On the evening of May 17, NDTV invited Amish Tripathi, a writer of fantasy fiction, to discuss whether India should go digging up the past vis-à-vis the Gyanvapi mosque. What ensued was 17 minutes of a pantomime where Tripathi made a series of ahistorical statements. Unsurprisingly, since he is by no means a historian. Imagine if the TV news channel had invited a fantasy fiction writer to talk about how to develop hypersonic space vehicles?
Yet, to examine a question of history in a country full of historians with years of astute scholarship, NDTV decided to call Tripathi who claimed, for one, that the Mughals were foreigners because they spoke Turkic and Persian, which unlike Urdu are not Indian languages. This is absurd, not least because Urdu developed as the lingua franca of Mughal army camps from a confluence of Persian, Turkic, Arabic, Sanskrit and Prakrit. Indeed, “Urdu” is a Turkic word for “camp”. So the people that Tripathi labels foreigners were those who gave India one of its top modern languages.
