In his famous Khuda Bakhsh Annual Lecture (1985) Dr Pande said: 'Thus under a definite policy the Indian history books text-books were so falsified and distorted as to give an impression that the medieval [i.e. Muslim] period of Indian history was full of atrocities committed by Muslim rulers on their Hindu subjects and the Hindus had to suffer terrible indignities under Muslim rule. And there were no common factors [between Hindus and Muslims] in social, political and economic life.'

Therefore, Dr Pande was extra careful. Whenever he came across a 'fact' that looked odd to him, he would try to check and verify rather than adopt it uncritically.

He came across a history text-book taught in the Anglo-Bengali College, Allahabad which claimed that 'three thousand Brahmins had committed suicide as Tipu wanted to convert them forcibly into the fold of Islam'. The author was a very famous scholar, Dr Har Prashad Shastri, head of the department of Sanskrit at Calcutta University. (Tipu Sultan (1750-99), who ruled over the South Indian state of Mysore (1782-99), is one of the most heroic figures in Indian history. He died on the battlefield, fighting the British.)

Was it true? Dr Pande wrote immediately to the author and asked him for the source on which he had based this episode in his text-book. After several reminders, Dr Shastri replied that he had taken this information from the Mysore Gazetteer. So Dr Pande requested the Mysore University vice chancellor, Sir Brijendra Nath Seal, to verify for him Dr Shastri's statement from the Gazetteer. Sir Brijendra referred his letter to Prof Srikantia who was then working on a new edition of the Gazetteer. Srikantia wrote to say that the Gazetteer mentioned no such incident and, as a historian himself, he was certain that nothing like this had taken place. Prof Srikantia added that both the prime minister and the commander-in-chief of Tipu Sultan were themselves Brahmins. He also enclosed a list of 136 Hindu temples which used to receive annual grants from the Sultan's treasury.

It transpired that Shastri had lifted this story from Colonel Miles' History of Mysore which Miles claimed he had taken from a Persian manuscript in the personal library of Queen Victoria. When Dr Pande checked further, he found that no such manuscript existed in Queen Victoria's library. Yet Dr Shastri's book was being used as a high school history text-book in seven Indian states, Assam, Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. So he sent his entire correspondence about the book to the vice chancellor of Calcutta University, Sir Ashutosh Chaudhary. Sir Ashutosh promptly ordered Shashtri's book out of the course. Yet years later, in 1972, Dr Pande was surprised to discover the same suicide story was still being taught as 'history' in junior high schools in Uttar Pradesh. The lie had found currency as a fact of history.

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