“But few could see the obvious, being blinded by the glitter of the Mughal emperor’s mountainous hoard of gold and gems, his marble palaces, the Peacock throne, the Taj. But behind the imperial façade there was another scene, another life – people in mud hovels, their lives barely distinct from those of animals, wretched half-naked, half-starved, and from whom every drop of sap had been wrung out by their predatory masters, Muslim as well as Hindu…

“At the height of Mughal splendour under Shah Jahan, over a quarter of the gross national product of the empire was appropriated by just 655 individuals, while the bulk of the approximately 120 million people of India lived on a dead level of poverty. No one gave a thought to their plight. Famine swept the land every few years, devouring hundreds of thousands of men, and in its wake came, always and inevitably, pestilence, devouring hundreds of thousands more. In Mughal India the contrast between legend and reality was grotesque.”

This from the epilogue of Abraham Eraly’s history of the Mughal invasion and rule, The Mughal Throne. Curiously, the back cover of Eraly’s book has an endorsing quote from a review: “ An excellent introduction to this period and the sometimes forgotten moment of multicultural assimilation it represented….. one of the most crucial and misrepresented periods of Indian history.”

The review is by William Dalrymple.

Eraly’s history, 550 pages of it, is replete with the wars, the slaughter, the cruelty and finally the crushing poverty in which a foreign satrapy of central Asian monarchs, chieftains and their courtiers, those 655 individuals, left India.

One cannot presume to speak for Dalrymple but his remarks presumably mean that this era of Muslim rule has been characterised as other than the summation that appends Eraly’s history. It is also a new and startlingly original definition of ‘multiculturalism’.

One knows the word as defining the liberal aspiration of today’s Britain and Europe, which have over the last few decades imported millions of people from their ex-colonies to work, mainly in the lower reaches of their economies. The social programme to assimilate these people into a civil society free of racial strife has been dubbed ‘multiculturalism’.

Dalrymple points us to a more deeply historical use of the word. The imperial impulse, the conquest, slaughter, suppression, cruelty, shame, degradation and subsequent victimisation must be taken together with the benefits of having a braver, more intelligent, monotheistic, fratricidal race which brings all the pluses of kebabi cuisine and the flora of Central Asia – together with their sartorial, poetic and polygamous inclinations, to the culture. Multiculturalism is this rich amalgam, surely? The bottom line is what counts, what?

Black academics in America would profit from accepting the Dalrymple definition and revisitng the ‘multiculturalism’ of America and the benefits of the great cotton economy before and after the civil war. All that Jazz?

Perhaps all imperial endeavour ought to be seen as bestowing the benefits of ‘multiculturalism’.