Audrey Truschke

Audrey Truschke is a historian of South Asia and a professor at Rutgers University. Her work focuses on inter-community relations in medieval South Asia, especially during the Mughal Empire. In 2017, she was conferred with the John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History by American Historical Association. Truschke has been a frequent target of harassment by supporters of Hindutva, who accuse her of having prejudiced views on Hinduism, and making offensive statements; scholars reject the charges.

Education and career

Truschke earned her bachelor's degree in religious studies from the University of Chicago in 2004. Edmond Smith of the University of Kent, writing for Reviews in History, found the work to be "evocative, [and] expertly researched", where Truschke used her "exceptional linguistic talents" to pose and answer provoking questions about the Mughal Empire while inspiring other scholars to re-examine their approaches to studying religions.

Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India's Most Controversial King

In 2017, Truschke published Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India's Most Controversial King about the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, with Stanford University Press. Truschke, in her reading of sources, suggests that Aurangzeb was not the anti-Hindu tyrant he has been made out to be in popular scholarship; there was no "systematic" attack on Hindus and his sporadic destruction of temples or imposition of jizya must be interpreted from within a political and economical milieu.

Truschke opines that the execution of the ninth Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur in 1675 by Aurangzeb was a political matter rather than a religious act. She writes that Guru Tegh Bahadur was viewed as a rebel causing unrest in the state of Punjab and "a threat to the state security". In response to her alternate take on the killing of the ninth Guru, scholars and the Sikh community including Network of Sikh Organisations, wrote to her "reminding" her that it is "widely acknowledged and documented" that the killing took place against the backdrop of a delegation of Kashmiri Pandits approaching Guru Tegh Bahadur in 1675 to seek his protection from religious persecution.

Munis D. Faruqui, a historian of Mughal India, found the book to be an excellent work aimed at non-specialists, and praised Truschke's willingness to tackle the topic despite being aware about the inevitability of "vicious personal attacks from mostly non-academic critics". However, Faruqui cautioned that the book "[did] not fill unexplored gaps in the historiography."

The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Indo-Muslim Rule Truschke's third monograph, The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Indo-Muslim Rule, was published in January 2021 by Columbia University Press.

India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent Truschke's fourth monograph, India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent, was published in June 2025 by Princeton University Press.

Edited volumes In May 2021, Truschke co-edited "The Ramayana of Hamida Banu Begum, Queen Mother of Mughal India" which was published by Silvana Editoriale and Museum of Islamic Art, Doha.

Honors In 2017, Truschke was awarded the John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History by the American Historical Association for Culture of Encounters being the "most distinguished work of scholarship on South Asian history, [published in 2016]". She received the Rutgers Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence in 2020.

Social media activity Translation controversy In one of her tweets in 2018, Truschke, referring to an episode in the Ramayana, said that Sita had admonished Rama as a "misogynist pig"; she cited a critical translation of the Valmiki Ramayana by Robert P. Goldman in support. Sanskrit scholars Nityanand Misra and Shankar Rajaraman wrote a "clinical demolition" of her claims and invited her to a Sanskrit debate over her claims. Due to her historical works and her choice of language, she has become a target of the Hindu right In 2021, Truschke, along with a group of other scholars, formed a collective to combat increasing harassment of South Asian scholars by people affiliated with Hindutva. although she is "not Jewish".

Aurangzeb After publishing her monograph on Aurangzeb, Truschke was accused of allegedly whitewashing the figure and was trolled by the Hindu right. Wendy Doniger noted these to be ad-hominem attacks infused with Islamophobia and misogyny. The philosophy of violence (and nonviolence), as espoused in Bhagavadgita and their appropriation into sociopolitical discourse has attracted significant scholarship. See Palshikar, Sanjay. "Evil and the Philosophy of Retribution: Modern Commentaries on the Bhagavad-Gītā". UK: Routledge (2014) linking Hindus with the January 6 United States Capitol attack, The man who waved the Indian flag has been found as having been an immigrant from Kochi who lived in the United States for 28 years, with "no real close relationship for that matter with any politician in India", and joined the Republican Party out of opposition to Obama's healthcare policies rather than diaspora politics. Despite this, other scholars have noted the enmeshing of Hindu Nationalist diaspora with the US-based far right. whitewashing the "trauma" inflicted on Hindus by Aurangzeb, Truschke was represented by Cornell Law School's First Amendment Clinic and Davis Wright Tremaine. A year and a half later, Judge Amit Mehta dismissed the suit since HAF not only failed to establish any cause of action — even assuming that their allegations were factually accurate — but also failed to evidence that the court had any personal jurisdiction over the defendants.

A diverse group of intellectuals and academics—Akeel Bilgrami, Amitav Ghosh, Anita Desai, Cornel West, Martha Nussbaum, Nandini Sundar, Noam Chomsky, Romila Thapar, Sudipta Kaviraj, Sheldon Pollock, and Wendy Doniger among others—have condemned HAF's tactics as a strategic lawsuit against public participation to silence critics and push forward Hindutva.

Personal life Truschke has three children.