Chapter 1
The Official Narrative
How textbooks portray Bahlul Lodi — and what the primary historical sources actually document about his reign, conquests, and impact on Indian civilization.
How textbooks portray Bahlul Lodi — and what the primary historical sources actually document about his reign, conquests, and impact on Indian civilization.
If you went through the Indian education system, here is what you were likely taught about Bahlul Lodi:
Upon ascending the throne of Delhi in 1451, Bahlul took the title "Bahlul Shah Ghazi". The word "Ghazi" in Islamic tradition specifically means a warrior who fights for the faith — a holy warrior against infidels. This was not a ceremonial title; it was a statement of religious and military intent. Textbooks mention his name but never explain the significance of this title.
Bahlul Lodi's most celebrated achievement in textbooks is the annexation of the Jaunpur Sultanate (finally achieved in 1479). This is presented as "bringing stability" to northern India. What textbooks omit is that the Jaunpur Sultanate, under the Sharqi dynasty, had developed its own relatively stable civilization. Bahlul's brutal military campaigns to annex it involved decades of warfare, displacement of populations, destruction of local governance, and the imposition of Afghan Sultanate authority over millions of people who had no say in the matter.
While Bahlul Lodi is described as "tolerant," he maintained the Jizya tax — a discriminatory religious tax imposed on all non-Muslim subjects. This was not a minor administrative detail; it was a systematic mechanism of religious oppression that marked Hindus as second-class subjects in their own land. The fact that he did not personally destroy temples (like his son would) does not make the continuation of institutional religious discrimination "tolerance."
Perhaps the most significant omission is that Bahlul Lodi's legacy is inseparable from what followed. His son, Sikandar Lodi, would go on to commit some of the most documented atrocities in Indian history — destroying the sacred Krishna Janmasthan temple at Mathura, ordering idols to be given to butchers as meat-weights, executing a Brahmin for expressing his faith, and earning the title "But-Shikan" (Destroyer of Idols). Bahlul Lodi built the machinery — his son used it.
Bahlul Lodi's rule was fundamentally about establishing Afghan ethnic and political supremacy over Indian society. He treated Afghan nobles as equals — but this was a tribal in-group dynamic, not a universal principle. The same "equality" did not extend to Hindu subjects, who remained under the oppressive Sultanate framework with discriminatory laws, religious taxation, and no political voice.
The way Bahlul Lodi is taught in Indian schools is a case study in historiographical manipulation through selective emphasis. By describing him as "tolerant" and "humane," textbooks create a false impression that the Lodi dynasty was a benign period in Indian history. This serves a specific ideological purpose:
To read about the systematic bias in Indian historiography, see Arun Shourie's Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud (1998), which documents how textbooks and academic institutions have selectively presented history to serve political agendas.
Bahlul Lodi's story cannot be understood in isolation. Explore the full Lodi dynasty through our sister projects:
