Reimagining History Pedagogy: Beyond Denial, Beyond Vengeance
Recent changes to NCERT’s Class 8 social science textbook—highlighting 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 thoughtful reconstruction. In several of my posts here and elsewhere many a times, I have dwelled extensively on textbooks debate and presented my views. I yet again iterate a critique of history textbooks including the most recent and argue for a new historical imagination.
From Civilisational Amnesia to Scorekeeping: The Two Failed Models
Under the Congress-left consensus, NCERT textbooks were shaped by a secularist historiography that treated religious difference as dangerous - something to be effaced unless it could be rearticulated as “synthesis.” The brutality of conquest under Turkish, Afghan, and Mughal regimes was muted or euphemised, reframed through lenses of architectural grandeur, administrative sophistication, literary refinement, and cultural assimilation. Islamic rule was cast less as rupture than as enrichment—highlighting figures like Akbar, Dara Shikoh, or the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, while showcasing Rajput-Mughal collaboration or Muslim officers in Maratha courts as proof of composite culture. Simultaneously, Hindu society was critiqued largely through its internal inequities like caste, gender, and orthodoxy and inability to cohere as a united entity without any attention to Hinduism’s ethical ideals or reformative traditions.
Even the idea of civilisational unity, as seen in Nehru’s Discovery of India, was a retrospective construction—fashioned largely in response to colonial readings that painted India as fractured and unhistorical. Pre-Islamic plurality was acknowledged but framed as regionally discrete and pragmatically coexisting, not as part of an evolving spiritual or ethical continuum. Students were left with a fragmented sense of the past where Vedic culture displaced Harappans, Brahmins oppressed Shudras, and Muslims brought tolerance after conquest. In this view, India’s nationhood was finally redeemed only through modern secularism after 1885.
Teaching Rupture Without Retribution: Toward a Reflective Civilisational Pedagogy
A more adequate pedagogy would begin by acknowledging that Islamic conquest did, in many regions, mark a civilisational rupture—one involving violence, desecration, and deep ethical contestation. But to name this rupture is not to authorise communal resentment. Rather, it is to create a space for discernment: How did Hindu society absorb or resist these incursions? How did political forms like Bhakti, sectarian reform, or metaphysical universalism emerge in response to historical trauma?
Such a pedagogy must include “Contested Histories” modules in Class 9 or 10 (maybe class 8 or before be perhaps a bit early for students needing cognitive discernment faculties for endeavours suggested), where students are exposed to different historical interpretations—not just “facts.” Instead of flattening historical figures into heroes or villains (e.g., “Akbar was tolerant,” “Brahmins oppressed Dalits,” “Marathas were looters”), we need to teach early teens that historical actors often embody moral contradictions. i.e. Akbar’s Sulh-i-Kul was visionary, but also politically strategic—and his empire was still grounded in conquest; Krishnadevaraya was a temple-builder and a patron of the arts, but also an expansionist; Caste-based exclusion was real, but temples also fed the poor, staged mass rituals, and structured public life.
Let them therefore read contrasting voices: Jadunath Sarkar vs Irfan Habib, Meenakshi Jain vs Audrey Truschke. Let them ask: Was Akbar’s tolerance genuine or strategic? Was temple desecration political, theological, or symbolic? Did caste ossify due to Islamic presence, British administration, or Brahminical inertia?
Teachers, too, must be reoriented—not merely to know answers but to facilitate reflection, mediate moral disagreement, and uphold philosophical humility. This requires familiarity not only with textual scholarship but with the lived experiences of marginalised and religious communities. A plural republic demands a plural pedagogy—one that allows critique without collapse, memory without vengeance.
It is equally important that minority perspectives be acknowledged without being absolutised. Muslim students must not feel indicted by past conquests. Dalit and Christian students must not be asked to disown their grievances or heritage. But nor should they be positioned as the final arbiters of historical truth. A reflective historical pedagogy would affirm the Indic civilisational arc, while also acknowledging its exclusions—and inviting its renewal. Such possibilities of learning can be introduced through storytelling, thought experiments, and comparison exercises. This builds both empathy and discernment—hallmarks of a reflective civic ethos.
