Ghaziabad, Republic of India – It’s alike to nighttime. Ruchika Sharma sits in her makeshift studio at her house in Ghaziabad, a town simply out of doors Republic of India’s capital, Unutilized Delhi, a tiny mic hooked to her blouse. The 33-year-old historian and previous teacher is getting in a position for her untouched YouTube video display.
The recording hours are atypical, however this can be a regarded as choice. There’s negligible ambient noise at this occasion, she causes. For an isolated writer like Sharma, a studio with fancy audio setups and soundproofing is past achieve – particularly since she is aware of that every video she places out makes it tougher for her to land a task.
Sharma seems to be at a telephone that doubles as a teleprompter. Any other telephone serves as her recording rig. On two tiny wood racks hung at the cream-coloured wall at the back of Sharma, take a seat a accumulation historical past books. Additionally at the wall are an image of Indian modern icon Bhagat Singh, who was once hanged via the British colonial regime in 1931, and a book of the Seventeenth-century portray of the Sasanian king Khosrow Parviz’s first optical of his Christian spouse Shirin, washing in a pond.
On her wood desk, along tripods and ring lighting is an eclectic mixture of beauty merchandise: brushes, mascara, concealer, powder puff, and, maximum remarkable of all, eyeshadow.
She hits the document button.
Sharma begins with an creation to Nalanda, a sixth-century Buddhist college in northern Republic of India that was once house to 9 million manuscripts and was once burned unwell in a significant hearth within the twelfth century. A extensively held trust – promoted via categories of Republic of India’s Hindu accurate, amplified via a government-run modern day model of Nalanda College, and referenced in more than one information articles – means that Nalanda was once destroyed via a Muslim common named Bakhtiyar Khilji.
Sharma cries this one of the vital “biggest myths of Indian history” earlier than bringing up a slew of historic resources that she says buttress her statement. Those resources, which she says are regularly cited via those that paint Khilji as Nalanda’s villain, don’t in truth please see the college in any respect, she issues out. In lieu, she says, the resources counsel Khilji attacked any other Buddhist college, the place many folk have been killed in his assault.
Halfway in the course of the narration, she alternatives up a bottle of concealer and applies it underneath her visions. She drops a sarcastic shaggy dog story – telling her audience that she is bringing up the exact same resources that WhatsApp forwards pushing doubtful or pretend historical past generally tend to cite. A sponge comes out to mix with the surface sound, and shortly, a lilac eyeshadow is in park.
At a occasion when High Minister Narendra Modi’s authorities and its Hindu nationalist allies face allegations of rewriting historical past, turning the generation right into a political battleground for the generation, those unconventional historical past courses, laced with make-up and satire, are Sharma’s aim at surroundings the document directly.
With greater than 200 YouTube movies in simply over two years, the historian is development a rising target audience: Her YouTube channel, Eyeshadow & Etihaas, has just about 20,000 subscribers, presen on X, the place she amplifies the arguments she makes in her movies, she has 30,000 fans.
However possibly the most important testomony to her mounting affect lies within the warnings and abuse she mechanically receives for her movies. They’re a badge of celebrate she shrugs off, however would instead no longer must put on.
“I often get such death threats. Rape remarks keep coming,” she says. “They no longer work on me.”
Eyeshadow and historical past
Sharma grew up surrounded via historical past, in a crowd formed – like tens of millions of others – via Republic of India’s trendy tumult.
A grandchild of partition refugees, Sharma spent her adolescence in Mehrauli, Unutilized Delhi’s oldest surviving inhabited branch. Nearest Republic of India’s cleavage at self rule in 1947, her grandparents, each Punjabis from present-day Pakistan, discovered sanctuary within the neighbourhood and acquired land on which they constructed a house.
She thinks of the tales of partition she heard from them as her first brush with historical past. From her terrace, she would keep watch Qutb Minar, a five-story crimson and buff sandstone tower constructed within the twelfth and thirteenth centuries via Muslim rulers this is as a lot a landmark of Unutilized Delhi because the Eiffel Tower is of Paris. “I have a strong emotional connection with it. I think that monument is beautiful,” Sharma says.
When she was once 13, her folks made up our minds they wanted extra dimension and moved out of the crowd area to Ghaziabad, a neighbouring district of Delhi, the place she lives together with her elder sister and her 61-year-old mom, a retired authorities legitimate who labored at Indian Oil, a central authority oil and gasoline company. Sharma misplaced her father to most cancers in 2017.
Sharma says she was once at all times thinking about perceptible make-up. She would put on kohl in highschool. She started the usage of lip gloss in faculty, and all the way through her PhD in 2020, she began making use of perceptible make-up and lipstick to deal with an abusive courting.
“I was in a physically and mentally abusive relationship for 10 years, battling PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], and scary thoughts of self-harm. I was in therapy for it,” she explains.
