7 highlights
- From her online activities, it would appear that Truschke relishes taking on people of faith. In one tweet, Truschke referred to Rama as a “misogynist” and used a slur after the word.1
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When asked to justify this claim, she cited a translation of the Ramayana by Robert Goldman. When Prof. Goldman was contacted, he said: “I find it extremely disturbing but perhaps not unexpected to learn that AT (Audrey Trushcke) has used such inappropriate language and passed it off as coming from Valmiki.
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About Aurangzeb, Truschke’s main thesis can be boiled down to this passage from her book, an argument she repeats often: “It is not difficult to identify specific actions taken by Aurangzeb that fail to meet modern democratic, egalitarian, and human rights standards. Aurangzeb ruled in a pre-modern world of kingdoms and empires, and his ideas about violence, state authority, and everything else were conditioned by the time.”
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It is this very premise, however, that is flawed (or falsified) as Girish Shahane pointed out in a critique published in Scroll: “The problem with the actions specified above is not just that they seem abhorrent to modern individuals, but that they undercut the liberal policies of previous Mughal rulers, something Truschke herself admits. Bringing up modern morality is a red herring, because the namazi, as his eldest brother Dara Shikoh contemptuously called him, was a bigot not just by our standards but by those of his predecessors and peers.”
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True to form, she targets the Kashmiri Pandit community, tarring them with shop-worn tropes such as “Brahminical privilege”. It’s hard to see how privilege can be invoked when demagogues such as Sikander Butshikan destroyed Hindu temples, imposed the Jaziya tax for non-Muslim subjects, banned art, entertainment, music, poetry and dance, and administered numerous other humiliations well documented by subsequent historians.2
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The main problem with Truschke’s work lies not in its elisions and omissions but the implications it has for the entire body of Western scholarship on India. A number of renowned academics writing about pre-modern India have come under attack by nativists and political actors for not toeing the Hindutva line.
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As the English poet Alexander Pope wrote, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.”