The article “India’s complex history cannot be wished away through textbook revisions – it must be confronted”, by Hasnain Naqvi published in Scroll on May 3 claims to defend the complexity of Indian history from ideological tampering. But behind its rhetoric of “confrontation” and “complexity” lies a deeper discomfort with the idea of India as a coherent civilisation. What it actually defends is not history per se, but a specific historiographic orthodoxy: one that emerged in the postcolonial decades and became hegemonic in our textbooks, universities and public discourse.
This orthodoxy has long been shaped by Marxist and secular-liberal frameworks, which treat religion, civilisational continuity and cultural symbolism with suspicion. It tends to see India not as a civilisational whole but as a fractured political entity patched together by modern secularism. Ironically, while it accuses others of whitewashing or politicising the past, it has long indulged in its own forms of selective erasure and ideological flattening.
Yes, the present round of textbook deletions – especially if done without scholarly deliberation – is problematic. And possibly before the critics jump the gun, let us wait and see if between classes 8-10 textbooks whose new editions are yet out, do bring in Mughals and Delhi Sultanate or Bahamani or Bengal Sultans into some reckoning. Yet, we must confront how previous textbook regimes wrote Indian history. That confrontation must not stop at individual rulers or events, but interrogate the very categories through which India’s past has been framed and transmitted.
A civilisational self denied
For decades, school history textbooks taught students to approach India as a series of disconnected episodes – Harappan mystery, Vedic ritualism, Mauryan bureaucracy, Sultanate and Mughal court politics, colonial exploitation, and finally, the “idea of India” born in the crucible of the freedom struggle. Rarely did students encounter India as a civilisational project: a vast, diverse, yet spiritually resonant culture anchored in ethical reflection, philosophical inquiry and sacred geography. The civilisation if at all was too abstractly conjured vis pre colonial times.
Figures like Aurobindo, Vivekananda, and even Gandhi – whose imagination of India was deeply civilisational – were often reduced to moral slogans or sanitised into harmless icons. The vibrant traditions of Hindu metaphysics, logic, grammar, and aesthetics were marginalised or rendered “non-historical”. The idea that India had an indigenous, historically evolving self-conception was dismissed as myth or communal nostalgia.
The Scroll article perpetuates this problem. It sees any gesture toward civilisational continuity as an attempt to erase complexity or promote a majoritarian agenda. But this is a false binary. It is possible to affirm India’s civilisational unity without denying its pluralism. It is possible to critique textbook changes while also acknowledging that earlier curricula downplayed temple desecration, religious conflict, or the lived experience of dhimmi status under certain Islamic regimes.
To ask why these themes were once absent is not to communalise history – it is to democratise it.
Sacred geography is not supersessionist
The foundational insight of early Indian thinkers like Radha Kumud Mukherjee – and later echoed by Diana Eck and more recently in works of historian Shonaleeka Kaul is that India’s unity was not political but spiritual and symbolic. Sacred rivers, pilgrimage sites, epic narratives, and shared ritual practices created an inner cohesion across linguistic, regional, and sectarian lines. This was not a homogenising force, but a pluralistic frame.
Yet, modern historians, especially those influenced by Marxist materialism or postcolonial skepticism, have been wary of engaging this civilisational idiom. They prefer categories of economic exploitation, caste oppression, or dynastic power. These are important, but insufficient. A civilisation is not only built by rulers and classes, but by ethics, aesthetics, devotion, and longing.
To recover this civilisational depth is not to erase conflict. It is to place it within a wider frame of meaning.
Erasures we ignore
The Scroll article laments deletions in recent textbooks, such as the removal of references to Gandhi’s assassination or the 2002 Gujarat riots. But what of the long-standing exclusions in our textbooks? Why were students rarely exposed to the religious motivations behind the Partition? Why did so few textbooks dwell on how figures like VD Savarkar – however controversial – articulated their anguish at centuries of perceived cultural subjugation?
Why is it that when Hindu spiritual traditions are discussed, they are often framed in terms of caste oppression, ritual superstition, or proto-nationalism – never as sources of ethical insight or social resilience?
A historiography that insists on “confronting” the past must also confront its own blind spots.
Of course, the solution is not to replace one ideology with another. Hindutva historiography has its own flaws: it often descends into grievance, triumphalism, or homogenisation. But we must not allow its excesses to become an excuse to silence all talk of civilisational belonging. India is not just a constitutional republic or a postcolonial state – it is also a civilisational entity that has survived ruptures, invasions, and colonisation through cultural resilience and moral imagination.
Call for a normative historiography
History is about modernity and citizenship no doubt, but modernity’s normative worth can be (re)presented as having ancient roots. Modernity’s dialogic and emancipatory ontology to reconstruct Indian pluralism can be availed but as having an ancient and pre-Islamic quest and character, that indeed accommodated Islam too even if Islamic tenets was theologically and rigidly imposed by many of its rulers save exceptions. Our Constitution itself has poorly articulated or maybe disregarded this insight. Yet, if a political dispensation today wants to reframe it so, the legitimacy of such an endeavour cannot be denied. Yes, how they go about executing such a vision – in pedagogic appropriateness and intellectual rigour – is key.
What India needs is a normative, not merely factual, historiography. One that does not reduce all tradition to superstition, or all resistance to communalism.
This means rethinking how we teach the Vedas – not just as ritual texts but as reflections on being and order. It means reading the Bhakti movement not just as social protest but as a spiritual outpouring. It means understanding Gandhi’s invocation of Ram Rajya (but which along with his fetishised conception of ahimsa too can be seen as emasculating at one level) not as religious revivalism but as an attempt to anchor modern India in dharmic ethics.
In short, we need to move beyond both amnesia and apologia. The real battle is not between secular and communal histories, but between shallow accounts of the past and those that seek meaning and history seeking such ethical normative lenses from its so-called Hindu past remains not just valid but historical.
RS Krishna is a retired school teacher based in Bengaluru who worked with TVS Educational Society institutions and Azim Premji Foundation, Bengaluru, and the author of India’s Past, its Learnings, its Pedagogies – Teacher meditation of history textbooks in India.
