Photojournalist Shahidul Alam and expert on corruption Andrew Feinstein on the journey into activism and the Gaza crisis.
For more than 40 years, Bangladeshi photojournalist Shahidul Alam has chronicled social movements, political turmoil and human rights abuses. He was imprisoned and tortured for criticising his government’s response to student protests. In 2018, he became a Time Magazine Person of the Year.
A former MP in Nelson Mandela’s first democratic government, Andrew Feinstein resigned over his party’s refusal to allow an investigation into a $6.2bn arms deal. Ever since, he has become a leading expert on corruption and the global arms trade.
In this episode, Alam and Feinstein discuss their journeys into activism and how to bring about social and political change.
Kami Rita and fellow Sherpa guide Pasang Dawa have been competing for the title of most climbs of the world’s highest peak.
One of the world’s most skilled climbing guides on Mount Everest has reached the Earth’s highest peak for the 29th time, beating his own record for most times to the summit, according to expedition organisers.
Kami Rita reached the 8,849-meter (29,032-foot) peak early morning on Sunday, said Mingma Sherpa from Seven Summits Treks.
He was reported to be in good health and already on his way down to lower camps of the mountain. Mingma Sherpa said the weather on the mountain was good and favourable for climbing to the summit.
“Back again for the 29th summit to the top of the world…One man’s job, another man/woman’s dream,” Rita posted on his Instagram from base camp last week.
Rita had climbed Mount Everest twice last year, setting the record for most climbs on his first expedition and adding to it less than a week later.
He and fellow Sherpa guide Pasang Dawa have been competing with each other for the title of most climbs of the world’s highest peak. Dawa has made it to the top of the mountain 27 times.
Rita first climbed Everest in 1994 and has been climbing to the top almost every year since, earning the nickname “Everest Man”. He has built a reputation for being a vital guide for foreign climbers.
He builds on his father’s legacy, who was among the first Sherpa guides.
Hundreds of people will be attempting to climb the mountain this month, with Nepalese authorities issuing hundreds of climbing permits to foreign climbers.
Nepal is home to eight of the world’s 10 highest peaks and welcomes hundreds of people each spring, when temperatures are warm and winds are light.
Last year, more than 600 climbers made it to the summit of Everest but it was also the deadliest season on the mountain, with 18 fatalities.
Amandeep Singh, 22, was already in custody for unrelated gun charges before being charged in Hardeep Singh Nijjar’s murder.
A fourth Indian national has been arrested and charged by the Canadian authorities over the killing of a separatist Sikh activist in Vancouver last year – a case that has strained diplomatic relations with India.
Amandeep Singh, 22, was already in custody for unrelated gun charges before being charged with “first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder” in the slaying of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team (IHIT) said on Saturday.
Singh lived in the cities of Brampton, Surrey and Abbotsford.
Three other Indian nationals were arrested earlier this month in the city of Edmonton in Alberta, with the authorities saying they were investigating whether the men had ties to the Indian government.
Kamalpreet Singh, 22; Karan Brar, 22; and Karanpreet Singh, 28, appeared in court on Tuesday via videolink and agreed to a trial in English. They have also been charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
Sikh leaders in North America have welcomed the arrests, but allegations that the Indian government was involved have fuelled questions and unease.
Nijjar, 45, was shot dead in June outside a Sikh temple in Surrey, a Vancouver suburb with a large Sikh population. He was campaigning for the creation of Khalistan, an independent Sikh homeland carved out of India.
India has long been embittered by Sikh separatist groups in Canada and had deemed Nijjar a “terrorist”.
Shortly after his death, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said there was evidence of potential Indian government involvement in Nijjar’s murder, which led to a backlash from India.
New Delhi dismissed the allegations as “absurd” and responded furiously, briefly curbing visas for Canadians and forcing Ottawa to withdraw diplomats.
In November, the US Department of Justice charged an Indian citizen, Nikhil Gupta, living in the Czech Republic with plotting a similar assassination attempt on US soil.
Prosecutors said in unsealed court documents that an Indian government official was also involved in the planning to assassinate Sikh-American activist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun.
The shock allegations came after US President Joe Biden hosted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a rare state visit as Washington seeks closer ties with India against China’s growing influence.
US intelligence agencies have assessed that the plot on US soil was approved by India’s top spy official at the time, Samant Goel, The Washington Post reported in April.
About 770,000 Sikhs live in Canada, nearly 2 percent of the country’s population and the largest number of the community outside India.
India is bracing itself for the fourth phase of its weeks-long elections on May 13 to elect 96 members of parliament to the Lok Sabha, or the lower house of parliament, as the world’s largest electoral exercise moves into its final month.
Last week, the third phase of the voting saw Modi cast his vote in Gujarat’s Gandhinagar constituency. It also saw the competition between the two main contenders heighten as the Congress Party’s former President Sonia Gandhi said Modi and the BJP were focusing “only on gaining power at any cost”.
The fourth phase also features a bit of glamour in the east of the country, where Bollywood veteran Shatrughan Sinha is seeking re-election in West Bengal’s Asansol, and to the south, where actress Maadhavi Latha from the BJP is standing for the Hyderabad seat in Telangana. Latha is pitted against Asaduddin Owaisi, a four-time MP from the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen party.
The first three phases of the election, which were held on April 19, April 26 and May 7, saw a voter turnout of 66.1, 66.7, and 61 percent, respectively. The voting so far has been lower than in the 2019 elections. In total, 969 million people are registered to vote in 543 parliamentary constituencies across 36 states and federally-governed union territories.
Who is voting in the fourth phase?
Registered voters across nine states and a union territory will cast their ballots for the following constituencies:
Andhra Pradesh: All 25 constituencies in the southern coastal state
Telangana: All 17 constituencies in the southern state
Jharkhand: Four of the eastern state’s 14 constituencies
Odisha: Four of the eastern state’s 21 constituencies
Uttar Pradesh: Thirteen of the northern state’s 80 constituencies
Madhya Pradesh: Eight of the central state’s 29 constituencies
Bihar: Five of the eastern state’s 40 constituencies
Maharashtra: Eleven of the western state’s 48 constituencies
West Bengal: Eight of the eastern state’s 42 constituencies
Jammu and Kashmir: One of the union territory’s five constituencies
Which are some of the key constituencies?
