Free website to read the only available copy of the book yourself: Archive.org link

A PDF from having saved it from the aforementioned.

I can only give my own subjective opinion, but I was personally so blown away by how informative this book was that I felt so compelled to keep reading and it was never boring. I don’t quite know how to put in terms how amazing this book was and how much I’d have preferred reading a physical copy instead of a PDF copy that had some parts very difficult to read due to the legibility in some parts, which I later cross-referenced with similar written material in a PDF copy of one of his other works, “Indian Muslims: Who Are They?” to better understand everything. It was barely different in those key points and I was able to read most of the more difficultly smudged portions by powering through. This book was basically everything I ever wanted in terms of a general overview of understanding important portions of India’s history during Islamic conquest and rule, which I didn’t ever get a clear picture of when reading Western Indologists. I’m very sorry if that sounds political, but it shouldn’t be and I can only give my own best arguments in as honest a manner possible.

From Historian Kishori Saran Lal’s book, Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India, he makes the case as follows: within the Preface, he explains that Hindus and Muslims clashed and coexisted for eight-hundred years, which seemed far more academically honest than others. Kishori Saran Lal explains in Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India that the estimates are based upon significant historical computation of reported demographic behavior from the sources that he’s used. He separated the time periods into four parts of: A. D. 1000 to 1200, 1200 to 1400, 1400 to 1600, and 1600 to 1800 on the basis of the rise and fall of different Islamic monarchies and their overall impact on the population of India. Lal explains that much of the book’s studies were assisted by other professors during his time researching and writing it; a visiting Professor of the University of Chicago, David F. Lach provided him with demographic tables of European cities. This was to compare population estimates to how European travelers compared different locales in India to their own European civilizations. He explains a Professor of Demography in the Institute of Economic Growth, Ashish Bose, read through the first draft, offered advice for certain areas of the book, and helped Lal prepare the Tables and Diagrams. Dr. Suren Navalakha of the Asian Research Centre gave significant information to assist in better understanding the growth of the Muslim population in Bengal. Dr. H. C. Varma prepared the Index of the book. Something I’ve never seen anyone mention is that K.S. Lal explained some of the calculations for his research were done by Dr. Feroz Ahmad of the Physics department of the University of Delhi; Lal briefly mentions that Dr. Ahmad did this “ungrudgingly” which means that Dr. Ahmad wanted to help.

In “Part I: The Data” within the subsection “Source Materials and Limitations of Demographic Data” from pages three through nine, K. S. Lal explains data of 1000 – 1200 is done by cross-referencing among various Arab or Persian geographers and travelers and he makes the case that he only added their estimates of the population sizes as authentic when they all agreed upon the same events and the similar range of figures or archaeology could back-up their claims.[1] He notes on page four the example that Alberuni, Utbi, Baihaqi, Ibn al-Asir all give similar information on the decline and dispersal of the Indian population due to Mahmud of Ghazni’s invasions of India, as an example.[2] Data from 1300 – 1700s by Islamic court officials and Islamic historians would be from people who could directly interview Islamic military officials, including those doing the Islamic war campaigns, and they would have had access to Islamic royal libraries of the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal empire to cross-reference population estimates even if those records no longer exist for us. K.S. Lal lists Ziyariddsu Bafani, Amir Khusrau. Isaml, and Shams Siraj Afif as his sources for the Delhi Sultanate period; for the Mughal time period, he lists Babur, Abul Fazl, Nizamuddin Ahmad, Khafi Khan, and says that Firishta (formally named Muhammad Qasim Hindu Shah Astarabadi) is a very descriptive writer. He explains they’re ultimately the most trustworthy, even if they do exaggerate a few numbers here or there; the references to the historic times of Emperor Akbar are especially useful because Akbar had multiple population consensuses done during his time, even if those records were lost. On page five, Lal explains that from the 16^th century onwards, Persian writers become very detailed including with information on population statistics.[3]

