The long-dead seldom pose a plausible threat to the living, let alone to those among them who happen to be all-powerful, paid-up members of the ruling class. Then again, South Asia is no stranger to the strange. Different rules apply there. Undeterred by the fact that there were scarcely any Buddhists in Afghanistan, the Taliban blew the sixth-century Bamiyan Buddhas to kingdom come in 2001. A similar impulse guided their co-religionists on the other side of the Durand Line in Pakistan, where Hindu temples from a bygone age were desecrated with gusto in 1993.

Both episodes were, after a fashion, responses to one that took place further afield, across the Radcliffe Line in India: the flattening of Babur’s 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya in 1992 by Hindu activists bent on recovering the ‘birthplace’ of Ram, which apparently lay underneath its edifice. The outlandish conviction rested on slim foundations. To begin with, Ram is a mythological deity. His ‘magical’ cameo at the mosque in 1949 may well have been the work of an earthly entrepreneur. Many Hindus, however, were disinclined to believe the secular sceptics who questioned the miracle. After a decades-long campaign, the mosque was razed to the ground.

It would be too simple to attribute these iconoclastic episodes to a kind of vestigial fervour that still obtains in the more atavistic corners of the world. Truth be told, they have little to do with religion and everything to do with politics. In the first two instances above, the logic was geopolitical; in the third, demographic.

The Taliban, for its part, didn’t exactly lay down a clear party line. We have, then, a panoply of motives. Blowing up the Buddhas, a party spokesman told the BBC, was an act of solidarity with India’s Muslims in the wake of Ayodhya. Yet it was no mere case of belated tit for tat, according to Sayed Rahmatullah Hashimi, the Taliban envoy to the US. It was instead a response to Western sanctions at a time of famine – to the hypocrisy of the Western press, which placed art above life: ‘When your children are dying in front of you, then you don’t care about a piece of art.’

As in Afghanistan, so in Pakistan. The attack on Lahore’s Bansi Dhar Temple, among other Hindu sites, betrayed not so much the workings of the pious Muslim mind as that of the Pakistani nationalist. The iconoclasm was of a piece with the grim pas de deux of retaliatory violence that has governed Indo-Pakistani relations since independence; last month’s fighting, sparked by the killing of 26 people in Indian-administered Kashmir, was only the latest round of the long-running conflict. Partition in 1947 set the tone, with the pogrom pendulum swinging endlessly from one country to the other. The same transpired following the theft of a relic, a strand of hair from the Prophet Muhammad’s beard, from the Hazratbal shrine in 1963. And so it was in 1992. The destruction of Babur’s mosque and the massacre of Muslims in India was followed by attacks on Hindu temples and the slaughter of Hindus in Pakistan.

In India, too, iconoclasm carried a distinct political flavour. The Hindu nationalist contempt for India’s heritage, in particular its medieval Muslim past, stemmed not so much from timeless Hindu hatreds as from contemporary anxieties. India’s Muslim minority may be poor, wretched, and powerless, underrepresented in parliament and overrepresented in prison, but all the same it poses a demographic threat to the Hindu majority, Hindu nationalists argue.

A great many of them subscribe to a local declension of the Great Replacement Theory, which has it that today’s minority is poised to become tomorrow’s majority, thanks to liberal conniving. In the West, far-right fears turn on racial replacement; in India, by contrast, they turn on confessional replacement.

At present, Hindus account for 80 per cent of the population, and Muslims 14 per cent. Yet on the strength of the latter’s marginally faster rate of multiplication, the former tremble in apprehension at the prospect of one day having to submit to Muslim rule. Statistically, it hardly needs saying, the possibility of that happening is unlikely in the extreme. Even so, it remains a seductive conspiracy theory.

Then there is that other bugbear: the persistence of a separate code of law governing the lives of Muslims in the country. Of shariatic stamp, it condones polygyny and gender inequity (by allowing, for instance, sons to inherit twice the share as daughters), arousing by turns jealousy and resentment among Hindu men.

The two grievances – great replacement and juridical autonomy – have for over a century now legitimised violence against Muslims. They are what the cultural historian Peter Gay has called ‘alibis for aggression’. Crudely put, Muslims in India are considered fair game. At the time of riots, the police look the other way as Muslims are killed. Discrimination in the civil service, and in society at large, is likewise casually accepted as a fact of life. India’s ‘Muslim’ monuments, as stand-ins for the community, are collateral damage of this logic.

The demolition of Babur’s mosque in 1992 by Hindu nationalists was a watershed. In its immediate aftermath, it paved the way for the massacre of thousands of Muslims across Indian cities. A few years later, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rode to power, promising to make good on its pledge to build a temple on the mosque’s ruins. As with everything in India, construction proceeded at a leisurely pace, and it was only in 2024 that India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, consecrated the sandstone Xanadu that is the Ram Temple, still incomplete.

