Five thousand years, as it happened

The Taj Mahal is the tomb Shah Jahan built for Mumtaz Mahal from 1632, on land he took from Raja Jai Singh of Amber in exchange for other property. No record of a temple on the site has ever been produced.

The minar was begun by Qutb-ud-din Aibak around 1199 and raised higher by Iltutmish. What is true is that the mosque at its foot was built from demolished temples, as its own inscription says, and that the iron pillar beside it is a Gupta-era standard of Bhagwan Vishnu.

The pillar resists rust remarkably well, and the reason has been worked out: its iron is rich in phosphorus and was made by forge-welding lumps of bloomery iron, which lets a thin protective film form on the surface. It is a real achievement of Gupta-era smiths, and it is known, not lost.

Indian kings did send armies and fleets beyond their borders: Rajaraja Chola into Lanka, Rajendra Chola across the sea to Srivijaya in 1025, Lalitaditya of Kashmir far into the north-west. What is true is that Hindu culture spread across South-East Asia mostly by trade, priests and marriage, not by conquest.

Bharat kept history in its own forms: dated royal inscriptions by the thousand, temple chronicles, court genealogies, and full histories such as Kalhana’s Rajatarangini (1148–49) and the Ahom Buranjis.

Zero as a number, with rules for working with it, is set out by Brahmagupta in 628 CE. The Arabs learned the nine figures and zero from India and called them Hindi numerals; Europe then learned them from the Arabs and called them Arabic.