Indian historian’s biggest battle lies in weeding out colonial hangover in the country’s popular history

While attacking the historicity of sites is a common occurrence across nations, in India, the attacks come with dangerous communal twists. Underlying such contestations is the colonial idea that the history of medieval India is just the conquest of one religion over another, with mosques and dargahs being the visual symbols of such a conquest. The claims of a temple/temple ruins being buried underneath Mathura’s Shahi Eidgah, Sambhal Jama mosque and, more recently, the Ajmer Sharif dargah were given impetus by court-ordered surveys of these monuments. This has brought under scrutiny the legitimacy of the Places of Worship Act, 1991, a law that protects the religious character of places of worship in India as they stood on the day of Independence.

The perils of entertaining such claims are all too fresh in India’s memory. The Babri mosque demolition in 1992 not only led to a spate of communal riots across the country but also led to a loss of history. This loss has since then only been accelerated in similar claims on historical sites which are premised on a superficial reading of Indian history. Here, the colonial binaries of Hindu and Muslim architecture are repeated ad infinitum, without a nuanced definition of either terms.

This is where the Indian historian’s biggest battle lies, in weeding out the colonial hangover in India’s popular history. The claims on these historical sites often cite colonial reports written by English officers who had no expertise in history or archaeology but are touted to be serious records of Indian history. The claim on the Sambhal mosque typifies this, where a solitary report by British officer ACL Carlleyle, full of hearsay and no proper survey, is considered to be indelible proof of a temple being underneath the mosque.

But it is not only in the contested sites where such specious readings of Indian history are pushed forward. The NCERT school textbooks underwent a series of erasures in 2024 to reflect similar notions of Indian history. These erasures included removing the history of the Babri mosque, its demolition and the spate of communal riots that followed. In the same vein, the Gujarat riots of 2002 and the deadly riots that followed Partition in 1947 were removed from school textbooks. Such omissions were sometimes justified as “syllabus rationalisation” and at other times deemed necessary to create “positive citizens”.

If ahistorical claims on contested sites and erasures in NCERT textbooks are not enough, 2024 witnessed an aggressive furtherance of “WhatsApp history” where bite-sized myths of Indian history are created and made “viral” on popular social media sites. To the Indian historian, all three are teachable moments, a study not just in how deeply entrenched the colonial version of history is in the average Indian mind but also how even the basics of history elude it. Primary and secondary sources of history as well as studies based on the critical analysis of these sources are also never properly taught to Indian school children.

The challenge for the Indian historian is a tall one, but is also perhaps an excellent opportunity to harness the rising interest of the population in its history and steer it towards more refined debates. The pertinent question then is, will the Indian historian rise to defeat the gargantuan of WhatsApp history? The answer to this is a lot more pessimistic than one can imagine given how the Indian historian’s history has been one of peaceful ivory towers, churning jargon-riddled papers for journals. This is the Indian historian’s comfort nest, as author William Dalrymple had recently pointed out. India’s academic historians exist in an echo chamber and rarely come out of it to correct popular narratives of Indian history, thereby allowing fake social-media forwards to mushroom.

A good historian must be an embattled one, prepared not only to fight against reductionist tropes in popular history but also rallying for the preservation of multiple histories. It is the responsibility of every historian to give back to society by educating notions of popular history. In India, the need for this is now more than ever, as ill-informed ideas of Indian history are furthered for vote bank politics. Organisations such as the ASI and the NCERT cannot be relied upon, for their very nature is statist.

The way forward lies in the Indian historian reaching out to the public through either books or social-media websites, making good academic history palatable by reaching out in the popular languages of India. A bulk of academic Indian history is still chained to the shackles of the English language and must be freed from it.

In my experience as an academic historian trying to correct popular myths of Indian history via social media, the task is far from easy. Not only is one subjected to brutal trolling and death threats but there’s always a risk of community identities getting “hurt” by opening the pandora’s box of academic history. It is still a battle worth pursuing, given how quickly India’s history is being eroded. But will the Indian historian go to war?

The writer is a Delhi-based historian and professor. She runs a popular Youtube channel on Indian history called Eyeshadow and Etihaas.