In a recent column, historian Anirudh Kanisetti argued that India has “lost the language for what Iran actually means to it.” It is a striking phrase, and an accurate one. India today speaks of Iran in the vocabulary of diplomacy and energy corridors, but avoids the harder historical and strategic truths that should shape its policy.

That selective memory is not accidental. For years, the Iranian embassy and its interlocutors have tried to foreground civilisational links, shared culture, and the deep imprint of Persian on the subcontinent. There is truth in that story. Persian was once the language of administration and high culture in India for centuries, shaping literature, governance, and elite life.  In fact, modern Hindi and Urdu descend from Hindustani, a forced marriage of evolutions of local dialects of the north with Persian.

But that is only half the history.

The other half is far less comfortable. The rise of Islamic polities linked to Persia and Central Asia in the subcontinent was accompanied by violence, displacement, and religious upheaval. Kanisetti selectively ignores that Persian was imposed by the sword and from Mahmoud of Ghazni to Nadirshah of Iran,........

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