• The pivotal role of intelligence in the battle of Trench is equally undisputed as it helped the Muslims to anticipate the incoming threat, disunite the coalition and handle internal threats, thereby ensuring a decisive victory

Momina Khan

When 10,000 warriors of Quraysh and their allied army marched to attack Medina, they were completely caught off guard by the defense mechanism of trench warfare, as they were only accustomed to open field battles. History has shown, that by successfully utilizing this rather unconventional warfare tactic, a comparatively smaller Muslim army was able to inflict sustainable damage. The battle of Trench which is also known as the battle of Confederates that took place around 627 AD, radically altered the balance of power in the Arabian peninsula and officially dismantled the superiority of Meccans over the Muslims. Soon after the unsuccessful siege, the prophet Muhammad (PBUH) declared that “From now onwards we will attack them. They shall not be able to attack us.” These words of the prophet signaled a significant regional shift, paving way for Muslim dominance.

When news of the oncoming assault reached Medina, the prophet convened an urgent meeting, where he consulted his companions to work out a plan. An innovative tactic of a defensive trench which was proposed by Salman al Farsi was entertained, as it was not considered sensible to confront the enemy in an open battlefield. Although this unique concept of digging a trench as a defensive shield was an unfamiliar concept in Arabia, but it was a recognized defence tactic and was often used to neutralize superior cavalries by the Persians and Romans.

Muslim leadership embraced the challenge by adopting this rather unprecedented strategy and a trench was dug on the northern exposed side of the city of Medina.

Muslims from various tribes of Medina worked together tirelessly for approximately 20 days to dig this massive trench which was about 8 to 15 feet wide and 10 feet deep. Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) not only actively participated alongside others in building the trench but also motivated them throughout the project, as they were encountering scarcity of resources. During this time of trial and tribulation, the prophet set a precedent of steadfastness and successfully manoeuvred the otherwise uncertain situation through effective communication and proactive action. Therefore, despite harsh conditions, the Muslims demonstrated remarkable physical and spiritual resilience. As the trench prevented the Quraysh to launch a direct assault, therefore they resorted to laying a siege.

This strategy of Trench warfare not only surprised the opponents but also threw them off balance, ultimately hampering their advancement. It acted as a defensive shield and a stalemate facilitator, thereby tilting the balance of power in favour of the Muslim army. The battle of Trench also qualifies as an example of the “porcupine strategy” which is an asymmetrical warfare doctrine and focuses on achieving deterrence by evading enemy’s strengths and eventually capitalizing on its vulnerabilities. As Muslims were greatly outnumbered by the Quraysh, the defending Muslim army avoided a head on collision in an open battlefield and rather opted for this defensive strategy. Furthermore, the trench around Medina acted as the quills of a porcupine which aided in constraining the combat strength of a superior aggressive force, thereby neutralizing its numerical advantage.

The pivotal role of intelligence in the battle of Trench is equally undisputed as it helped the Muslims to anticipate the incoming threat, disunite the coalition and handle internal threats, thereby ensuring a decisive victory. Early intelligence reports of the advancing allied army allowed the Muslims to prepare and subsequently surprise the enemy with an unfamiliar idea of the trench.

Besides this, intelligence agents were deployed to gather information about enemy numbers etc. At the same time in order to prevent internal threats, accurate internal reports which identified disloyal and enemy agents, facilitated precautionary measures. Meanwhile the secret conversion of Nuaym ibn Mas’ud who was a member of the Ghatafan tribe also played a pivotal role as he managed to strategically manoeuvre the shaky alliance between the Quraysh and its allied army. On one side he warned Banu Qurayzah that the Quraysh would eventually abandon them in case of defeat and hence they should demand hostages from Quraysh as a precautionary measure. While on the other side, he managed to convince the the Quraysh that Banu Qurayzah had changed their mind and were planning to demand some men from the Quraysh’s side as hostages. So, when the Quraysh urged Banu Qurayzah to participate in a joint attack against the Muslims, the latter in return demanded some high-profile hostages, which proved Nuaym’s statement. Consequently, Nuaym ibn Mas’ud successfully created disharmony amongst the ranks of Quraysh.

Although a full-scale combat did not take place apart from a few skirmishes, there was a notable clash between Amr ibn Abd al Wadd from the Quraysh’s side and Ali bin Abi Talib, who represented the Muslim army. The duel was won by Ali bin Abi Talib, and this additional blow left the Meccan army utterly ruined.

A final yet vital point is the powerful role of divine intervention in the battle of Trench which tends to be the demonstration of God’s deliverance and protection against all odds. The savage windstorm which is also mentioned in the Holy Quran that occurred during the battle of Trench acted as a divine tool which severely disrupted the enemy camp. These hurricane style winds tore the enemy’s tents, extinguished their fires, eventually leading to their chaotic retreat. Till date the battle of Trench stands out as a classic example of explicit divine intervention and the Holy Quran mentions the storm by stating that, “O you who believe, remember the favour of Allah upon you when armies came against you, and We sent against them a wind and forces you did not see. Allah is ever seeing of what you do.” Surah Al Ahzaab (33:9)

The strategic prowess exhibited by the Prophet and the adaptation of an unusual strategy of static warfare combined with crucial divine aid, ultimately enabled a glorious victory for Muslims.

Read: Not all eggs in one basket

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The writer is a freelance journalist focusing on politics, international relations and tourism.

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SHAFIGA RAHIMLI

The policy of ethnic cleansing and deportation directed against Muslims in the Balkans, which began in the 19th century, continued until the end of the 20th century. This policy, which was felt more intensely in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, served the aim of establishing nation-states based on a single ethnic identity rather than maintaining coexistence.

When Bulgaria was established, Bulgarians were deeply concerned because the Turkish population constituted more than fifty percent of the population. The only way to reduce the number of Turks within Bulgaria’s borders was perceived as either eliminating Muslims or forcing them into exile. Reducing the Turkish population in Bulgaria was an anti-humanist political strategy designed to strengthen the position of Bulgarians in governance.

During the redrawing of borders, large-scale mass migrations took place, and the primary victims of these migrations were the Turks. The assimilation policies imposed on the Turks of Bulgaria lasted for a long time and intensified significantly after the Balkan Wars and the World Wars. Even during the Cold War period, Turks in the Balkans were subjected to migration through bilateral agreements. The assimilation of Turks in Bulgaria remains a painful reality shaped by Bulgarian nationalism, the effects of which can still be observed today.

This study analyzes the assimilation and migration policies applied against Turks in Bulgaria, along with their causes and consequences, based on historical and scientific facts and documents.

One of Turkey’s oldest neighbors, Bulgaria is the Balkan country with the largest Turkish population (approximately 10% of its total population). Historians emphasize that Turks did not arrive in the Balkans later, but were among the indigenous peoples of the region long before the Ottoman conquest. Even the name “Balkan” itself, which is of Turkish origin meaning “mountainous, forested area,” reflects the deep historical roots of Turks in the region.

It is known that Turkic tribes descending from the Huns lived in this region centuries before Christ. The presence of Turkic tribes such as the Avars, Pechenegs, Uzes, Berends, Cumans, and Kipchaks in the Balkans at least a thousand years before the Ottomans is an undeniable historical fact. As Prof. Dr. Ali Arslan states in his work “Migration or Forced Displacement in the Balkans?”, the arrival of Turks, particularly in the Southern Balkans, was not later than that of the Slavs. During the Seljuk and especially the Ottoman periods, the migration to the Balkans represented a fusion between Balkan Turks and Oghuz Turks.

The settlement of Oghuz Turkic tribes in the territory of present-day Bulgaria began in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries and continued until the Ottoman conquest. Bulgaria remained under Ottoman rule for approximately 500 years, from the late 14th century until the late 19th century. Following the conquest of the region by Sultan Murad I, Oghuz Turks settled in these lands, and through interaction with local populations, they became known as Bulgarian Turks. The process of Ottoman expansion initiated by Murad I was completed during the reign of Bayezid I in 1389, after which Bulgaria came under Ottoman sovereignty.

Until the 19th century, the Turks of Bulgaria lived relatively freely in the Balkans; however, their fate changed after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. Prior to this war, the fact that the Turkish population in the region exceeded that of the Bulgarians was itself an indicator of this relative freedom. However, following what is historically known as the “War of ’93,” Bulgarian authorities began systematic efforts to reduce the Turkish population. These years, remembered as some of the darkest periods of oppression, witnessed massacres of Turks and triggered large-scale migrations to Ottoman territories.

The period of the Balkan Wars represents a second phase marked by intensified political aggression against the Turks, characterized by assimilation and forced migration policies. These policies, accelerated by the Balkan Wars, further intensified during the First World War and resulted in devastating consequences during and after the Second World War. The migrations of 1950–1951 and 1989 clearly demonstrate that such policies continued even during the Cold War, albeit through new methods of assimilation.

Read: Turkey honors Azerbaijani Poetess

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SHAFIGA RAHIMLI = Master’s degree at Dokuz Eylül University, Turkey

The post When Identity Became a Target first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Mohammad Ehsan Leghari

History does not always move in straight lines, but its patterns are often too consistent to ignore. The unfolding crises in West Asia, particularly the intensifying confrontation around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz in 2026, are not isolated geopolitical events. Rather, they represent the continuation of a much older strategic logic, one that began over five centuries ago with the arrival of European naval power in the Indian Ocean. This long arc of history suggests that what we witness today is not merely a modern conflict, but the latest chapter in a 550-year-old struggle for global dominance.

The Lost Order of the Indian Ocean

Before the arrival of European fleets at the close of the 15th century, the Indian Ocean was not a battlefield; it was a shared commercial space. Known in Sanskrit as Ratnakara, or the “mine of gems,” it functioned as a decentralized yet remarkably stable network of trade and cultural exchange. This system was governed less by coercive naval dominance and more by environmental rhythms and ethical norms. The monsoon winds dictated the pace of commerce, compelling merchants from Arabia, East Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia to coexist, cooperate, and often reside temporarily in foreign ports. These interactions cultivated a cosmopolitan maritime culture grounded in trust and mutual benefit.