India’s iconoclastic chapter is far from over. The culture wars carry on. Hindu nationalists have set their sights on another Mughal monument. Earlier last month, with nods from party elders, Udayanraje Bhosale, BJP MP for Satara, deemed the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s tomb in Khuldabad ripe for desecration. The tomb, replete with Mughal motifs, is in fact a fairly recent construction. Aurangzeb died in 1707, having ruled a good chunk of the subcontinent over the preceding half-century, but it was only at the turn of the last century that George Curzon, the historically-minded British viceroy, installed a marble screen around the emperor’s remains – dignifying him, yet defying his dying wish to be buried in an unmarked grave.

Aurangzeb was a pious fellow. That austere instruction reflected nothing so much as his desire to be disassociated from his father, Emperor Shah Jahan of Taj Mahal fame, that ‘glorified jeweller’ as the historian Ellison Banks Findly has called him.

Abstemious and puritanical, Aurangzeb is an easy figure to detest. Hindus today, however, find even fewer virtues in him than did the English playwright John Dryden, who depicted the emperor as an archetypal oriental despot in his Restoration-era tragedy, Aureng-zebe. Their beef with him derives from his destruction of a good many temples in Mathura, Benares and beyond in his bid to undermine the authority of enemy rajas and rebels, not to mention the reviled jizya property tax he imposed on non-Muslims.

To be sure, it was all a little while ago. Not that Hindu nationalists are overly bothered by the passage of time. The historical hurt has a contemporary resonance to them. They see their unsuspecting Muslim neighbour in the Muslim ruler of old, who is now transmogrified into a cartoon monster.

Yet the real Aurangzeb, certainly no unreconstructed Hinduphobe, employed very many Hindus in his army and administration. Temples were given grants. Many Maratha rulers, moreover, had no sense of religious solidarity, and joined the Muslim ‘invader’ – the enemy’s enemy as it were – in doing battle with their Hindu brethren. For his part, the Sunni Aurangzeb took a dim view of his Shia and Ismaili confrères.

Still, on balance, Aurangzeb ruled in a fashion that a later age would call secular. This, at any rate, is the scholarly consensus on the emperor. But it is a judgement one makes at one’s peril in India today. Abu Azmi, a legislator in Maharashtra, learned this the hard way when he was suspended from the state’s legislative assembly for making this anodyne statement: ‘Aurangzeb built many temples. I do not consider Aurangzeb a cruel administrator.’

Nothing short of iconoclastic vengeance, it seems, will satisfy the country’s present rulers. Three centuries on, Aurangzeb will be made to pay dearly for his temple desecrations.

It is a peculiar approach to the past to say the least. It is also a complete departure from colonial policy. The Raj, in its late phase, was keen to preserve India’s precolonial heritage. Indeed, it is no small irony that Aurangzeb’s tomb, latticed fripperies and all, was not of contemporary Mughal provenance, but was instead a retardataire construction thrown up by Curzon. A product of the fin-de-siècle embrace of history, the viceroy was an unapologetic conservationist. Equating history with hierarchy, he defended both with equal energy. It was class that mattered, not race. Indian princes were ‘colleagues’, with whom he maintained a sense of camaraderie.

Curzon had no truck with what he called ‘the levelling tendencies of the age.’ Whigs he despised, for their hare-brained desire to turn Indians into Englishmen. It was on the same grounds that he opposed missionary activity in the subcontinent. In their zestful quest for converts, he thought, missionaries rode roughshod over India’s ‘ancient and noble races’ and their ‘profound truths’. The Raj’s forebears also came in for rough handling. The East India Company’s apparatchiks stood accused of ‘stupid and unlettered vandalism’. Armed with ‘the dogmas of a combative theology’, they had neglected, and worse, destroyed India’s precious heritage.

The Raj, then, would set the past to rights. Accordingly, the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act was passed in parliament in 1904. Aurangzeb’s tomb was spruced up in short order, and a whopping £50,000 was spent by the state on the restoration of Agra’s monuments, the Taj Mahal included. Craftsmen were trained in marble, sandstone, and pietra dura to restore Mughal monuments to their past glory.

Jawaharlal Nehru, one of Curzon’s successors, had this to say after independence: ‘After every viceroy has been forgotten, Curzon will be remembered because he restored all that was beautiful in India.’

No doubt, there was a touch of self-aggrandisement to Curzon’s monumentalism. His writings suggest that he was in India solely to live out some sort of Ruritanian romance. He was equally a product of his milieu. Edwardian England, reeling from the Boer War, was beset by imperial anxieties. It was as a response to these that a paternalistic justification for empire was found in developmentalism and conservationism: the British Empire would yank the colonies into modernity (since they had no sense of the future) and also protect their heritage (since they had no sense of history).

