What Rana Pratap and Napoleon have in common

Both rulers lost, one at

Haldighati

and the other at

Waterloo

. And both are heroes despite the defeats. So why the need to rewrite history?

Was Haldighati

Rana Pratap

's defeat? Nonsense! It was his decisive victory against the Mughals. Welcome to 21stcentury Rajasthan, where the government looks all set to carry out a surgical strike on history books: the 16th-century Mewar ruler who, after having suffered the ignominy of defeat for over 400 years, will now be crowned the victor of Haldighati.

Historians might wonder what new material this hypothesis is hinged on. Well, none -Akbar's foreign ancestry and Pratap's patriotism are enough. History is now a permanent battleground where fiction trumps facts. Dead people are resurrected to fight imaginary battles with pre-decided ends.

Ever since Union home minister Rajnath Singh lamented in 2015 that only Akbar got the epithet 'great' and not Pratap, the complex Mewar-Mughal conflict has been reduced to the easy binary of patriot versus invader. "What the Rajasthan government has done is to prefer wish fulfilment over what actually occurred. To achieve victory over the dead is no triumph," says Professor

Dilip Menon

, historian and director of the Centre for Indian Studies at Witwatersrand University, South Africa.

Rana Pratap, through his lifelong fight against the Mughals, has been a shining inspiration for generations. One could argue that even though he lost to the Mughals at Haldighati, he lived on in popular imagination. And in that, perhaps, he had a victory of sorts. "Pratap has been a tragic hero, someone who lost to the Mughals but carried on the fight. He is presented and accepted as somebody who had a moral victory over a superior adversary. Now if you make him a victor of Haldighati, what happens to that image? That's like knocking down the very foundation on which the narrative of Pratap rests," says historian and Rajasthan expert Tanuja Kothiyal.

It's common across the world to explain away humiliating defeats. The

Prithviraj Raso

, for instance, tries to bring honour to an otherwise catastrophic defeat of

Prithviraj Chauhan

at the hands of Muhammad Ghori. According to the author's narrative, Chauhan, blinded and imprisoned in Ghazni, eventually avenges his defeat by killing Ghori. Historians say Chauhan had bolted from the Tarain battlefield, and was executed by the Turks. Yet the Raso story remains popular and many believe it to be true.

TWO BATTLES, SIMILAR TALES
The Battle of Haldighati was a four-hour showdown between the Mewar king and a

Mughal

army led by Kachhwaha king Raja Man Singh that happened on June 18 (or 21, by some accounts) 1576. Despite the big troop numbers mentioned by Colonel James Tod in his Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, modern historians believe Pratap had 3,000 troops against 5,000 Mughals. The result was a Mughal victory that led to the capture of Pratap's capital and other strongholds. The legend of Pratap began from there.

Over 230 years later, on June 18, 1815,

Napoleon Bonaparte

lost to the Seventh Coalition led by the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo. Apart from the date, Waterloo has another similarity with Haldighati -the French believe it was a score draw and that Napoleon had a moral victory as he had almost crushed the Duke of Wellington when Blucher's Prussians suddenly arrived and tilted the balance in Wellington's favour.

"There is a group of French historians who so admire their national hero that they can't accept defeat. They say Waterloo was just one battle in Napoleon's long career, that it was a moral victory because of the heroism of Napoleon's defeated troops... He lost the battle of Waterloo but won the war of history," says British writer Stephen Clarke, the author of How the French Won Waterloo, or Think They Did.

A FRENCH LESSON FOR INDIANS
But sentiments apart, the French have never altered the facts of the battle. "We all need heroes. But you don't need to change history for that. Napoleon's defiant guards are remembered as heroes even though they were slaughtered...They lost but they're heroes. A heroic defeat can be just as honourable as a great victory , and even more memorable," Clarke adds.

DU professor Anirudh Deshpande believes history is always a permanent battle between belief and reason. "While all nationalisms tend to sacrifice facts at the altar of mythology , no one can best the cultural nationalist in this game. To present and popularise history in binary terms, the nationalists often cross the limits of common sense," he says.

Kothiyal warns against this tendency to see things in black and white. "It is also true that Pratap's son and grandson accepted Mughal suzerainty and Mewar became a Mughal feudatory state. These are facts; you can't tinker with them," she says.

Deshpande agrees: "In the Battle of Haldighati, Muslims fought for Pratap whereas the Mughal army was led by a famous Rajput General. In the 16th century , to be a Muslim or Hindu obviously did not mean the alignment of politics with religion, as it does for the modern cultural nationalist."

Perhaps Indians could learn from the French, on how to balance their wounded pride with historical accuracy .