Islam played a particularly important role in shaping this order. The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), himself a merchant, provided a moral and commercial framework that emphasized honesty, contractual integrity, and cross-cultural engagement. Trade was not merely economic; it was civilizational. Equally significant was the existence of indigenous maritime legal systems, such as the Undang-Undang Laut Melaka, which regulated shipping, hierarchy, dispute resolution, and safety. These codes demonstrate that the seas were far from lawless; they were governed spaces with their own constitutional logic.

1494: The Beginning of Maritime Violence

This equilibrium was shattered at the end of the 15th century. The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 symbolically divided the non-European world between Spain and Portugal, while Vasco da Gama’s arrival in 1498 physically inaugurated a new era defined by militarized trade. European ships were fundamentally different from the merchant vessels of the Indian Ocean; they were not merely carriers of goods, but floating artillery platforms. The integration of heavy bronze cannons into naval design transformed maritime interaction from negotiation to coercion.

Vasco da Gama’s second voyage in year 1502 demonstrated this shift with brutal clarity. His actions, burning a ship full of pilgrims, bombarding Calicut, and mutilating captives, were not aberrations. They were calculated strategies designed to impose a new order through terror. Under this new paradigm, trade was no longer a shared enterprise; it became a monopoly enforced at gunpoint.

The Cartaz System: From Commerce to Control

The Portuguese institutionalized this violence through the Cartaz system, a naval licensing regime that required all ships to obtain permission and pay fees to operate in the Indian Ocean. This system effectively transformed the ocean into a controlled economic space where ships without permits were seized and crews were often killed. What had once been a free-flowing commercial network was converted into a “toll-gated” maritime empire. This logic of controlling trade by controlling movement did not disappear with the Portuguese; it evolved. Later European empires, and eventually modern global powers, adopted similar strategies, replacing cannons with sanctions, blockades, and surveillance.

Global Expansion and Human Catastrophe

The maritime revolution did not remain confined to the Indian Ocean; it expanded outward, producing one of the most devastating demographic collapses in human history. In the Americas, indigenous populations declined by up to 90% within a century and a half of European contact. Disease, mass killing, forced labor, and ecological disruption combined to dismantle entire civilizations. This was not merely conquest; it was systemic transformation. Ecosystems were reshaped, economies reoriented, and societies restructured to serve external interests. The so-called “discovery” of new lands was, in reality, the beginning of their reconfiguration.

Chokepoints: The Geography of Power

At the heart of this transformation lay a simple but enduring idea: control key maritime chokepoints, and you control global trade. In the 16th century, this meant places like the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Malacca. Portuguese strategist Afonso de Albuquerque recognized that dominating a few strategic locations could yield disproportionate power over vast trade networks. By the 20th century, the commodity had changed from spices to oil, but the geography remained almost identical. Hormuz, once vital for spice routes, became indispensable for global energy flows. Pipelines, naval bases, and military alliances were all designed around this enduring reality: whoever controls the chokepoints shapes the global economy.

The Geopolitics of Oil and Intervention

Iran’s modern history reflects this long arc of geopolitical contestation. Its strategic location at the Strait of Hormuz and its vast energy resources have made it a focal point of external intervention. The 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, triggered by his attempt to nationalize oil, set a precedent for regime change as a tool of economic control. Subsequent decades saw cycles of conflict, including the “Tanker War” of the 1980s, where maritime routes themselves became battlegrounds. These episodes reinforced a consistent pattern: ensuring that no regional power could independently control critical trade corridors.

2026: A Modern Echo of an Old Strategy

The recent military strikes against Iran in 2026, framed in terms of countering nuclear threats and ensuring regional stability, mirror earlier strategies in both form and intent. Technologies have changed; precision-guided missiles have replaced bronze cannons, but the underlying logic remains strikingly similar. The objective is not merely military victory, but strategic reordering: securing chokepoints, ensuring compliant regimes, and maintaining control over global flows of energy and trade.

Conclusion: An Unfinished Historical Project

The story that began in 1494 is far from over. What started as a maritime rupture has evolved into a global system where power is exercised through control of movement, of ships, goods, and resources. The Indian Ocean was once a shared space governed by cooperation and legal pluralism. Its transformation into a contested arena of military and economic dominance marked the beginning of a new world order that continues to shape contemporary conflicts. Understanding today’s crises, particularly in regions like the Strait of Hormuz, requires looking beyond immediate events. It demands recognizing the deeper historical structures that continue to guide global politics. Until the logic of chokepoint control and coercive dominance is replaced by a more equitable framework, the cycle initiated over five centuries ago is likely to persist, adapting in form, but not in essence.

References

Boxer, C.R. (1969) The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825. London: Hutchinson.

Chaudhuri, K.N. (1985) Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kinzer, S. (2003) All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.

Mahan, A.T. (1890) The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

Yergin, D. (1991) The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Read: The War, Trade, and Transit

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Mohammad Ehsan Leghari is a water expert, former Member (Sindh), Indus River System Authority (IRSA), and former Managing Director, SIDA.

The post From Vasco to Hormuz: Maritime Might first appeared on Sindh Courier.

Our common values—unrivaled hospitality, deep-rooted respect for the elderly, and an innate love for classical poetry—ensure that despite modern borders, the people of Bukhara and Sindh remain spiritual kin, guided by the enduring echoes of our ancestors toward a future of mutual peace and prosperity.

Rashidova Shakhrizoda | Bukhara, Uzbekistan

The historical ties between the verdant lands of Uzbekistan and the Sindh region of Pakistan are not merely measured in miles, but in centuries of shared wisdom, trade, and spiritual heritage. For millennia, the Silk Road functioned as the world’s primary artery, carrying not only silk and spices but also the great scholars, architects, and Sufi saints who fundamentally shaped the cultural soul of South and Central Asia.

The Intellectual Bridge: From Transoxiana to the Indus

Historically, the intellectual exchange between Bukhara—often called the “Dome of Islam”—and Sindh, known as “Bab-ul-Islam” (The Gateway of Islam), created a unified scholarly corridor. In the 9th and 10th centuries, the rigorous methodology of Imam Al-Bukhari became the cornerstone of theological studies in the madrasas of Sindh. This wasn’t a one-way street; the Indus Valley served as a vital hub where Indian mathematics and astronomy were translated and refined by Central Asian polymaths, later reaching the global stage through the libraries of Bukhara and Khiva.

Dynastic Links and Political Synergy

The political landscape of Sindh was deeply influenced by the migratory waves and dynastic shifts originating from Central Asia. From the Ghaznavid era to the profound impact of the Timurid Renaissance, the administrative and military structures of the region mirrored the sophisticated systems of Samarkand and Bukhara. The arrival of artisans, calligraphers, and statesmen from the heart of the Silk Road transformed the urban centers of Sindh into cosmopolitan hubs of Persianate culture, leaving an indelible mark on the region’s governance and legal frameworks.

The Naqshbandi Trail and Sufi Mysticism

The most enduring legacy is perhaps the spiritual one. The Naqshbandi Sufi order, which blossomed in the sacred soil of Bukhara under Khwaja Bahauddin Naqshband, found a secondary home in Sindh. These wandering dervishes and pirs brought with them a philosophy of “solitude in the crowd,” which resonated deeply with the local population. Even today, the rhythmic chants and spiritual practices in the shrines of Sehwan Sharif and Bhit Shah echo the mystical traditions nurtured in the khanqahs of Uzbekistan, bridging the geographical gap through a shared language of the heart.

Architectural Mirrors: Blue Tiles and Terracotta

The visual landscape of Sindh is a testament to Central Asian aesthetic mastery. The iconic blue faience tiles of Multan and Hala are direct descendants of the turquoise mosaics found on the Registan Square. The architectural silhouette of Sindhi tombs—characterized by high drums, majestic domes, and intricate brickwork—draws directly from the “Bukhara school” of construction. This shared architectural DNA proves that for centuries, master builders moved freely between the Zarafshan and Indus rivers, blending local materials with Timurid grandeur.

A Shared Vision for the Future

Revisiting this rich tapestry of history is more than an academic exercise; it is the foundation for a modern partnership. As Uzbekistan and Pakistan rebuild the “Iron Silk Road” through new transport corridors and diplomatic initiatives, we are simply reviving an ancient pulse. Our common values—unrivaled hospitality, deep-rooted respect for the elderly, and an innate love for classical poetry—ensure that despite modern borders, the people of Bukhara and Sindh remain spiritual kin, guided by the enduring echoes of our ancestors toward a future of mutual peace and prosperity.

Read: BUKHARA: A TIMELESS TAPESTRY OF HISTORY AND CULTURE

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Rashidova Shakhrizoda, a student from Bukhara, Uzbekistan

The post Bukhara and Sindh: Spiritual Echoes first appeared on Sindh Courier.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Thind (1923) impacted all South Asians in the United States and led to the denaturalization of over fifty South Asian Americans who had already become naturalized citizens. One of them was Vaishno Das Bagai—and though Bagai’s painful story has been told before, records I recently discovered in the National Archives further reveal the deliberate and organized campaign that the U.S. government waged against South Asian Americans after Thind. As we mark the 100th anniversary of the decision, there are lessons we can draw from this history to reckon with racism and xenophobia today.

Born in Peshawar in 1891, Bagai was an early supporter of India’s freedom and independence from the British and was already working with the Ghadar Party in San Francisco when he decided to settle in the United States following his father’s death. He had inherited a good deal of land which could have cemented his family’s livelihood in Peshawar for the next generation. Instead, he used a portion of his inheritance to start a new life for himself and his family in the United States.

Bagai arrived in San Francisco on September 6, 1915 with his wife Kala and their three young sons, Brij, Madan, and Ram. He was eager to continue the cause of Indian independence and to allow his children to grow up in the United States. As his granddaughter Rani recounted some years later, Bagai “relished his new life in America.” He owned a home, started a business called Bagai’s Bazaar, and continued his work with the Ghadar Party.

And just over two weeks after his arrival, he declared his intention to become a naturalized citizen of the United States. In his application he declared that he would “renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity” to the King of Great Britain and Ireland, become a citizen of the United States of America, and permanently reside in the U.S. He formally filed his naturalization papers five years later and secured the signatures of two witnesses.

