Talk:Mughal conquest of Garha

Claim of a massacre

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Dhawangupta, you state that Akbar wasn't 9 years old at the time of this battle, but rather 9 years into his rule. Fair enough. But I still have problems with the edit. Let us take at a look at your first paragraph:

In the early years of his reign, Akbar ordered a massacre of infidel Hindus of Garha in 1560, under the command of Asaf Khan. Abul Fazl states that 40,000 peasants, along with 8,000 Rajputs, were executed, while trying to defend their temples and property.

References

I am surprised that you provide a link for "SAGE Publications", but not for the book itself. This version of the book is not available for preview online. So I presume you have a hardcopy version of the book. Can you tell us the section/entry of the Encyclopedia you were looking at? Who wrote this entry? Can you provide a quotation that your paragraph is based on?

Fortunately I was able to locate another version of the book that is available for preview. But the page 173 of this edition deals with "Biochemical factors in aggression". Nothing about Akbar.

Since you have edit-warred with two editors including a senior administrator, I presume you are really confident of your content. So can you please provide the full citation and a quotation to establish the veracity of this content? -- Kautilya3 (talk) 12:32, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

We have a short Mughal conquest of Garha, which does not mention this massacre, nor does Asaf Khan. If it checks out, it should go there first. But "executed, while trying to defend their temples and property.." sounds like "died in fighting" to me. The old Oxford History of India (p. 341, 1981 edn), no fan of Akbar, has a hostile long para on the conquest, without mentioning a massacre. Abu'l-Fazl ibn Mubarak is the claimed source, presumably in his Akbarnama. The online SAGE booik preview includes the article on "India" (pp. 863-865), which doesn't mention this, but it might be under say "massacre". Keay, John, India, a History, 2000, HarperCollins, ISBN 0002557177 doesn't mention it (or even the conquest) that I can see. Johnbod (talk) 13:51, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

I am not sure what methods are being used for verifying the sources but I do note that page numbers may be different to others depending on the Google books' print or snippet versions. Source clearly supports the disputed content by saying: "In 1545, Sher Shah Suri led a campaign of religious violence across the eastern and western states of the Indian subcontinent. Akbar, in the early years of his reign, ordered a massacre of Hindus of Garha in 1560 CE. The Mughal historian Aub-l Fazl states that 40,000 peasants, along with 8,000 Rajputs, were executed." Dhawangupta (talk) 15:00, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

I see this is all over the internet from Hinduvuta sources, but The Cambridge History of India, Volume 5, has a page-long account of the conquest which doesn't mention the massacre (like the Oxford one it does mention the massacre of all the palace women on the defeated raja's orders). Unlike the SAGE source, these are by specialized historians. The Akbarnama account is online in an old translation, but unfortunately 2 pages are not on the preview. Johnbod (talk) 15:52, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

Actually, this version of the same book has the full account by Abu'l-Fazl, with no mention of a massacre at all! Like the accounts mentioned above, what it dwells on is the treasure taken in the conquest. Actually, I wonder if there is confusion with the Siege of Chittorgarh (1567–1568), where there does seem to have been a massacre, but not such a large one. Johnbod (talk) 16:09, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

This one says: "to another case where 8,000 Rajput soldiers were killed ; and from anger at their stubborn resistance 30,000 out of 40,000 peasants were massacred when Akbar entered Chitor after the siege." Another source.[1] These details are about what happened with connection to fort of Chittor. Dhawangupta (talk) 16:55, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

The siege of Chittorgarh and the killing of 30,000, is already discussed in the article citing work of Vincent Arthur Smith and Satish Chandra. Abecedare (talk) 17:10, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

• Related: I have removed other parts of the recently added content about persecution of Hindus because:
  1. The Antonio Monserrate account is a primary source. We'll need secondary scholarship to assess its claims and put in the proper context.
  2. The donation to Abdul Qadir Badaoni is a cherry-picked anecdote, which again needs context and better sourcing than The Legacy of Jihad, written by a medical doctor.
  3. The POV sub-section titles "Persecution of Hindus", "Support of Hindus" that were introduced, are inappropriate. That binary is not how such topics are dealt with.

That said, the current Relations with Hindus sub-section is neither well-written nor well-sourced, either (relying entirely on two non-specialist sources). For now, I have removed the sentence, "It was rumoured that each night a Brahman priest, suspended on a string cot pulled up to the window of Akbar's bedchamber, would captivate the emperor with tales of Hindu gods." from the section. It is admittedly apocryphal, clearly undue, and sourced to a history of curry. Further work on the section is needed. Abecedare (talk) 16:48, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

• I agree with most of what Abecedare and Johnbod say above. I would add that given the large body of scholarship on the Mughals, using a single line from a book that intends to give a very broad overview, and even in doing so feels the need to attribute that statement to a Mughal-era scholar (I assume "Aub-l Fazl" is Abu'l-Fazl ibn Mubarak), raises serious due weight concerns. Vanamonde (Talk) 17:03, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Further comments

The claim appears in

• Dwivedi, Amitabh Vikram (2016), "Cultural Militarism, South Asia", in Paul Joseph (ed.), The SAGE Encyclopedia of War: Social Science Perspectives, SAGE Publications, pp. 432–434, ISBN 978-1-4833-5988-5

The author specializes in Languages and Literature. No credentials for history. The same article also claims that 50,000 Hindus were killed when Mahmud of Ghazni attacked the Somnath temple. Almost all the numbers in the article are five figures. Interestingly, the article also says that when Bhindranwale demanded a separate Sikh nation in 1984, Indira Gandhi suspended the constitution and imposed an emergency. If it was up to me, I would fire the Vice Chancellor who gave him a job in a University. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 10:05, 28 April 2021 (UTC)