Today, I am not writing as a government employee or as a historian. Today, I am writing as a public intellectual, as someone who deeply believes in the idea of India – an India which celebrates different ideologies, different cultures, different opinions and different religions, and does not let its people sleep hungry.As we celebrate the country’s 80th Independence Day, we must question the India we are celebrating. We are celebrating a country that thrives on diversity and syncretism. Ours is a beautiful constitution. It gives an extraordinary promise of freedom, equality and dignity to every citizen, regardless of religion, language, caste, gender or region. The founding fathers did not envision an India where people would all be the same; instead, they hoped to create a framework where differences could coexist and flourish. Hence, I am writing from a place of optimism and hope. We have several reasons to be proud: our roads are safe, the country is growing and we are leaders in international relations. However, we are becoming increasingly reluctant to acknowledge our early modern past – the Mughals.Reclaiming the pastThe term is becoming synonymous to a ‘bad word’ in popular culture and movies like Chhava and Tanhaji are clearly not helping. The last nail in the coffin came recently, when a vice-chancellor (V-C) of one of the most prestigious universities in the country clubbed the Mughals with the British. Although a decolonial approach is important, the understanding that the Mughals were also colonisers is problematic. The decolonial approach tries to establish that Indian civilisation is an old civilisation that we should take pride in. That is absolutely true. But the colonisers were the British. Period.This is not an apology for the Mughals, who were rulers, politicians and invaders, and had their own flaws. However, they were not equivalent to the British.One very basic difference between the two is that, even though the Mughals also had a homeland outside India, in Central Asia, they were not systematically sending taxes, money and resources from India to that particular location. The British, however, had a home country to which they transferred wealth extracted from India and other ex-colonies. It is was on our money that the British built much of their imperial wealth. As Dadabhai Naoroji rightly wrote, they were deeply un-British in their behaviour towards Indians.One cannot even measure the amount of harm that the colonial rule inflicted upon India. The harm was not just economic, in terms of the British loot. Communalism, colonisation of the mind and the crippling of independent thought are also colonial hangovers that we Indians still carry. Interestingly, the hatred towards the Mughals is itself a colonial gift.India’s forgotten golden ageThe Mughal period, like the Maurya or Gupta periods, was one of the golden ages of Indian history. On Saturday (August 15), Prime Minister Narendra Modi talked about how at least 50 Indian companies should be there in the Fortune 500 list, reflecting the global impact of the nation. This is a genuine dream, but one should also remember that there was once a time when India was a global superpower, not just in the ancient period, when India was exporting ideas, culture, education and craft, but also in the Mughal period. At the height of the Mughal empire, India was contributing almost 25% of the global economic output. So, we were a golden bird. And the golden age of the Mughals was also an age of dissent. I would invoke Amartya Sen here and argue that Indians have always been argumentative. From the beginning of our civilisation until today, that has been one of the strengths of this great democracy.A tradition of dissentA poet by the name of Mirza Muhammad Niamat Khan wrote a satirical piece about the son of Emperor Aurangzeb’s wazir (highest administrative official). The wazir petitioned that that the poet be punished. To this, Aurangzeb replied that it was not proper to punish the poet, as doing so would cause a greater disgrace. The poet could then write things about Aurangzeb himself. Niamat Khan had earlier written satirical pieces about Aurangzeb as well and despite the emperor increasing his reward, he did not stop his commentary. Having this knowledge, I felt responsible for putting it out for people to read, so that they can form their own opinions about whether the Mughals were colonisers or not. The colonial legacy of villainising the Mughals needs to be undone. Colonial understandings of our past need to be questioned and countered. And the communal seed that was sown in our hearts and in our lives by the British needs to be taken apart and called out.Because the hatred towards the Mughals is, ultimately, a colonial construct.Lubna Irfan is a research scholar at the Centre of Advanced Study, department of history in Aligarh Muslim University.A version of this article appeared on Heritage Times.