Within the subsection where he explains the methodological limits titled “Some Methodological Problems of Estimating Population” which range from pages ten through twenty-two, K.S. Lal explains on page ten that definite population statistics don’t exist for any country in pre-consensus times and all historians are forced to work with the limitations of those who were eyewitness accounts and evidence provided by archaeology. K.S. Lal explains the limits of the Arab and Persian writers is that they’re faulty with figures and statistics when it comes to the number of towns and villages on pages 10 – 11; judging from what he explains later, it seems that the Arab and Persian writers had very good details about urban life, but let their imagination run wild on villages because they never bothered to visit them. For example, on page eighteen, Lal says that Islamic historians gave very thorough and detailed information on the pricing of foodgrains, the amount and rate of revenue of their respective Sultanates and Islamic empires, price-schedules on revenue demands, and the listings of other commodities. K.S. Lal further explains on page 18 as follows regarding how he utilized this information and why it is important: “For instance, many chroniclers give reliable data about the prices of foodgrains and other commodities pertaining to their times. About the same period the amount of revenue, the rate of revenue, the price-schedules on which the revenue demand was settled, are also given. All this information helps in calculating ‘the total amount of produce on which the then population subsisted and estimating, on the basis of per capita consumption of foodgrains and other edibles, the then density of population. Thus, in spite of their few weaknesses, the facts and figures supplied by medieval chroniclers are of great value in our study.”[4] Therefore, the urban population statistics are vastly more reliable because the overwhelming majority of these writers were actually there to visit these places at the time and they made copious notes. A major weakness is that, due to receiving patronage from Islamic rulers and Islamic royal families, some Islamic writers tended to exaggerate the military size of the Sultans and Emperors as a way of glorifying them in the battlefield. Unless there is archaeological evidence or other writers giving context to support these claims, the strength of the Islamic military forces needed to be carefully assessed with skepticism and cross-referenced by the other writers who give similar statistics on military forces to give credibility to the numbers. K.S. Lal essentially always chose the conservative estimates by writers on the scale of massacres of Hindus and only accepted the sizes of military forces if multiple Islamic writers cited the same range of statistical figures.

Islamic court officials giving detailed accounts about the military forces of Sultans and Emperors were essentially more reliable due to the rich amount of details on the number of forces, weaponry, and their accounts of skulls or heads taken from the massacres of Hindus. K.S. Lal explains on pages sixteen – seventeen that Medieval wars consisted of Islamic rulers encouraging their military personnel to make a tower of heads or skulls of Hindus by giving cash rewards for slaying them and that the Islamic court officials could count the heads at their leisure, interview military officials who would give them the number of heads counted from military campaigns they participated in, go to the Islamic archives where such records would have been recorded, or be given the information from other government officials who had records. K.S. Lal explains on page seventeen the Islamic historians and recordkeepers had access to court archives for estimated population figures to cross-reference all their material because they were usually serving under the patronage of the Islamic ruler or their royal family[5]; he notes that if foreigners were granted access to the archives, then it’s doubtless that the official Royal Court-appointed historians of the Emperors’ and royal families’ would also have access.[6] Therefore, K.S. Lal says that they are very useful, informative, and trustworthy sources overall despite a few exaggerations and limitations. From 1400s – 1600s, Western travelers and Muslim court officials giving similar or the same estimates of various populations would ultimately be the most trustworthy. The comparison of population statistics that European travelers make to their own European cities are also a useful reference. The most egregious weakness of European travelers specifically, despite their detailed approach, was that they sometimes failed to distinguish Hindus and Muslims and so their information must be taken with great care. K.S. Lal even notes the perplexing information that has dumbfounded historians of India; on pages eighteen – nineteen, he explains that Vasco da Gama was very ignorant of the Hindu religion despite spending three months living in India since his arrival on May 17, 1498. Vasco da Gama mistook a Hindu temple for a chapel and prayed there in Calicut.[7] The major weakness of both Islamic and European writers was that these estimates were mostly for cities and usually did not account for rural areas among all these various groups of people. European travelers and Islamic writers mainly travelled and were interested in urban areas and not rural areas, according to Lal. Moreover, these are obviously pre-modern consensus figures, but K.S. Lal mentions taken altogether the information on India’s population history is above average compared to the gaps in most other societies and it is clear that this is mainly due to the thorough work of Islamic geographers, travelers, and Court officials for approximately seven-hundred to eight-hundred years of history.

