P. N. Oak

Purushottam Nagesh Oak (2 March 1917 – 4 December 2007), commonly referred to as P. N. Oak, was a fringe Hinducentric historical negationist from India.

Among his prominent claims were that Christianity and Islam are both derivatives of Hinduism, Vatican City, Kaaba, Westminster Abbey and the Taj Mahal were once Hindu temples dedicated to Mahadeva and that the Papacy was originally a Vedic Priesthood; their reception in Indian popular culture have been noted by observers of contemporary Indian society. He ran an 'Institute for Rewriting Indian History ' in the 1980s which published a quarterly periodical called Itihas Patrika dedicated to fringe causes; he had also written numerous books, some of which have even lead to court cases in a bid to correct the mainstream history narrative.

Life
Oak was born in 1917 in Indore in the erstwhile Princely State of Indore, British India. According to his own account, he completed an M.A. (Agra) and a law degree (LL.B. Mumbai), before being inducted as a Class I Gazetted officer in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting wherein he wrote various journalistic pieces. Before joining the army, he also claims to have worked as an English tutor at Fergusson College in Pune.

In 1964, he founded an organisation called Institute for Rewriting Indian History. He died on 4 December 2007, at 3.30 am at his Pune residence aged 90.

Taj Mahal Theory
In 2000 India's Supreme Court dismissed Oak's petition to declare that a Hindu king had built the Taj Mahal by saying he had a "bee in his bonnet" about the Taj. Till date, as of 2017, several court cases about Taj Mahal being a Hindu temple have been inspired by Oak's theory. In August 2017, Archaeological Survey of India stated there was no evidence to suggest the monument ever housed a temple.

Giles Tillotson calls Oak's claims as a "desperate bid to assign a new meaning to the Taj" and "pseudo-scholarship". He states that Oak interprets the statements of Padshahnama about Shah Jahan's purchase of the land for the Taj from Jai Singh I upon where a mansion built by an ancestor of the Raja earlier existed, to claim that Taj Mahal was a wonder of ancient Hinduism. Tillotson adds that no evidence is offered by Oak to redate it to thirteen centuries earlier. He adds that the technical know-how to construct structural buildings didn't exist in pre-Mughal India, the only surviving architecture being rock-cut or monolithic. He points that Oak later dropped this claim and claimed it to be from 12th century. He adds that Oak claims Mughals built nothing and only converted Hindu buildings. In relation to similarity with buildings of West Asia, Oak also claims them all to be "products of Hindu architecture".

Kaaba Theory: Vedic origins
In a 13-page pamphlet titled Was Kaaba a Hindu Temple?, Oak derives a claim of a "Vedic past of Arabia" based on an inscription mentioning the legendary Indian king Vikramāditya that Oak claims was found inside a dish inside the Kaaba. According to Oak, the text of the alleged inscription is taken from the page 315 of an anthology of poetry entitled Sayar-ul-Okul (Se’-arul Oqul meaning the memorable words), compiled in 1742 on the orders of a "Sultan Salim" (the actual Sultan at the time being Mahmud I, sultan Selim III lived from 1761 to 1808) from the earlier work of prophet Muhammed's uncle Amr ibn Hishām (poetic name "Abu al-Ḥakam" (or ابوالحكم) or meaning the "Father of wisdom") who had refused to convert to Islam, and, first modern version published in 1864 in Berlin and a subsequent edition was published in Beirut in 1932. Oak goes on to state that the anthology is kept in the "Makhtab-e-Sultania Library" (Galatasaray Mekteb-i Sultanisi or Galatasaray Imperial School) in Istanbul, Turkey which has been now renamed as Galatasaray Lisesi school.

Reception
Srinivas Aravamudan notes Oak to be a mythistorian whose work resorted to exploiting comparative philology in the generation of delusional etymologies—associating Sanskrit sound-alikes with foreign terms such as Vatican=vatika (hermitage), Christianity=Krishna-niti (the way of Krishna), Abraham as an aberration of Brahma -- to purvey an Islamophobic and anti-Christian agenda under the covers of Hindutva. Edwin Bryant in his work on Indo-Aryan theory describes Oak to be a self-styled historian whose works suffer from an ubiquitous and very poor standard of professionalism and critical methodology and who fit the definition of a crack-pot.

Giles Tillotson describes Oak's work on Taj Mahal as a "startling piece of pseudo-scholarship", which was plainly a work of polemical fantasy intended to denigrate Islam and did not merit any serious scholarly attention. Art historian Rebecca Brown described Oak's books as "revisionist history as subtle as Captain Russell's smirk" (referring to a character in the Hindi movie Lagaan).

Oak's theories have been noted to have found a popular following among right-wing Hindu factions in a bid to wage politico-religious battles. Tapan Raychaudhuri has referred to him as "a 'historian' much respected by the Sangh Parivar." Incidentally, one of his books "Some Blunders in Indian Historical Research" was banned from the Parliament's library by the Speaker of the Lok Sabha.