Swara Bhasker claims Mughals made India rich based on a DailyO article

Swara Bhasker, the self-professed ‘armchair activist, Twitter warrior, troll destroyer, Right-wing baiter, liberal hysteric’ has created a huge controversy on Twitter after claiming that “Mughals made India rich..” She is being trolled endlessly for being uneducated in economics and some users also claimed that the information Bhasker presented was taken out of JNU’s WhatsApp group.

Swara Bhasker claimed that Mughals made India rich based on an article by a leftist historian named Rana Safvi two years ago. The article titled “No, Mughals didn’t loot India. They made us rich” was published on DailyO, a website of India Today group know to publish extremist views.

The article makes some shady claims to suit the narratives and then concludes by saying, “Thus, to say that the Mughals looted India is a falsification of facts.” Interestingly, the article published the following table to claim that India was a rich country under Mughals and then wealth was drained by the British.

The table is made from the research by economic historian Angus Deaton who took the herculean task of calculating the GDP since the last two millennium. The table selectively quotes India’s share in global GDP at 22.54 percent in 1600 AD when India was under the Mughal rule.

However, if we make a graph of India’s share in global GDP over the last two millenium, then it gives a better understanding of the scenario.

India’s share in global GDP in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms was near 40 percent in the first thousand years. The share in global GDP declined to near 30 percent after the successive attacks by Turks, Khiljis, and Lodhis. The Muslim invaders looted the wealth from Indian temples.

The loot at Somnath Temple by Turkic ruler Mahmud of Ghazni who plundered the temple and broke its jyotirlinga is the most infamous incident of loot of India by a Muslim ruler. The country was further looted by Khiljis and Lodhis and the country’s share in global GDP declined by one fourth by 1,500 AD.

By the first half of the 16^th century, Mughals established themselves in North India. Till the British came to be the most powerful entity in the country by the early 19^th century, the share of India’s GDP in the world declined to 20 percent. So, the share of the country’s GDP declined by one third to 20 percent.

So, the claim made by Rana Safvi that Mughals made India rich, they promoted trade, developed land and sea infrastructure for transportation and contributed in economic growth falls short on facts. In fact, wealth was highly concentrated. More than half of collected taxes were distributed among less than 100 members of the royal family and Darbari elites. 

The country’s share in global GDP further declined by half to 10 percent under the British rule. So, the land of riches which contributed 40 percent of global GDP in 1,000 AD left with only 10 percent share by 1950. Swara Bhasker did her undergraduate in English literature from Delhi University and Masters in Sociology from JNU. Such ignorance of economic history and popularization of false claims tell us the real scenario of social sciences education in our elite universities.