This book was frankly amazing. While Kishori Saran Lal has a very slight bias for Hinduism, he doesn’t mince words on how brutal and foolish Hindu Rajas were compared to Muslim Sultans. In Pages 39 – 51, Lal explains that the Turkish and Tughlaq bloodthirsty rule and cruelty was during a time when they had wars with Rajputs and also with each other. Lal makes it clear that Rajputs were warring amongst themselves too. He never ignored Hindu deaths as a result of Intra-Hindu violence. Beyond the trappings of Sultan and Raja, the idea that every ruler had during the Medieval period was to seize it all for their own power and privilege. However, the cruelty visited upon Hindu serfs by Islamic rulers was unique compared to the more sporadic and rarer instances of Hindu Rajas being so murderous to serfs under their rule. This was especially true for the treatment of women. Whereas Buddhism and Adi Shankara’s brand of Brahmanism reduced women’s status; under Islamic rule, women became little more than commodities to be sold and purchased at slave markets alongside their children. I was struck by how the descriptions under the Tughlaq dynasty of Medieval India was no different than the Sabaya system of the Islamic State in 2015 that the New York Times did an expo on. I recall Will Durant mentioning in Our Oriental Heritage how Hindu Rajputs would war with each other to kidnap Hindu princesses to have them married to them prior to Islam’s existence; the bizarre aspect of this was that Hindu Princesses felt thorough gratification in their royal status being held to such high esteem amongst warring Rajputs that they felt it only fitting that a Rajput kidnap them to force them into marriage as an honor and duty. Having men of Princely States build armies and war amongst themselves for a princess’s hand-in-marriage elevated the status of the Hindu princess in the eyes of the broader public of ancient Indian society. I was genuinely dumbfounded by this explanation and I had to fight my natural inclinations of how hilarious and how stupid this sounded to try to understand the minds of ancient people. I could only compare it to Western cultural stories like Snow White and Rapunzel and realized the origin of such stories was probably to make systems like this more palatable for a broader audience; which may have explained the variations throughout different cultures. The Islamic system of slavery did away with this by creating a market where women and children were put up for sale for either the highest Muslim bidder among Muslim armies or the higher-class Muslims picked whatever woman they wanted as a personal slave because of their physical appearance or skills in dancing, singing, or playing musical instruments. Ibn Battuta is quoted stating that Sultans sold Rajas princesses by making them perform for Muslim audiences before selling them to the highest bidder. As paradoxical as it is, the social destruction of hierarchy of Hindu society under Muslim rule made for a more degrading system where women were even put into pens like cattle; again, no different from the New York Times expo on how ISIS treated Yazidi women in 2015.

The majority of Kishori Saran Lal’s consensus data seems very good. Imperial consensus by Akbar the Great on page 64, affirmed an approximately 140 million population size from approximately 170 million prior on pages 48 – 51. The consensus of 140 million is based upon a summation of Akbar the Great’s having done a royal consensus on the twenty-fifth year of his reign where his officials gathered information on households within his empire including individuals in each household. The 170 million approximation is based upon Muslim geographers and historians under the Tughlaq dynasty giving very detailed and dry accounts of the amounts of foodgrain, foodgrain taxes, and Kishori Saran Lal then mathematically computing how much that would typically serve each individual and household after setting aside two-thirds of the material for non-edibles or for animal husbandry in Medieval society. The calculations on the taxes and the sheer largesse of foodgrain amounted to a population of approximately 170 million during Firoz Tughlaq’s reign. In other words, the mathematics of foodgrain pricing from the thorough analyses of Muslim historians and Geographers in the 1380s and Akbar’s population consensus during the twenty-fifth year of his reign which should have been around 1581 confirms a drop in population size of approximately thirty million under Islamic rule. Most of the stories prior to Akbar detailed by Muslim historians’ detail mass slaughter, enslavement, and torture of Hindus by Muslims and not of any famines causing this massive drop in population size. Adding the bloodthirsty massacres of the early Islamic contact period from Mahmud of Ghazni onwards, and the approximation of 60 – 80 million deaths under Islamic rule of India stands the test of time.

