Delhi University drops course on centuries of Muslim rule in India

NEW DELHI, India (MNTV) — One of India’s leading universities has dropped a decades-old postgraduate course examining the Delhi Sultanate, removing a major period of Muslim rule from its latest history curriculum amid a wider ideological battle over how India’s past is taught.

Delhi University omitted “The Delhi Sultanate: Structures of Authority in Medieval North India (13th-14th Centuries)” from its newly notified third-semester postgraduate history syllabus, The Indian Express reported.

The course examined the establishment and evolution of the Delhi Sultanate, which governed large parts of the Indian subcontinent from the 13th to 16th centuries and profoundly influenced the region’s political institutions, architecture, languages, literature and religious and cultural life.

Another course covering northern India between 1400 and 1550 — the period connecting the later Delhi Sultanate with the emergence of the Mughal Empire — was also left out. It included the study of Afghan political cultures, Sufism and Bhakti religious traditions, literary production and debates surrounding state formation and Islamization.

The changes extend beyond Muslim history. Courses dealing with women in ancient India, ancient political institutions and religious traditions including Buddhism and Jainism were among several papers excluded from the final syllabus.

Only 16 of 38 specialized elective courses proposed by the university’s History Department were included in the syllabus notified Aug. 7. Some of the remaining courses are officially recorded as still being discussed or awaiting consideration.

The removal of the Delhi Sultanate course nevertheless carries particular political significance because it comes amid years of contentious revisions to the teaching of India’s Muslim past under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government.

The Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire together represent centuries in which Muslim dynasties governed substantial parts of the subcontinent.

Their rule produced complex periods of conflict, accommodation and cultural exchange that helped shape modern South Asia, but that history has increasingly become a political battleground for Hindu nationalist groups.

Rights advocates have accused the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and its ideological allies of “saffronization” — reshaping education around a Hindutva interpretation that presents India primarily as an ancient Hindu civilization while portraying centuries of Muslim rule largely through conquest, religious persecution and destruction.

The dispute intensified again this year after revised government school textbooks characterized the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal eras through religious intolerance and violence.

A new eighth-grade textbook described Mughal founder Babur as a “ruthless conqueror,” characterized Emperor Akbar’s rule as combining “brutality and tolerance,” and emphasized Emperor Aurangzeb’s destruction of Hindu and Sikh places of worship.

Earlier textbook revisions had already reduced or removed material dealing with the Mughals and Delhi Sultanate, while Delhi University itself changed its undergraduate history curriculum in 2023, including removing references to “Brahmanisation” and dropping a course examining inequality and social difference.

Such changes have fueled concerns among historians and opposition politicians that curriculum revision is becoming a means of reconstructing national memory — diminishing the complexity and contributions of Muslim-ruled periods while elevating a Hindu-centric account of India’s past.