Happily, this view confirmed Curzon’s own. His biographer, David Gilmour, recounts in an arresting passage how a trip to Athens in his twenties had produced an acute dilemma. It was obvious from the Greek disregard for their monuments that adventitious intervention was needed. But was Elgin right to remove the marbles from the Parthenon frieze? He was indeed, Curzon concluded after some dithering, for the British were more philhellenic than the Hellenes.

The British were likewise better Indophiles than the Indians themselves. To this end, Curzon put together an ambitious preservation programme, erecting dozens of statues and memorials to such colonial heroes as Robert Clive, that condottiere detested by the likes of Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. The statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford, incidentally, belongs to this period; it was made in 1909-11.

The statue mania, both in the metropole and colony, underscored the same point. These were reminders of colonial sovereignty; the British Empire may have looked like a shaky enterprise, they seemed to say, but it was still a going concern. To the Indian audience, the historian Durba Ghosh has argued, Curzon’s policy projected a message of historical continuity. By protecting the subcontinent’s architectural inheritance as well as adding to it, the Raj effectively signalled both responsibility and sovereignty. The baton had passed from the Mughal to the British Empire.

India’s passage from the colonial to the postcolonial state was, as we have seen, accompanied by a change in temperament. The Hindu nationalist BJP sets little store by such whimsical notions as national heritage. What accounts for the marked difference between Indian and British views on the subject?

Cultural quirks are not to be discounted, but they only partially explain the contrasting attitudes to conservation. There is, in the British isles, an unmistakable veneration of tradition. Of High Tory and National Trust derivation, conservation found champions even in such unlikely figures as the socialist Kenneth Clark and the modernist Nikolaus Pevsner. So much so that Yimbys complain, with some justice, that Britain’s cities have become Grade II museums. The Edinburgh Council gave credence to this view last month, when it expressed unease with a proposal to turn an ‘iconic’ scrapyard – dating back to the distant 1990s – into student accommodation.

In India, by contrast, no protective halo surrounds constructions. Monuments are treated with a blithe disregard that would scandalise Brits. On most of them, narcissistic lovers’ etchings abound. The state, too, betrays no loftier purpose. Earlier this year, for instance, Aurangzeb’s haveli – mansion – in Agra was bulldozed by a builder, apparently in cahoots with local authorities, despite its ‘protected’ status.

Then we have the case of the ‘missing’ monuments, a mystery worthy of Conan Doyle. Systematically catalogued from Curzon’s time onward, by the time of independence in 1947, a total of 3,693 monuments had been identified and deemed ‘protected’ by the Archaeological Survey of India.

Thereafter, the matter was swiftly forgotten – until 2013. As it was, the new ‘comprehensive physical survey of all monuments’ revealed 50 of them to be missing. One, the 14th-century mausoleum of Khan-i-Jahan Tilangani, seems to have disappeared right under the surveyors’ noses in central Delhi. Many more have been lost to realtors and road widening. Small wonder the state has opted to abdicate its conservation duties, if in piecemeal fashion. Already, some 19 private businesses have signed up to the ‘Adopt a Heritage’ scheme, footing the bill for upkeep in exchange for licenses to run kiosks and sound and light shows on site.

Yet cultural explanations don’t alone suffice. The fact is that few Hindus cared to raze Babur’s mosque or Aurangzeb’s tomb before Hindu nationalists arrived on the scene. It took obsessive agents provocateurs to turn a fuzzy religious sentiment into a hot political issue. Something similar has transpired in Britain in recent years. It would be remiss not to mention the new British penchant for iconoclasm – so far claiming one victim in Edward Colston and lighting on a potential second in Cecil Rhodes.

As in India, there is something rather bizarre about this hobby horse. The Muslim monuments are patently not symbols of oppression. Hindus rule the country, and Muslims are second-class citizens. Colston and Rhodes likewise are no proxies for contemporary persecutions. Slavery and white supremacy are things of the past. Indeed, there isn’t even a racial wage gap in Britain. The British Empire, such as it is, is on its last legs, eking out an attenuated existence in a handful of minor Atlantic islands; its 1920s territorial heyday is well beyond living memory.

Misguided as these iconoclasts are, it would be churlish all the same to suggest that iconoclasm ought to have no place at all in any society. Art derives its power from contestation, and, perhaps perversely, iconoclasm can be a mode of engagement. Who can deny the appositeness of the blowing up of Speer’s marble swastika atop the Zeppelinfeld in 1945, or the toppling of Stalin’s bust during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, or indeed of Rhodes’ statues when the white supremacist Rhodesian state fell in 1979? There was a convergence of material and symbolic objectives in these instances.

Rhodes and Aurangzeb, by contrast, strike me not as urgent priorities but as senseless distractions from the pressing problems plaguing the two societies today. In any case, both are diminutive affairs. Walking past Rhodes’s statue on Oxford’s High Street or Aurangzeb’s tomb in Khuldabad, one is reminded of Robert Musil’s quip: ‘The most striking feature of monuments is that you do not notice them.’