However, there is one weakness which is in the mid to late 1500s in Chapter Six, it seems more credible that famine from lack of monsoons and a spread of general diseases related to famine weakening bodily immunity was more the cause of a great many deaths in the millions. What surprised me though is the explanation that within roughly 30 – 40 years most population sizes quickly recovered from many of these famines or bloodlettings from Islamic massacres of Hindus and Buddhists, intra-Islamic wars over the Sultanate throne, intra-Hindu wars over territory, and wars amongst Hindus and Muslims in which the Tughlaq dynasty in general and Aurangzeb of the Mughal empire slaughtered innocent Hindus. While there was much bloodletting, the civilian populations worked to rebuild, recover, and bounce back time after time to the shock of many of the ruling elite; especially the Muslim ruling elite. The resilience of the general Hindu population played a significant factor in why the millions upon millions of deaths can be understood to be credible. Between periods of war campaigns, civilians worked to fix-up what was shattered, migrate to better job opportunities, or repair and rebuild economies until they were improved and thriving just as before they were shattered by mostly Islamic conquests such as sackings and kidnappings of women and children to sell at slave auctions. For as much destruction as was wrought in Medieval India’s history, there was attempts at rebuilding, reconstruction, and returning to the thriving lifestyle through great efforts time after time and it usually succeeded within an approximate forty-year timespan from these communities. After having finished it, I’m left with the impression that the more conservative 60 – 75 million approximation is plausibly closer to a real assessment of the Hindu losses under Islamic rule than the oft-repeated 80 million of the 60 – 80 million range that is given. This is mainly because the rest of the twenty million seems to have been more likely due to mixed factors of famine mortality, intra-Muslim military slaughters caused by rival Muslim militaries upon each other and the slaughter of Muslim civilians over Sultanate thrones, and forced conversions of millions of women and children into Islam as per Jihad theology of kuffar women being spoils of war as slave girls for Muslim men in the Quran (4:3, 4:24, 16:71, 23:5-6, 24:33, 24:58, 33:50). It’s worth mentioning – and I swear that I do not say this lightly, but in an effort for full and thorough honesty – that Great Britain’s mass death toll of India which is also in the 60 – 80 million range happened in half the time as Islamic rule did, it has far more credible evidence to back it up including Britain’s own recordkeeping, and it was far more devastating to India’s economy than anything that came before it from my understanding of the evidence. The facts do seem to support that India needed far more time to rebuild due to how thoroughly brutal British colonialism was to the entire population of India for 250 years in what is now India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh than the damage Islamic rule did for approximately 500 years prior to Akbar the Great’s more peaceful rule.

One aspect that has me thoroughly confused is Indian Muslims and even pseudo-Indologists like Audrey Truschke rallying around the figure of Islamic ruler Aurangzeb when there are much less bloodthirsty Islamic rulers that they could have used as a rallying point and the not-so-insignificant fact that we have a great amount of historical information, including two eyewitness accounts, that could make a compelling argument that Aurangzeb almost certainly murdered more Muslims than any other ruler in India’s entire history. Regardless of their motives, it’s a definitive nail in the coffin for their credibility to rally around this bloodthirsty monarch. In fact, European eyewitness accounts during Aurangzeb’s reign are the ones who confirm this. Page 84 explains that Niccolao Manucci mentions Aurangzeb’s armies destroyed crops and heavily suggests a military campaign not unlike scorched-earth policies. The people being slaughtered and the Kingdoms that Aurangzeb was warring against were independent Muslim Kings of the Deccan and the ones dying from plague due to a mix of the failure of rains and the thorough destruction of crop fields by Aurangzeb’s military were undoubtedly Muslims. Niccolao states over two million people died in just two years from 1702 – 1704; these two million would have to be mostly Muslim peasants ruled under independent Deccan Sultanates. Moreover, he left a desolation of crops during a time when the rain wasn’t falling, which means the death toll of just Muslims must’ve been enormous afterwards due to Aurangzeb’s war campaigns against independent Muslim Sultans; especially if the confirmed record of two million Muslim deaths in just two years due to Aurangzeb’s wars is anything to go by. K.S. Lal also cites the more neutral Khafi Khan on pages 84 – 85, a Mughal historian who was also an eyewitness, who explains there were mass killings, the burning down of populated locations, he confirms a purposeful scorched-earth policy on cultivation, starvation of carriage-animals, and a general massacring of the populous. . . all of these victims would have been Muslim peasants. Khafi Khan likely waited until Aurangzeb’s death because he wanted to be honest about what was done to the Muslim population of the Deccan. Any claims he was lying are perplexing given that Aurangzeb’s multiple war campaigns are well-attested history that led to the Mughal Empire’s decline. Page 86 mentions Islamic rulers in Afghanistan invading and further weakening Mughal hold at various times from the 1730s – 1790s that was tenuous due to internal power struggles among self-serving Mughal princes and viziers. This is not to say that it was exclusively Muslim and K.S. Lal makes no such illusions; page 85 also mentions that the Marathas were having intra-rulership struggles including villages burned, open murder and robbery gone unchecked, and caravans destroyed in what were intra-Hindu power struggles for control of Maratha territory. The victims of the Maratha power struggles would have largely been Hindus, just as the victims of Mughal power struggles were largely Muslims.