Hyderabad (Telangana): Asaduddin Owaisi is being challenged by the BJP’s Maadhavi Latha in his family bastion. Owaisi’s brother, Akbaruddin Owaisi is a member of the state legislative assembly while his father, Sultan Salahuddin Owaisi, represented the parliamentary constituency, with a substantial Muslim population, six times. Owaisi pitches himself as the voice of India’s Muslim minority whose issues he regularly raises in his parliamentary debates. Owaisi was given the “best parliamentarian” award in 2022.
Srinagar (Jammu and Kashmir): This constituency in Kashmir registered just 15 percent voting in the 2019 election, which was marred by a boycott. This is the first parliamentary election in Kashmir since the region’s special status was removed in August 2019. The two biggest mainstream pro-India parties in the region – the National Conference and People’s Democratic Party – have fielded Aga Syed and Waheed Parra, respectively, as their candidates.
Krishnanagar, Baharampur and Asansol (West Bengal): These three parliamentary contests in West Bengal state, bordering Bangladesh, offer a mix of star power and political significance. Bollywood actor-turned-politician Shatrughan Sinha is seeking re-election from Asansol, while ex-cricketer Yusuf Pathan is taking on senior Congress Party leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, who has been representing Bahrampur since 1999. Chowdhury was also the leader of the opposition Congress Party in the outgoing Lok Sabha. Pathan is the candidate of the Trinamool Congress (TMC), the party that rules the state and is also aligned with the national opposition INDIA alliance – even though the coalition’s members are standing against each other in West Bengal.
Yet, the most high-profile electoral battle in the state on May 13, is in Krishnanagar, where the fiery TMC parliamentarian and fierce critic of Modi, Mahua Moitra, is seeking a second term. A former vice president of JPMorgan Chase based in London, Moitra entered politics in 2009. Her parliamentary speeches asking tough questions of the government often go viral. In December 2023, the firebrand MP was expelled from parliament after being accused of accepting cash to ask questions. She said her expulsion was a way to silence her. She has challenged her expulsion in the Supreme Court. The BJP has fielded Amrita Roy, whose husband is a descendant of the erstwhile king of the region, against Moitra.
Kannauj and Lakhimpur Kheri (Uttar Pradesh): Akhilesh Yadav, the leader of the Samajwadi Party – a regional powerhouse that has seen its influence shrink with the BJP’s rise – has decided to enter the electoral race in Kannauj in northern Uttar Pradesh state, which accounts for 80 seats in the parliament. The BJP currently governs the state. Kannauj, known for its perfume industry, has been a Yadav family bastion. Akhilesh, his father Mulayan Singh Yadav and his wife Dimple Yadav have represented the seat since 1999. But in 2019, Dimple lost to the BJP in a shock defeat. Akhilesh’s entry into the electoral fray is an attempt to wrest back the family pocket borough.
The other seat that has attracted a lot of attention is Lakhimpur Kheri, where controversial federal Minister of Home Affairs Ajay Mishra Teni is seeking re-election. Mishra has been caught in a storm since his son Ashish Mishra allegedly ran his car over farmers protesting against now-repealed farm laws. Ashish is out on bail and farmers’ groups as well as activists have been demanding that Mishra be denied a ticket by the BJP.
Indore (Madhya Pradesh): This constituency, a stronghold of the BJP, has been in the news for unlikely reasons. The Congress candidate Akshay Kanti Bam withdrew from the race at the last minute, after the last date for candidates to file nominations had passed. The Congress could not field a replacement and Bam later joined the BJP. Thirteen other candidates are in the fray, but the Congress Party has urged voters to opt for NOTA (none of the above) in protest.
When does the voting start and end?
Voting will begin at 7am local time (01:30 GMT) and end at 6pm (12:30 GMT). Voters already in the queue by the time polls close will get to vote, even if that means keeping polling stations open longer.
Complete election results for all phases are to be released on June 4.
Which parties rule the states being polled in the fourth phase?
The BJP governs Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh outright.
The BJP governs Maharashtra and Bihar in alliances.
Odisha is governed by the Biju Janata Dal (BJD), which leans towards the NDA but is not a part of the alliance.
Andhra Pradesh is governed by the Yuvajana Sramika Rythu (YSR) Congress Party.
Congressgoverns Telangana.
Jharkhand is governed by the INDIA alliance led by Jharkhand Mukti Morcha.
Jammu and Kashmir is governed directly by New Delhi. Its state legislature remains suspended.
Who won these Lok Sabha seats in 2019?
In the last Lok Sabha elections, Congress, along with parties now affiliated with the INDIA alliance and those affiliated then with the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance, won 13 of the 96 seats to be decided on May 13.
The BJP and parties affiliated with the NDA won 50 of the seats in 2019.
The YSR Congress Party in Andhra Pradesh won 22 seats while the Telangana-based Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) won nine seats in 2019.
The All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) won two seats in 2019.
How much of India has voted so far?
The first three phases of the Lok Sabha elections have already decided the fate of 284 MPs.
So far, voting has concluded for all seats in the states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Meghalaya, Assam, Manipur, Karnataka, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Sikkim, Tripura; the Andaman and Nicobar islands; and the Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Daman, Diu, Lakshadweep and Puducherry union territories.
The fifth phase will kick off on May 20 and the sixth on May 25, before the election heads towards the seventh and final phase on June 1.
Skardu, Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan – As we make our way towards Pakistan’s first organic village, an intense one-hour trek along the rugged, steep and unfenced mountainside pathway from Mindoq-Khar, near Kharpocho Fort, my legs are shaking with a mix of fear and strain.
The sharp mountain edges stick out threateningly, and I am reminded of the soulful lyrics of Ali Zafar’s Paharon Ki Qasam (Oaths of the Mountains), a tribute to the late Pakistani climbing hero, Muhammad Ali Sadpara from Skardu, who tragically lost his life in February 2021 while climbing the notorious Bottleneck gully which is just 300 metres (984 feet) below the summit of K2.
Above us, the sky is a brilliant shade of blue, adding to the surreal beauty of the landscape. As we gain a wider view of the Indus River Valley below us, our 44-year-old guide, Abbas Jaan, stops and draws our attention to the colour of the water.
