Itihasa made itihasya...

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...