The most surprising aspect of reading this book was Kishori Saran Lal’s examination of what the role of Caste actually played. Lal carefully explains that both the arguments that Caste was so brutal that Hindus converted and that Caste was so strong that Hindus did not convert are ignorant, do not have much evidence at all, and lack the main factor in what compelled certain groups to convert to Islam and others not to. What keeps being missed from the picture of Caste politics of Medieval India is economics and economic incentives. I was surprised to learn that Caste, as part of the social fabric of Medieval Indian society, meant that Indians of the same lower Castes were more likely to form guilds based on their Castes. I could only really compare this knowledge to video games like Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion or adventure Anime where characters were part of separate guilds like mage, swordsman, archer and so on. In this real-life case, it was guilds of shoemakers, goldsmiths, swordsmiths, Elephant riders, and plausibly even fashion guilds. I had thought the restriction on Third-Gender people’s careers under Islamic rule to fashion designers were due to bigotry by Muslims, but K. S. Lal makes a very compelling case that it was more plausible that this shift occurred due to the Muslim population’s preference for living in urban areas and enthusiasm for the latest and most expensive clothes and clothing designs. Essentially, whenever conversion to Islam was more congenial, Medieval Indians usually converted based upon economic incentives if the patrons were usually Muslim and there were massive profits to be made for their guilds. Most likely, social cohesion within the guilds caused people to gradually convert because they wouldn’t want to be left out of either work or their Caste community. Lal mentions that those Castes like shoemakers who were thoroughly discriminated against by upper-caste Hindus usually converted, but also that there was a ubiquitous fondness among Islamic rulers for elephants. For esteemed elephant riders of Rajas, nearly all the Sultans and Islamic emperors provided very generous economic incentives for elephant riders to convert to Islam with any refusal being met with death. Goldsmiths whose patrons were usually Hindus had no reason or even incentive to convert because Hindus had a higher preference for goldsmith wears than Muslims in Medieval India; the same is generally true of the Castes that were swordsmiths. Any group of outcastes that did butchery of animals, which is generally frowned upon with Hindu culture and society, would have almost certainly converted to Islam for economic opportunities and higher monetary gains. For rural populations, there actually wasn’t any higher status gain or even equality if they converted to Islam because Islamic monarchies were already firmly established; Sultans and Islamic emperors generally married Hindu princesses to legitimize their rule in territories they conquered. A Muslim peasant wasn’t suddenly going to become equal to an Emperor or Sultan. Women were also less equal in most respects; women were generally made slaves under Islam. Hindu princesses made to convert to Islam becoming Muslim queens or Muslim slave-consorts generally spent their days trying to find ways to force their rival Islamic wives into stillbirths so that their child would reign after the Emperor or Sultan. Perhaps the most surprising fact of all, which in hindsight is very obvious due to the decline of Buddhism and loss of the Buddha’s teachings in his original language, is that Islam actually shattered Buddhism and almost certainly converted more Buddhists proportionally through violent conquest than Hindus. Hinduism had a paradoxical relationship with conversion to Islam due to Medieval Caste pride, economic incentives, and Caste-based guilds that served as social communities and for economic opportunities; Buddhism evidently didn’t have any of these caveats. As a result, it was completely shattered into conversions to Islam in Bengal, especially in what is now Bangladesh.