“You can see the water turning a murky grey, carrying with it the particles from the retreating glaciers,” he says, his eyes scanning the slow-flowing waves of this vital drinking water supply. “And even though it’s grey,” he adds, “the glacial water is mineral-rich and incredibly pure.”
“But, year by year, these glaciers are melting fast. They are decreasing,” he says, pointing towards the thousands of smaller glacier peaks that surround us in the far distance; some mountains are snow-covered while others are dry and brown.
The city of Skardu, from where we have departed, sits some 2,228 metres (7,310 feet) above sea level. It is the gateway to the Karakoram mountain range and some of the world’s highest peaks such as K2, Broad Peak and Gasherbrum, making it a popular destination for trekkers and mountaineers who come to marvel at the breathtaking scenery.
Following the rugged, fenceless path to the organic village, Khari Nangsoq [Anam Hussain/Al Jazeera]
With a population of more than 200,000, the city boasts a rich cultural blend influenced by Tibetan, Balti and other Central Asian traditions, where diverse Islamic sects, including Noor Bakshi, Sunni and Shia, coexist.
But this region of Pakistan is also home to more than 7,000 glaciers – the largest number outside the earth’s polar regions.
These icy giants are far more than just a breathtaking natural spectacle; they are vital to the local ecosystem.
They serve as a crucial source of freshwater, sustaining agriculture and powering electricity generation through the meltwater that feeds into rivers.
Now, however, their existence is under threat.
A 2019 study (PDF) published in the Pakistan Geographical Review by Lahore College for Women University, highlights the increasingly unusual behaviour of glaciers in the Karakoram range, compared with glaciers in other parts of the world.
The Baltoro Glacier is a particular example. Spanning some 63km (39 miles) in length, the Baltoro is one of the longest glaciers in the world outside the polar regions. Its width varies, but generally ranges from two to three kilometres. The meltwater from the Baltoro Glaciers feeds the Shigar River, which is the main right-bank tributary of the Indus River Valley in the Skardu Valley.
It is an essential source of freshwater for this region and beyond, but the study showed that the glacier has been decreasing in size by 0.9 percent each year between 2003 and 2017.
The immediate effect of the shrinking glacier is a rise in water levels and even dangerous flooding in the Shigar River.
The position of the Baltoro and Sachien glaciers in Pakistan (AJ Labs)
Locally, roads have been known to have become completely submerged when water levels rise too high, says Chris Lininger, founder and director of US-based travel company Epic Expeditions, who has been travelling across Pakistan’s intricate terrains, including the Baltoro Glacier, since 2018.
“I actually had a problem coming out of a trip when the floods happened in 2022 because the road was just gone,” he says over a Zoom call. “Many [locals] are already in a low socioeconomic state, and when this happens, it’s catastrophic for them.”
But the extreme long-term effect will be even more deadly – the water will eventually dry up when the glacier is gone.
Israel bans and blocks Al Jazeera as Rafah – Gaza’s ‘last safe space’ – is invaded.
Israel rejects a ceasefire agreement, invades Rafah, and orders the closure of Al Jazeera – all in a week’s work for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Middle East’s so-called “only democracy”.
Contributors: Diana Buttu – Palestinian lawyer Jeremy Scahill – Senior correspondent & editor, The Intercept Amjad Iraqi – Senior editor, +972 Magazine Richard Silverstein – Writer, Tikun Olam
On our radar:
Journalists at Italy’s public broadcaster have gone on strike. Producer Tariq Nafi reports on Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s “suffocating control” over RAI.
India’s political dynamics: Navigating Modi’s dominance with Akash Banerjee
YouTuber and journalist Akash Banerjee breaks down the politics and the coverage of India’s election.
Featuring: Akash Banerjee – Founder & host, The DeshBhakt
Thousands of houses have been destroyed or damaged in the worst-hit northern province of Baghlan.
At least 153 people have been killed in flash floods in northern Afghanistan triggered by torrential rains, the Taliban’s Ministry of Interior Affairs has said.
On Saturday, ministry spokesman Abdul Mateen Qani put the number of injured at 138 people in three provinces, the Reuters news agency reported.
Heavy rains on Friday led to flooding in several areas of the country, with fears of the death toll rising.
Zabihullah Mujahid, the chief spokesman for the Taliban government, said in a social media post on Saturday that “hundreds … have succumbed to these calamitous floods, while a substantial number have sustained injuries”.
Apart from Baghlan in the north, the provinces of Badakhshan in the northeast, central Ghor and western Herat were also heavily affected, he wrote on X, adding that “the extensive devastation” had resulted in “significant financial losses”.
The UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) told the AFP news agency on Saturday that more than 200 people were killed and thousands of homes were destroyed or damaged in the worst-hit province of Baghlan alone.
The air force had started evacuating people and moved more than 100 injured people to military hospitals, the Taliban Ministry of Defense said on Saturday, without mentioning from which provinces.
“By announcing the state of emergency in [affected] areas, the Ministry of National Defense has started distributing food, medicine and first aid to the impacted people,” it said in a statement.
Hedayatullah Hamdard, the head of Baghlan’s natural disaster management department, earlier told AFP that the toll “will probably increase”, adding that light rain had continued into the night in multiple districts of the province.
Residents were unprepared for the sudden rush of water set off by the heavy downpour in recent days, he added.
Emergency personnel were “searching for any possible victims under the mud and rubble, with the help of security forces from the national army and police”, Hamdard said.
Since mid-April, floods have killed about 100 people in 10 of Afghanistan’s provinces, with no region entirely spared, according to the authorities.
Farmlands have been submerged in a country where 80 percent of the more than 40 million people depend on agriculture to survive.
Mohammad Akram Akbari, the provincial director of natural disaster management in Badakhshan, said the mountainous province had seen “heavy financial losses in several areas … due to floods”.
He said casualties were feared in Tishkan district, where floodwaters had blocked a road and cut off access to an area where about 20,000 people lived.
Children survey their damaged homes after heavy flooding in Baghlan province in northern Afghanistan [Mehrab Ibrahimi/AP]
Weather experts warn of potential disruptions to power grids, communications as sun’s outburst continues in coming days.
The most powerful solar storm in more than 20 years has struck Earth’s atmosphere, triggering warnings over the potential disruption to power grids and satellite communications while also producing spectacular celestial light shows in some parts of the world.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which issued a rare solar storm warning, said the solar outburst reached Earth at about 16:00 GMT on Friday, hours sooner than anticipated.
