Velmurugan Kuberan

Does this man look Chinese to you? This is an authenticated contemporary painting of Emperor Akbar At a Lit Festival yesterday, @authoramish said that it was absurd that we think Akbar looked like Prithviraj Kapoor. As per him, to our eyes, he would've appeared Mongolian or Chinese Also that his language wasn't Urdu but Turkish/Persian Nobody had asked him about this! He said it on his own as an example of the historical absurdities we believe... and repeated it about three times. According to him Akbar was Central Asian, looked nothing like an Indian Now I see this as a real problem when we've left history in the hands of so called history narrators instead of history scholars, because make no mistake, it is a scholarly discipline If Mr Tripathi had done even a bit of research on either history or geography he would have come to know that while Akbar's court language was Persian, by his generation, the spoken language in the royal household was close to what is now Brij Bhasha & Haryanvi - what later evolved into Hindustani. Akbar incidentally also was very interested in Sanskrit and Sanskrit texts. Of course, he was famously illiterate so could not read/write in any language Back to geography and Prithviraj Kapoor. Mr Kapoor was born in Peshawar probably in the same mohalla my grandmother (my parents are both Peshawar born) If only Tripathi had picked up a map of Asia, he would have found that even Babar's birthplace is only about 700 km from Peshawar - about 30% less than the distance between say, Delhi and Patna. The world is, surprise surprise, a continuum where faces don't magically transform at borders of modern nation states. That is why many in Mumbai persistently mistake me for a Parsi or Irani. Or why Prithviraj's son had blue eyes 😊 The burden of Mr Tripathi's song was that all history is biased with an unstated corollary that therefore any made up version of history is as good or valid as an academic's This is a dangerous slope in any field History ultimately has to be based on original (preferably contemporary) accounts if available, as well as other sources like archaeology, architecture, sculpture etc A close friend of mine, a world renowned business strategy professor, once said to me, "I've more in common with a Ph D in History or Physics than I have with a management practitioner. My mindset is that of an academic". He has the discipline of researching everything from original research papers so much so that during Covid all of us in the batch gave up trying to keep up with the fast changing medical research & delegated it entirely to him to read the papers properly and advise us on the latest research, along with the caveats That is the discipline of #academics! This whole thinking that no rigor is required to start spouting your version of history or anything else at all makes me wince Even assuming earlier #history writings are biased they've to be refuted by proper #research, not made up stories!