The richness and brutal honesty of this book honestly blew me away. I can’t go into full details without an overly lengthy review, but I can’t help but gush this book with praise in all but a few areas. To give a few snippets: on page 98, details on Qasim’s campaigns in 664 AD into Sindh. Pages 102 – 107 details Mahmud of Ghazni’s conversion by force. Pages 113 – 116 explains the enslavement of women and children into forced conversions, and other conversions under the Muslim slave system. Page 138 gives a brief explanation of the surprising history of racism against African Muslims who came to India; the racism was by the fair-skinned Arab, Turkish, Persian, Abyssinians, and Egyptian Muslim upper-class in the Medieval period. There is no dearth of rich, well-structured, well-argued, and fact-finding details in this book. It’s such a shame that I had to read it on PDF with nearly half the pages hard to read, because it is no longer in English circulation. This book deserves so much more attention. I felt as if I was finally learning real history without any obfuscation and just a general reading of brute facts regardless of how I felt about them.

When I contrast this with how Andrew J. Nicholson tried to portray India’s Medieval history in which he cited Cynthia Talbot, Sheldon Pollock, and Romila Thapar; it genuinely made no sense whatsoever purely on the basis that Medieval history is simply filled with bloodletting on a scope and scale that makes modern people deeply uncomfortable. Andrew Nicholson citing his own Indology fields of translators who – citing no evidence whatsoever – make preposterous claims that Hindus and Muslims weren’t aware of each other; the reason Nicholson’s and the claims of those he cites are clearly falsifications is that it genuinely is counter to basic human psychology; especially according to the studies of Polish social psychologist, Henri Tajfel. In Tajfel’s repeated studies, he found that psychological in-group and out-group associations in social identity are instantaneous among disparate groups of people. Tajfel conducted these studies to better understand the mentality of the Nazis for having committed the Holocaust; he wanted to understand why it happened because many of his family died in the Holocaust. Essentially, these studies on basic human psychology by Tajfel overwhelmingly prove that Nicholson, Talbot, Thapar, and whatever other pseudo-Indologists espousing the claim that Hindus and Muslims lacked awareness of each other are thoroughly and willfully lying. They likely haven’t been academically honest at all and if they were being honest, then it’s laziest research possible. Compare the information to other places during Medieval history as that might be a useful way to understand the problem better. Apparently, Vlad Dracula slaughtering his own people including infants into stakes and making a gate out of it in Southeastern Europe to strike fear into the Turkish armies is perfectly credible, but Muslim massacres of villages of both Muslims and Hindus in the same time period of history is delusional? Intra-Native American clan wars and dynastic wars of each dynasty setting fire to temples in order to conquer vast swathes of territory under their respective dynastic or clan rule is perfectly credible Medieval history information on the Mayan and Mexica civilizations, but Sultans raising armies and slaughtering Hindus with conversion or death is not? Ancient Rome taking women as spoils of war as slaves, burning Carthage to the ground, and salting the earth out of deep-seeded revenge for losses in previous war campaigns to Carthage is perfectly credible; but the slaughter Hindu Rajas and Rajputs and enslavement of their women and children to be sold in Islamic slave markets is not?