The first of several coronal mass ejections (CMEs), described as the expulsions of plasma and magnetic fields from the sun, was later upgraded by the NOAA to an “extreme” geomagnetic storm.
It was the first solar storm occurrence since the Halloween storms of October 2003, which caused blackouts in Sweden and damaged power infrastructure in South Africa.
More solar expulsions are expected in the coming days, and possibly into next week, according to the NOAA.
The United States agency alerted operators of power plants and spacecraft in orbit to take precautions.
Fluctuating magnetic fields associated with geomagnetic storms induce currents in long wires, including power lines, which can potentially cause blackouts. Long pipelines can also become electrified, leading to engineering problems.
Spacecraft are at risk from high doses of radiation, although the atmosphere prevents this from reaching Earth.
Following one particularly strong peak, the NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center said users of high-frequency radio signals “may experience temporary degradation or complete loss of signal on much of the sunlit side of Earth”.
Unlike solar flares, which travel at the speed of light and reach Earth in about eight minutes, CMEs travel at a steadier pace, with officials putting the current average at 800km (500 miles) per second.
They said that the CMEs emanated from a massive sunspot cluster that is 17 times wider than Earth.
Even pigeons and other species that have internal biological compasses could be affected. Pigeon handlers have noted a reduction in birds coming home during geomagnetic storms, according to US space agency NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The most powerful geomagnetic storm in recorded history, known as the Carrington Event after British astronomer Richard Carrington, occurred in September 1859.
— NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (@NWSSWPC) May 10, 2024
‘Gift from space’
Social media lit up with people posting pictures of auroras from northern Europe and Australasia.
“We’ve just woken the kids to go watch the Northern Lights in the back garden! Clearly visible with the naked eye,” Iain Mansfield in Hertford, England, told the AFP news agency.
That sense of wonder was shared in Australia’s island state of Tasmania.
“Absolutely biblical skies in Tasmania at 4am this morning,” photographer Sean O’Riordan posted on X alongside a photo.
The storm could also produce northern lights as far south in the United States as Alabama and across northern California, according to the NOAA.
But it was hard to predict and experts stressed it would not be the dramatic curtains of colour normally associated with the Northern Lights, but more like splashes of greenish hues.
“That’s really the gift from space weather – the aurora,” Rob Steenburgh, a scientist with the Space Weather Prediction Center, told The Associated Press news agency.
The Northern Lights seen over the National Monument of Scotland in Edinburgh during the most powerful solar storm in more than 20 years [Jacob Anderson/AFP]
Ghaziabad, India – It is close to midnight. Ruchika Sharma sits in her makeshift studio at her home in Ghaziabad, a city just outside India’s capital, New Delhi, a small mic hooked to her shirt. The 33-year-old historian and former professor is getting ready for her latest YouTube video show.
The recording hours are odd, but it is a considered decision. There is little ambient noise at this time, she reasons. For an independent creator like Sharma, a studio with fancy audio setups and soundproofing is beyond reach – especially since she knows that each video she puts out makes it harder for her to land a job.
Sharma looks at a phone that doubles as a teleprompter. Another phone serves as her recording rig. On two small wooden racks hung on the cream-coloured wall behind Sharma, sit a dozen history books. Also on the wall are a picture of Indian revolutionary icon Bhagat Singh, who was hanged by the British colonial regime in 1931, and a copy of the 17th-century painting of the Sasanian king Khosrow Parviz’s first sight of his Christian wife Shirin, bathing in a pool.
On her wooden table, alongside tripods and ring lights is an eclectic mix of cosmetic products: brushes, mascara, concealer, powder puff, and, most important of all, eyeshadow.
She hits the record button.
Sharma starts with an introduction to Nalanda, a sixth-century Buddhist university in northern India that was home to nine million manuscripts and was burned down in a major fire in the 12th century. A widely held belief – promoted by sections of India’s Hindu right, amplified by a government-run modern-day version of Nalanda University, and referenced in multiple news articles – suggests that Nalanda was destroyed by a Muslim general named Bakhtiyar Khilji.
Sharma calls this one of the “biggest myths of Indian history” before citing a slew of historical sources that she says buttress her assertion. These sources, which she says are often cited by those who paint Khilji as Nalanda’s villain, don’t actually refer to the university at all, she points out. Instead, she says, the sources suggest Khilji attacked another Buddhist university, where many people were killed in his attack.
Midway through the narration, she picks up a bottle of concealer and applies it under her eyes. She drops a sarcastic joke – telling her viewers that she is citing the very same sources that WhatsApp forwards pushing dubious or fake history tend to quote. A sponge comes out to blend with the skin tone, and soon, a lilac eyeshadow is in place.
At a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and its Hindu nationalist allies face allegations of rewriting history, turning the past into a political battleground for the future, these unconventional history lessons, laced with makeup and satire, are Sharma’s attempt at setting the record straight.
With more than 200 YouTube videos in just over two years, the historian is building a growing audience: Her YouTube channel, Eyeshadow & Etihaas, has nearly 20,000 subscribers, while on X, where she amplifies the arguments she makes in her videos, she has 30,000 followers.
But perhaps the biggest testament to her mounting influence lies in the threats and abuse she routinely receives for her videos. They’re a badge of honour she shrugs off, but would rather not have to wear.
“I often get such death threats. Rape remarks keep coming,” she says. “They no longer work on me.”
A spread of makeup palettes, brushes and mascara in front of Sharma, which she uses during her recording [Md Meharban/Al Jazeera]
Eyeshadow and history
Sharma grew up surrounded by history, in a family shaped – like millions of others – by India’s modern tumult.
A grandchild of partition refugees, Sharma spent her childhood in Mehrauli, New Delhi’s oldest surviving inhabited area. After India’s cleavage at independence in 1947, her grandparents, both Punjabis from present-day Pakistan, found sanctuary in the neighbourhood and bought land on which they built a home.
She thinks of the stories of partition she heard from them as her first brush with history. From her terrace, she would watch Qutb Minar, a five-story red and buff sandstone tower built in the 12th and 13th centuries by Muslim rulers that is as much a landmark of New Delhi as 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 13, her parents decided they needed more space and moved out of the family house to Ghaziabad, a neighbouring district of Delhi, where she lives with her elder sister and her 61-year-old mother, a retired government official who worked at Indian Oil, a government oil and gas corporation. Sharma lost her father to cancer in 2017.