That South Asian Americans were able to successfully naturalize was an anomaly. Other Asian immigrants had already been barred from naturalized citizenship on the grounds that they were not “white” as required by the nation’s naturalization laws dating back to 1790. It would not be until the Supreme Court ruled in the Thind decision, on February 19, 1923, that South Asians were not considered “white.”

The Thind decision dealt a devastating blow to all South Asians in the United States, especially those who had become naturalized citizens. It disrupted dreams. It put already vulnerable people at further risk of discrimination. And it further codified anti-Asian racism.

For Bagai, it proved to be too much. He had staked so much in America. He had tried to do everything that immigrants were supposed to do. He wore American suits, spoke English fluently, and adopted Western manners. As he later explained, the family had “all made ourselves as much Americanized as possible.”

But after he was denaturalized, everything changed. Without U.S. citizenship, Bagai became subjected to California’s alien land laws which barred “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” i.e. Asian immigrants, from owning land. He was forced to give up his property, including Bagai’s Bazaar. When he tried to visit relatives in India in 1928, he was refused a U.S. passport. Struggling with this injustice and feeling trapped and betrayed, in 1928 Vaishno Das died by suicide. In a letter addressed to the San Francisco Examiner, he explained that he was taking his life in protest.

I end my story with a famous quote written by America’s great scholar and a jurist.

Is life worth living in a gilded cage? Obstacles this way, blockades that way, and the bridges burnt behind.

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The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his articles.

Read: America’s betrayal of Europe!

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By Nazarul Islam | USA

People born six decades ago, have seen this iconic picture. An American helicopter perches atop a building as would-be evacuees clamber up a ladder to the roof. They’re desperate to flee Saigon, capital of a doomed South Vietnam, before it falls to the communist troops advancing somewhere out of shot below.

A Dutch news agency photographer, Hugh van Es, snapped that picture from his office balcony, on 29 April 1975. The roof belonged to a nearby apartment building where senior CIA staffers were based. It was not the US Embassy, though that’s how it’s been misremembered ever since. Exactly half a century later, van Es’ shot remains engraved in memory as the defining image of how America made its exit.

It also points to something more. In the decades after 1945, the helicopter became the embodiment of the United States’ nimble superpower modernity, descending from on high to bring salvation, or vengeance.

Presidents had ducked under the rotating blades to be buzzed from the White House lawn to Camp David, to decide the fate of nations.

Aerospace corporations kept thousands at work in places such as Fort Worth, Texas, the home of Bell Helicopter, which made the UH-1 Iroquois, nicknamed the ‘Huey’. It was one of those Hueys up on that the Saigon roof – at one point, Bell was making 150 every week.

Imagine a movie where war came to America itself? And, imagine a scenario where the Soviets nuke the largest cities, amidst chaos business leaders are busy planning to pile into choppers and flee to the luxury bunkers awaiting them beneath a popular location in the countryside.

When young protesters rebelled against what they saw as their authoritarian, militaristic elders, those same authorities retaliated by sending in the choppers. In August 1968, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago became a fortress. Outside, furious, thwarted left-wing activists demanded a say in the selection of the party’s candidate for president.

Mayor Richard Daley sent in baton-wielding cops – and ’copters. In No One Was Killed, his book-length report on the mayhem that followed, the journalist-novelist John Schultz detected the shadow of the hated war in Asia looming over the protesters below:

Overhead, a helicopter hummed up and down the length of Michigan Avenue from the Hilton to 18th Street, playing its searchlight on the crowd rushing north and on the alleys. Perhaps the helicopter was radioing information to the [National] Guard and the cops, but mainly it was there to frighten, to intimidate. Everyone in the crowd knew that in Vietnam a machine gun could be working away behind the searchlight.

America’s film director George Shultz, is angrily shaking his fist at the cop behind the bulb, imagining him ‘curling his lip at my affront, fingering a trigger and saying, “Oh, what I could do, buddy boy, oh, yes, what I could do”’.

Likewise, nine months later, to disperse huge campus protests at Berkeley, Governor Ronald Reagan dispatched the National Guard. They surrounded the students, while a helicopter swooped in past the university bell tower, pumping out tear gas.

No wonder that, by 1970, such images had come to symbolize implacable, centralized force. In EL Doctorow’s novel The Book of Daniel, the military-industrial complex is described as ‘highly visible’. On a dystopic Californian plain, the protagonist watches a mysterious dark green helicopter track back and forth across the sky all day, ‘its compressions beating the white air till it’s thick’.

Around this time, the US military formalized its long-standing practice of naming its helicopters after Native American tribes (Iroquois, Apache, Chinook) and leaders (Black Hawk). This was reportedly meant to invoke American history while evoking the aircrafts’ stealth and speed. It also underlines the power of the state that was commissioning them. It’s not hard to imagine what the 19th-century federal government would have done with Apache helicopters to actual Apaches.

All the same, these images are more ambiguous than they seem. Helicopters may have left John Schultz feeling powerless as he stared up from the ground, but finally it’s just another person up there, trying to control a tiny, vulnerable vehicle. The helicopter is irreducibly hubristic. It is this that makes it such a potent symbol of the image America presents to itself, and to the rest of us. It hovers, all-powerful, over everything, but sometimes seems a shot away from calamity.

The historian Christian Appy has pointed out that it was helicopters, rather than the far more destructive B-52 bombers, that came to symbolize America’s war in Vietnam. But this is not just because they were incessantly visible over Vietnam itself, and on television: it’s because they embody both sides of the US intervention – omnipotent, and impotent. In Chickenhawk, his bestselling memoir of his year spent flying Hueys early in the war, Robert Mason recalls watching a Viet Cong soldier with a rifle hopelessly trying ‘to take on our entire air-assault battalion, machine guns blazing’.

He also describes the intense fear induced by flying low, his ‘chickenshit’ commander hunched low in the seat beside him, and how other Viet Cong fighters took out US pilots – such as Mason’s successor – by shooting vertically through the cockpit from the ground.

This duality was captured in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 movie Apocalypse Now, in another spin on these images that are seared into the collective memory. The ascending Wagnerian strings of ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ are blasted from a helicopter convoy as it swoops in across the sea, effortlessly wiping out scurrying Vietnamese peasants. Yet as soon as one of the choppers lands, a Vietnamese woman runs up and throws in a grenade. And of course that photo from the Saigon roof was only partly an image of American power. It also signified defeat.

More dispiriting images followed. In 1980, with Apocalypse Now still in cinemas, President Carter sent commandos from the Delta Force special missions unit to carry out ‘Operation Eagle Claw’. This was a bid to rescue American diplomats being held hostage in Iran. Three of the eight helicopters malfunctioned. The mission was aborted, in the course of which another crashed into a cargo aircraft, killing eight servicemen.

Three years later, under Ronald Reagan, Delta Force landed in another debacle. ‘Operation Urgent Fury’ was a plan to invade Grenada on the dubious premise that this small Caribbean island, a member of the British Commonwealth, had become a ‘Soviet-Cuban colony’, and a Launchpad for terrorism. At one point, Delta Force descended in daylight in Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawks, struggling through anti-aircraft fire at point-blank range on a mission to liberate political prisoners – only to find the prison empty.

Overall, the invasion amounted to something of a political triumph, but, as Reagan’s biographer Max Boot writes, it ‘suffered from many of the same dysfunctions as Operation Eagle Claw’. As if to rub the point in, Robert Mason’s groundbreaking account of the Viet Cong shooting US pilots had touched down in bookstores just weeks before.

By far the most devastating such incident arrived under President Clinton, in October 1993. US forces operating with the United Nations in the war-torn Somalia capital Mogadishu attempted to capture an insurgent leader who had ordered the ambush of a peacekeeping convoy. Once again, Delta Force led the operation in Black Hawks – which had become a focus of Somalis’ anger towards the UN forces. According to the New York Times, even when they weren’t visiting deadly force from the air, their rotors ‘whipped the roofs of whole neighborhoods’.

The operation, ‘Gothic Serpent’, was a disaster. A soldier fell to the ground from 70 feet up. One Black Hawk crashed; another was shot down. Two Delta Force snipers, deployed by helicopter to secure one of the crash sites, were among the 18 Americans killed. The mutilated body of a US soldier was dragged through the city streets. A helicopter pilot was captured. Images of both men horrified Americans back home: it felt like Vietnam all over again.

After Saigon fell, the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that America’s ill-fated intervention ‘was exclusively guided by the needs of a superpower to create for itself an image which would convince the world that it was indeed “the mightiest power on earth”’. Yet that was not shattered by what happened in Iran, Grenada and Somalia. Instead, the image of American power that had once spooked many on the 1960s left began to spook many more in the 1990s, this time on the political right.

When America won the Cold War, it lost its unifying enemy. The ‘New World Order’ that emerged instead felt to some Americans less like victory than defeat, shaped as it was by globalization, disappearing jobs, the closure of defense manufacturing plants, and then the ascent of Bill Clinton to the presidency: a man they cast as a Vietnam draft-dodger, hell-bent on confiscating patriots’ guns. In reaction against all this, and the violent resolution of sieges at Waco and elsewhere, a large-scale militia movement emerged, some of whose leaders had served in Vietnam.

The beliefs that shaped the movement varied from the extreme right to a much more general discontent, but some of those involved harbored a remarkably detailed vision of imminent tyranny, in which a treacherous federal government, in cahoots with the United Nations, would carve up the republic.

This was an early sign of the worldview that has now come to dominate US politics, with its fears of a phantom ‘deep state’, rooted in unease about the federal government’s power. In the 1990s, the image that crystallized this fear was a sinister apparition on the skyline: the unmarked black helicopter.

Read: Reviving Islamic Discourse and Rationalism

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The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his articles.

The post Images tell the real story first appeared on Sindh Courier.

