In an Instagram reel, Jahan Ara, daughter of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, is lying next to her father on a bed strewn with rose petals. The scene hints at an incestuous relationship that no historical record supports.
The disturbing clip, entirely generated by artificial intelligence, was uploaded by the account History Labs, which has more than 64,000 subscribers on YouTube and is monetised on the platform.
India’s history has increasingly become a site of conflict, shaped by the current political climate. Textbook revisions that critics argue marginalise the Mughal past, recurring disputes over Mughal monuments and mosque sites, and films that promote skewed narratives instead of real histories all reflect this tension. In such a climate, AI creators are turning rumours, fantasies, and fabrications into political framings and old prejudices—presented as bite-sized history.
For millions who encounter these AI-generated videos in a casual scroll, they appear less like fiction and more like historical evidence.
The New History Classrooms
Over the past year, dozens of AI-powered history channels — HistoryvideoAI, KathaAI, History Labs — have sprouted across Instagram and YouTube. Together, they command hundreds of thousands of followers, particularly among young audiences and especially among the UPSC aspirants. Hashtags like #UPSC and #historyshorts appear frequently under the reels.
Not all the videos are false. Some recreate battles or monuments with reasonable accuracy. But Decode’s review of these videos revealed a troubling trend: the most viral clips often rely on rumor, innuendo, or outright fabrication — presented with lifelike AI avatars that look authoritative.
One popular video on Instagram shows Shah Jahan gloating that he will soon chop off the hands of his labourers so they cannot build another monument like it. Meanwhile, the AI labourers say that the “king has called them to give a gift”.
“This is a rumour, and has no historic evidence,” says Shireen Moosvi, a historian who specialises in Mughal history.
Moosvi, who is a retired professor at Aligarh Muslim University, and has written extensively on the Mughal period, said, “If you look at primary texts like Shah Jahan Nama, there is nothing to suggest this ever happened.”
On the claim of Shah Jahan’s relationship with his daughter, Saifuddin Ahmad, professor of history at Delhi University, said such claims originated from European travelers like Bernier and Tavernier.
“These accusations represent less an authentic insight into Mughal court life and more a projection of European fantasies and suspicions,” Ahmad said.
“These were men who never entered the zenana (women’s quarters), yet wrote with the confidence of eyewitnesses.” No Mughal chronicler, he pointed out, ever hinted at an incestuous relationship between Shah Jahan and Jahan Ara.
Then there’s Razia Sultan, the Delhi Sultanate’s only woman ruler. Multiple AI clips portray her as a queen who promoted her former slave, Yaqut, to an aristocrat. Her romance with him leads to her downfall, according to the AI-generated videos.
Ahmad called it a complete distortion. “Razia’s promotion of Yaqut was a political move to unsettle the Turkish nobility. Turning it into a love affair is a way of reducing a powerful woman to the men around her.” He said that the accusation appears much later in Ibn Battuta’s account, commenting on how their relationship was wrongly portrayed by writers and filmmakers.
Across these examples, the formula is clear: rumours and misogynistic tropes dressed up as animated fact.
The Creators
Shikhar Srivastava, a 25-year-old software engineer from Delhi, is the founder of HistoryvideoAI. He started making AI videos in June this year, using tools like Adobe Premiere Pro and Kling to churn out slick, voiceover-led shorts. In just three months, the account gathered nearly 700K followers on Instagram and 240K subscribers on YouTube.
“I saw that most AI history videos were just for entertainment,” he said, “I thought, what if I add a learning curve?” he asked himself before creating the YouTube channel.
But Srivastava’s research process is thin. “Mostly Wikipedia,” he admitted, occasionally supplemented with the history textbook Spectrum, popular among students preparing for civil services examinations. One of his earliest videos showed a Qutub Minar labourer complaining he hadn’t been paid. After it was flagged, Srivastava archived it.
When asked why his videos carry no disclaimers, he shrugged, “Instagram itself is for entertainment. No one will casually scroll and learn from Instagram.” Yet many of his reels carry the #UPSC tag, and the comments are filled with aspirants thanking him for “useful” lessons.
“I use the UPSC hashtag just to interact with students,” he insisted. Srivastava said that the responsibility lies with Instagram to eliminate misinformation from the platform. “Platforms should moderate. Creators can’t police everything,” he said.
On his part, as his defense, he said that he added comments in some videos, saying that there’s “uncertainty in the facts”.
A tool revealed that many of these AI history channels are monetised on YouTube and run active ads. Decode reached out to Meta and YouTube for comment, but has not received a response yet. The story will be updated if and when we receive a response.
The Politics In AI ‘Entertainment’
Historians say these distortions are not just careless — they are political.
“It’s not surprising that Mughals are being shown negatively in the current climate,” said Moosvi. She pointed to AI depictions of Shah Jahan with a Hindu tilak on his forehead — a detail absent from any historical record.
The gendered misrepresentations are equally telling. “The queen could be brave, but only if she was also romantically flawed,” said Ahmad. “Both Jahan Ara and Razia Sultan are reduced to a scandal. The stories, with no historical basis, show how women in power are so often reduced to the men around them,” he added.
For Umar Ashraf, who runs the page Heritage Times, which talks about historical figures from India, AI history videos fall into two categories: “Some are just experiments. But many operate like propaganda machines.” The monetised YouTube channel has over 30K subscribers, and over 300K followers on Facebook.
Maariyah Siddique, a media scholar based in Kolkata, said, “Most of such history videos by other channels are made with the intention of going viral, not necessarily meaning to present the factual account of subjects.” She called such videos “digital extensions of propaganda films like The Kerala Story or Chhaava.”
The hyper-sexualised portrayals of Muslim women and vilification of Muslim rulers, she said, connect directly to online Islamophobia — from trolling campaigns like Bulli Bai and Sulli Deals to right-wing influencer networks.
“These are not neutral tools,” she warned.
“They normalise misogyny and Islamophobia so that when bigger political actors use the same narratives, they feel acceptable, even harmless.”
The impact could be huge on students, Siddique believes. She said that it is important for teachers to caution students against learning history from such AI videos.
For many viewers, though, the appeal is undeniable.
“History used to feel boring. Now it’s simple and funny,” said Jyoti Sharma, an ardent follower of history pages that create videos using AI. The 29-year-old said that it adds a “layer of creativity to facts”, making her want more long-form AI history videos.
Others are more cautious. Urooj Bano, a Delhi-based journalist, said she always cross-checks: “Mughals are constantly shown in a bad light. You can’t just take these videos at face value.” Wamika Singh likes the creative format but said, “The way entire chapters get rewritten today, this could be misused easily.” She said she doesn’t know if the videos are completely accurate, but believes one must fact-check them. Umair Alware, a 25-year-old lawyer and history enthusiast, bluntly added, “Most of these videos are right-wing fiction.”
AI may be giving history a glossy, scroll-friendly upgrade, but it’s also smuggling in rumors, prejudice, and political spin under the guise of fact. What looks like harmless entertainment on Instagram can, with enough repetition, harden into memory.
In a country where the past is already a battleground, through textbooks to monuments to memes, the video clips risk becoming the history lesson.
And on the internet, once a story looks real enough, it rarely stays on just social media feeds.