Sharma says she was always interested in eye makeup. She would wear kohl in high school. She began using lip gloss in college, and during her PhD in 2020, she started applying eye makeup and lipstick to cope with an abusive relationship.
“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 saw an eyeshadow YouTube video that caught her attention. “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 teaching in a college at the time and would buy eyeshadow palettes, though her mother 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,” said her mother, who requested anonymity.
Her mother’s other concern was that Sharma was spending too much money on expensive eyeshadow palettes.
As with makeup, Sharma’s academic pursuit of history was not something her parents supported initially.
Sharma was in eighth grade when a history teacher who she remembers as “Sheila ma’am” changed her view of the subject. Until then, she says, teachers would ask students to underline important dates and moments in history in their textbooks, and then 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 began to visit the school library frequently and study any history books she came across, finding the process fascinating. Sharma got 94 percentile in 10th grade and took up humanities in high school.
Sharma got into Lady Shri Ram College, one of New Delhi’s top arts institutions, for her undergraduate studies, but her parents believed there was no future in history and pressured her into taking up an undergraduate programme in business studies.
Fresh out of college at the age of 21, she was recruited by a high-paying corporate firm. She left her job after just four months. She was bored. “I realised I needed to return to history. My parents were not very enthusiastic about my change of plans,” she says.
Sharma had continued to read history as a hobby during her undergraduate years. One book influenced her above all others – The Hindus: An Alternative History, by American historian Wendy Doniger, who was targeted by the Hindu right-wing who claimed that her book vilified the Hindu religion. Publishers subsequently pulled the book from the Indian market in 2014, raising widespread concerns about the state of free speech in India.
Making the leap from a corporate life to go back to school, she joined Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), which regularly ranks as among India’s top research universities, for her master’s and PhD in history.
Sharma took up a contractual teaching position at Indraprastha College For Women in Delhi University. And in mid-2022, as physical classes resumed after COVID-19 cases dipped, Sharma started wearing 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 read up online on how to start a YouTube channel. And two weeks later, she recorded her first episode where she matched her blue outfit with blue eyeshadow.
Her first video was a trip down memory lane: a 28-minute episode about Qutb Minar, where she discussed the monument’s history and construction, its architecture, and the history of architecture and design in Islam.
That first video, which she described as an experiment, brought her over 400 subscribers in the first few days.
Sharma, the YouTube historian, was born.
Sharma shooting a YouTube live for her history channel from Humayun’s tomb, a Mughal-era monument in New Delhi, India [Md Meharban/Al Jazeera]
‘Cannot let these myths slide’
Myth-busting was not the idea behind her YouTube channel initially, she says. She wanted to introduce people to aspects of Indian history that they were unfamiliar with.
She soon started recording videos on architectural reuse, non-vegetarian food in Indian history, homosexual and interfaith relationships in the Mughal period, and Sati, an ancient Hindu practice in which widows would burn to death by sitting atop their deceased husbands’ funeral pyres.
But the comments she saw under her videos often had little to do with the content of what she had said.
“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 each video, the responses alerted her to more historical myths, half-truths and instances of complex themes from the past that were often presented publicly without context.
“Initially, the trolling and abuse I received for my videos affected me greatly,” she says. Her past mental health struggles compounded the hurt, she said. “But over time, I became immune.”
Since then, she has had no shortage of material to work with: from the razing of Hindu temples, ostensibly by medieval Muslim rulers; to stories of atrocities committed by these rulers that eliminate nuance.
These are subjects that are often invoked by leaders of Prime Minister Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and their allies to paint India’s history as one filled with the oppression of Hindus by Muslims – a narrative that critics have long warned feeds into the demonisation of India’s 200 million Muslims. In an animated Instagram video in late April that the platform later took down, the BJP portrayed India as a Hindu land pillaged by Muslim raiders for centuries. In fact, Islam arrived in the Indian subcontinent as early as the 7th century – much before Khilji, the Mughals and other Muslim rulers and commanders.
Under Modi, school textbooks have been changed to incorporate this Hindu nationalist reading of history – including suggestions that a Vedic sage was the “father of aviation” and that atomic science was known to ancient 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 adds, arguing that the portrayal of Indian Muslims as historical villains has helped make it easier for Hindu majoritarian politicians and mobs to target them. Since Modi came to power in 2014, hate crimes – including lynchings – against Muslims have skyrocketed.
No figure in Indian history evokes the kind of hatred in Hindu nationalist historical accounts that Aurangzeb, the last major Mughal emperor does. He is accused of having killed hundreds of thousands of Hindus, committing unimaginable atrocities on his ‘kafir’ (infidel) subjects, and razing down religious sites of ‘non-believers’.
Sharma believes this portrayal of Aurangzeb ignores the time 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 were “all about political conquest”.
Breaking temples built or patronised by defeated kings was the norm at the time, she says – one that Hindu kings too had long followed. The idea was simple: Such temples were seen as manifestations of the former sovereign’s authority. Aurangzeb followed that practice, while at least 25 new Hindu temples also came up under his reign, Sharma says.
Yet, the widely held image of Aurangzeb as a particularly evil king has real-world consequences for those who differ. The Mughal king is also eulogised by some for having practised a humble lifestyle and for his religious knowledge. This landed a 14-year-old Muslim boy in trouble. In June 2023, police arrested a teenager for putting up a social media status praising Aurangzeb, after receiving complaints.
“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.
According to Abhilash Mallick, an associate editor of the fact-checking unit of The Quint, an India-based digital news organisation, history is challenging to fact-check because “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.”
That is where Sharma comes in. “She removes the historical jargon and makes videos in Hindi which is what I like about Ruchika’s approach,” he says.
As India votes in its seven-phase national election, the race between the politicisation of history and attempts to counter myth-making has only grown in intensity.
In late April, Sharma decided to take on a particularly powerful opponent – Prime Minister Modi himself.
Who is an ‘outsider’?
Speaking at an election rally in the western Indian state of Rajasthan on April 21, Modi appeared to describe Indian Muslims as “infiltrators” in trying to suggest that the opposition Congress wanted to take the private property of Hindus and distribute them among Muslims.
