Audrey Truschke

Audrey Truschke is an Associate Professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University. In her own words she is a Mughal historian. She is also a racist, an Islamic propagandist and Hindu hating professor. Her teaching and research interests focus on the cultural, imperial, and intellectual history of early modern and modern India (c. 1500-present). She wishes to re-write Indian history by glorifying Mughal rulers and white-wash Hindu genocide at the hands of Islamists.

She is the authored two books: Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court and Aurangzeb. She has been taught by two famous Hindu hating professors Sheldon Pollock and Wendy Doniger whose contempt for Hinduism is very well known.

Audrey comes from a Christian Evangelical family. Both, her husband Thane Rehn and father-in-law Nathan Rehn are pastors of First Baptist Church. They were operating Bless India Ministeries in Andra Pradesh that was involved in conversion activities. Bless India Ministry was shut down after it got embroiled in ‘sinful activities’ as per their website. Her husband was a summer intern in Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. She herself has received funding from American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS), which is funded by Pakistani government. AIPS peddles pro-Islam, anti-Hindu agenda and funded Audrey’s work since 2012.

In her book Aurangzeb, Audrey white-washes the Islamist bigot’s life and calls him a ‘misunderstood king’. Some estimated accounts puts Hindu victims of his reign at 4.6 million. (https://wordpress.com/block-editor/page/stophinduhate.org/647). Yet, Audrey wants us to believe that he was ‘not as bad as we think’. She promotes Mughal barbarians in the name of India’s history, down plays the glorious history of Hindu kings and Hindu empires, questions the validity of birth of Shri Ram but never applies the same rigour for Islam. Below are some excerpts from her interviews to various news portals.

I also think that Aurangzeb is the most misunderstood of the Mughal kings. I don’t mean that in some kind of psychoanalytical, we should like this guy, sense. I mean misunderstood in causal, historical terms. I wanted to offer to popular readers, non-academics, a better way and a better framework of thinking about this complicated king. also think that Aurangzeb is the most misunderstood of the Mughal kings.

Audrey Truschke, Huffington Post India

There are historical facts that show that some Hindus benefitted from his rule. For instance, Aurangzeb employed a greater percentage of Hindus in the Mughal nobility than any other prior ruler by a significant margin, including Akbar. He issued land grants to temples, he issued orders protecting Brahmins, he issued orders saying that his officials should not interfere in local temple affairs and as a historian I have to explain those things. I do not have to issue a value judgment and I don’t want to issue a value judgment. Was he tolerant or intolerant is not a question that has much purchase with me. Rather, I want to say how do we take this jumble of facts and make sense of it. How can we explain his complicated actions as emperor, which seem contradictory to us, but did not seem so to him?

Audrey Truschke, Huffington Post India

 Aurangzeb is being historically demonised in India today. He destroyed some Hindu temples, although he protected many more. He killed some Hindus who opposed the Mughal state, such as Sambhaji, but he also welcomed willing Marathas into the Mughal administration to the extent that they outnumbered Rajputs at one point.

My argument is not that Aurangzeb was not as bad as we think, although that is probably true. Rather, I contend that we should strive to treat Aurangzeb with historical rigour and understand him on his own terms. This is a basic mission of historians, and I think that we stand to learn about pre-colonial India if we come to a more historically-grounded interpretation of Aurangzeb and his impact on the subcontinent.

Audrey Truschke, GreaterKashmir.com news portal

Audrey has many times stressed the need to re-write history by glorifying tyrannical, barbarians like Aurangzeb. According to her she knows Sanskrit but has many times deliberately mis-translated showing Hindus and Hindu scriptures in poor light. As per Audrey’s translation Shri Ram was a ‘misogynistic pig and uncouth’, Shri Ram belongs to ‘the realms of myth and belief rather than history’, building a Shri Ram temple in Ayodhya is “tragedy”, no historical evidence if Shri Ram being born, ‘Sita accusses Lakshman of lusting after her’, these are some of her blasphemous assault on Hindu religious texts and yet Rutgers University not only retains her as a Professor but also award her as well.

Hindu nationalism has a particular history that is deeply tied to colonial ideas, as I have written about elsewhere. Hindu nationalism faces a significant problem, however, which is that it advances historically bogus claims. Hence the need to rewrite history arises.

Rewriting the past is a dangerous activity with potentially serious repercussions in the present and future. Hindu nationalist attempts to simultaneously villainise and erase Indo-Islamic history go hand-in-hand with casting aspersions on modern Muslims and bode ill for religious tolerance in India.

Audrey Truschke, GreaterKashmir.com news portal