Debating Possibilities in Indian History - Teaching, Textbooks & Ideas

India's history wars have a peculiar quality: both sides are simultaneously right about their opponent and catastrophically wrong about themselves. The left-secular historian correctly identifies the crudeness of Hindutva's historical imagination . The Hindutva ideologue correctly identifies the evasions of the secular-liberal one. Each holds a valid mirror to the other's face and neither is capable of looking into its own. It is, as it were, a battle between two blindnesses, conducted with considerable noise and very little light. I have written about this now in three published pieces in Indian Express and Scroll and the responses or the silence, have only deepened my conviction that both camps prefer their comforts to their obligations.

Recent changes to NCERT’s Class 8 social science textbook that highlight among other claims,  Mughal brutality with a no-blame disclaimer, Shivaji’s heroics while omitting Tipu Sultan and the Anglo-Mysore wars entirely ( https://tinyurl.com/n6rb92mw https://tinyurl.com/y6ft4v7x   https://tinyurl.com/6jpzfd9c ) exemplify the deeper malaise in India’s history pedagogy . Our school textbooks have long been battlegrounds between political ideologies. Initially shaped by a secular-nationalist project that muffled religious and civilisational conflict and now being reshaped by a Hindutva-inflected project that asserts grievance and civilisational glory with shallow depth. Whether through euphemism or selective omission our textbooks remain captive to ideological compulsions. What they fail to offer is a morally discerning, civilisationally grounded and pedagogically intelligent engagement with the past. We do not need curated forgetting or curated vengeance . We need thou...