I think the Congress party unwittingly gave away that space of historiography to the stranglehold of Marxist historians. And in a discipline like thi… - Vikram Sampath

Within just a year of ascending the throne, in 1659 ce, Aurangzeb ordered the demolition of the famous Shiva temple of Krittivaseshwara situated in Daranagar, the heart of Varanasi. In its place, the Alamgiri mosque was constructed. To this day, there is just a small, empty tank that marks the site of the first, second, and third reconstructions of this temple. It was kept open to devotees for brief worship only on the occasion of Mahashivaratri on the specific condition that the offerings were to be shared with the mutawalli (a person appointed orally or under a deed to administer a waqf property) of the mosque.

Tipu Sultan, in the early part of his reign i.e., 1783, is thus also seen as an arbiter between warring sects and also someone who permitted the procession and festivities at Melukote with pomp.29 Interestingly, this was barely a month or two before committing the cruellest atrocity on the same Sri Vaishanava community by massacring 700 families of the Mandyam Iyengars, who shared the same gotra of Bharadwaja with that of the Mysore Pradhans who were acting on Maharani Lakshmi Ammanni’s behalf.

Right from his early days in the Andamans, Vinayak encouraged people to speak in Hindi....Till then, government records were maintained in Urdu, and even Hindi was written in the Persian script. Vinayak strongly advocated the implementation of the Devanagari script as it was the one in which the oldest language of the subcontinent, Sanskrit, was written. During his interactions with local merchants in his capacity as the foreman of oil collections, Vinayak passed this zeal on to them too. Through his influence, a girls’ school that was started in the Andamans began a compulsory teaching of Hindi in the Devanagari script.