History as Systems Thinking: Making Social Sciences Practical and Concrete
What also often gets eclipsed in ideological battles over history is that the discipline is not only about ethics or national identity based on ontics of conflicts. It is also a powerful cognitive tool for understanding how societies function, how change unfolds, and how disparate domains like technology, trade, and governance interact. The popular view that math and science are “practical” while history is “soft” or merely “political” has stunted not only pedagogy but also interdisciplinary imagination.
History, when taught through a systems lens, can help students develop skills in pattern recognition, causal inference, and long-range thinking—capacities vital to engineers, doctors, designers, policy-makers, and technologists. Think of James Burke’s pioneering BBC series Connections (1978), which traced how seemingly unrelated events and inventions—like the stirrup, the water mill, and the telegraph—cumulatively reconfigured entire social and political structures. His work showed that history is a chain of interdependencies, not isolated milestones. Also looking at works of Matt Ridley, Steven Johnson, Ed Conway, Jared Diamond show how historical inquiry explains how changes happen: how technological diffusion, economic shifts, or ecological constraints shape entire civilisations. In Fernand Braudel’s longue durée approach, historical time is examined not as a sequence of political events but as overlapping temporalities—geographical, material, and cultural—that shape how civilisations evolve.
This kind of knowledge—practical, dynamic, and inferential—is no less valuable than mathematics or physics. Such frameworks can allow us to reimagine Indian history not just as a series of conquests or empires, but as a civilisational laboratory of technological innovation, social engineering, and economic adaptation. Consider masonry and temple architecture—the precision of granite cutting in Chola temples or the mortarless joinery of Konark’s sun temple were feats of civil engineering. The Vishwakarma tradition and knowledge systems embedded in sthapatya veda and shilpa shastra are not merely ritual; they are applied physics, design logic, and aesthetic proportion.
Even metallurgy in premodern India—iron pillars that resisted corrosion, Wootz steel exported to the Middle East—reveals a social history of materials, artisanship, and statecraft. K.T. Achaya’s writings, particularly his Indian Food: A Historical Companion traces how crops, dishes, cooking evolved in context of trade, migration, ecological changes. Similarly, Yashaswini Chandra’s The Tale of the Horse weaves together trade, ecology, and warfare—showing how animal economies shaped Indian polity and culture over centuries. Most appropriate book in this regard for youngsters, in fact for adults as much, would be The History of India in 100 Objects by Devika Cariappa. It delightfully underscore how material culture—tools, coins, inscriptions, textiles—can illuminate the lived rhythms of civilisation, reminding us that history is not just about events and empires but about artefacts, everyday ingenuity and the subtle interweaving of the tangible with the symbolic. In such a sense The Foundation for Indian Historical and Cultural Research (FIHCR) chaired by historian Vikram Sampath has also taken an independent initiative with four titles on ancient and early medieval India. I haven’t gone through these books yet (https://fihcr.com/yuva-books-series/) and have to vet whether these reference books for children are based on the thematic premise and epistemology I’m suggesting. However even if their focus is largely on ancient and pre Islamic India and those few who opposed and fought Islamic despots, in itself can’t be a ground for dismissal of its historical and pedagogical import.
How irrigation systems in the Deccan adapted to erratic monsoons?
How temple towns were economic hubs, not just religious spaces?
How colonial forest laws altered caste and tribal economies?
How the early medieval South Indian states reconfigured urban planning?
Just as mathematics fosters abstraction and proof, history too fosters proof - how sources are identified and used and ‘facts’ established. But I argue further. Many facts that emerge in our pasts are also about interconnectivity and reflection. It trains the mind to think relationally: to see how trade routes affect language patterns, how metallurgy intersects with warfare, how theological shifts map onto state formation. These are not “soft” skills—they are cognitive assets in a complex world.
In a society aspiring to become both technologically advanced and civilisationally anchored, teaching history in this way is not just desirable—it is urgent. It enables students to think beyond binaries: not merely “Was Akbar tolerant?” or “Was caste evil?” but also “How did urbanisation, artisanal guilds, and agrarian reforms interact across time?” This is how history can reclaim its place—not beneath the hard sciences, but alongside them, as a discipline that nurtures both conscience and cognition. We need pedagogy of the historical where past is not an imagined ideal where hierarchy, exclusion, and violence too were its facets but such a view is also incomplete. For our past also had ethical traditions, civic formations, and spiritual insight. We need to draw from these selectively, ethically, for becoming, not for domination.
