I was reading the petition against Dr Audrey Truschke and was quite taken aback by the infantile claims made in it. But one particular claim caught my attention — that she has "whitewashed Hindu genocide" by Emperor Aurangzeb in which 4.6 million Hindus were killed. 4.6 million!
What is the proof for that claim? A graphic published by New York Times in 2011. While citing this "evidence", none of them actually read what NYT had said. This graphic was based on claims made in a 2011 book called 'The Great Big Book of Horrible Things' by one Matthew White.
White is neither a historian nor a statistician. NYT found it to be an "amusing account" so made a graphic out of it.
I looked up the book and found the Aurangzeb reference. The author says he calculated the figure of 4.6 million by reading a reference made by Niccolao Manucci.
I looked up the book and found the Aurangzeb reference. The author says he calculated the figure of 4.6 million by reading a reference made by Niccolao Manucci.
I checked that reference and Manucci says that Aurangzeb's campaign in the Deccan was going badly in the later years and about 100,000 (1 lakh) soldiers were dying every year. Then there was a famine between 1702 and 1704 in which two million people died.
So, White has taken Manucci's reference at face value and multiplied 100,000 by 26 for the 26 years that Aurangzeb's Deccan wars took. That comes to 2.6 million people. So 2 million famine deaths and 2.6 million soldier deaths make it 4.6 million. This is absurd!
Every serious student of history who has studied the subject at the postgraduate level knows that such figures should be approached with caution. A trained historian would have known that. But White isn't one.
Besides, Manucci nowhere says that 1 lakh soldiers died every year for all the 26 years. He doesn't even specify when it started going that bad for the Mughals, but indicates this could have been after 1695. Nowhere is it claimed that so many Hindus were killed.
Also, can anyone imagine the Mughal military losing 26 lakh troops like that? It is hard to come up with a precise number, but the total size of the Mughal military never crossed 700,000. The figure could be lower than this.
Even though there is a quote attributed to Shah Jahan that says that he was the master of 900,000 horsemen, we have to take that number with a pinch of salt. Figures from India's medieval and early modern past are always exaggerated and should never be taken at face value.
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