Naseeruddin Shah questions those who ‘villainize’ the Mughals. The veteran actor says it’s true that we have glorified the Mughals but there’s no need to also vilify them.
Naseeruddin Shah’s statements on Mughals: Actor Naseeruddin Shah says the recent attempt to alter the history in India by renaming iconic places and roads initially named after the Mughals, ‘amuses’ him. The actor, who plays the role of Mughal emperor Akbar in ZEE 5’s latest series Taj-Divided by Blood, spoke to a news organisation and maintained that our textbooks have been glorifying the Mughals for the time memorial. He added that we need to change that but not at the cost of completely wiping off their names from Indian history.
Shah has been actively speaking about the ruling government, providing a discourse on the decisions made by the current leaders. However, he now says people aren’t ready to listen or question, they are just ready to follow. In an interview with Indian Express, the popular Indian actor said people today only want to blame the adversities on the past. When asked why people believe everything wrong in our country is the doing of the Mughals, he said, “It amuses me because it is so utterly ridiculous. I mean, people can’t tell the difference between Akbar and a murderous invader like Nader Shah or Babar’s great-grandfather Taimur.”
NASEERUDDIN SHAH: MUGHALS DIDN’T COME HERE TO LOOT
Shah added, “These were people who came here to loot, the Mughals didn’t come here to loot. They came here to make this their home and that’s what they did. Who can deny their contribution?”
The veteran actor, respected and celebrated for his work in the movies like ‘A Wednesday’, ‘Ishqiya’, ‘Aakrosh’, ‘Masoom’, ‘Irada’, Manthan’ and ‘Sparsh’ and ‘Khandar’ among others, said the textbook history needs to be changed but not removed. In school, unfortunately, history dwelled mainly on the Mughals or the British. We knew about Lord Hardy, Lord Cornwallis, and about the Mughal emperors, but we didn’t know about the Gupta dynasty, the Maurya dynasty, the Vijayanagara Empire, the history of the Ajanta caves, or the northeast. We didn’t read any of these things because history was written by the Englishmen or the Anglophiles and I think that’s really unfair,” he explained.
NASEERUDDIN SHAH: ‘MUGHALS HAVE BEEN GLORIFIED BUT…’
The actor went on to say that he agrees the Mughals have been glorified but many of them contributed to our culture in the grand way that we see it today. “So what people are saying is to some extent true, that the Mughals have been glorified at the expense of our own indigenous traditions. Perhaps that’s true, (But) there is no need to villainize them either,” he said.
“If everything they did was horrible, then knock down the Taj Mahal, knock down the Red Fort, knock down Qutub Minar. Why do we consider the Red Fort sacred, it was built by a Mughal. We need not glorify them, but there is no need to vilify them either,” he concluded.
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