From Civilisational Amnesia to Scorekeeping: The Two Failed Models
Under the Congress-left consensus, NCERT textbooks were shaped by a secularist historiography that treated religious difference as dangerous - something to be effaced unless it could be rearticulated as “synthesis.” The brutality of conquest under Turkish, Afghan, and Mughal regimes was muted or euphemised, reframed through lenses of architectural grandeur, administrative sophistication, literary refinement, and cultural assimilation. Islamic rule was cast less as rupture than as enrichment—highlighting figures like Akbar, Dara Shikoh, or the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, while showcasing Rajput-Mughal collaboration or Muslim officers in Maratha courts as proof of composite culture. Simultaneously, Hindu society was critiqued largely through its internal inequities like caste, gender, and orthodoxy and inability to cohere as a united entity without any attention to Hinduism’s ethical ideals or reformative traditions.
Even the idea of civilisational unity, as seen in Nehru’s Discovery of India, was a retrospective construction—fashioned largely in response to colonial readings that painted India as fractured and unhistorical. Pre-Islamic plurality was acknowledged but framed as regionally discrete and pragmatically coexisting, not as part of an evolving spiritual or ethical continuum. Students were left with a fragmented sense of the past where Vedic culture displaced Harappans, Brahmins oppressed Shudras, and Muslims brought tolerance after conquest. In this view, India’s nationhood was finally redeemed only through modern secularism after 1885.
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The current textbook revisions seek to course-correct this—but possibly does so by swinging to the other extreme. Now, the emphasis is on religious identities, civilisational grievance, and a pedagogical tone of vindication. Mughal rule is described largely in terms of temple desecration, atrocities, and forced conversions, but with no framework to understand how Islamic and Indic political theologies fundamentally diverged. Hindu failings—social exclusion, caste violence—are either ignored or marginalised. History becomes a ledger of civilisational scores, not a space for ethical grappling. The occasional caveats such as those in the new Class 8 book that urge students not to blame present-day communities are ethically sound but intellectually thin. They suggest reconciliation but without offering students the tools for civilisational understanding.
Teaching Rupture Without Retribution: Toward a Reflective Civilisational Pedagogy
A more adequate pedagogy would begin by acknowledging that Islamic conquest did, in many regions, mark a civilisational rupture—one involving violence, desecration, and deep ethical contestation. But to name this rupture is not to authorise communal resentment. Rather, it is to create a space for discernment: How did Hindu society absorb or resist these incursions? How did political forms like Bhakti, sectarian reform, or metaphysical universalism emerge in response to historical trauma?
Such a pedagogy must include “Contested Histories” modules in Class 9 or 10 (maybe class 8 or before be perhaps a bit early for students needing cognitive discernment faculties for endeavours suggested), where students are exposed to different historical interpretations—not just “facts.” Instead of flattening historical figures into heroes or villains (e.g., “Akbar was tolerant,” “Brahmins oppressed Dalits,” “Marathas were looters”), we need to teach early teens that historical actors often embody moral contradictions. i.e. Akbar’s Sulh-i-Kul was visionary, but also politically strategic—and his empire was still grounded in conquest; Krishnadevaraya was a temple-builder and a patron of the arts, but also an expansionist; Caste-based exclusion was real, but temples also fed the poor, staged mass rituals, and structured public life.
Let them therefore read contrasting voices: Jadunath Sarkar vs Irfan Habib, Meenakshi Jain vs Audrey Truschke. Let them ask: Was Akbar’s tolerance genuine or strategic? Was temple desecration political, theological, or symbolic? Did caste ossify due to Islamic presence, British administration, or Brahminical inertia?
Teachers, too, must be reoriented—not merely to know answers but to facilitate reflection, mediate moral disagreement, and uphold philosophical humility. This requires familiarity not only with textual scholarship but with the lived experiences of marginalised and religious communities. A plural republic demands a plural pedagogy—one that allows critique without collapse, memory without vengeance.
