But begin to examine Truschke’s work and the strain on credulity becomes clear. Yes, historians agree that four million Indians were killed under Aurangzeb, but Truschke blithely brushes it off as “questionable.” Yes, Aurangzeb killed all of his brothers and jailed his ailing father, Shah Jahan, for life, but that was just what Mughals did. Nay, Truschke says, it was good, because the fratricide strengthened the eventual ruler’s hand!

Sure, Aurangzeb levied jaziya, or a tax, on all non-Muslims and engaged in mass conversions, but this was just a tactic to coalesce his rule. True, Aurangzeb brutally tortured and decapitated the Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadur, or Shivaji’s son, Sambhaji, but that was just what a king did to control territory. And yes, Aurangzeb destroyed Hindu temples – but not thousands, just several dozen!

Aurangzeb was just being an emperor of his times and stop judging him by modern standards Truschke demands – even if Aurangzeb echoes in the carnage of ISIS.

Credit Truschke with uncommon alacrity to whites-plain to a billion Indians (not just the plethora of Twitter handles arrayed against her) that the massacres of their ancestors passed down by oral tradition, documented by contemporaries and catalogued by historians, is well, deniable.

That the suffering of those who rose to oppose Aurangzeb – heroes that every civilisation craves to inspire coming generations – was just the collateral damage of an emperor’s ambition.

Not even Truschke ventures a denial that Aurangzeb destroyed temples that ranked among the holiest for Hindus. Take three examples: The Kesava Deo temple where Lord Krishna was born, the Kashi Vishwanath Temple in Benares, and the Somnath temple in Gujarat. Those temples were of incredible significance, and their destruction was only meant to terrorise Hindus of his era.

Must those sins be explained away? Instead of allowing a plural Indian democracy to face the holocausts of its past and present and then reconcile them, Truschke and her ilk deny catharsis in the condescending belief that Indians don’t want the truth – they can’t handle the truth.

Truschke is not the first to minimise the evil that Aurangzeb personified. Romila Thapar, Ram Punyani, D N Jha and many others have played the activist game of minimising the evil of Mughal tyrants so as not to “agitate” the ignorant masses.

But Truschke is perhaps the first in the age of Twitter to engage in atrocity denial and grab the mantle of a young academic standing tall against Hindutva trolls who, not known for subtlety or command of articulating thoughts in 140 words, play their part in over-the-top online attacks. These attacks, in turn, win click-bait headlines in Indian media, help sell her books, and beckon Marxist historians enjoying repute in India to rush to her defense.

The reviews of Truschke’s book are decidedly mixed, and lay historians are making attempts to rebut her most provocative contentions. Truschke, though, brushes off these critiques with an easy retort: they are not scholarly. But Truschke herself denies that Aurangzeb is a scholarly work.

Not even a rigorous endeavour – no peer review, and she dispensed with footnotes and diacritical marks throughout the book, simply listing biographical references at the end of the book.

All of this is amusing, but Hindu Americans can’t ignore the stakes.

For even though Truschke’s work is not academic in nature, her scholarly credentials infuse her book with the imprimatur of objectivity and erudition. It is not a long journey from the lay press to a history textbook in California where Hindu Americans have spent nearly a decade questioning, debunking and removing academically legitimised myths of the Aryan invasion into India, to take one example. And just last month, Hindu Americans were treated to another academic at home in popular media, Reza Aslan, sharing his wildly erroneous understanding of caste and running along a Ganges river bank from Aghori monks practising their eccentric rituals.

Scholar activists like Truschke enjoy privilege. Access to publishers, support of an academy invested in similar ideology, access to ideologically aligned dominant media and ownership of the most crucial currency of all – credibility. But how long can each of us in the academy count on that currency? Can one leverage credibility to such an extent that it is rendered worthless? The reception to Truschke’s book will answer that question.