I figure that’s only 20 years away. I hope.
Chimps and dolphins are a few more years off. 
Of course, using “Chimp” will be a racist term, too.
Oh, come now! We’ve already had a chimpanzee president…there’s obviously no speciesism in the US…
Post #10?
You mean you’ve already got surely 
Call it hopeful anticipation…
How about Audie Murphy? No scandals, affairs, slave-owning, native-pillaging…the guy is so straight-edge clean in his heroism and fame that he’s downright boring.
He’s never been “torn down” but I did read at least one warts ‘n all biography of him…No Name On The Bullet I think it was called. Towards the end of his life, Murphy was acting kind of unstable. In one of his autobiographies, Kirk Douglas was pretty uncomplimentary towards Murphy. I believe he used the term “psycho” to describe him. It’s been years since I read the book, and I no longer own it, but IIRC it was something about Murphy pulling a gun on Douglas’ buddy Tony Curtis.
He had PTSD pretty bad. His wife also claimed he pulled a gun on her as well during an “episode.”
I assume you meant to say Muslim presense, the Mughals being, relatively speaking, newcomers.
But actually for the bulk of the population in the Deccan ( i.e. the agrarian pesantry ) I wouldn’t be so quick to make that assumption. Or at least not so broadly. I suspect most probably took no notice. This was an illiterate, mostly sedentary group who for the most part would never have interacted with any Muslims - the lower and middle levels of the administrative class, the local gentry and lesser nobility and the majority of the army of the Deccan sultanates were composed of Hindus.
There also doesn’t seem to have been much difference in taxation. I snipped a long digression on the weirdness of jizya systems in India, but suffice it to say that the Marathas seemed to have taxed their subjects about the same. At times in an equally discriminatory fashion - Alamgir, ultra-orthodox zealot bent on coversion that he was, imposed in 1665 a discriminatory customs tax on internal trade, 2.5% for Muslims, 5% for Hindus. When the Marathas replaced the Mughals as the authority in certain Mughal lands they kept the Mughal tax system pretty much in place as is, including the discriminatory customs tax.
Even amongst the elites we see a number Maratha families that continued to favor the Mughals and Deccani sultans well after Shivaji’s rise. There was no real outpouring of early Hindutva.
Which isn’t to say that there wasn’t any anti-Muslim reaction at times. There certainly was, especially when some orthodox ruler ( i.e. an Alamgir or Firuz Shah )would decide that it was time to crack on Hindu practices. I just wouldn’t cast it as a universal yearning. Particularly in the Deccan, where rural bhakti Hinduism and Sufism frequently synergized ( and where you’d find such seeming oddities as Hindus worshipping at the tombs of Sufi saints and a Muslim poet proclaiming his devotion to Ganesh ).
Well, I wouldn’t label any pre-modern society as a secular, even vaguely. That’s a pretty modern concept. But as noted above, when it was a difference it tended to be more down to individual rulers.
Precious few, I’m sure :). Garibaldi’s ( another figure subject to much revisionism ) are rare. Shivaji was indeed brilliant, but not really revolutionary ( except in the sense that he laid the foundations for a powerful new state ).
By the by, I should note in this discussion on revisionism that as much as you see traditional heroes are often “revised” into less nakedly heroic, more human figures, you are also seeing traditional villains or incompetents looked at with a new clarity.
Sometimes this is examining facts that have been well known for quite some time with a new eye ( i.e. England’s King John ) and sometimes it is based on a careful examination of contradictory chronicles and the shackles of older theories of historiography ( i.e. the Carolingian emperor Charles III ‘the Fat’ ). But modern histories, while still point out there abundant flaws, make it clear they weren’t near as ineffectual as they have often been portrayed.