Within hours, Sharma posted a link on X, referencing a video of Modi’s comments and pointing to a YouTube episode of her show, challenging common beliefs about the Mughal empire that ruled India from 1526-1719 AD, though weaker kings from the dynasty continued to control an ever-shrinking empire all the way up to 1857.
The Mughal video, like all of Sharma’s history videos, begins with a more than one-minute preview of the video, followed by her introduction, in which she lists her credentials and tells viewers that her channel is a “passion project”.
Sharma applies a reddish eyeshadow that matches her red top. Throughout the video, she combines memes and Bollywood music to inject humour. Three minutes into the video, she picks up a skin serum and pours a few drops on her right palm as she takes on the first myth – that the Mughals were outsiders.
She discusses how, with the exception of Babur, the dynasty’s founder, and his son Humayun, the remainder of the Mughal rulers were born in India. Mughal food and clothing, she claims, are now commonplace in most Indian households. She discusses modern borders and the idea of nations and how they emerged centuries after the Mughals, and how by today’s notions of nationhood, most of the dynasties that ruled India would have had roots that could make them “outsiders”.
Sharma then picks up a concealer and begins applying it to her left eye as she debunks the second myth: that the Mughals were especially violent.
She refers to suggestions that the Mughals burned all documents prior to their rule. She explains how the Mughals preserved the histories and texts of the ancient Indian period through translations, such as Razmnama, a Persian translation of the Hindu epic Mahabharata.
A provocative question follows: “If documents were not burned, did they burn people?” she asks, before answering herself.
“Maybe as much as some other kings in India burned,” she says, explaining that the Mughals, while violent, had a track record no worse than many other rulers of the time.
But fighting historical battles in India’s present, surcharged political environment has risks. Doing so while wielding an eyeliner as a weapon is even harder – as Sharma has learned.
Sharma filming b-rolls of a Mughal-era monument for use in her YouTube broadcasts [Md Meharban/Al Jazeera]
‘I don’t want to rot in jail’
From labelling her a pseudo-historian and questioning her credentials to hypersexualised slander, the online abuse that Sharma faces is as wide-ranging as the makeup tools on her table and the slices from history she clinically dissects.
Sharma admits that when she first started creating the videos, she worried she wouldn’t be able to withstand 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 word used to slander Muslim women.
“But I’ve come to realise now I have a thicker skin.”
Still, she feels let down by her own peers. Sharma often hears from members of academia – including female historians – that she is cheapening history by talking about it while putting on makeup in front of a camera. “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 history professor at Delhi University’s Indraprastha College for Women, believes that few academics are willing to speak out in India’s current political climate, where many universities have cracked down on critics of the Modi government.
“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.
Academics “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 convey accurate history to the public – but that for the most part, they’ve failed. “Historians are happy writing journals that only five people read,” Sharma says.
She chooses to make her videos in Hindi, rather than English, to reach a larger Indian audience.
But as her viewership grows, so does – she believes – the target on her back. Sharma has applied for assistant professor positions at more than two dozen Delhi University colleges since 2022, after her short-term contract job at Indraprastha College was over, but has not been able to land a job. That is no coincidence, she says.
Often, she says, questions asked during interviews are attempts to tease out the interviewee’s ideology. She speaks of an incident where the interviewer turned out to be a senior historian aligned with the current government, whom she had confronted in a separate panel discussion earlier. During the job interview, she says, he inquired about recent archaeological excavations at a Mughal palace and mentioned the discovery of temple remains 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 recalls. “He said, ‘Why is it that only under mosques do you find remains of temples?’”
Sharma knew then that she wouldn’t get the job.
Now, she says, she goes to interviews without any expectations that she might be selected. “One Google search and anyone will know about my ideology and the government does not want somebody like me.”
It is not just her career that is on the line: Dozens of critics of the Modi government, including journalists and academics, have been arrested over the past decade, many on charges that rights groups have described as excessive or motivated.
Sharma doesn’t want to join 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 before turning to the humour that often marks her videos too. “I can do much better work if I stay outside.”
Her mother worries about her daughter. “I keep telling her to quit this work. I feel scared,” she says.
Sharma has asked her mother not to share her videos in family WhatsApp groups and worries about being recognised in public. “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.
But despite her fears, Sharma is not ready to give up yet.
In her makeshift studio, it is time for a retake, so she sifts through brushes and picks the eye-shadow palette. She gently brushes the eyeshadow on her left eyelid. “I will continue making videos as long as they let me.”
New Delhi, India – It is close to midnight. Ruchika Sharma sits in her makeshift studio at her home just outside India’s capital, New Delhi, a small mic hooked to her shirt. The 33-year-old historian and former professor is getting ready for her latest YouTube video show.
The recording hours are odd, but it is a considered decision. There is little ambient noise at this time, she reasons. For an independent creator like Sharma, a studio with fancy audio setups and soundproofing is beyond reach – especially since she knows that each video she puts out makes it harder for her to land a job.
Sharma looks at a phone that doubles as a teleprompter. Another phone serves as her recording rig. On two small wooden racks hung on the cream-coloured wall behind Sharma, sit a dozen history books. Also on the wall are a picture of Indian revolutionary icon Bhagat Singh, who was hanged by the British colonial regime in 1931, and a copy of the 17th-century painting of the Sasanian king Khosrow Parviz’s first sight of his Christian wife Shirin, bathing in a pool.
On her wooden table, alongside tripods and ring lights is an eclectic mix of cosmetic products: brushes, mascara, concealer, powder puff, and, most important of all, eyeshadow.
She hits the record button.
Sharma starts with an introduction to Nalanda, a sixth-century Buddhist university in northern India that was home to nine million manuscripts and was burned down in a major fire in the 12th century. A widely held belief – promoted by sections of India’s Hindu right, amplified by a government-run modern-day version of Nalanda University, and referenced in multiple news articles – suggests that Nalanda was destroyed by a Muslim general named Bakhtiyar Khilji.
Sharma calls this one of the “biggest myths of Indian history” before citing a slew of historical sources that she says buttress her assertion. These sources, which she says are often cited by those who paint Khilji as Nalanda’s villain, don’t actually refer to the university at all, she points out. Instead, she says, the sources suggest Khilji attacked another Buddhist university, where many people were killed in his attack.
