Myth vs Fact

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.

The Persians’ own books say chess came to them from India. The Indian game chaturanga, named for the four limbs of an army, reached the court of Khosrow I in the 6th century and became shatranj.

Few people speak Sanskrit as their first language, 24,821 in the 2011 census, but it has never stopped being used: in daily worship across the world, in scholarship, in new writing, in a daily newspaper since 1970 and in villages where families speak it at home.

Da Gama found a way for Portuguese ships to reach India round Africa. The sea route across the Arabian Sea was centuries old, and he crossed it from Malindi to Calicut with a pilot taken on in East Africa, reaching the coast near Kappad on 20 May 1498.

From the 1560s Akbar lifted the pilgrim tax and the jizya and later let Hindu nobles build great temples. But his own victory letter after Chittor in 1568 calls the war a holy war against infidels, and the massacre there is recorded by his own historian.

The British joined most of the subcontinent under one administration, but the idea of Bharat as one land is written in the Puranas, walked by pilgrims from Kedarnath to Rameswaram, and was ruled as one by the Mauryas from Kandahar to Karnataka.

Turkish raids under Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji around 1200 ruined the great viharas of Bihar and killed many monks, and Nalanda never recovered. But no contemporary source names a library fire lasting months; that detail is a modern addition.

The Koh-i-Noor was surrendered under Article III of the Treaty of Lahore of 29 March 1849, imposed on the ten-year-old Maharaja Duleep Singh after the British defeated the Sikh army and annexed Punjab.

The Sushruta Samhita describes rebuilding a nose with a flap of living skin, and British surgeons learned the forehead-flap method from Indian practitioners: it was reported from Pune in 1794 and first performed in England by Joseph Carpue in 1814.

Indian astronomical works treat the Earth as a sphere. Aryabhata in 499 CE described the Earth as a round globe hanging in space and said it turns on its axis, so that the stars only seem to move west.

NASA never said this. Its images of 2002 show a chain of shoals between Pamban and Mannar, and NASA stated that photographs from orbit cannot tell the origin or age of such a chain. The Setu stands on the authority of the Ramayana, not on NASA.

The Cholas sent a fleet across the Bay of Bengal to strike Srivijaya in 1025. Shivaji built sea forts and a fighting navy, and later Kanhoji Angre, Sarkhel of the Maratha fleet, held the Konkan coast against the English, Portuguese and Dutch until his death in 1729.

Shivaji treated people of every faith with fairness, but his Swaraj was built on dharma: he was crowned with Vedic rites in 1674, restored temples, and replaced Persian court terms with Sanskrit ones.

Shivaji fought for Swaraj against whoever stood in its way, Hindu chiefs and Mughal-serving Rajputs included, and Muslim officers such as Siddi Hilal and his naval commander Daulat Khan served him.

Baudhayana’s Shulbasutra states the rule clearly, for any rectangle, as part of building Vedic fire-altars, but it gives no proof in the Greek sense. The rule was also known in Old Babylonia, whose clay tablet Plimpton 322 lists such triples around 1800 BCE.

The Vaimanika Shastra was dictated by Pandit Subbaraya Shastry in the early 20th century and first printed in 1973. Aeronautical engineers at the Indian Institute of Science studied it in 1974 and found its craft could not fly.

Ashoka’s own Rock Edict XIII records his remorse for Kalinga and his turn to dhamma, but the same edict warns the forest peoples that he still has the power to punish, and he kept Kalinga and his army.

Gandhi’s mass movements were the broadest part of the struggle, but they were not the only part. From 1857 to the revolutionaries, the Azad Hind Fauj and the naval revolt of February 1946, armed resistance was part of how Indians fought and how Britain judged it could no longer hold India.

Bharata is the land’s own ancient name, found in the Puranas, the Mahabharata and the Hathigumpha inscription of Kharavela. India came through Persian and Greek from Sindhu, the river. Article 1 of the Constitution keeps both: India, that is Bharat.