Two Orthodoxies in Search of History: NCERT Textbooks, Secular Historiography and the Hindutva Corrective
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 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.
The Scroll piece by Hasnain Naqvi that prompted my counterview was a fine specimen of this tendency. It defended complexity while enacting its own simplification: that any invocation of civilisational coherence is, at bottom, a majoritarian gesture in disguise. Manu Pillai's otherwise erudite reading of premodern India, which I engaged in a rejoinder in Scroll, reflects the same discomfort. Hybridity, accommodation, fragmentation become the master-keys that unlock every historical door, leaving no room for the question of whether something normative and enduring also ran through the subcontinent's institutional and ethical life. That precolonial India had a moral grammar however imperfect, hierarchical and contested, but a grammar nonetheless, is a proposition that much of liberal historiography cannot entertain without reaching for its smelling salts.
Removing Mughals wholesale from a Class 8 textbook is not civilisational recovery. It becomes civilisational insecurity. A tradition confident in its depth does not need to disappear its interlocutors. Highlighting Mughal brutality with a no-blame disclaimer while erasing Tipu Sultan entirely is not pedagogy. It is the same ideological flattening in a saffron coat. The secular textbook said: here is India, it had no coherent self, learn its fragments. The new textbook says: here is India, it had a glorious self, learn only its triumphs. Both are, in their different registers, a disservice to the student who must eventually live in a country that is neither a wound nor a trophy but a civilisation - complicated, plural, ethically demanding and historically deep.
The real tragedy is that the space for a genuinely normative historiography, one that holds civilisational depth and critical rigour together, that can speak of dharma without descending into triumphalism, of Islamic statecraft without either romanticising or demonising it remains largely unoccupied in our public discourse. The historians who could occupy it are either too invested in their academic guilds to take the risk or too polite to say plainly what they think. Those who are not polite are, unfortunately, not always historians.
India's past deserves better. So do its students.
The Secular Orthodoxy's Long Evasion
For decades, India's school history textbooks operated under a particular kind of self-congratulatory sophistication. They were 'complex.' They were 'nuanced.' They refused the seduction of nationalist mythology. What they were less candid about was their own mythology. This was the mythology of a secular-liberal dispensation that had decided, somewhere in the 1950s, that India's civilisational self was either an embarrassment or a communal provocation. Figures like Vivekananda and Aurobindo were safely neutered into moral mascots. The Bhakti movement became social protest. Sacred geography became superstition. And dharma that capacious, unruly, philosophically rich concept, was quietly ushered out of the historiographical room, lest it make the wrong sort of guests feel welcome.The Scroll piece by Hasnain Naqvi that prompted my counterview was a fine specimen of this tendency. It defended complexity while enacting its own simplification: that any invocation of civilisational coherence is, at bottom, a majoritarian gesture in disguise. Manu Pillai's otherwise erudite reading of premodern India, which I engaged in a rejoinder in Scroll, reflects the same discomfort. Hybridity, accommodation, fragmentation become the master-keys that unlock every historical door, leaving no room for the question of whether something normative and enduring also ran through the subcontinent's institutional and ethical life. That precolonial India had a moral grammar however imperfect, hierarchical and contested, but a grammar nonetheless, is a proposition that much of liberal historiography cannot entertain without reaching for its smelling salts.
The Hindutva 'Correction' and Its Own Shallowness
If the secular orthodoxy's problem is evasion dressed as sophistication, the Hindutva corrective's problem is grievance dressed as restoration. The recent NCERT revisions and my Indian Express piece engaged with them with measured fairness, do gesture, however clumsily, toward something legitimate: the recovery of a civilisational self that postcolonial curricula had suppressed. That gesture deserves acknowledgment. What it does not deserve is the execution it has received.Removing Mughals wholesale from a Class 8 textbook is not civilisational recovery. It becomes civilisational insecurity. A tradition confident in its depth does not need to disappear its interlocutors. Highlighting Mughal brutality with a no-blame disclaimer while erasing Tipu Sultan entirely is not pedagogy. It is the same ideological flattening in a saffron coat. The secular textbook said: here is India, it had no coherent self, learn its fragments. The new textbook says: here is India, it had a glorious self, learn only its triumphs. Both are, in their different registers, a disservice to the student who must eventually live in a country that is neither a wound nor a trophy but a civilisation - complicated, plural, ethically demanding and historically deep.
The real tragedy is that the space for a genuinely normative historiography, one that holds civilisational depth and critical rigour together, that can speak of dharma without descending into triumphalism, of Islamic statecraft without either romanticising or demonising it remains largely unoccupied in our public discourse. The historians who could occupy it are either too invested in their academic guilds to take the risk or too polite to say plainly what they think. Those who are not polite are, unfortunately, not always historians.
A Note to the Reader
I have laboured at this question in classrooms, in research, in print for over two decades. The arguments I am making are not new. They have appeared, in longer and more carefully footnoted form, in the pieces linked above and in the larger body of work on this site. What is new, perhaps, is my diminishing patience with the performative quality of India's history wars: the secular historian who discovers fresh outrage with every BJP press release, the Hindutva polemicist who mistakes loudness for argument. Neither is building anything. Both are, in their way, monuments to the very shallowness they accuse the other of.India's past deserves better. So do its students.