NEW DELHI: Historians on Monday were divided over the Archaeological Survey of India’s (ASI) decision to alter a plaque detailing a key 16th-century battle, with some accusing the government of “vested political interests” and “rewriting history” while others said it was important to “remove incorrect facts.”
It follows the growing controversy over a decades-old plaque, located in the Rakta Talai area of Rajsamand district in northwestern Rajasthan, about the main details of the Haldighati battle between Rajput ruler Maharana Pratap and the great Mughal emperor Akbar who ruled India between 1556 to 1605.
The dispute is over a line that says, “circumstances forced the Rajputs to retreat, and the struggle ended at midday on the 21st June 1576 A.D.”
Last week, Diya Kumari, a local lawmaker for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), told reporters: “I had urged the union art, culture and tourism minister to understand the sentiments, as the information mentioned on the plaque are factually incorrect, including the dates.”
In a Twitter post on July 15, she thanked the official for accepting her request to “remove the incorrect details about Maharana Pratap from the plaque.”
On Monday, officials told Arab News they were going ahead with the move.
“Within a couple of weeks, we will be changing the plaque,” Bipin Chandra Negi, superintendent of the ASI in Rajasthan’s Jodhpur division, said. “We will change the dates, and if there are some irregularities in the plaque, we will check and change.”
Negi refused to elaborate on the reasons for changing the plaque, but added: “When the plaque was installed 40 years ago, the area was not declared a monument of national importance. In 2003, it was declared so, and we want to change the plaque which has also become worn out. There is no issue regarding history.”
However local historian Dr. Chandrasekhar Sharma, who was at the forefront of a campaign to change the writing on the plaque, said: “It is wrong to say that Pratap lost the battle.”
“I have done my Ph.D on Maharana Pratap and studied Persian sources, which also do not make Akbar the victor in the Battle of Haldighati,” Sharma, who teaches history at Government Meera College in Rajsamand’s neighboring town of Udaipur, told Arab News. “I am a historian and not a politician, and my demand is based on the merit of history.”

Other experts, however, termed the change as a “destruction of history.”

“It’s not only the destruction of history, but the destruction of any scientific, objective method of research,” Prof. Farhat Hasan, from the University of Delhi, told Arab News. “It’s certainly painful and has a larger implication: It is not about the distortion of the historical facts, it is also about eliminating and marginalizing the rational, objective and reasonable forces in the Indian society.”

The expert on medieval Indian history also viewed the “distortion” of facts as part of the “majoritarian politics” that had come to “define India after the advent of the BJP” as a ruling party in 2014.

“The reason is to invoke the past and create a divisive, polarized social world. It is to push forward an exclusive notion of nationalism,” Hasan added. “The whole attempt is to ignore and undermine the Sultanate and Mughal period of Indian history. Since they can’t do that, they would like to present the period in which you have a person like Maharana Pratap, who is shown as the real hero of the period, and ignore people like Mughal ruler Akbar.”

Government officials were unavailable for comment when contacted by Arab News on Monday.

The development comes as the country’s largest professional body of historians, the Indian History Congress (IHC), accused the government of “rewriting” history in school textbooks.

In a July 14 letter to the government, the IHC said it was “disturbed at the misinformation and biased view that is being projected in the name of bringing reforms” in the existing National Council of Education Research and Training textbooks taught in schools.

“We are opposed to any tampering with our understanding of the history of the past where it is not academic concerns but non-academic concerns which are going to present that historical period and an event,” Prof. R. Mahalakshmi, IHC secretary, told Arab News. “There is a certain section looking at the medieval period as a Muslim period and ancient period as Hindu period; this is erroneous of looking at history.”

Prof. Ishrat Alam, from the renowned Aligarh Muslim University, said the government, in its “overenthusiasm to change history, is ignoring the facts.”

“It’s not mentioned in any of the contemporary sources — be it Persian or Rajasthani — that Maharana Pratap won the battle,” Alam told Arab News. “Otherwise, how will one explain why Pratap’s son Amar Singh made a truce with emperor Jehangir (Akbar’s successor) if the Rajput king was victorious? They are inserting recent mythology into history.”

Kamal Kishore Paliwal, a journalist and editor of the Rajsamand Times, was curious about “what we want to achieve by changing the dates and details of the plaque.”

He runs the haldighati.com website and wants to develop the rural area where the battle took place into “a hub of village tourism.”

“As a local, I will say that it is the emotion that is driving people to demand the change in the plaque,” he told Arab News. “But history and sentiment are two different things.”