Hinduism can reasonably be seen as a long religious tradition that stretched back 3,500 years to the Vedic period and has encompassed many ways of life over the centuries. But much about ancient Hindu traditions, to say nothing of ancient Indian traditions more broadly, is anathema to Hindu nationalists. For example, the people who composed and recited the Rig Veda for centuries were a beef-eating, horse-sacrificing lot. Medieval Hindu rulers desecrated one another’s temples and idols (a practice which inspired similar behavior among Muslim rulers after they arrived in India). I hesitate to even mention Tantric practices, an important part of pre-modern Hindu traditions that few Hindu nationalists would easily embrace today.

Hindu nationalists are often in denial about their ideology being rather modern and, frankly, rather Western in its formulation. This is odd from a historian’s perspective since, after all, Hindu nationalists fall within the broad umbrella of nationalism, a doctrine that only makes sense in the context of the relatively recently-formulated world of nation states. Moreover, early Hindutva ideologues openly modelled their ideology on European fascist movements in terms of methods and objectives.

The Indian subcontinent has a long, rich history, but the Indian nation state has had a quite brief existence to date. When people conflate the two, they lose the bulk of Indian history and end up making nonsensical statements, such as that Shah Jahan, the Mughal king who sponsored the construction of the Taj Mahal, was a traitor. One might ask: A traitor to whom or what exactly? To the modern Indian nation state that was not founded until nearly 300 years after Shah Jahan’s death?

Indian history does not belong to the modern nation state of India. Often in the West we speak of South Asian history, in part, to make precisely this distinction between the region’s past and nationalist claims upon it. Nonetheless, the Indian state is the de facto custodian of the historical sites contained within the nation’s borders, including Mughal monuments. Recent politically-charged statements and actions designed to erode the crucial role of the Mughals in India history raise the question of how much longer the Indian state will serve as a responsible caretaker for monuments that are much beloved across the world.

(Audrey Truschke, Assistant professor of South Asian History, Rutgers University and the author of ‘Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth’)