The Politics of History: How Written Sources Can Be Manipulated

When we seek heroes and villains in history, we become storytellers who serve politicians. Two case studies reveal this well. One related to Pushyamitra Shunga, who ruled about 2,200 years ago. The other is related to Aurangzeb, the Mughal emperor who died in 1707. A small lesson on sources first. Historians use two broad kinds of evidence. One is written stories, like chronicles and religious texts. The other is physical evidence, like buildings, coins and inscriptions (words carved into stone). Written stories tell us what someone wanted us to believe. Stones and coins are harder to fake. When the two disagree, the stone usually wins. Pushyamitra was a general under the last Maurya king, Brihadratha. Around 185 BCE, he killed the king and took the throne. He was a Brahmin, and an inscription found at Ayodhya says he performed the ashvamedha, the Vedic horse sacrifice, twice. The story of him as a monk-killer comes from a Buddhist book called the Divyavadana: A Collection of Early Buddhist Legends , put together two or three hundred years after his death. It recounts that Pushyamitra offered 100 dinaras for the head of every Buddhist monk. The stones say something different. Under the Shunga rule, the stupa at Bharhut got a carved stone railing, and one gateway says it was built “in the reign of the Shungas”. At Sanchi, the old brick stupa was enlarged and covered in stone. Hundreds of small carvings name the monks, nuns, and merchants who paid for each pillar. People do not happily build Buddhist monuments where monks are being hunted. In 1669, Aurangzeb ordered the demolition of the Vishwanath temple at Kashi. In 1670, the Keshava Deva temple at Mathura was destroyed. In 1679, he brought back the jizya , a tax on non-Muslims that Akbar had removed. His court writer, Saqi Mustaid Khan, recorded all this proudly in the Maasir-i-Alamgiri, a Persian-language chronicle written shortly after Aurangzeb’s death in 1707. Yet the same emperor issued firmans (royal orders) protecting the Brahmins of Banaras and confirming land grants to temples in Chitrakoot and Guwahati . The historian Richard Eaton found that temple destruction under Muslim rulers was mostly political: temples linked to rebels were hit, temples in loyal areas left alone. And in 1867, a British official, Henry Elliot, translated Persian court histories while saying openly that he wanted Indians to see how much better British rule was. He picked the bloodiest passages. Now bring in two very different thinkers. B R Ambedkar, in his unfinished work “ Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India “, saw the rise of Buddhism as a revolution and its decline as a counter-revolution led by Brahmins. He argued that the Manusmriti was promulgated by Pushyamitra himself, as the law code of a Brahmanic revolution against the Buddhist state of the Mauryas. Here is a problem. Patrick Olivelle, who produced the critical edition of the Manusmriti in 2005, dates the text to roughly the 2nd or 3rd century CE, centuries after Pushyamitra. Ambedkar also relied on the very Divyavadana story we just examined. Meenakshi Jain, a historian who taught at Delhi University and was nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 2025, reads the evidence the other way. In “ Flight of Deities and Rebirth of Temples ” (2019), she argues that temple destruction was not limited to one region or period but continued for centuries, from the 7th century to Aurangzeb and after. She tracks how priests hid images to save them, such as the murtis of Varadaraja, Ekamresvara and Kamakshi Amman, quietly removed from their temples out of fear of Aurangzeb and brought back once the danger passed. She rejects the argument that Hindu kings routinely dishonoured the temples of their rivals, which is a direct challenge to Eaton’s political reading. In her 2024 book, “ Vishwanath rises and rises: the story of eternal Kashi ”, Meenakshi Jain tells the Kashi story as one of repeated attack and return. And on conflict between Indian faiths, she has said that stories of strife among Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists were part of a British “divide and rule” plan, and that these faiths lived together in harmony. No reference to the conflicts between Shaivas and Jains in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, which led to massacres. Notice the pattern. Ambedkar believes the Buddhist text about Pushyamitra and also believes the Muslim chroniclers. Jain believes the Muslim chroniclers about Aurangzeb and distrusts stories of Hindu violence against Buddhists. Each accepts the cruel source that fits the cause and questions the one that does not. Neither of them invented their sources. They chose them. That choosing is where history ends and politics begins. A good student learns to ask who wrote the story, when, and what the person quoting it today wants. (Devdutt Pattanaik is a renowned mythologist who writes on art, culture and heritage.) Post read questions 1. History is not merely about collecting facts but also about critically examining the sources through which facts are reconstructed. Discuss with suitable examples from ancient Indian history. 2. Examine the significance of archaeological and epigraphic evidence in evaluating literary narratives about Pushyamitra Shunga. 3. Does the coexistence of religious patronage and religious persecution complicates simplistic narratives of medieval Indian rulers? Illustrate with examples. 4. Discuss how selective use of historical sources can transform historical inquiry into political storytelling. Suggest methodological principles that can help in maintaining objectivity. 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