attempt to save the future of our students,” he added.

Manimugdha S Sharma who is pursuing a PhD in History at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and is the author of the book Allahu Akbar: Understanding the Great Mughal in Today’s India, said: “The significance of many of our popular historical characters is relative to the Mughals. Lachit Barphukan in Assam, Shivaji in Maharashtra, and Rana Pratap in Rajasthan, all fought the Mughals. If the Mughals did not exist, their significance wouldn’t too.”

“If we specifically look at the history of Assam, many of the celebrated names such as Atan Burhagohain, Bagh Hazarika, and Mula Gabharu fought against armies sent by the Mughals or previous sultanates of Bengal. If you take out these Sultanates from the record, then whom did these warriors fight to achieve their unique status in popular memory,” Sharma questioned.

“Also, beyond their military resistance, there is nothing much in the lives of these heroes that makes them stand out. In fact, we do not know much about what they did for their subjects, how well they managed their kingdoms or provinces, etc. And there lies the tragedy of our times — history is reduced to a celebration or a lament of wars and battles, of the rise and fall of empires and dynasties,” Sharma told The Federal.

“Add religion to this admixture and we have our present predicament where anything involving Muslims is derided and dismissed. The Hindu Right, which understands the past through the prism of religion, feels ashamed about Muslim empires dominating the Indian subcontinent for 800-odd years. This latest bid to wipe out the Mughals from NCERT textbooks is a bid to wipe off this shame,” he said.

Some believe the exercise to remove references to Mughals, of which some Hindu rulers have become victims, reflects a wider derision for ‘Muslims’ in present-day India.

“It is clear that the word Mughal has frequently been used by some of the extreme right ideologues to refer to all the Muslims of the world. They try to portray that all Muslims were either invaders or were victims of forced conversion from Hinduism. This theory automatically assigns a second-class citizen status to Muslims,” said retired IAS officer and an Assamese writer Laxmi Nath Tamuly.

“Medieval Indian history, which covers 666 glorious years of Mughal rule, staring from the First Battle of Tarain in 1191 to the end of Mughal rule in 1857, without chapters on Mughals, is akin to a human who has an axe stuck vertically into their body. Such a person is alive but as good as dead,” Tamuly said.

“Even if medical science someday can help this person live, they would be dysfunctional. What NCERT has done is tell us that medieval history never happened. The education body has stripped history of its integrity and cohesion,” he said.

“Emperor Akbar not only patronized the Hindu Generals and scholars, he also got the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Upanishads, the Geeta and other Hindu scriptures translated into Persian language, which enabled their translation into other European languages. The Bhakti or Vaishnava Movement in medieval India had happened only because of the advent of Islam. The great religious preachers could have never emerged without the influence of the Islamic doctrines,” Tamuly said.

Critics say in denying Mughals and whatever existed in relation to them a place in history, the BJP and Sangh Parivar are attempting to hide the fact that they themselves had no positive role in shaping the India of today.

The Opposition has attacked the BJP for trying to rewrite history and hide the facts that its own idols had no role in the freedom struggle.

Leader of Opposition in the Assam legislative Assembly Debabrata Saikia said that BJP leaders and their idols did not play any role in the freedom struggle, and they want to hide history to deceive the people of India. “The Mughal era was not an entirely dark phase in Indian history. Thousands of people still visit monuments built by the Mughals and this has been a major boon for tourism over the years,” Saikia said.

Meanwhile, Bir Lachit and Mula Gabharu have lost out on their place in books and may soon be forgotten only because they chose to fight the Mughals and stop them from entering Assam.