Sharma noticed an eyeshadow YouTube video that stuck her consideration. “Watching eyeshadow videos, seeing the colours arranged in palettes, and putting them on my eyelids was incredibly therapeutic for me. It would calm me down,” remarked Sharma.
She was once instructing in a faculty on the occasion and would purchase eyeshadow palettes, despite the fact that her mom disapproved of it.
“I’ve never worn makeup in my life, even to parties or weddings. I don’t like her makeup and clothing style. I’m conservative and religious, and I come from a different generation and period,” stated her mom, who asked anonymity.
Her mom’s alternative fear was once that Sharma was once spending extra cash on dear eyeshadow palettes.
As with make-up, Sharma’s instructional pursuit of historical past was once no longer one thing her folks supported first of all.
Sharma was once in 8th grade when a historical past mentor who she recalls as “Sheila ma’am” modified her view of the topic. Till upcoming, she says, academics would ask scholars to underline remarkable dates and moments in historical past of their textbooks, and upcoming memorise them.
“However, at our first lesson with Sheila ma’am, she said that history could not be taught using a single textbook and that she would give us lectures like they do in colleges, and that we would have to take notes,” Sharma says. “Initially, I thought I would fail the history exam.”
Sharma started to talk over with the varsity library often and learn about any historical past books she got here throughout, discovering the method interesting. Sharma were given 94 percentile in tenth grade and took up humanities in highschool.
Sharma were given into Woman Shri Ram School, one among Unutilized Delhi’s manage arts establishments, for her undergraduate research, however her folks believed there was once refuse generation in historical past and harassed her into taking over an undergraduate programme in industry research.
Untouched out of faculty on the time of 21, she was once recruited via a high-paying company company. She left her process later simply 4 months. She was once bored. “I realised I needed to return to history. My parents were not very enthusiastic about my change of plans,” she says.
Sharma had endured to learn historical past as a interest all the way through her undergraduate years. One accumulation influenced her above all others – The Hindus: An Backup Historical past, via American historian Wendy Doniger, who was once centered via the Hindu right-wing who claimed that her accumulation vilified the Hindu faith. Publishers due to this fact pulled the accumulation from the Indian marketplace in 2014, elevating pervasive considerations concerning the shape of distant accent in Republic of India.
Making the soar from a company presen to walk again to college, she joined Jawaharlal Nehru College (JNU), which frequently ranks as amongst Republic of India’s manage analysis universities, for her grasp’s and PhD in historical past.
Sharma took up a contractual instructing place at Indraprastha School For Ladies in Delhi College. And in mid-2022, as bodily categories resumed later COVID-19 instances dipped, Sharma began dressed in eyeshadow to campus. “My students were very piqued by it and encouraged me to start a YouTube channel where I could provide makeup tutorials,” she says. “I declined. but then a student proposed that I talk about history while putting on eye makeup”.
That intrigued her. She learn up on-line on easy methods to get started a YouTube channel. And two weeks after, she recorded her first episode the place she matched her blue outfit with blue eyeshadow.
Her first video was once a go back and forth unwell reminiscence lane: a 28-minute episode about Qutb Minar, the place she mentioned the monument’s historical past and development, its structure, and the historical past of structure and design in Islam.
That first video, which she described as an experiment, introduced her over 400 subscribers within the first few days.
Sharma, the YouTube historian, was once born.
‘Cannot let these myths slide’
Fiction-busting was once no longer the speculation at the back of her YouTube channel first of all, she says. She sought after to introduce folk to sides of Indian historical past that they have been unfamiliar with.
She quickly began recording movies on architectural reuse, non-vegetarian meals in Indian historical past, gay and interfaith relationships within the Mughal length, and Sati, an historical Hindu observe wherein widows would burn to dying via sitting atop their deceased husbands’ funeral pyres.
However the feedback she noticed underneath her movies regularly had negligible to do with the content material of what she had stated.
“People used to comment a lot on videos about the Mughals breaking temples and oppressing Hindus. This is how I learned about the widespread myths, which I compiled into a video debunking the 10 biggest myths about Mughals,” she explains.
With every video, the responses alerted her to extra historic myths, half-truths and cases of advanced topics from the generation that have been regularly offered publicly with out context.
“Initially, the trolling and abuse I received for my videos affected me greatly,” she says. Her generation psychological fitness struggles compounded the harm, she stated. “But over time, I became immune.”
Since upcoming, she has had refuse insufficiency of subject material to paintings with: from the razing of Hindu temples, ostensibly via medieval Muslim rulers; to tales of atrocities dedicated via those rulers that do away with nuance.
