History as a Political Battlefield in India and the Discipline's Quiet Defence Against It

Every few years, an Indian government revises school history textbooks, and every few years a controversy follows that generates more heat than the actual pedagogical stakes usually warrant. This is not new. It is also not confined to one political formation, though the pattern of who initiates the controversy and who objects to it has shifted with changing governments. Understanding the recurrence requires separating two different questions that get routinely conflated: what actually happened in the past, a matter for evidence and method, and what a nation wants its citizens to feel about the past, a matter of political psychology entirely distinct from historical accuracy.

The Long History of Textbook Disputes

The pattern predates the current period by decades. In the 1970s, the NCERT commissioned textbooks from historians including R.S. Sharma, Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra and Satish Chandra that presented a broadly secular, materially grounded account of Indian history, one that treated religious identity as one factor among many rather than the primary engine of historical change. These textbooks drew criticism from Hindu nationalist organisations for decades, culminating in the early 2000s when the NDA government under the BJP, through Murli Manohar Joshi's human resource development ministry, commissioned replacement textbooks that were themselves criticised by professional historians for factual errors and ideological framing, including claims about Vedic-era scientific achievement that lacked archaeological or textual support. When the UPA government returned to power in 2004, it reinstated the earlier textbooks with revisions.

More recently, the NCERT's 2023 syllabus rationalisation removed or substantially trimmed chapters on the Mughal Empire, the Emergency period under Indira Gandhi, and the 2002 Gujarat riots, moves the NCERT justified as reducing curricular load but which most professional historians read as a continuation of the same recurring pattern, this time trimming material inconvenient to the current political dispensation's preferred narrative rather than adding material favourable to a previous one. The direction has changed across decades; the underlying dynamic, using the school curriculum to shape civic memory rather than to teach historical method, has not.

What Professional History Actually Claims

Set against this recurring political battle, it is worth being precise about what trained historians are actually committed to, because the commitment is considerably narrower and more defensible than either side of the textbook wars usually credits. The discipline's core method involves triangulating multiple kinds of evidence, epigraphic, numismatic, archaeological, and textual, against each other, weighting sources by proximity to the events they describe, and remaining explicit about uncertainty where the evidence genuinely does not settle a question. This is why, for instance, Romila Thapar's work on the Somnath temple raids by Mahmud of Ghazni is often mischaracterised in political debate as denying that the raid happened, when her actual argument, based on comparing Persian court chronicles, Sanskrit inscriptions from the temple's own region, and Jain trading community records from roughly the same period, was that these different sources described the same event with strikingly different emphases and that the trauma narrative later attached to the episode developed considerably after the fact, shaped as much by later colonial and nationalist retelling as by contemporary eleventh-century testimony. This is a claim about the history of memory, not a denial of the raid itself, and the distinction has been repeatedly flattened in political commentary on her work.

The Colonial Root of the Distortion

Much of the present controversy inherits categories first imposed by colonial historiography rather than indigenous tradition. James Mill's early nineteenth-century periodisation of Indian history into Hindu, Muslim and British ages, in his hugely influential History of British India, written by a man who never visited the subcontinent, imposed a framework that treated religious identity of rulers as the primary organising category of historical time, a framework professional historians since have worked hard to dismantle in favour of periodisation based on economic structure, state formation and regional variation. It is a considerable historical irony that contemporary Hindu nationalist historiography, in its insistence on reading medieval history primarily through the lens of Hindu-Muslim conflict, often reproduces Mill's colonial framework almost exactly, even as it presents itself as a nationalist corrective to colonial distortion.

The Discipline's Actual Defence

The strongest defence available to historians against political capture from any direction is not a counter-nationalism of their own, asserting a rival simplified narrative in defence of secularism, but a disciplined insistence on procedure: publish sources, allow peer scrutiny, distinguish between the confidence levels warranted by inscriptional evidence versus later literary embellishment, and resist the pressure, whichever direction it comes from, to make a historical claim serve a present political conclusion more definitively than the evidence supports. This is admittedly a less satisfying answer than either side of the textbook wars wants to hear, since it refuses to hand either nationalist pride or oppositional politics a clean historical verdict.

It is worth conceding, in fairness to critics of the professional historical establishment, that historians are not immune to their own selective emphases, and that some genuinely have written with contemporary secular politics in mind, understating uncomfortable episodes of medieval religious conflict just as nationalist historiography overstates them. A discipline that wants to defend itself credibly against political capture has to hold itself to the same evidentiary standard it demands of its critics, rather than treating professional credentials alone as sufficient protection against ideological bias. The textbook, in the end, is too blunt an instrument to carry the weight either side keeps placing on it; the more durable defence lies in a citizenry trained, even briefly, in how to weigh a primary source, a skill no single textbook edition can substitute for and no government of any persuasion can simply legislate into being.