Midway through the narration, she picks up a bottle of concealer and applies it under her eyes. She drops a sarcastic joke – telling her viewers that she is citing the very same sources that WhatsApp forwards pushing dubious or fake history tend to quote. A sponge comes out to blend with the skin tone, and soon, a lilac eyeshadow is in place.
At a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and its Hindu nationalist allies face allegations of rewriting history, turning the past into a political battleground for the future, these unconventional history lessons, laced with makeup and satire, are Sharma’s attempt at setting the record straight.
With more than 200 YouTube videos in just over two years, the historian is building a growing audience: Her YouTube channel, Eyeshadow & Etihaas, has nearly 20,000 subscribers, while on X, where she amplifies the arguments she makes in her videos, she has 30,000 followers.
But perhaps the biggest testament to her mounting influence lies in the threats and abuse she routinely receives for her videos. They’re a badge of honour she shrugs off, but would rather not have to wear.
“I often get such death threats. Rape remarks keep coming,” she says. “They no longer work on me.”
A spread of makeup palettes, brushes and mascara in front of Sharma, which she uses during her recording [Md Meharban/Al Jazeera]
Eyeshadow and history
Sharma grew up surrounded by history, in a family shaped – like millions of others – by India’s modern tumult.
A grandchild of partition refugees, Sharma spent her childhood in Mehrauli, New Delhi’s oldest surviving inhabited area. After India’s cleavage at independence in 1947, her grandparents, both Punjabis from present-day Pakistan, found sanctuary in the neighbourhood and bought land on which they built a home.
She thinks of the stories of partition she heard from them as her first brush with history. From her terrace, she would watch Qutb Minar, a five-story red and buff sandstone tower built in the 12th and 13th centuries by Muslim rulers that is as much a landmark of New Delhi as 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 13, her parents decided they needed more space and moved out of the family house to a district neighbouring Delhi, where she lives with her elder sister and her 61-year-old mother, a retired government official who worked at Indian Oil, a government oil and gas corporation. Sharma lost her father to cancer in 2017.
Sharma says she was always interested in eye makeup. She would wear kohl in high school. She began using lip gloss in college, and during her PhD in 2020, she started applying eye makeup and lipstick to cope with an abusive relationship.
“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 saw an eyeshadow YouTube video that caught her attention. “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 teaching in a college at the time and would buy eyeshadow palettes, though her mother 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,” said her mother, who requested anonymity.
Her mother’s other concern was that Sharma was spending too much money on expensive eyeshadow palettes.
As with makeup, Sharma’s academic pursuit of history was not something her parents supported initially.
Sharma was in eighth grade when a history teacher who she remembers as “Sheila ma’am” changed her view of the subject. Until then, she says, teachers would ask students to underline important dates and moments in history in their textbooks, and then 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 began to visit the school library frequently and study any history books she came across, finding the process fascinating. Sharma got 94 percent in her 10th grade examination and took up humanities in high school.
Sharma got into Lady Shri Ram College, one of New Delhi’s top arts institutions, for her undergraduate studies, but her parents believed there was no future in history and pressured her into taking up an undergraduate programme in business studies.
Fresh out of college at the age of 21, she was recruited by a high-paying corporate firm. She left her job after just four months. She was bored. “I realised I needed to return to history. My parents were not very enthusiastic about my change of plans,” she says.
Sharma had continued to read history as a hobby during her undergraduate years. One book influenced her above all others – The Hindus: An Alternative History, by American historian Wendy Doniger, who was targeted by the Hindu right-wing who claimed that her book vilified the Hindu religion. Publishers subsequently pulled the book from the Indian market in 2014, raising widespread concerns about the state of free speech in India.
Making the leap from a corporate life to go back to school, she joined Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), which regularly ranks as among India’s top research universities, for her master’s and PhD in history.
Sharma took up a contractual teaching position at Indraprastha College For Women in Delhi University. And in mid-2022, as physical classes resumed after COVID-19 cases dipped, Sharma started wearing 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 read up online on how to start a YouTube channel. And two weeks later, she recorded her first episode where she matched her blue outfit with blue eyeshadow.
Her first video was a trip down memory lane: a 28-minute episode about Qutb Minar, where she discussed the monument’s history and construction, its architecture, and the history of architecture and design in Islam.
That first video, which she described as an experiment, brought her over 400 subscribers in the first few days.
Sharma, the YouTube historian, was born.
Sharma shooting a YouTube live for her history channel from Humayun’s tomb, a Mughal-era monument in New Delhi, India [Md Meharban/Al Jazeera]
‘Cannot let these myths slide’
Myth-busting was not the idea behind her YouTube channel initially, she says. She wanted to introduce people to aspects of Indian history that they were unfamiliar with.
She soon started recording videos on architectural reuse, non-vegetarian food in Indian history, homosexual and interfaith relationships in the Mughal period, and Sati, an ancient Hindu practice in which widows would burn to death by sitting atop their deceased husbands’ funeral pyres.
But the comments she saw under her videos often had little to do with the content of what she had said.
“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 each video, the responses alerted her to more historical myths, half-truths and instances of complex themes from the past that were often presented publicly without context.
“Initially, the trolling and abuse I received for my videos affected me greatly,” she says. Her past mental health struggles compounded the hurt, she said. “But over time, I became immune.”
Since then, she has had no shortage of material to work with: from the razing of Hindu temples, ostensibly by medieval Muslim rulers; to stories of atrocities committed by these rulers that eliminate nuance.
These are subjects that are often invoked by leaders of Prime Minister Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and their allies to paint India’s history as one filled with the oppression of Hindus by Muslims – a narrative that critics have long warned feeds into the demonisation of India’s 200 million Muslims. In an animated Instagram video in late April that the platform later took down, the BJP portrayed India as a Hindu land pillaged by Muslim raiders for centuries. In fact, Islam arrived in the Indian subcontinent as early as the 7th century – much before Khilji, the Mughals and other Muslim rulers and commanders.
Under Modi, school textbooks have been changed to incorporate this Hindu nationalist reading of history – including suggestions that a Vedic sage was the “father of aviation” and that atomic science was known to ancient 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 adds, arguing that the portrayal of Indian Muslims as historical villains has helped make it easier for Hindu majoritarian politicians and mobs to target them. Since Modi came to power in 2014, hate crimes – including lynchings – against Muslims have skyrocketed.
