Meenakshi Jain

Life and career

Meenakshi Jain is the daughter of journalist Girilal Jain, a former editor of The Times of India. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Delhi. Her thesis on the social base and relations between caste and politics was published in 1991. She also worked as a Fellow of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. Currently, Jain is an associate professor of history at Gargi College, affiliated to the University of Delhi.

In December 2014, Jain was nominated as a member of the Indian Council of Historical Research by the Narendra Modi government.

Works

Books

Selected Articles

Jain also wrote a review of Romila Thapar's Somanatha: Many Voices of a History.

Reception

The Professor of Law and Ethics at Chicago University, Martha Nussbaum finds Jain's Medieval India "lacking in the complexity of the medieval period and its historical sources". Her account is seen to oscillate between responsibility to the truth and the demands of a "prior ideological commitment." Sociologist Nandini Sundar states that the exactions of the Sultanate rulers and the Mughals are exaggerated. Their contributions to the society, culture and polity are ignored.

John Stratton Hawley finds the book going against the grain in its treatment of the Bhakti movement. Jain presents the movement as a response to Shankaracharya's monism rather than as a reaction to the egalitarian message of Islam. She rejects any idea that the Indian masses converted to Islam due to its professed egalitarian appeal. Rather, she believes that the Muslim elites suffered from "extreme racialism" that continued well into the seventeenth century. Hence, there is no place to look but the bhakti movement for a class-comprehensive view of religion.

According to Nussbaum, Jain's review of Somanatha contains a heavy dose of "dogmatic ideology", "making her serious points less convincing". Among the serious points, Nussbaum counts the contention that Thapar has not paid attention to the religious motivations of Mahmud of Ghazni in desecrating Hindu temples.

Chander Pal Singh finds Jain's Parallel Pathways to be "path-breaking work" that questions the standard narrative of "amicable relations" between Hindus and Muslims during the medieval times broken only by the divide-and-rule policies of the British colonial government. Jain argues that there were fundamental differences between the two communities and that such differences were aggravated during the period of Mughal decline which saw the resurgence of Hindu and Sikh powers and the rise of Muslim orthodoxy. Jain notes that a great majority of the nobility in the Mughal court consisted of immigrants, and that such an elite would consciously transform Hindavi into Urdu by substituting a large number of Sanskrit-origin words with Persian and Arabic words in order to maintain a separate identity. Jain holds Muslim orthodoxy responsible for inviting the invasions of Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah Abdali for explicit purpose of preserving Islam. She also questions the thesis that the India's First War of Independence was a joint Hindu-Muslim project and notes that Islamic institutions issued over 200,000 fatwas in the post-Revolt period to "outlaw" customary practices shared between both Hindus and Muslims.

M. V. Kamath, in the Free Press Journal, describes Jain's Rama and Ayodhya as briefly examining the antiquity of Rama's story and its spread through the Indian subcontinent, and then devoting the rest of the book to the Ayodhya dispute. Jain's enormous research makes Rama "come alive," tracing stories about him from the 4th century to the present. She has provided "fair" criticism to Irfan Habib and Romila Thapar, reporting the presentation of their case in considerable detail. Professor Pralay Kanungo, of Jawaharlal Nehru University, calls the book a "serious exercise" that aspires to make a quiet impact. It succeeds in trying to create a coherent and authentic historical narrative that aims to demolish the dominant narrative of the 'Left historians' of India. Koenraad Elst has called the book a "definitive Ayodhya chronicle," forming required reading for any one talking about the Ayodhya dispute. He finds the chapter on Hindu testimonies of Muslim iconoclasm "highly original," which also details the measures taken by Hindu society to prevent or remedy instances of such iconoclasm. Another chapter gives an "exhaustive enumeration" of all the testimonies of the tradition that the Babri Masjid replaced a Hindu temple, including the statements made in Allahabad High Court. Also detailed are the testimonies of the pro-Masjid historians in the court and outside, which were eventually disregarded by the Allahabad High Court for their lack of competence.