History in Fragments: The Politics of Erasure and Historical Consciousness in Contemporary India

Romila Thapar’s Warning and the Crisis of Continuity

-Ramphal Kataria

Manufacturing the Past: State Power, Myth, and the Politics of History in Contemporary India

History, as Romila Thapar has consistently argued, is not a catalogue of isolated events but a continuous process—an evolving record of social relations, political institutions, cultural exchanges, and intellectual traditions. To excise entire periods or dynasties from the curriculum is not merely a pedagogical error; it is an epistemic rupture that undermines the very possibility of historical understanding. Speaking at the Kerala Literature Festival (2026), Thapar described the removal of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal period from school textbooks as “nonsense,” cautioning that such deletions fracture continuity and render India’s past unintelligible.

This intervention must be read against the backdrop of post-2014 curricular and institutional changes that have reoriented history writing and teaching in India. These changes are neither incidental nor value-neutral. They form part of a longer ideological project that treats history as an instrument of political mobilisation rather than a discipline grounded in evidence, debate, and methodological rigour.

Textbook Revisions after 2014: Selective Erasure as Policy

Since 2014, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has undertaken multiple rounds of textbook “rationalisation” (2017, 2019, 2022–23, and 2025–26). While officially justified as measures to reduce academic burden, the pattern of deletions reveals clear ideological selectivity.

Entire chapters and substantial references to the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire have been removed from middle- and secondary-school textbooks. Discussions of Mahatma Gandhi’s opposition by Hindu extremists, including the ideological location of Nathuram Godse and the brief ban on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) after Gandhi’s assassination, have been excised. Detailed treatments of caste hierarchies, social protest movements, and episodes such as the 2002 Gujarat riots have been diluted or deleted, even as other instances of communal violence remain.

What is at stake here is not a difference of interpretation but the removal of structural episodes essential to understanding state formation, administrative evolution, agrarian relations, and the longue durée of communal politics in South Asia. Erasure, unlike revision, forecloses debate.

Why Continuity Matters: The Mughal Period and Indian Modernity

The Mughal period is not a detachable appendix to Indian history. It constitutes a crucial phase in the subcontinent’s transition to early modernity. Systems of revenue assessment, land rights, urbanisation, architecture, literary cultures, and composite languages such as Hindustani evolved through complex interactions among diverse social groups during this era. British colonial governance itself cannot be understood without reference to the administrative and fiscal practices it inherited and reconfigured.

To remove the Mughals from the curriculum is to create a civilisational gap that students cannot bridge analytically. It reduces history to a moralised binary—ancient glory followed by medieval darkness—thereby reproducing a colonial-period framework that serious historians have long rejected.

From History to “Mythistory”: Collapsing the Boundary between Evidence and Faith

A defining feature of recent interventions is the growing conflation of mythology with history. Epics such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are increasingly presented as empirical historical records, while well-established scholarly frameworks—such as the Aryan migration theory—are dismissed as ideological conspiracies. The Indus Valley Civilisation is rebranded as the “Saraswati Civilisation” to align archaeological interpretation with a Vedic-Hindu origin narrative.

This turn towards what historians have described as “mythistory” replaces peer-reviewed scholarship with faith-based assertion. As Thapar, Irfan Habib, and D N Jha have repeatedly emphasised, civilisations are products of migration, exchange, conflict, and synthesis. To deny this is to deny history as a discipline.

Popular Culture and Visual Nationalism

The rewriting of history now extends well beyond textbooks. Cinema, television, and OTT platforms have emerged as powerful sites of popular pedagogy. Films such as Padmaavat, The Kashmir Files, The Kerala Story, and Chhaava deploy selective narratives that foreground Muslim aggression and Hindu victimhood while marginalising complexity, context, and countervailing evidence.

Visual media operates affectively rather than analytically. Its impact on collective memory is therefore deeper and more durable than that of written text. When such representations circulate alongside curricular erasure, they produce a mutually reinforcing ecosystem of historical simplification and communal polarisation.

Social Media and the Collapse of Scholarly Authority

Digital platforms have become parallel classrooms, disseminating short-form content that claims to reveal the “history you were never taught.” These narratives often rely on fabricated quotations, exaggerated claims of temple destruction, and unverified archaeological assertions. Algorithms amplify outrage, not accuracy.

Thapar’s distinction between professional history and “popular history” is critical here. When opinion is repeatedly presented as scholarship, the authority of evidence itself is eroded. This has profound implications for democratic reasoning and public debate.

Institutional Capture and the Marginalisation of Dissent

Curricular changes have been accompanied by appointments of ideologically aligned individuals to key academic bodies, including the Indian Council of Historical Research. University syllabi have seen the removal of texts that foreground pluralism, subaltern perspectives, or critical theory, while dissenting historians are routinely branded as “anti-national.”

Such developments narrow the space for intellectual disagreement and replace scholarly pluralism with epistemic conformity.

Correction versus Erasure

No serious historian denies the need for revision. Historical knowledge advances through new evidence, fresh questions, and critical re-evaluation. But revision requires citation, peer review, and continuity. Erasure, by contrast, forecloses inquiry and substitutes political convenience for scholarly responsibility.

If aspects of Mughal or medieval history require reinterpretation, this must be achieved by expanding sources and incorporating diverse historiographical perspectives—not by deleting the period altogether.

A Republic’s Stake in Its Past

Romila Thapar’s anguish reflects a larger civilisational concern. A society that amputates its past weakens its capacity to understand the present and imagine a shared future. History taught in fragments cannot produce citizens capable of plural coexistence, constitutional morality, or critical thought.

Erasing inconvenient histories may serve immediate political ends, but it impoverishes the nation’s intellectual commons. India does not require a sanitised or sanctified past. It requires an honest, continuous, and contested history—one that recognises conflict and coexistence as equally constitutive of its making.

Conclusion: Recovering Historical Reason and Democratic Pluralism

The contemporary struggle over history in India is not merely a contest over the past but a decisive battle over the normative foundations of the republic. What is at stake is the distinction between history as a critical, evidence-based discipline and history as an instrument of political mobilization. The systematic privileging of myth over method, faith over archival scrutiny, and identity over inquiry risks hollowing out historical consciousness itself, reducing it to a legitimising device for present-day power. This process does not simply marginalise professional historians; it undermines the democratic ethic that depends upon disagreement, plural memories, and the capacity to confront uncomfortable pasts.

For scholars, this moment demands a renewed defence of historiography as a public good. Future research must move beyond reactive critique to examine how state power, curriculum design, popular media, and digital platforms together produce a hegemonic historical commonsense. Comparative work—across regions within India and with other societies that have witnessed politicised pasts—can illuminate both the limits and possibilities of resistance. Equally urgent is an engagement with pedagogy: how history can be taught not as a closed narrative of civilisational pride, but as an open-ended inquiry that trains citizens to question sources, interrogate silences, and recognise plurality.

Ultimately, the recovery of historical reason is inseparable from the defence of constitutional democracy. A society that abandons critical history in favour of selective remembrance risks mistaking unanimity for unity and obedience for cohesion. The challenge before historians, educators, and public intellectuals is therefore not only to preserve the integrity of the past, but to insist that the future of Indian democracy remains anchored in reasoned debate, evidentiary rigour, and an ethic of pluralism.

References

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