I always wanted to know more about the transition from the ancient world of India to the modern India as it exists today and how Islam influenced the politics. When I read Western Indology such as several chapters of a book from Gerald J. Larson, an essay from Sheldon Pollock, and the entirety of Unifying Hinduism from Andrew J. Nicholson . . . all I got out of it was confusion. I went so far as to read the Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy and it was plainly filled with Western racialization of Indian culture to the point that I don’t find it valuable at all. Andrew J. Nicholson’s book was just outright shoddy scholarship and perhaps even the poster-child of shoddy scholarship when it comes to Islam. He cited Akbar the Great, an Ex-Muslim King who founded his own religion of the Din-i Ilahi and who banned distribution of the Quran late in his reign, as a Muslim King curious about Hinduism. That information was an abject lie. If these usual folks of Marxist Westerners are just going to scream that Hindus are Nazis and lie so religiously about factual information while exploiting Academic freedom as a cover for bigotry and hate, then y’know what? They have the Free Speech to do… whatever it is that they’re doing, and I will go forward with purchasing credible historic information that helps to give me a clearer understanding of a history that I’m curious about. Honestly, it isn’t just the dehumanizing bigotry against Hindus that bothers me, but also the fact that they’re just a waste of time and the fact I wasted my own money on a book of ignorance and pure obfuscation. I could read and refute each and every one of them, but if they’re so hellbent on just lying to create their own concocted fantasies about another people’s history while calling them racist, Nazi, bigot, Casteist, and treating Hindutva as a sort of Nazism while deliberately not distinguishing between Hindutva and Hinduism; what am I even arguing against apart from a group of conspiracy theorist nutjobs who just happen to be college professors? They’re the equivalent of “Holocaust Denial” Professors and make comments that make them sound no different from nuisance streamers like Johnny Somali. I agree with criticizing their views so that it doesn’t go unchallenged, I think giving them credible information to show why we think they’re wrong is valuable, and I don’t agree with trying to shut them down; but honestly, engaging with people who don’t care about our perspective in this whole experience is just a waste of my time. If I want credible fact-finding information about India’s history, then I’ll read from historians like Kishori Saran Lal and Will Durant. Growth of the Muslim Population of Medieval India gets a 9 / 10 from me; apart from one weakness in the period of the mid to late 1500s, it’s a phenomenal work by a legitimate historian. What I want and value is the pursuit of knowledge and I can only seem to get that from these historians; I honestly wouldn’t care so much about the bigotry against Hinduism as a theology, if there was fact-finding research to back it up from these Marxist-leaning Indologists like there is with Historians like Will Durant, Marxist-Environmentalist Mike Davis, and Kishori Saran Lal.

[1] Lal, Kishori Saran. “Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India AD 1000- …” Internet Archive, Internet Archive, 5 Aug. 2018, ia902800.us.archive.org/11/items/GrowthOfMuslimPopulationInMedievalIndiaAd10001800/Growth-Of-Muslim-Population-In-Medieval-India-ad-1000-1800_text.pdf.

[2] Lal, Kishori Saran. “Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India AD 1000- …” Internet Archive, Internet Archive, 5 Aug. 2018, ia902800.us.archive.org/11/items/GrowthOfMuslimPopulationInMedievalIndiaAd10001800/Growth-Of-Muslim-Population-In-Medieval-India-ad-1000-1800_text.pdf.

[3] Lal, Kishori Saran. “Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India AD 1000- …” Internet Archive, Internet Archive, 5 Aug. 2018, ia902800.us.archive.org/11/items/GrowthOfMuslimPopulationInMedievalIndiaAd10001800/Growth-Of-Muslim-Population-In-Medieval-India-ad-1000-1800_text.pdf.

[4] Lal, Kishori Saran. “Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India AD 1000- …” Internet Archive, Internet Archive, 5 Aug. 2018, ia902800.us.archive.org/11/items/GrowthOfMuslimPopulationInMedievalIndiaAd10001800/Growth-Of-Muslim-Population-In-Medieval-India-ad-1000-1800_text.pdf.

[5] Lal, Kishori Saran. “Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India AD 1000- …” Internet Archive, Internet Archive, 5 Aug. 2018, ia902800.us.archive.org/11/items/GrowthOfMuslimPopulationInMedievalIndiaAd10001800/Growth-Of-Muslim-Population-In-Medieval-India-ad-1000-1800_text.pdf.

[6] Lal, Kishori Saran. “Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India AD 1000- …” Internet Archive, Internet Archive, 5 Aug. 2018, ia902800.us.archive.org/11/items/GrowthOfMuslimPopulationInMedievalIndiaAd10001800/Growth-Of-Muslim-Population-In-Medieval-India-ad-1000-1800_text.pdf.

[7] Lal, Kishori Saran. “Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India AD 1000- …” Internet Archive, Internet Archive, 5 Aug. 2018, ia902800.us.archive.org/11/items/GrowthOfMuslimPopulationInMedievalIndiaAd10001800/Growth-Of-Muslim-Population-In-Medieval-India-ad-1000-1800_text.pdf.