Babur the Naturalist
Interesting to see how the British Library celebrates the founder of the Mughal empire without mentioning even once the atrocities committed by the Mughals in the conquest and upkeep of the empire [1]. At the same time the British Library does all it can to meticulously portray the history of the west and especially the British Empire in a bad light where everything is put on a scale and weighed for racism, sexism, homophobia, slavery and more [2].<p>Here&#x27;s a few choice quotes from the first source on what the British Library has no problems in portraying with this glowing article:<p>Dr. Koenraad Elst in his article “Was There an Islamic Genocide of Hindus?” states:<p><i>With the invasion of India by Mahmud Ghazni about 1000 A.D., began the Muslim invasions into the Indian subcontinent and they lasted for several centuries. Nadir Shah made a mountain of the skulls of the Hindus he killed in Delhi alone. Babur raised towers of Hindu skulls at Khanua when he defeated Rana Sanga in 1527 and later he repeated the same horrors after capturing the fort of Chanderi. Akbar ordered a general massacre of 30,000 Rajputs after he captured Chithorgarh in 1568. The Bahamani Sultans had an annual agenda of killing a minimum of 100,000 Hindus every year.<p>The history of medieval India is full of such instances. The holocaust of the Hindus in India continued for 800 years, till the brutal regimes were effectively overpowered in a life and death struggle by the Sikhs in the Panjab and the Hindu Maratha armies in other parts of India in the late 1700’s.<p>We have elaborate literary evidence of the World’s biggest holocaust from existing historical contemporary eyewitness accounts. The historians and biographers of the invading armies and subsequent rulers of India have left quite detailed records of the atrocities they committed in their day-to-day encounters with India’s Hindus.<p>These contemporary records boasted about and glorified the crimes that were committed – and the genocide of tens of millions of Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhist and Jainist, mass rapes of women and the destruction of thousands of ancient Hindu &#x2F; Buddhist temples and libraries have been well documented and provide solid proof of the World’s biggest holocaust.</i><p><i>...over 13 centuries and a territory as vast as the Subcontinent, Muslim Holy Warriors easily killed more Hindus than the 6 million of the Holocaust...</i><p><i>...The Muslim conquests, down to the 16th century, were for the Hindus a pure struggle of life and death. Entire cities were burnt down and the populations massacred, with hundreds of thousands killed in every campaign, and similar numbers deported as slaves. Every new invader made (often literally) his hills of Hindus skulls. Thus, the conquest of Afghanistan in the year 1000 was followed by the annihilation of the Hindu population; the region is still called the Hindu Kush, i.e. Hindu slaughter...</i><p>Will Durant in his book “The Story of Civilisation: Our Oriental Heritage”:<p><i>...The Mohammedan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. The Islamic historians and scholars have recorded with great glee and pride the slaughters of Hindus, forced conversions, abduction of Hindu women and children to slave markets and the destruction of temples carried out by the warriors of Islam during 800 AD to 1700 AD. Millions of Hindus were converted to Islam by sword during this period...</i><p>Francois Gautier in his book ‘Rewriting Indian History’ (1996) wrote:<p><i>...The massacres perpetuated by Muslims in India are unparalleled in history, bigger than the Holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis; or the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks; more extensive even than the slaughter of the South American native populations by the invading Spanish and Portuguese...</i><p>Alain Danielou in his book, Histoire de l’ Inde writes:<p><i>...From the time Muslims started arriving, around 632 AD, the history of India becomes a long, monotonous series of murders, massacres, spoliations, and destructions. It is, as usual, in the name of ‘a holy war’ of their faith, of their sole God, that the barbarians have destroyed civilizations, wiped out entire races...</i><p>Irfan Husain in his article “Demons from the Past” observes:<p><i>...While historical events should be judged in the context of their times, it cannot be denied that even in that bloody period of history, no mercy was shown to the Hindus unfortunate enough to be in the path of either the Arab conquerors of Sindh and south Punjab, or the Central Asians who swept in from Afghanistan…The Muslim heroes who figure larger than life in our history books committed some dreadful crimes. Mahmud of Ghazni, Qutb-ud-Din Aibak, Balban, Mohammed bin Qasim, and Sultan Mohammad Tughlak, all have blood-stained hands that the passage of years has not cleansed..Seen through Hindu eyes, the Muslim invasion of their homeland was an unmitigated disaster....</i><p>The list goes on but the message is clear, the Mughal conquest was a bloody and disgraceful history which, had it been perpetrated by white westerners would have been the subject of yearly discussions on shame, repent, self-flagellation and reparations. Since it was not white westerners but brown Arabs and Asians who perpetrated these acts of barbarism they are relegated to the sidelines of history with barely a mentioning where even that is put in a positive light  - <i>In between intense military activities, Babur somehow managed to find time to write his memoirs (Vāqiʻāt-i Bāburī). In these Babur records his ruthless victories, but at the same time writes unpretentiously of his personal feelings, revealing himself to be a scholar, a poet and a keen naturalist</i>.<p>If the keepers of the British Library had any sense of honour they would treat the aforementioned deeds in the same way as they treat those done by western conquerors: either portray all history of conquest as the bloody gorefest it often was no matter the skin colour or religion or culture of the perpetrator <i>or</i> shuffle it all under the carpet. I prefer the former to the latter since all it requires is an objective view. What they do now is just as bad as what they most likely did during the times of the British Empire, they just reversed their stance on who the bad guys are.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sikhnet.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;islamic-india-biggest-holocaust-world-history" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sikhnet.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;islamic-india-biggest-holocaust...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bl.uk&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;2020&#x2F;july&#x2F;british-library-commits-to-becoming-an-anti-racist-organisation" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bl.uk&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;2020&#x2F;july&#x2F;british-library-c...</a>