Debating Possibilities in Indian History - Teaching, Textbooks & Ideas

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.