It is equally important that minority perspectives be acknowledged without being absolutised. Muslim students must not feel indicted by past conquests. Dalit and Christian students must not be asked to disown their grievances or heritage. But nor should they be positioned as the final arbiters of historical truth. A reflective historical pedagogy would affirm the Indic civilisational arc, while also acknowledging its exclusions—and inviting its renewal. Such possibilities of learning can be introduced through storytelling, thought experiments, and comparison exercises. This builds both empathy and discernment—hallmarks of a reflective civic ethos.
History as Systems Thinking: Making Social Sciences Practical and Concrete
What also often gets eclipsed in ideological battles over history is that the discipline is not only about ethics or national identity based on ontics of conflicts. It is also a powerful cognitive tool for understanding how societies function, how change unfolds, and how disparate domains like technology, trade, and governance interact. The popular view that math and science are “practical” while history is “soft” or merely “political” has stunted not only pedagogy but also interdisciplinary imagination.
History, when taught through a systems lens, can help students develop skills in pattern recognition, causal inference, and long-range thinking—capacities vital to engineers, doctors, designers, policy-makers, and technologists. Think of James Burke’s pioneering BBC series Connections (1978), which traced how seemingly unrelated events and inventions—like the stirrup, the water mill, and the telegraph—cumulatively reconfigured entire social and political structures. His work showed that history is a chain of interdependencies, not isolated milestones. Also looking at works of Matt Ridley, Steven Johnson, Ed Conway, Jared Diamond show how historical inquiry explains how changes happen: how technological diffusion, economic shifts, or ecological constraints shape entire civilisations. In Fernand Braudel’s longue durée approach, historical time is examined not as a sequence of political events but as overlapping temporalities—geographical, material, and cultural—that shape how civilisations evolve.
Incorporating these stories into school textbooks would possibly enhance material and functional history but also expand what is considered ’useful knowledge.’ Students would see that history isn’t just a moral ledger or cultural archive, but a repository of design, strategy, failure, and insight. Why not include modules on:
How irrigation systems in the Deccan adapted to erratic monsoons?
How temple towns were economic hubs, not just religious spaces?
How colonial forest laws altered caste and tribal economies?
How the early medieval South Indian states reconfigured urban planning?
Just as mathematics fosters abstraction and proof, history too fosters proof - how sources are identified and used and ‘facts’ established. But I argue further. Many facts that emerge in our pasts are also about interconnectivity and reflection. It trains the mind to think relationally: to see how trade routes affect language patterns, how metallurgy intersects with warfare, how theological shifts map onto state formation. These are not “soft” skills—they are cognitive assets in a complex world.
In a society aspiring to become both technologically advanced and civilisationally anchored, teaching history in this way is not just desirable—it is urgent. It enables students to think beyond binaries: not merely “Was Akbar tolerant?” or “Was caste evil?” but also “How did urbanisation, artisanal guilds, and agrarian reforms interact across time?” This is how history can reclaim its place—not beneath the hard sciences, but alongside them, as a discipline that nurtures both conscience and cognition. We need pedagogy of the historical where past is not an imagined ideal where hierarchy, exclusion, and violence too were its facets but such a view is also incomplete. For our past also had ethical traditions, civic formations, and spiritual insight. We need to draw from these selectively, ethically, for becoming, not for domination.
Conclusion
We stand at a pedagogical crossroads. One path leads to shallow narratives—either euphemistic or vindictive. The other leads toward a historically grounded, ethically alive, and intellectually rich education. India’s civilisational legacy deserves better than ideological distortion. Its students deserve better than curated forgetting or sanctioned resentment. And its future depends on producing citizens who can read the past not merely to remember, but to think, to judge, and to act—wisely, not tribally.
We stand at a pedagogical crossroads. One path leads to shallow narratives—either euphemistic or vindictive. The other leads toward a historically grounded, ethically alive, and intellectually rich education. India’s civilisational legacy deserves better than ideological distortion. Its students deserve better than curated forgetting or sanctioned resentment. And its future depends on producing citizens who can read the past not merely to remember, but to think, to judge, and to act—wisely, not tribally.