SOCIAL SCIENTIST down to the notion that in the Mughal Empire the entire Muslim community was in the position of a ruling group who all the time endeavoured to keep the Hindu majority subjugated and firmly under control, a relationship which hardly allowed any scope for a cultural repprochement or even cordial interaction between the two communities. The narration of the history of the Mughal rule in India in a Islamic jargon by many of the Persian chroniclers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries seems to have prepared the ground for the general acceptance of this idea during the nineteenth century. But it formally crystallized into an interpretative tool of historical narration only in the writings of the early colonialist vintage. Elliot's English translation of passages from Persian histories, selected deliberately with the aim of emphasising Hindu-Muslim divide in Indian history, seems to have given greater substance and credibility to this idea.10 Subsequently, it was propagated systematically through history text-books as well as different literary forms in the vernaculars, particularly Hindi, Bengali and Marathi. Before the end of the nineteenth century, the idea that the Mughal Empire represented "Muslim rule" came to be accepted by most of the educated Indians as if it was a universal truth.11 At the academic plane, this idea was, subsequently, challenged by many of the liberal nationalists; Mahatma Gandhi himself warned against its pernicious implications in 1920. But its spread at the popular level continued unabated throughout the twentieth century paving the ground for the blatant use of communalized history for political mobilization, by the champions of the Two-Nations Theory in both its "Pakistani" and "Hindutva" garbs. It also needs to be pointed out in this context that, at present, there exists almost an unbridgeable hiatus between the academic discourses of different hues, including some having communal overtones, on the one hand, and the utterly vulgar versions of communal interpretation based on manufactured evidence, on the other. These vulgarized versions of communal interpretation are being disseminated aggressively through text-books and mass media all over the subcontinent. Total divorce from a critical reading of the source material and an attitude of hatred between communities are the two distinctive features of these versions which place them decisively beyond the pale of academic argument.12 Yet in view of their wide currency and growing impact even on history studied at the institutions of higher learning, one cannot afford to ignore them in a discussion of the character of the Mughal Empire. As a matter of fact, in the