• If history is not carefully reconstructed using contemporary evidence and logical reasoning, and if it is not responsibly presented to the public, we risk forever living with a ‘mystical view of an imagined past’ with all its attendant dangers

By Nazarul Islam | USA

‘As is true of autocracies everywhere’, wrote David Remnick renowned American journalist, last April, ‘this Administration demands a mystical view of an imagined past.’  Although Remnick was referring to Trump’s America, something of the same sort could be said of India today. Informed by Hindutva (Hindu-centric) ideals, the country’s governing BJP party imagines a Hindu ‘golden age’ abruptly cut short when Muslim outsiders invaded and occupied an imagined sacred realm, opening a long and dreary ‘dark age’ of anti-Hindu violence and tyranny. In 2014, India’s prime minister declared that India had experienced 1,200 years of ‘slavery’ (ghulami), referring to ten centuries of Muslim rule and two of the British Raj. But whereas the British, in this view, had the good sense to go home, Muslims never left the land they had presumably violated and plundered. To say the least, India’s history has become a political minefield.

Between the early 16th and the mid-18th century, towards the end of those 12 centuries of alleged ‘slavery’, most of South Asia was dominated by the Mughal Empire, a dazzling polity that, governed by a dynasty of Muslims, was for a while the world’s richest and most powerful state. Although it declined precipitously during the century before its liquidation by Queen Victoria in 1858, today’s India would be unrecognizable without the imprint the Mughals had made, and continue to make, on its society and culture. It was they who, for the first time, unified most of South Asia politically. On every 15 August since 1947, India’s Independence Day, the country’s prime minister unintentionally acknowledges the Mughals’ political legacy by delivering a nationwide address from the parapets of the mightiest symbol of Mughal power – Delhi’s massive Red Fort, built in 1648.

Much of modern India’s administrative and legal infrastructure was inherited from Mughal practices and procedures. The basis of India’s currency system today, the rupee, was standardized by the Mughals. Indian dress, architecture, languages, art, and speech are all permeated by Mughal practices and sensibilities. It’s hard to imagine Indian music without the sitar, the tabla, or the sarod. Almost any Indian restaurant, whether in India or beyond, will have its tandoori chicken, kebab, biryani, or shahi paneer.

One can hardly utter a sentence in a north Indian language without using words borrowed from Persian, the Mughals’ official language. India’s most popular entertainment medium – Bollywood cinema – is saturated with dialogue and songs delivered in Urdu, a language that, rooted in the vernacular tongue of the Mughal court, diffused throughout India thanks to its association with imperial patronage and the prestige of the dynasty’s principal capital, Delhi.

Yet, despite all this, and notwithstanding the prime minister’s national address at Delhi’s Red Fort, India’s government is engaged in a determined drive to erase the Mughals from public consciousness, to the extent possible. In recent years it has severely curtailed or even abolished the teaching of Mughal history in all schools that follow the national curriculum. Coverage of the Mughals has been entirely eliminated in Class Seven (for students about 12 years old), a little of it appears in Class Eight, none at all in Classes Nine to 11, and a shortened version survives in Class 12. In 2017, a government tourism brochure omitted any mention of the Taj Mahal, the acme of Mughal architecture and one of the world’s most glorious treasures, completed in 1653. Lawyers in Agra, the monument’s site, have even petitioned the courts to have it declared a Hindu temple.

Although such radical measures have failed to gain traction, the national government has made more subtle efforts to dissociate the monument from the Mughals and identify it with Hindu sensibilities. For example, authorities have eliminated the initial ‘a’ from the name of one of its surrounding gardens, so that what had been Aram Bagh, the ‘Garden of Tranquility’, is now Ram Bagh, the ‘Garden of Ram’, the popular Hindu deity. This is the same deity to which India’s current government recently dedicated an extravagant temple complex on the site of the Babri Masjid, the mosque in eastern India that the Mughal Empire’s founder had built in 1528, but which a mob of Hindu activists tore down brick by brick in 1992.

All of this prompts two related questions: how did a rich, Persian-inflected Mughal culture sink such deep roots in today’s India in the first place? And why in recent years has the memory of that culture come under siege?

Ever since the early 13th century, a series of dynastic houses, known collectively as the Delhi sultanate, had dominated the north Indian plain. The last of these houses, the ethnically Afghan Lodis, was dislodged by one of the most vivid figures in early modern history, Zahir al-Din Babur (1483-1530). In 1526 Babur led an army of mostly free-born Turkish retainers from his base in Kabul, down through the Khyber Pass and onto the wide Indo-Gangetic plain, thereby launching what would become the Mughal Empire.

As was true for the Delhi sultans, the new polity’s success lay in controlling access to ancient trade routes connecting Delhi and Lahore with Kabul, Balkh, and Central Asian markets, such as Samarkand and Bukhara. For centuries, cotton and other Indian goods moved northwards along this route, while horses – more than a hundred thousand annually, by Babur’s day – moved southwards to markets across South Asia. War horses had long formed the basis of power for Indian states, together with native war elephants. But the larger and stronger horses preferred by Indian rulers had to be continually imported from abroad, especially from Central Asia’s vast, long-feathered grasslands where native herds roamed freely.

Having established a fledgling kingdom centered on Delhi, Agra and Lahore, Babur bequeathed to his descendants a durable connection to the cosmopolitan world of Timurid Central Asia, a refined aesthetic sensibility, a love of the natural world reflected in his delightful memoir, the Baburnama, and a passion for gardens. Aiming to recreate in India the refreshing paradisiac spaces that he knew from his Central Asian homeland, Babur built gardens across his realm, a practice his descendants would continue, culminating in the Taj Mahal.

Since he died only four years after reaching India, Babur’s new kingdom merely continued many institutions of the defeated Lodis, such as giving his most trusted retainers land assignments, from which they collected taxes and maintained specified numbers of cavalry for state use. It was Babur’s son Humayun (r. 1530-40, 1555-56) who took the first steps to deepen the roots of Mughal legitimacy in Indian soil, as when he married the daughter of an Indian Muslim landholder rather than a Central Asian Turk, a practice he encouraged his nobles to follow. More importantly, while seated in a raised pavilion (jharokha) that projected from his palace’s outer walls, he would greet the morning’s rising sun and show his face to the public, just as the sun showed itself to him. This followed an ancient practice of Indian rajas that subtly conflated the image of a seated monarch with the icon of a Brahmanical deity, before whom one pays respectful devotion through mutual eye contact (darshan).

The Mughals became further Indianised during the long reign of Humayun’s son Akbar (r. 1556-1605). Whereas for three centuries the Delhi sultans had struggled to defeat the Rajput warrior clans that dominated north India’s politics, Akbar adopted the opposite policy of absorbing them into his empire as subordinate kings. Nearly all Rajput kings accepted this arrangement, for by doing so they could retain rulership over their ancestral lands while simultaneously receiving high-ranking positions in Akbar’s newly created ruling class – the imperial mansabdars.

Their new status also allowed them to operate on an all-India political stage instead of remaining provincial notables. Moreover, they were granted religious freedom, including the right to build and patronize Hindu temples. Over time, there emerged a warrior ethos common to both Mughals and Rajputs that superseded religious identities, allowing the latter to understand Muslim warriors as fellow Rajputs, and even to equate Akbar himself with the deity Rama. For their part, Akbar and his successors, as the Rajputs’ sovereign overlords, acquired regular tribute payments from subordinate dynastic houses, the service of north India’s finest cavalry, access to the sea through Rajasthani trade routes leading to Gujarat’s lucrative markets, and the incorporation of Rajput princesses in the imperial harem.

This last point proved especially consequential. As more Rajput states submitted to Mughal overlordship, the imperial court swelled into a huge, multi-ethnic and women-centered world in which the Rajput element steadily gained influence over other ethnicities. Moreover, since Rajput women could become legal wives of the emperor, from Akbar’s time onwards an emperor’s child by a Rajput mother was eligible for the throne. As a result, Akbar’s son Jahangir (r. 1605-23) was half Rajput, as his mother was a Rajput princess. Jahangir, in turn, married seven daughters of Rajput rulers, one of whom was the mother of his imperial successor Shah Jahan, making the latter biologically three-quarters Rajput.

Inevitably, Rajput mothers in the imperial harem imparted their culture to their offspring, who were raised in the harem world. This allowed Indian sensibilities and values to seep deeply into Mughal imperial culture, reflected in imperial art, architecture, language, and cuisine. At the same time, the absorption of Rajput cavalry in the imperial system allowed native military practices to diffuse throughout the empire’s military culture.

Like all authentically Indian emperors, moreover, the Mughals engaged with Sanskrit literary traditions and welcomed Brahmin and Jain scholars to their courts. From the 1580s on, Akbar sponsored Persian translations of the great Sanskrit epics Mahabharata and Ramayana, effectively accommodating Indian thought to Mughal notions of statecraft. Whereas the Sanskrit Mahabharata stressed cosmic and social order (dharma), its Persian translation stressed the proper virtues of the king. Similarly, the Sanskrit Ramayana was subtly refashioned into a meditation on Mughal sovereignty, while the epic’s hero, Rama, was associated with Akbar himself, as though the emperor were an avatar of Vishnu.

Beginning with Akbar, the Mughals also fostered cultural fusions in the domains of medicine and astronomy.  By the mid-17th century, the Mughals’ Greco-Arab (Yunani) medical tradition had become thoroughly Indianised, as Indo-Persian scholars engaged with Indian (Ayurvedic) works on pharmacology and the use of native Indian plants.

Similarly, from the late 16th century on, Persian-Sanskrit dictionaries allowed Sanskrit scholars to absorb Arabo-Persian ideas that had derived from ancient Greek understandings of the uniformity of nature and laws of motion. That knowledge, together with astronomical tables patronized by Shah Jahan that enabled the prediction of planetary movements, then spread among the Mughal-Rajput ruling class at large.

The most telling indication of the public’s acceptance of the Mughals as authentically Indian is that in both the 18th and 19th centuries, when the empire faced existential threats from outside, native forces rallied around the Mughal emperor as the country’s sole legitimate sovereign. In 1739 the Persian warlord Nadir Shah invaded India, routed a much larger Mughal army, sacked Delhi, and marched back to Iran with enormous loot, including the symbolically charged Peacock Throne. At this moment, the Marathas, who for decades had fiercely resisted the imposition of Mughal hegemony over the Indian peninsula, realised that the Mughals represented the ultimate symbol of Indian sovereignty and must be preserved at all costs. The Marathas’ chief minister Baji Rao (1700-40) even proposed that all of north India’s political stakeholders form a confederation to support and defend the weakened Mughal dynasty from foreign invaders.