Those are boxes which might be regularly invoked via leaders of High Minister Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Birthday celebration and their allies to color Republic of India’s historical past as one stuffed with the oppression of Hindus via Muslims – a story that critics have lengthy warned feeds into the demonisation of Republic of India’s 200 million Muslims. In an animated Instagram video in past due April that the platform after took unwell, the BJP portrayed Republic of India as a Hindu land pillaged via Muslim raiders for hundreds of years. Actually, Islam arrived within the Indian subcontinent as early because the seventh century – a lot earlier than Khilji, the Mughals and alternative Muslim rulers and commanders.
Underneath Modi, faculty textbooks had been modified to include this Hindu nationalist studying of historical past – together with ideas {that a} Vedic sage was once the “father of aviation” and that atomic science was once recognized to historical Hindus.
“I cannot just let these myths slide,” Sharma says.
“Lines were always blurred in India between history, faith and politics. But what has changed is that blurring of lines has led to violence,” she provides, arguing that the portrayal of Indian Muslims as historic villains has helped create it more uncomplicated for Hindu majoritarian politicians and mobs to focus on them. Since Modi got here to energy in 2014, dislike crimes – together with lynchings – in opposition to Muslims have skyrocketed.
Refuse determine in Indian historical past inspires the type of hatred in Hindu nationalist historic accounts that Aurangzeb, the utmost main Mughal emperor does. He’s accused of getting killed loads of 1000’s of Hindus, committing unattainable atrocities on his ‘kafir’ (infidel) boxes, and razing unwell non secular websites of ‘non-believers’.
Sharma believes this portrayal of Aurangzeb ignores the occasion he lived in.
“Aurangzeb arrived at a critical juncture in the history of the Mughal Empire when the empire was on the verge of disintegration,” she says. The wars he waged had “little to do with religion”, and have been “all about political conquest”.
Breaking temples constructed or patronised via defeated kings was once the norm on the occasion, she says – one who Hindu kings too had lengthy adopted. The speculation was once easy: Such temples have been obvious as manifestations of the previous independent’s authority. Aurangzeb adopted that observe, presen a minimum of 25 untouched Hindu temples additionally got here up underneath his reign, Sharma says.
But, the commonly held symbol of Aurangzeb as a in particular unholy king has real-world repercussions for individuals who fluctuate. The Mughal king may be eulogised via some for having practised a humble way of life and for his non secular wisdom. This landed a 14-year-old Muslim boy in bother. In June 2023, police arrested a teen for placing up a social media situation praising Aurangzeb, later receiving court cases.
“This idea is that because Aurangzeb broke a temple, so I will break this person’s house because he is a Muslim and because I think Aurangzeb and this person are the same,” Sharma says.
In step with Abhilash Mallick, an assistant scribbler of the fact-checking unit of The Quint, an Republic of India-based virtual information organisation, historical past is difficult to fact-check as a result of “we are unable to provide a yes or no answer”.
“So we must cite historians and their research and then allow the reader to draw their own conclusions,” he says. “We need people who can simplify history in videos and give all kinds of proofs in the same link. Videos work best. People consume them the most.”
This is the place Sharma is available in. “She removes the historical jargon and makes videos in Hindi which is what I like about Ruchika’s approach,” he says.
As Republic of India votes in its seven-phase nationwide election, the race between the politicisation of historical past and makes an attempt to counter myth-making has best grown in depth.
In past due April, Sharma made up our minds to tackle a in particular robust opponent – High Minister Modi himself.
Who’s an ‘outsider’?
Talking at an election rally within the western Indian shape of Rajasthan on April 21, Modi seemed to describe Indian Muslims as “infiltrators” in looking to counsel that the opposition Congress sought after to hurry the personal detail of Hindus and distribute them amongst Muslims.
Inside hours, Sharma posted a hyperlink on X, referencing a video of Modi’s feedback and pointing to a YouTube episode of her display, difficult regular ideals concerning the Mughal empire that dominated Republic of India from 1526-1719 AD, despite the fact that weaker kings from the dynasty endured to keep watch over an ever-shrinking empire the entire means as much as 1857.
The Mughal video, like several of Sharma’s historical past movies, starts with a greater than one-minute preview of the video, adopted via her creation, wherein she lists her credentials and tells audience that her channel is a “passion project”.
Sharma applies a reddish eyeshadow that fits her crimson manage. All the way through the video, she combines memes and Bollywood song to inject humour. 3 mins into the video, she alternatives up a pores and skin serum and pours a couple of drops on her accurate palm as she takes at the first fantasy – that the Mughals have been outsiders.
She discusses how, excluding Babur, the dynasty’s founder, and his son Humayun, the remains of the Mughal rulers have been born in Republic of India. Mughal meals and clothes, she claims, at the moment are not unusual in maximum Indian families. She discusses trendy borders and the speculation of countries and the way they emerged centuries later the Mughals, and the way via these days’s notions of nationhood, many of the dynasties that dominated Republic of India would have had roots that might create them “outsiders”.
