Itihasa made itihasya...

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 o...

If a longue durée of Bengaluru’s historical evolution is taken, both romanticised nostalgia and presentist reductionism can present problems. A nuanced, pedagogically sensitive approach that reimagines memory, heritage, and the city’s layered identity is needed. Bengaluru, now solidified as India’s key economic epicenter by its IT juggernauts and unicorn startups, looms large with its towering parks, sprawling complexes, and cavernous malls, devouring the hamlets, pastures, and lakes that once defined the region. Yet, beneath this frenetic modernity lies an antiquity far older than India’s other metropolises, enshrined in the name Bengaluru, predating its anglicized alias, Bangalore. This past, stretching from prehistoric murmurs to the Western Gangas’ six-century reign (4th to 10th century CE) and the 17th-century vision of Kempe Gowda, pulses with a vitality often eclipsed by today’s apocalyptic traffic, garbage heaps, cratered roads, and reckless construction. A chorus of scholars, ...

A short video presentation where I summarise my key thoughts on historiography and historiographical conflicts. It is in essence a distillation albeit rather simplified if not simplistic, of my arguments, ideas, meanings and purpose that has informed my teaching, my trainings, my professional interactions over years. The broad perspective presented here have further been the backdrop for my explorations, deliberations and experimentations particularly via different pedagogical endeavours that I have shared in these pages, in my book  and my facebook page . Of course my presentation may leave a lot wanting, given my own clumsiness in articulation and lacking media finesse and media savviness but yet I hope in some little more than 8 minutes, key issues in contemporary historiography and some directions in resolving messy and fraught epistemic imbroglios emerge. 

Manu Pillai and Anirudh Kanisetti have been two writers who attempt to present their understanding of India’s past in a style and prose that can fancy more discerning readers bought on popular fiction. While it is doubtful if they present any original research, they certainly lay before a much larger audience, distilled views from more serious academic studies in racy and elegant prose. Otherwise much of social sciences and historical research are transacted in obtuse language that can intimidate and deter many. Yet social science scholarship is very subjective and over the years the conflict paradigm has dominated its practice. This perspective is not without its problems for it imagines an eternally divided world from the past where matters have always worked against the putatively disadvantaged communities at the hands of a propertied minority.  While no doubt hierarchies are obnoxious, we can also see how communities in the past have sought to combat the vileness, the oppressi...

The repeated revisions and pruning of the NCERT history and political studies textbooks under the current regime, has been in news again. History, politics, sociology and the way India’s past, its society and politics are represented rakes up matters among the most erudite of scholars who otherwise would care little for our schools and the sorry curricular transactions that transpire in our classrooms even with most thoughtful of textbooks. This time, several scholars associated with the NCERT’s social sciences textbooks seek removal of their names from them. The narrative of these texts with several deletions, these writers allege, ends with different meanings from what was originally intended. And these changes were done without their consent. They claim the repeated changes are attempts at whitewashing history, rather saffronising them. It is the consequence and one of the many orchestrated charades of Hindutva politics that in excising portions on RSS’s role in Gandhi’s assassinati...