Similarly, by the mid-19th century, the English East India Company had acquired de facto control over much of the subcontinent, while the reigning Mughal ruler, Bahadur II (r. 1837-57), had been reduced to a virtual prisoner in Delhi’s Red Fort, an emperor in name only. But in 1857 a rebellion broke out when a disaffected detachment of the Company’s own Indian troops massacred their English officers in the north Indian cantonment of Meerut. Seeking support for what they hoped would become an India-wide rebellion, the mutineers then galloped down to Delhi and enthusiastically rallied around a rather bewildered Bahadur II.  Notwithstanding his own and his empire’s decrepit condition, to the rebels, this feeble remnant of the house of Babur still represented India’s legitimate sovereign.

Through the Mughals’ twilight years, spanning the two incidents mentioned above, one emperor was especially revered in public memory – ‘Alamgir (r. 1658-1707), widely known today by his princely name, Aurangzeb. Upon his death, large and reverential crowds watched his coffin move 75 miles across the Deccan plateau to Khuldabad, a saintly cemetery in present-day Maharashtra. There, the emperor’s body was placed, at his own request, in a humble gravesite open to the sky, quite unlike the imposing monuments built to glorify the memory of his dynastic predecessors (excepting Babur). That simple tomb soon became an object of intense popular devotion. For years, crowds thronged his gravesite beseeching ‘Alamgir’s intercession with the unseen world, for his saintly charisma (baraka) was believed to cling to his gravesite, just as in life it had clung to his person. For, during his lifetime, the emperor was popularly known as ‘Alamgir zinda-pir, or ‘Alamgir, the living saint’, one whose invisible powers could work magic.

‘Alamgir’s status as a saintly monarch continued to grow after his death in 1707. Already in 1709 Bhimsen Saksena, a former imperial official, praised ‘Alamgir for his pious character and his ability to mobilise supernatural power in the empire’s cause. In 1730, another retired noble, Ishwar Das Nagar, credited ‘Alamgir for the exceptional peace, security, and justice that had characterized his long reign. Nagar’s account followed a spate of histories that praised the emperor as a dedicated, even heroic administrator, and his half-century reign as a ‘golden age’ of governmental efficiency.

Further contributing to ‘Alamgir’s cult was the appearance of hundreds of images depicting the emperor engaged in administration, military activity, or religious devotion. Reflecting the extent of the ‘Alamgir cult, many of these post-1707 paintings were produced not at the imperial court but in north India’s Hindu courts, including those of the Mughals’ former enemies. No other Mughal emperor was so venerated, and for so long a period, as ‘Alamgir.

Over time, however, Indians gradually came to see the Mughal period – and especially ‘Alamgir’s reign – in an increasingly negative light. As the East India Company attained control over South Asia in the late-18th century, British administrators, being unable as foreigners to deploy a nativist rationale to justify their rule, cited the efficiency, justice, peace and stability that they had brought to their Indian colony. And because the Mughals had immediately preceded the advent of Company rule, those rulers were necessarily construed as having been inefficient and unjust despots in a war-torn and unstable land.

The colonial understanding of Muslims and Hindus as homogeneous and mutually antagonistic communities also facilitated aligning colonial policies with the old Roman strategy of divide et impera. More perniciously, the colonial view of the Mughals as alien ‘Mahomedans’ who had oppressed a mainly non-Muslim population reinforced the notion of a native Hindu ‘self’ and a non-native Muslim ‘other’ – constructions that would bear bitter fruit.

Although originating from within the colonial regime, such ideas gradually percolated into the public domain as the 19th century progressed and Indians became increasingly absorbed in the Raj’s educational and administrative institutions. It was not until the 1880s, with the first stirrings of Indian nationalist sentiment, however, that such colonial tropes became widely politicized. As the possibility of an independent nation took root, Indian nationalists began to look to their own past for models that might inspire and mobilize mass support for their cause. The writing of history soon became a political endeavour, ultimately degenerating into a black-and-white morality play that clearly distinguished heroes from villains. In short, India’s precolonial past became a screen onto which many – though not all – Hindu nationalists projected the tropes of the Hindu self and the Muslim other.

Between 1912 and 1924, one of India’s most esteemed historians, Jadunath Sarkar, published his five-volume History of Aurangzib, the princely name of ‘Alamgir, who would soon become the most controversial – and ultimately the most hated – ruler of the Mughal dynasty. Sarkar’s study was so detailed, so thoroughly researched, and so authoritative that, in the century following its publication no other historian even attempted a thorough survey of ‘Alamgir’s reign.

Importantly, Sarkar wrote against the backdrop of the Great War and a nationalist movement that was just then reaching a fever pitch. In 1905 Lord Curzon, the Viceroy for India, had partitioned Sarkar’s native province of Bengal in half, a cynical divide-and-rule measure that ‘awarded’ Bengali Muslims with their own Muslim-majority province of eastern Bengal. The very next year, there appeared the All-India Muslim League, a political party committed to protecting the interests of India’s Muslims. Meanwhile, the partition of Bengal had provoked a furious protest by Bengali Hindus, leading to India-wide boycotts against British-made goods. Ultimately, the government gave in to Hindu demands and in 1911 annulled the partition, which only intensified fear and anxiety within India’s Muslim minority community.

It was in this highly charged political atmosphere that Sarkar worked on his biography of ‘Alamgir. With each successive volume of his study, the emperor was portrayed in darker colours, as were Muslims generally. In the end, Sarkar blamed ‘Alamgir for destroying Hindu schools and temples, thereby depriving Hindus of the ‘light of knowledge’ and the ‘consolations of religion’, and for exposing Hindus to ‘constant public humiliation and political disabilities’. Writing amid the gathering agitation for an independent Indian nation, Sarkar maintained that ‘no fusion between the two classes [Hindus and Muslims] was possible’, adding that while a Muslim might feel that he was in India, he could not feel of India, and that ‘Alamgir ‘deliberately undid the beginnings of a national and rational policy which Akbar [had] set on foot.’

Perhaps more than any other factor, Sarkar’s negative assessment of ‘Alamgir has shaped how millions have thought about that emperor’s place in Indian history. Since the publication of History of Aurangzib, professional historians have generally shied away from writing about the emperor, as though he were politically radioactive. This, in turn, opened up space in India’s popular culture for demagogues to demonize the Mughal emperor. For millions today, ‘Alamgir is the principal villain in a rogues’ gallery of premodern Indo-Muslim rulers, a bigoted fanatic who allegedly ruined the communal harmony established by Akbar and set India on a headlong course that, many believe, in 1947 culminated in the creation of a separate Muslim state, Pakistan.

In today’s vast, anything-goes blogosphere, in social media posts, and in movie theaters, he has been reduced to a cardboard cutout, a grotesque caricature serving as a historical punching bag. A recent example is the film Chhaava, a Bollywood blockbuster that was released on February 14, 2025 and has since rocketed to superstar status. Among films in only their sixth week since release, already by late March it had grossed the second-largest earnings in Indian cinema history.

Loosely based on a Marathi novel of the same title, Chhaava purports to tell the story of a pivotal moment in ‘Alamgir’s 25-year campaign to conquer the undefeated states of the Deccan plateau. These included two venerable sultanates, Bijapur and Golkonda, and the newly formed Maratha kingdom, launched in 1674 by an intrepid chieftain and the Mughals’ arch-enemy, Shivaji (r. 1674-80). The film concerns the reign of Shivaji’s elder son and ruling successor, Sambhaji (r. 1680-89), his struggles with Mughal armies, and finally his capture, torture, and execution at ‘Alamgir’s order in 1689.

The film is not subtle. With its non-stop violence, gratuitous blood and gore, overwrought plot, and black-and-white worldview, the movie turns the contest between Sambhaji and ‘Alamgir into a cartoonish spectacle, like a Marvel Comics struggle between Spiderman and Doctor Doom. Whereas Sambhaji single-handedly vanquishes an entire Mughal army, ‘Alamgir is pure, menacing evil. Mughal armies display over-the-top brutality toward civilians: innocent Indians are hanged from trees, women are sexually assaulted, a shepherdess is burned to death, and so forth.

In reality, ‘Alamgir is not known to have plundered Indian villages or attacked civilians (unlike the Marathas themselves, whose raids in Bengal alone caused the deaths of some 400,000 civilians in the 1740s). On the other hand, contemporary sources record Sambhaji’s administrative mismanagement, his abandonment by leading Maratha officers inherited from his father reign, his weakness for alcohol and merry-making, and how, instead of resisting Mughal forces sent to capture him, he hid in a hole in his minister’s house, from which he was dragged by his long hair before being taken to ‘Alamgir.

Historical accuracy is not Chhaava’s strength, nor its purpose. More important are its consequences. Within weeks of its release, the film whipped up public fury against ‘Alamgir and the Mughals. In one venue where the movie was showing, a viewer wearing medieval warrior attire rode into the theatre on horseback; in another, a viewer became so frenzied during the film’s protracted scene of Sambhaji’s torture that he leapt to the stage and began tearing the screen apart.

Politicians swiftly joined the fray. In early March, a member of India’s ruling BJP party demanded that ‘Alamgir’s grave be removed from Maharashtra, the heartland of the Maratha kingdom. On 16 March another party member went further, demanding that the emperor’s tomb be bulldozed. The next day, a riot broke out in Nagpur, headquarters for the far-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, India’s paramilitary Hindu supremacist organization. It began when around 100 activists who supported bulldozing ‘Alamgir’s grave burned an effigy of the emperor. In response, a group of the city’s Muslims staged a counter-protest, culminating in violence, personal injuries, the destruction of property, and many arrests. The fevered demand for bulldozing ‘Alamgir’s final resting place, however, is deeply ironic. In 1707, Sambhaji’s son and eventual successor to the Maratha throne, Shahu, traveled 75 miles by foot to pay his pious respects to ‘Alamgir’s tomb.

In the end, the furor over ‘Alamgir’s gravesite illustrates the temptation to adjust the historical past to conform to present-day political priorities. Indicating the Indian government’s support for Chhaava’s version of history, in late March, India’s governing party scheduled a special screening of the film in New Delhi’s Parliament building for the prime minister, Cabinet ministers, and members of parliament.