Sharma upcoming alternatives up a concealer and starts making use of it to her left perceptible as she debunks the second one fantasy: that the Mughals have been particularly violent.
She refers to ideas that the Mughals burned all paperwork previous to their rule. She explains how the Mughals guarded the histories and texts of the traditional Indian length thru translations, akin to Razmnama, a Persian translation of the Hindu epic Mahabharata.
A provocative query follows: “If documents were not burned, did they burn people?” she asks, earlier than answering herself.
“Maybe as much as some other kings in India burned,” she says, explaining that the Mughals, presen violent, had a observe document refuse worse than many alternative rulers of the occasion.
However combating historic battles in Republic of India’s reward, surcharged political circumstance has dangers. Doing so presen wielding an eyeliner as a weapon is even tougher – as Sharma has discovered.
‘I don’t need to rot in prison’
From labelling her a pseudo-historian and wondering her credentials to hypersexualised slander, the net abuse that Sharma faces is as wide-ranging because the make-up equipment on her desk and the slices from historical past she clinically dissects.
Sharma admits that after she first began developing the movies, she anxious she wouldn’t be ready to resist the trolling. “They call me ugly. They assume I’m a [religious] convert. They call me a mulli and a jihadi,” she says. Mulli is a derogatory contract old to slander Muslim girls.
“But I’ve come to realise now I have a thicker skin.”
Nonetheless, she feels let unwell via her personal friends. Sharma regularly hears from individuals of academia – together with feminine historians – that she is cheapening historical past via speaking about it presen placing on make-up in entrance of a digicam. “Women have internalised this idea that if they want to be taken seriously, they need to invisibilise their body and desexualise themselves,” Sharma says. “You shouldn’t have to choose between femininity and academia.”
Meena Bhargava, a retired historical past teacher at Delhi College’s Indraprastha School for Ladies, believes that few lecturers are keen to talk out in Republic of India’s wave political order, the place many universities have cracked unwell on critics of the Modi authorities.
“Some historians simply give up. We’ve talked so many times and then grown tired that people aren’t changing. Despite the harassment, Ruchika routinely posts historical videos on her YouTube account, which is encouraging,” says Bhargava.
Lecturers “who appear simple and dressed in a saree may be speaking nonsense”, she says.
“Then there’s Ruchika, who is flashy, fashionable, and wears trendy clothes. Despite all this, she knows what she is talking about.”
Sharma says Indian historians have a “social responsibility” to put across correct historical past to the community – however that for essentially the most phase, they’ve failed. “Historians are happy writing journals that only five people read,” Sharma says.
She chooses to create her movies in Hindi, instead than English, to achieve a bigger Indian target audience.
However as her viewership grows, so does – she believes – the objective on her again. Sharma has implemented for laborer teacher positions at greater than two accumulation Delhi College faculties since 2022, later her non permanent pledge process at Indraprastha School was once over, however has no longer been ready to land a task. This is refuse accident, she says.
Steadily, she says, questions requested all the way through interviews are makes an attempt to tease out the interviewee’s ideology. She speaks of an incident the place the interviewer grew to become out to be a senior historian aligned with the wave authorities, whom she had faced in a independent panel dialogue previous. All the way through the process interview, she says, he inquired about contemporary archaeological excavations at a Mughal palace and discussed the invention of temple remainder there.
“He asked me why they discovered temple remains there. I told him that one can find many things during excavation and that archaeology is very layered,” she remembers. “He said, ‘Why is it that only under mosques do you find remains of temples?’”
Sharma knew upcoming that she wouldn’t get the process.
Now, she says, she is going to interviews with none expectancies that she may well be decided on. “One Google search and anyone will know about my ideology and the government does not want somebody like me.”
It isn’t simply her profession this is at the order: Dozens of critics of the Modi authorities, together with newshounds and lecturers, had been arrested over the generation decade, many on fees that rights teams have described as over the top or ambitious.
Sharma doesn’t need to connect them.
“I don’t want to rot in jail. I don’t see the point of it. I’d rather say what I can rather than say something that could eventually land me in jail,” she says earlier than turning to the humour that regularly marks her movies too. “I can do much better work if I stay outside.”
Her mom worries about her daughter. “I keep telling her to quit this work. I feel scared,” she says.
Sharma has requested her mom to not proportion her movies in crowd WhatsApp teams and worries about being recognised in community. “I usually don’t tell her that I get death threats but she also has it in her brain that people are getting to know me and she tells me that I should wear a mask when I go outside,” says Sharma.
However regardless of her fears, Sharma isn’t in a position to surrender but.
In her makeshift studio, it’s occasion for a retake, so she sifts thru brushes and alternatives the eye-shadow palette. She gently brushes the eyeshadow on her left eyelid. “I will continue making videos as long as they let me.”