No figure in Indian history evokes the kind of hatred in Hindu nationalist historical accounts that Aurangzeb, the last major Mughal emperor does. He is accused of having killed hundreds of thousands of Hindus, committing unimaginable atrocities on his ‘kafir’ (infidel) subjects, and razing down religious sites of ‘non-believers’.
Sharma believes this portrayal of Aurangzeb ignores the time 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 were “all about political conquest”.
Breaking temples built or patronised by defeated kings was the norm at the time, she says – one that Hindu kings too had long followed. The idea was simple: Such temples were seen as manifestations of the former sovereign’s authority. Aurangzeb followed that practice, and patronised at least 25 Hindu temples, Sharma says.
Yet, the widely held image of Aurangzeb as a particularly evil king has real-world consequences for those who differ. The Mughal king is also eulogised by some for having practised a humble lifestyle and for his religious knowledge. This landed a 14-year-old Muslim boy in trouble. In June 2023, police arrested a teenager for putting up a social media status praising Aurangzeb, after receiving complaints.
“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.
According to Abhilash Mallick, an associate editor of the fact-checking unit of The Quint, an India-based digital news organisation, history is challenging to fact-check because “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.”
That is where Sharma comes in. “She removes the historical jargon and makes videos in Hindi which is what I like about Ruchika’s approach,” he says.
As India votes in its seven-phase national election, the race between the politicisation of history and attempts to counter myth-making has only grown in intensity.
In late April, Sharma decided to take on a particularly powerful opponent – Prime Minister Modi himself.
Who is an ‘outsider’?
Speaking at an election rally in the western Indian state of Rajasthan on April 21, Modi appeared to describe Indian Muslims as “infiltrators” in trying to suggest that the opposition Congress wanted to take the private property of Hindus and distribute them among Muslims.
Within hours, Sharma posted a link on X, referencing a video of Modi’s comments and pointing to a YouTube episode of her show, challenging common beliefs about the Mughal empire that ruled India from 1526-1719 AD, though weaker kings from the dynasty continued to control an ever-shrinking empire all the way up to 1857.
The Mughal video, like all of Sharma’s history videos, begins with a more than one-minute preview of the video, followed by her introduction, in which she lists her credentials and tells viewers that her channel is a “passion project”.
Sharma applies a reddish eyeshadow that matches her red top. Throughout the video, she combines memes and Bollywood music to inject humour. Three minutes into the video, she picks up a skin serum and pours a few drops on her right palm as she takes on the first myth – that the Mughals were outsiders.
She discusses how, with the exception of Babur, the dynasty’s founder, and his son Humayun, the remainder of the Mughal rulers were born in India. Mughal food and clothing, she claims, are now commonplace in most Indian households. She discusses modern borders and the idea of nations and how they emerged centuries after the Mughals, and how by today’s notions of nationhood, most of the dynasties that ruled India would have had roots that could make them “outsiders”.
Sharma then picks up a concealer and begins applying it to her left eye as she debunks the second myth: that the Mughals were especially violent.
She refers to suggestions that the Mughals burned all documents prior to their rule. She explains how the Mughals preserved the histories and texts of the ancient Indian period through translations, such as Razmnama, a Persian translation of the Hindu epic Mahabharata.
A provocative question follows: “If documents were not burned, did they burn people?” she asks, before answering herself.
“Maybe as much as some other kings in India burned,” she says, explaining that the Mughals, while violent, had a track record no worse than many other rulers of the time.
But fighting historical battles in India’s present, surcharged political environment has risks. Doing so while wielding an eyeliner as a weapon is even harder – as Sharma has learned.
Sharma filming b-rolls of a Mughal-era monument for use in her YouTube broadcasts [Md Meharban/Al Jazeera]
‘I don’t want to rot in jail’
From labelling her a pseudo-historian and questioning her credentials to hypersexualised slander, the online abuse that Sharma faces is as wide-ranging as the makeup tools on her table and the slices from history she clinically dissects.
Sharma admits that when she first started creating the videos, she worried she wouldn’t be able to withstand 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 word used to slander Muslim women.
“But I’ve come to realise now I have a thicker skin.”
Still, she feels let down by her own peers. Sharma often hears from members of academia – including female historians – that she is cheapening history by talking about it while putting on makeup in front of a camera. “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 history professor at Delhi University’s Indraprastha College for Women, believes that few academics are willing to speak out in India’s current political climate, where many universities have cracked down on critics of the Modi government.
“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.
Academics “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 convey accurate history to the public – but that for the most part, they’ve failed. “Historians are happy writing journals that only five people read,” Sharma says.
She chooses to make her videos in Hindi, rather than English, to reach a larger Indian audience.
But as her viewership grows, so does – she believes – the target on her back. Sharma has applied for assistant professor positions at more than two dozen Delhi University colleges since August 2023, after her short-term contract job at Indraprastha College was over, but has not been able to land a job. That is no coincidence, she says.
Often, she says, questions asked during interviews are attempts to tease out the interviewee’s ideology. She speaks of an incident where the interviewer turned out to be a senior historian aligned with the current government, whom she had confronted in a separate panel discussion earlier. During the job interview, she says, he inquired about recent archaeological excavations at a Mughal palace and mentioned the discovery of temple remains 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 recalls. “He said, ‘Why is it that only under mosques do you find remains of temples?’”
Sharma knew then that she wouldn’t get the job.
Now, she says, she goes to interviews without any expectations that she might be selected. “One Google search and anyone will know about my ideology and the government does not want somebody like me.”
It is not just her career that is on the line: Dozens of critics of the Modi government, including journalists and academics, have been arrested over the past decade, many on charges that rights groups have described as excessive or motivated.
Sharma doesn’t want to join 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 before turning to the humour that often marks her videos too. “I can do much better work if I stay outside.”
Her mother worries about her daughter. “I keep telling her to quit this work. I feel scared,” she says.
Sharma has asked her mother not to share her videos in family WhatsApp groups and worries about being recognised in public. “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.
But despite her fears, Sharma is not ready to give up yet.
In her makeshift studio, it is time for a retake, so she sifts through brushes and picks the eye-shadow palette. She gently brushes the eyeshadow on her left eyelid. “I will continue making videos as long as they let me.”
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