Nor is it only the historical past that is being adjusted to accord with present-day imagination. So is territory. In 2015, the Indian government officially renamed New Delhi’s Aurangzeb Road – so-named when the British had established the city – after a former Indian president. Eight years later, the city of Aurangabad, which Prince Aurangzeb named for himself while governor of the Deccan in 1653, was renamed Sambhaji Nagar, honouring the man the emperor had executed in 1689.

Such measures align with the government’s broader agenda to scrub from Indian maps place names associated with the Mughals or Islam and replace them with names bearing Hindu associations, or simply to Sanskritise place-names containing Arabic or Persian lexical elements. Examples include: Mustafabad to Saraswati Nagar (2016), Allahabad to Prayagraj (2018), Hoshangabad to Narmadapuram (2021), Ahmednagar to Ahilyanagar (2023), and Karimgunj to Sribhumi (2024). Many more such changes have been proposed – at least 14 in the state of Uttar Pradesh alone – but not yet officially authorized.

It is said that the past is a foreign country. Truly, one can never fully enter the mindset of earlier generations. But if history is not carefully reconstructed using contemporary evidence and logical reasoning, and if it is not responsibly presented to the public, we risk forever living with a ‘mystical view of an imagined past’ with all its attendant dangers, as Remnick warns.

Read: Glimpses from the British Raj

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The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his articles.

The post History is stranger than fiction first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Nazarul Islam | USA

Let me begin my article from India’s colonial past. “Every nerve a man may strain, every energy he may put forward, cannot be devoted to a nobler purpose than keeping tight the cords that hold India to ourselves,’ This unusual quote is attributed to Lord Curzon, who was one of the few British viceroys in India, who had struggled to develop a lasting emotional attachment to the country. Curzon possessed a perceptive grasp of history and geography. It was geopolitics, for Curzon that held the key to keeping India under British control.

In particular, having travelled across the larger Middle East in his formative years, Curzon understood the importance of the Persian Gulf for India’s westward security. Following in the footsteps of the Portuguese general Albuquerque, Curzon believed that a permanent British base in the Gulf could serve as a bridgehead to Bombay. The Persian Gulf is landlocked in all directions except the southeast. Mastery over the Gulf of Oman and the larger western Arabian Sea translated into control of the Persian Gulf. Geographically, Muscat is closer to Mumbai than Kolkata. If British ships could control the waterways of the Gulf, a seamless maritime highway would connect London’s interests in the larger Middle East to the Indian subcontinent. After all, other European powers had penetrated the East through the oceans. By the early twentieth century, when Curzon served in India as the Queen’s viceroy, Pax Britannica was writ large over the Persian Gulf. The cords of commerce connected the destinies of the Gulf sheikhdoms with the Indian subcontinent.

While contemporary India is no more a sea-spanning empire with extractive tendencies, implicit echoes of British policy inform India’s policy towards the Gulf. Delhi’s strategy radiates a strategic legacy of the Raj – a geopolitical imperative that informed the seasoned hands of the British Indian Foreign Office. Clinical calculation is back. In a departure from its post-independence past, Delhi now refers to the Gulf as its ‘extended neighborhood’.

In the late 18th century, the British position in the Gulf was not without its challenges. Competitors like France desired to control its waters. From roughly around 1835, the rulers of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Ajman, the al-Qasimi empire, Umm al-Quwain and Bahrain entered into a ‘Trucial system’ with British India. The Arab chiefs forfeited their right to wage war by sea in return for British protection from any external aggression. Kuwait and Oman also had similar longstanding agreements with the British. This system effectively placed the Gulf under the sphere of influence of British India. In time, British India’s political resident, headquartered in Bushire, would come to control, directly and indirectly, the destinies of Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Sharjah, Muscat, Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

By the 19th century, another gambler had entered the arena: Russia. Safeguarding India’s ramparts from Russian influence was crucial to protecting Britain’s Asian empire. Any Russian presence in southern Persia would directly threaten the security of British India. In essence, there was a direct inter-linkage between the security of the Indian subcontinent and the Persian Gulf. After coming to India as the Queen’s viceroy in 1899, Curzon was aghast at the Foreign Office’s inertia on matters relating to the Gulf. He started sending home incessant dispatches about Britain’s tenuous policy in the region. After much prodding, the then-Foreign Secretary, the Marquess of Lansdowne, proclaimed a British version of the Monroe Doctrine in the Persian Gulf. ‘If any other power established a naval base or fortified port in that sea, Britain would regard it as a very grave menace to her interests and would resist with all the means at her disposal’.

By 1903, Curzon was touring the Gulf States in a flamboyant display of British India’s naval prowess. Armed with an impressive flotilla, he visited Muscat, Sharjah, Bandar Abbas, Bahrain, Kuwait and Bushire. At various moments during the trip, he reminded the local sheikhs and chiefs that British naval protection had kept order in the region and facilitated trade and commerce. Curzon’s obsession with the Gulf reached such a crescendo that many in the Foreign Office circles even referred to the Persian Gulf as the Curzon Lake. Articulating Curzon’s view of the Persian Gulf, the then Times of India editor wrote:

Another British official who had embodied the geopolitical vision of the Raj was relatively less known Olaf Caroe. During his long career in the Indian Political Service, Caroe even served as acting resident in the Persian Gulf. By the start of the Second World War, he was made the Foreign Secretary to the Government of India. Reminiscent of Curzon, Caroe paid great attention to the unyielding facts of geography. As the historian Peter John Brobst put it, ‘they both had a clear sense that what British India was up to was what preceding empires had done’. Brobst had further argued, ‘Geopolitics is a condition, not an ideology. Geopolitics moves with empires; it doesn’t necessarily change’.

In linking the Persian Gulf to India, Caroe took a step further than Curzon. He referred to the vast region between the Euphrates and Indus as ‘Southwest Asia’. The Persian Gulf formed the throbbing heart of this interconnected zone. Caroe was also deeply aware of India’s pre-British influence in the Arab Gulf and southern Persia. Indian merchant families had crisscrossed the region’s waters since the time of the Harappan civilization, which traded with Akkad, Sumer, and the Omani Peninsula. In his book Wells of Power, Caroe reasoned:

By the time of the First World War, Germany had emerged as another rival menacing British India’s ‘informal empire’ in the Gulf from the West. While the Russians sought access through Persia, Germany established close ties with the Ottomans. Britain’s hegemony in the Atlantic forced Germany to look to the Persian Gulf for access to the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. Not being a Mediterranean power further hobbled German maritime ambitions. The much-trumpeted Berlin-Baghdad railway was a product of this thinking. Like many of their European predecessors, the Germans also believed that the Gulf was the gateway to India.

The world wars of the 20th century both confirmed the wisdom of the view developed by Curzon and Caroe. During the First World War, Indian troops under British control occupied Mesopotamia. In 1920, Britain formed, and assumed control of, the League of Nations Mandate for Mesopotamia, whose territories – extending from Basra in the south to Mosul in the north – became modern-day Iraq. The Indian army was also deployed in other theatres of the Middle East and East Africa to secure British interests.

The story in the Second World War was no different. The British war machine operated on the oil pumped from Iraqi fields in Mosul and Kirkuk, while the Iranian oil fields in Abadan also proved significant. At London’s behest, the Indian army was deployed in Iraq and Iran to serve imperial interests. As Srinath Raghavan argues, India was the ‘central strategic reservoir of the British Empire’. Without much choice of their own, multitudes of Indian men sailed across the seas to defend the empire. British power depended on Indian sacrifices.

Barring its prominence in war and conflict, the first quarter of the 20th century also marked the pinnacle of trading ties between India and the Gulf. Bahrain, Muscat, and Kuwait’s external trade was predominantly linked to India. British planners also envisioned an earlier version of the present India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor. The idea was to connect undivided India with the Middle East through a railway line. The project would enable Delhi to access the Mediterranean and Central Europe – an ambition that remains relevant today.

The tumult of independence and the need to maintain stability in the new republic drained the energies of India’s political elite after 1947. On external matters, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru proclaimed a break from the past. Like Curzon and Caroe, he too was a keen scholar of world history. He argued that given India’s size, geography and teeming resources, India would play a ‘pivotal’ role in the security of Asia and the larger Indian Ocean region. At one instance in 1946, he stated that India was the ‘pivot of Western, Southern and Southeast Asia’. Put otherwise, Nehru was not oblivious to the geopolitical heritage that he inherited from the Raj. For example, India’s relations with Nepal and Bhutan as states under its implicit sphere of influence symbolized a lingering inheritance of the Raj. Partition might be a chip on India’s shoulder, yet India remained at the heart of the Indian Ocean.

The difference in Jawaharlal Nehru’s outlook and that of the Raj arose in military terms. While the Raj backed its foreign policy pronouncements with military deterrence, post-1947 India relied on its civilizational and cultural history to maintain its influence in Asia. During much of the Cold War, India’s implicit preference for the Soviet Union smoothed its ties with socialist and secular regimes in the Middle East. Nasser’s Egypt and Ba’athist Iraq were the central pillars of India’s West Asia (Middle East) policy.

Yet, independent India largely ignored the old Indo-British connection to the Persian Gulf. Delhi remained sceptical of Pakistan’s close ties with the Gulf Arabs. Distrust of the US also spilt into India’s external outlook. Anything to do with American allies was a red line in India.

The post-Cold War period triggered a profound realignment in India’s strategic posture. Economic travails at home forced India to cast aside stale ideas of protectionism and central planning. As the Indian economy integrated into international markets, Delhi’s appetite to play a larger role on its western periphery multiplied. Rising energy requirements, needed to propel the domestic economy, a vibrant diaspora in the Gulf countries, and the importance of keeping sea lanes open propelled India to re-establish its longstanding relationship with the Arab Gulf states.

The sentiment in the UAE and Saudi Arabia was also positive. As a former Indian ambassador to Riyadh told me, senior members of the royal family asked, ‘Why has India forgotten us?’ From the Gulf perspective, expanding ties with India made sense. Delhi was a significant market for Gulf oil, as well as an emerging Asian power with a shared maritime geography. At the same time, an expanding services sector made India an attractive economic partner.

