(Published in Mint Lounge, September 11 2026)

In 1562, Emperor Akbar ordered the execution of a close associate. Adham Khan was one of the Mughal ruler’s kokas (foster brothers) and as such possessed vast influence. But he didn’t get along with another of Akbar’s ministers. So, as was the fashion in those times, Khan decided to eliminate his rival. Except, instead of deploying poison or some subtle means, his friends and he hacked the man to death. The emperor, awakened from an afternoon nap by the “dreadful clamour”, was aghast. There is more than one version of how he responded on first hearing the news (and before Khan was thrown off the fort walls). In one account, Akbar cries, “son of a b****”, a phrase preferred in our own times by such illustrious persons as Donald Trump. In the other, however, the lungi-clad padshah opts for a fouler expletive: “Kandu!”, he exclaims, (translated with touching fidelity by one scholar as “assf*****), “why did you kill (my minister)?!”

Abuses, it turns out, are one of the historical record’s most fascinating—and constant—features. It should not surprise us: inside and outside Parliament, India’s leaders have thrown at fellow politicians everything from “fat” (relatively low on the scandal scale) to “man-eater” (unusual). While this confirms that the historian of tomorrow will have much to chew on, historians today also find themselves in comparable situations. I can offer a case in point. When recording the audio edition of one of my books, I had to read out a quote from an episode during the Great Rebellion of 1857, where Indian soldiers used a certain word for their British officers. It is a common enough term, but personally I had never ever uttered it, until that day in the studio. The one saving grace was that the expression appeared in the text in its anglicised form. So, I took a deep breath and heard myself enunciate for the very first time: “You Banchats!”

While improper expostulations in public understandably cause outrage, historians trawling old writings also navigate a sea of colourful evidence in private exchanges. The correspondence of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, for instance, features everything from racist slurs to outright homophobia. This was not, of course, unusual at the time, but reading the material today can be disturbing. Based, of all things, on the shape of a distinguished but disliked person’s head, Marx jokes that his grandmother had “interbred with a Ni****”. Elsewhere, Engels describes a figure as a “jackass” and another as a “paederast”. Translators of these German letters, in fact, have sometimes played down the tone. As author Hubert Kennedy notes, when one encounters warmbrüderlich in one missive, it is not exactly a reference to “warm fraternal” but a snarky way to suggest “queer” (a polite translation) and “f**goty” (more bluntly).

While these were, of course, personal exchanges not intended for public consumption, there is no shortage of invective in some types of formal writing as well. Akbar’s son and heir, Emperor Jahangir, had a particular talent in this regard. In his autobiography, thus, a rebel is presented, understandably, as an “ungrateful b******” who was despatched to “hell”. Malik Ambar—the Africa-born Deccan warrior—is “black-faced”, “ill-starred”, a “treacherous trickster” and “meddling slave”. His troops were an “army of calamity”, while popular support for his anti-Mughal stance showed the Deccanis as a “people of unlimited stupidity”. Jahangir and Ambar died, but the conflict continued. The former’s grandson, Aurangzeb, in fact inherited both his grandfather’s political mission and his flair for language. A specific Deccan ruler was described as an “ape-like buffoon” and, in a flash of imperial condescension, a “vendor of Chinaware”.

Of course, none of this can match the scatological excess in one of religious history’s greatest polemical texts, written by a man born in the same year as the Mughals’ ancestor Babur. In his Against the Papacy in Rome Founded by the Devil (1545), Martin Luther excoriates the pope and the Catholic church in language even the most inured will find extraordinary. Apparently, the bishop of Rome was born out of the devil’s backside. There are a number of comparisons of Luther’s religious opponents with donkeys and pigs, and references to farts and faeces and things that are only good to be used as toilet paper. Today we have a sedate idea of a “religious reformer” like Luther. Little does most of the world know that this icon once played with and coined such lovely phrases as “pope fart donkey” and “fart donkey pope”—an inflammatory tradition now best personified by internet trolls.

Interestingly, India offers several examples of abuse as religious ritual. In Kodagu, the Kurubas celebrate the Kunde Habba (literally, “Bum Festival”) every year, in which dressed in drag, men hurl curses at a deity. In Kerala, there is the Kodungallur Bharani festival. Its songs feature a variety of terms, of varying degrees of social acceptability, for sexual organs, sexual activities, and more. There is an abundance of euphemisms and innuendos that need not be elaborated—references to flagstaffs, elephant trunks, and that sort of thing. A hundred years ago the queen of Travancore, raised in a Victorian mould, outlawed all this bawdy singing. She too was praised as a “reformer”, but the royal dictate did not alter reality on the ground. The tradition continues. Indeed, as the scholar Nimisha Jayan notes, even contemporary cultural influences have been incorporated—including references to such curious things as buses.

To individual targets, abuse is never a sweet experience. Nonetheless, as a social phenomenon, it tells us a lot about humanity and our species in general. For one, we learn that ultimately even our tallest, most feted figures are not immune to the temptations of venomous language—B.G. Tilak destroyed the moral pretensions of the Raj, for instance, but could not resist deploying a pun that likened a female Christian evangelical to a harlot. Periyar in Tamil Nadu held up a mirror to society and rained blows on the institution of caste yet also resorted to what can only be called problematic language. The British were casually racist toward Indians (“wogs”), while we Indians in turn still casually use abuses that are casteist in character. And more often than not, beyond hard instruments and physical damage, it is poisonous speech that can leave the most severe scars on societies and people. A sharp tongue, after all, is a phenomenally potent weapon.