Let me recall the infamous terrorist attacks on Mumbai in 2008, which created firmer political ground for India-Gulf ties. For a long time, royals in Riyadh had been sympathetic to Islamabad’s argument over the Kashmir issue. However, as terrorists struck Mumbai in 2008, the Gulf monarchies had quickly perceived the attacks as a case of state-sponsored terrorism against civilians; in their eyes, this had nothing to do with any ‘popular uprising’ in Kashmir.

Evidence collected, have indicated perpetrators had arrived in Mumbai via the maritime route. The Persian Gulf littoral was closer to Karachi than Mumbai. As a senior Indian diplomat serving in the region put it, ‘A point that particularly worried the Gulf was that they were next door to Pakistan. India is far away compared to the Gulf and has a navy. Yet [India] was wounded. What about us? We can’t sustain such an attack’. Moreover, for many royals in the Gulf, ‘the attack was very personal. The Taj Hotel has an iconic status in the Gulf. Many people in the Gulf had lived in the Taj since childhood’.

Witnessing the terror attack live on their television screens had a powerful impact on the political elite in the Gulf monarchies. Following the attacks, India initiated intelligence and security cooperation with Saudi Arabia and the UAE in counter-terrorism in quick succession.

From India’s perspective, 2014 marked a pivotal point in the country’s foreign policy outlook with the assumption of office by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He demonstrated a willingness to rethink India’s engagement with the world. After this point, the legacy of the Raj began to shape India’s external outlook more forcefully. Breaking away from past conventions, Modi made the Gulf States an immediate foreign policy priority. Since 2014, Modi’s successive visits to the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain have infused personal political capital in these relationships. India’s new enthusiasm for cooperating with Israel also fits well with the cooperation between Israel and the moderate Gulf Arab monarchies, such as the UAE and Bahrain. While Saudi Arabia may not publicly voice it, given the situation in Gaza, Riyadh shares Delhi’s affinity for Tel Aviv.

During his visits to regional countries, Modi has continued to pay homage to martyred Indian soldiers who died in the world wars fighting for British India. Modi’s visits are an implicit acknowledgement of British India’s role in the Indian Ocean region in the pre-1947 period. For example, during his 2017 visit to Israel, Modi paid tribute at the Indian War Cemetery in Haifa. He acknowledged the role played by Indian soldiers from Mysore, Hyderabad and Jodhpur who ‘liberated’ Haifa in the First World War. In 2023, during his visit to Egypt, Modi went to the Heliopolis Memorial to commemorate the 4,000 Indian soldiers who died fighting for British India in the Middle Eastern theatre during the First World War.

Two years earlier, India’s external affairs minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, made his own visit to pay tribute to Indian soldiers who lost their lives during the First World War at the Talpiot Cemetery in Israel. Jaishankar has also publicly spoken about British India’s role in shaping the geopolitical equilibrium in Asia. In 2021, he made the first explicit articulation, by any Indian minister, of British India’s strategic relevance in the Gulf and the broader Indian Ocean region, while discussing the sacrifices made by Indian soldiers in the Gallipoli Campaign during the First World War.

It is worth quoting Jaishankar in full:

For an Indian minister to allude to historical events where Indians have ‘shed blood’ for advancing British causes would be labelled blasphemous even a few years ago. Yet, as Jaishankar’s speech shows, a good place to begin thinking about India’s expanding role on the international stage is to revisit the history of British India. The ghosts of Curzon and Caroe haunt the corridors of New Delhi.

Structural factors like maritime security cooperation also carry a slight tinge of British Indian thinking in our times. Consider Oman. Following its long history of ties with British India, Muscat became the first Gulf Arab country to promote naval cooperation with independent India after 1947. Oman’s position at the entrance of the Gulf of Oman and onwards to the Persian Gulf makes it crucial for any major seapower. Muscat is also the first regional player to conduct biennial military exercises with all three services of the Indian military. In 2018, the Indian Navy was granted access to the deep-sea port of Duqm under a broad logistics agreement. Delhi’s maritime cooperation with the UAE and Saudi Arabia has also grown gradually over the last few years.

Meanwhile, Delhi has conducted regional maritime operations during times of crisis. In 2019, 23 Indian naval vessels were deployed in the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman to protect the country’s vital sea lanes of communication as regional uncertainty escalated. Again, in early 2024, the Indian Navy deployed 12 warships in the western Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Aden for anti-piracy operations to counter Houthi rebels and Somali pirates operating in regional waters.

Apart from directly safeguarding India’s commercial and security interests, Delhi’s growing presence also aims to balance China’s increasing influence in the broader Arabian Sea region. What Russia was to Curzon, China is to Jaishankar. As a former Indian ambassador to Oman argued, ‘India is concerned about the southern and western Indian Ocean. So our understanding is that the Australians don’t have that reach. The Japanese are not interested, because they have problems in their region. And as the US concentrates on that side, it will be India which will have to bear the responsibility of the western Indian Ocean, right up to the coast of Africa and even beyond.’

Invoking Curzon and Caroe does not imply that India has the intention to assume any responsibilities as a regional security guarantor for the Gulf in the same way that British India once did, at least not in the foreseeable future. Nor is India nostalgic about bygone empires. Indians are fiercely protective of their independent identity (as are the Arab Gulf states). Nonetheless, the ideas that animated Curzon and Caroe refuse to be forgotten. The centrality of India in the Indian Ocean region will, sooner or later, compel it to play a greater security role in its peripheral areas. As India’s economic size and interests grow, its security perimeter will expand accordingly. It is a case of when, not if.

Reflecting on the perennial dilemma of Indian policymakers perched in Delhi, a former foreign secretary and national security advisor said, ‘We have too much history for our own good’. Perhaps, therein lies the rub.

Read: Observations: Echoes from My Past

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The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his articles.

The post Glimpses from the British Raj first appeared on Sindh Courier.

• He was captured in July 1953 when villagers betrayed and handed him over to the police. He was hanged on April 30, 1954 when his appeal for commutation of the life sentence was denied by the Governor of Sindh

Farooq Sargani

The colonial period ended in 1947 with the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, yet the Hur rebellion continued under the leadership of Rahim Hingoro, also known as “Rahim Badshah,” targeting those who had betrayed Pir Sighatullah Shah, their spiritual leader martyred by the British rulers. To curb the resistance movement, Pakistan’s first Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan went to England to meet the sons of Pir Pagaro. As a result of negotiations, Pir Pagaro’s two sons returned to Pakistan and assured the Prime Minister that they would not disturb law and order in the new country. Consequently, in 1952, the Gadi (the spiritual headship) was restored.

The Hur uprising continued for a few years after independence but gradually petered out as their leaders, including Hingoro, were gradually rounded up. In the last phase of the Hur insurgency, Rahim Hingoro led the Hur guerrillas from his headquarters in the Makhi forest. Even H. T. Lambrick confirmed that regular commands were issued under Hingoro’s seal. After the restoration of the Gadi, Pir Pagaro Shah Mardan Shah ordered his followers to surrender, but Hingoro, along with many other Hur insurgents, refused.

The state declared Hingoro the most notorious terrorist of South Asia, accusing him of murdering hundreds of people and disturbing the India–Pakistan border area. Hingoro reportedly moved from one region to another without restriction because supporters of Pir Pagaro resided on both sides of the border. He was captured in July 1953 when villagers betrayed and handed him over to the police. He was incarcerated in Hyderabad jail. According to the New York Times, Pir Pagaro, instead of condoning Hingoro, helped police and military authorities track him down.

Meanwhile, his wife, Bhagi Hingoro, continued to wander the deserts. She was also a freedom fighter in her own right and, along with Hur guerrillas, engaged British troops on several occasions. After Rahim Hingoro’s imprisonment, she organized plans to liberate him, and with bands of Hur guerrillas attacked Hyderabad jail. Six hours of tension ensued between the police and the Hur guerrillas. In the ensuing chaos, Rahim Hingoro attempted to escape the prison but was injured by electrocution from the electric fence. Ultimately, the government decided to hang him on April 30, 1954, and his appeal for commutation of the life sentence was denied by the Governor of Sindh.

Nevertheless, Rahim Hingoro and other Hur guerrillas remain heroes in the history of Sindh. With Hingoro’s death, the second phase of the Hur movement came to an end.

Read: Hur women of Sindh fought guerrilla war against the British

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The author is freelance writer. He has graduated from Karachi University

The post Rahim Hingoro: The Last Hur Fighter first appeared on Sindh Courier.

• Their ‘smallness’ in the grand imperial schema and their indigenous character meant they were often sidelined in histories written by imperial chroniclers and later colonial historians.
• Revisiting their legacy is not just about glorifying the past; it is about learning how local leadership, rooted in cultural empathy and social justice, can create sustainable and inclusive societies

By Abdullah Usman Morai | Sweden

Reclaiming the Indigenous Voice of Sindh

In the grand mosaic of South Asian history, few dynasties have been as historically significant yet systematically underrepresented as the Soomro Dynasty of Sindh. Flourishing between the 11th and 14th centuries, the Soomros were not just rulers; they were pioneers of native Muslim governance in a region long under foreign dominion. They marked a critical shift in Sindh’s political landscape, transitioning from Arab-Islamic colonial control to an indigenous Islamic rule rooted in local traditions. Despite their pioneering status, their story is absent from many mainstream historical narratives in Pakistan. This article aims to revisit their legacy, explore the nuances of their governance, culture, and challenges, and argue for their rightful place in the collective historical memory of the region.

Origins and the Rise of the Soomros

The Soomros emerged in the aftermath of the weakening Abbasid Caliphate and the decline of Arab control over Sindh. The region had been governed for over three centuries by Arab governors after Muhammad bin Qasim’s conquest in 712 CE. As the Abbasid authority waned, local tribal elites, particularly the Soomros, believed to be a Sindhi Rajput tribe that embraced Islam, began to consolidate power. This transition was not merely political; it symbolized a reassertion of Sindhi identity within an Islamic framework.

The founder of the dynasty, Soomar bin Rao Soomar, established control around 1025 CE, and his successors continued to strengthen their grip over key cities like Mansura, Thatta, and later Bukkur and Sehwan. The Soomros brought political power back to the local population, governing not as distant invaders but as sons of the soil, sharing language, customs, and cultural lineage with their people.

Dodo Soomro was a distinguished ruler of Sindh during the era of the Soomro dynasty, a period marked by resistance, pride, and the preservation of Sindhi identity. Dodo Soomro, one of its most iconic and legendary figures, is remembered not only for his governance but more so for his courage, honor, and unshakable commitment to Sindh. His rule symbolized Sindhi resilience in the face of foreign invasion and tyranny. Most famously, the story of Dodo Soomro’s stand against invaders, especially as portrayed in Sindhi folklore and poetry, has elevated him to the status of a national hero. The epic of Dodo Chanesar immortalizes him as a brave king who chose death over dishonor and defiance over submission. His legacy lives on in Sindh’s collective memory as a symbol of valor, self-respect, and undying love for the motherland.

Governance and Administrative Strategies

Soomro governance, though not documented in great administrative detail like the Mughal bureaucracy, showed a form of proto-feudalism mixed with tribal autonomy. They established a localized administration where tribal chieftains were integrated into the ruling apparatus through mutual allegiance. This ensured loyalty while allowing for the preservation of tribal traditions and power structures.

The capital city of Mansura became a vibrant hub of trade, culture, and scholarship under their rule. Agricultural policies ensured the maintenance of canal irrigation systems along the Indus, a vital lifeline for the agrarian economy. The Soomros also promoted fair taxation and land rights, practices that reflected their understanding of the peasant base of Sindh’s economy.

Cultural and Religious Synthesis

One of the most remarkable aspects of the Soomro rule was their approach to religion and culture. Unlike the orthodoxy of foreign rulers, the Soomros nurtured a unique synthesis between Islamic values and indigenous Sindhi traditions. They supported the growth of Sufism, which became the spiritual heart of Sindh. Saints like Lal Shahbaz Qalandar and Sachal Sarmast, among others, found fertile ground for their teachings even during, and short and long after the Soomro rule.

The Soomros used Sindhi and Arabic as court languages, promoting literary development. Oral history, poetry, and folk tales from this era reveal a culture where devotion, tolerance, and local identity were seamlessly integrated. Shrines, mosques, and educational centers flourished under their patronage, with traces still visible in towns like Thatta and Sehwan.

An interesting and unique cultural tradition among women of the Soomro community is that they traditionally do not pierce their noses, a noticeable distinction in a region where nose-piercing is a common and cherished part of feminine identity and adornment. While there is no single documented historical explanation, this practice is deeply rooted in the community’s values and identity. Oral traditions and cultural interpretations suggest that this custom is connected to notions of pride, dignity, and symbolic resistance.

According to some community elders and cultural scholars, the refusal to pierce the nose is believed to have originated during the time of Dodo Soomro and the Soomro dynasty’s resistance against foreign domination. The act of not piercing the nose may have symbolized the strength, independence, and unyielding spirit of Soomro women, representing their unwillingness to conform to foreign customs or to be ornamented for subjugation. It became a silent, generational protest and a badge of identity, preserving a sense of autonomy and self-respect. Even today, many Soomro women continue this tradition with pride, considering it a reflection of their historical roots and cultural dignity. This small yet powerful gesture ties them back to a time when even the smallest customs were infused with meaning and resistance.

Soomros in Verse: Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, Shaikh Ayaz, and the Memory of Sindh

Sindh’s great Sufi poet, Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, and the modern revolutionary voice of Sindhi poetry, Shaikh Ayaz, both make references to the Soomros in their works. The Soomro dynasty holds an important place in Sindhi history, not only as a political power but also as a symbol of resistance, identity, and cultural pride. Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, in his verses, often evoked historical and legendary figures to highlight themes of bravery, loyalty, and the defense of Sindh’s soil, and the Soomros naturally found their place in this poetic universe. For him, their mention became a way of connecting spiritual wisdom with worldly struggles for justice and freedom.

Shaikh Ayaz, centuries later, also invoked the Soomros in his poetry, but with a more modern sensibility, linking their historical role to contemporary issues of identity, nationalism, and resistance against oppression. For Ayaz, the Soomros were not just rulers of the past; they symbolized the enduring spirit of Sindh and its people’s quest for dignity and autonomy. By mentioning them, both poets, Bhittai and Ayaz, created a bridge between Sindh’s history and its living cultural memory, making the Soomros an essential thread in the fabric of Sindhi literature and consciousness.

Foreign Relations and Conflicts

The Soomros ruled during a time when larger powers like the Ghaznavids and Ghurids were expanding in the region. Sindh, with its fertile plains and access to the Arabian Sea, was a coveted territory. The Soomros managed to retain autonomy largely through strategic diplomacy, intermarriage, and at times, military resistance.

For instance, when Mahmud of Ghazni attempted to extend his influence into Sindh, the Soomros resisted successfully, avoiding outright annexation. This act of defiance is often overlooked in Pakistani textbooks, yet it underscores their resilience. Later, the Delhi Sultanate under Alauddin Khilji posed another challenge, and while some Soomro territories eventually fell under imperial control, their core regions resisted full assimilation for decades.

Decline and End of the Dynasty

Like many dynasties, internal conflicts and external pressures led to the Soomro Dynasty’s decline by the mid-14th century. The rise of the Samma Dynasty, initially vassals or rivals, marked the next chapter in Sindh’s history. The Sammas, particularly under Jam Nizamuddin II, would go on to rule Thatta and further Sindh’s cultural and architectural heritage. Yet, they built on the foundations laid by the Soomros.

By the end of their rule, the Soomros had governed parts of Sindh for over three centuries. Their fall was not marked by catastrophic defeat but by a gradual absorption into emerging political realities. Many Soomros assimilated into local aristocracies, their descendants continuing to wield influence as landlords and spiritual leaders.

Legacy and Modern Relevance

In addition to Sindh, members of the Soomro community are also found in Pakistan’s Punjab and Balochistan provinces, as well as in the Indian states of Gujarat and Rajasthan, reflecting the historical extent of their geographical presence.

Today, the Soomro name persists in Sindh, not just as a surname but as a symbol of indigenous pride. Politicians like Muhammad Mian Soomro, former Chairman of the Senate of Pakistan and interim Prime Minister, trace their lineage to the dynasty, consciously or unconsciously invoking this ancestral legacy.

Among the most revered modern heirs to the Soomro legacy is Shaheed Allah Bux Soomro, a prominent political leader and two-time Chief Minister of Sindh in the 1930s and early 1940s. Known for his commitment to communal harmony and opposition to colonial rule, he was assassinated in 1943 due to his independent stance and inclusive vision. His life and martyrdom echo the Soomro dynasty’s values of justice, autonomy, and service to the people. Allah Bux Soomro’s legacy is commemorated in Sindh’s political consciousness as a symbol of principled leadership and resistance against both sectarianism and imperialism.

Another notable example is Shaheed Abdul Razzaque Soomro from Moro, revered as a martyr for the Sindhi language. His sacrifice underscores that the Soomros have not only been defenders of Sindh but also staunch guardians of the Sindhi language.

In Sindhi nationalist thought, the Soomros represent a pre-colonial model of self-rule and cultural autonomy. They are invoked in literature, songs, and academic discourses as guardians of Sindh’s soul, defenders of its identity during an age of foreign encroachments.

One compelling case study is the restoration work at Makli Necropolis near Thatta, where some Soomro-era tombs have been discovered and preserved. UNESCO and local historians have pushed for greater recognition of this heritage, using the Soomro legacy as a rallying point for cultural conservation.

In popular culture, the story of Queen Zainab Tari, the legendary Soomro woman who reportedly ruled after her husband’s death, is frequently cited in feminist retellings of Sindhi history. This narrative reflects the inclusive and relatively progressive ethos of Soomro governance.

Why They Were Forgotten

The Soomros were not conquerors from Central Asia or West Asia, nor were they aligned with major empires like the Mughals or Ottomans. Their ‘smallness’ in the grand imperial schema and their indigenous character meant they were often sidelined in histories written by imperial chroniclers and later colonial historians.

Post-partition, the state focused its historical narrative on foreign invaders like Bin Qasim and Ghaznavid rulers to forge a religious identity. Local, nuanced histories like that of the Soomros were downplayed in school curricula.

Reclaiming the Soomros: A Call to Action

To correct this historical amnesia, academia and media must give due space to regional dynasties like the Soomros. Sindh’s universities should incorporate detailed Soomro studies into their syllabi. Museums must document their cultural contributions. Local historians and journalists have a key role in reviving public interest.

In a time when questions of identity, autonomy, and indigenous rights are becoming central in global conversations, the story of the Soomros offers both inspiration and historical grounding. They exemplify how a society can remain rooted in its cultural essence while embracing the universality of Islam.

Conclusion: The Legacy Lives On

The Soomro Dynasty was more than just a political entity; it was a cultural movement, a reclamation of indigenous agency, and a precursor to modern Sindhi identity. By combining Islamic principles with local traditions, by resisting foreign domination without rejecting progress, and by promoting religious pluralism and cultural expression, the Soomros created a model that remains relevant even today.

Revisiting their legacy is not just about glorifying the past; it is about learning how local leadership, rooted in cultural empathy and social justice, can create sustainable and inclusive societies. In a world torn between extremes of global homogenization and sectarian fragmentation, the Soomro Dynasty offers a forgotten but powerful middle path, a legacy waiting to be remembered and revived.

Read: When Systems Fail, Children Miss Education

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Abdullah Soomro, penname Abdullah Usman Morai, hailing from Moro town of Sindh, province of Pakistan, is based in Stockholm Sweden. Currently he is working as Groundwater Engineer in Stockholm Sweden. He did BE (Agriculture) from Sindh Agriculture University Tando Jam and MSc water systems technology from KTH Stockholm Sweden as well as MSc Management from Stockholm University. Beside this he also did masters in journalism and economics from Shah Abdul Latif University Khairpur Mirs, Sindh. He is author of a travelogue book named ‘Musafatoon’. His second book is in process. He writes articles from time to time. A frequent traveler, he also does podcast on YouTube with channel name: VASJE Podcast.

The post The Forgotten Guardians of Sindh first appeared on Sindh Courier.