Historiography of India

The historiography of India refers to the studies, sources, critical methods and interpretations used by scholars to develop a history of India.

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
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Quotes

But history is no respecter of persons or communities, and must always strive to tell the truth, so far as it can be deduced from reliable evidence. This great academic principle has a bearing upon actual life, for ignorance seldom proves to be a real bliss either to an individual or to a nation. In the particular case under consideration, ignorance of the actual relation between the Hindus and the Muslims throughout the course of history - an ignorance deliberately encouraged by some - may ultimately be found to have been the most important single factor which led to the partition of India. The real and effective means of solving a problem is to know and understand the facts that gave rise to it, and not to ignore them by hiding the head, ostrich-like, into sands of fiction.” ~ R.C. Majumdar

It is very sad that the spirit of perverting history to suit political views is no longer confined to politicians, but has definitely spread even among professional historians… It is painful to mention though impossible to ignore, the fact that there is a distinct and conscious attempt to rewrite the whole chapter of the bigotry and intolerance of the Muslim rulers towards Hindu religion... Several writers in India have come forward to defend Aurangzeb against Jadunath Sarkar’s charge of religious intolerance.... Alas for poor Jadunath Sarkar, who must have turned in his grave if he were buried. For, after reading his History of Aurangzib, one would be tempted to ask, if the temple-breaking policy of Aurangzeb is a disputed point, is there a single fact in the whole recorded history of mankind which may be taken as undisputed? ~ R.C. Majumdar

Thus, there are two points to remember. First, our friends are not just Marxists, they are also Macaulayites. Second, they are Marxists in a special sense. They are Marxists in the sense that they have thought of themselves as Marxists, in the sense that they repeatedly regurgitate a handful of Marxist phrases and assertions. But more than being Marxist historians, they have been establishment historians. Their theories and ‘theses’ have accorded not just with the ‘classics’ of Marxism-Leninism, they have accorded with the ideology of, which in terms of their theory means, the needs of Congressite rulers. ~ Arun Shourie

B

• One must beware of falling into a kind of uncritical Indological McCarthyism towards those open to reconsidering the established contours of ancient Indian history, irrespective of their motives and backgrounds, and of lumping all challenges into a simplistic, convenient and easily-demonized 'Hindu Nationalist' category.
  • Edwin Bryant, Quoted from Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (Princeton, N.J.). (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines [1]

C

• The idea of continuity of the Indian civilization does not suit the beliefs of this group of people. There is a serious difference between these two groups. Whereas you can laugh the opinions of the former group away as those of Hindu traditionalists, you cannot do that in the case of the latter for the simple reason that they are mostly government of India historians with powers over the fate of history students and teachers in the country. India may be the only country where the government has its own brand of historians by appointing them in various capacities to the Indian Council of Historical Research which controls virtually the entire funding of historical research in the country. Irfan Habib, to whom the name Sarasvati is a kind of anathema, was a former chairman of this organization directly under the Ministry of Culture.
  • Whose Past and Which Past? The Warring Factions of the Ancient Indian Historical Research, by Dilip K Chakrabarti, also in NATION FIRST: Essays in the Politics of Ancient Indian Studies , 2014

D

• "Many of those who read history at Delhi in the mid-1970s and later, still bear the ugly scars inflicted by the thought police of sarkari Marxism. 'There are two interpretations of history', a leading representative of the Red Cretin Brigade used to inform his students casually, 'the bourgeois interpretation and the Marxist interpretation, and the Marxist interpretation is the correct one.' ...Whereas the British Marxists established their reputation by crafting their radical concerns their Indian counterparts took cheeky short cuts. it may also explain why substantive research on Indian history has increasingly become the prerogative of British, and a few American and Australian universities. The presiding deities of Indian historiography have meanwhile devoted themselves to writing politically correct text books that present history as chapters of received wisdom. They have also drafted resolutions for the Indian History Congress and written articles in the press on the Ayodhya issue."
  • Swapan Dasgupta, Indian Express of July 23, 1995. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 7

• The medieval period of Indian history has been a source of propaganda for historians with ideological predilections. .... But the tradition of tailoring and embroidering the past for influencing the course of future developments did not die with the departure of the British. The burden of carrying forward this admittedly unscientific historiography has now been enthusiastically assumed by their Marxist prototypes. Being victims of ideological myopia, the Marxist historians of India have cared to see only that aspect of reality which falls within the range of their narrow vision. Those aspects of reality which fall beyond it have been either left unexplained or treated merely as an extension of that which they have perceived and, therefore, utterly unworthy of their serious attention.
  • Prabha Dixit, , quoted in Devahuti, D., & Indian History and Culture Society. (1980). Bias in Indian historiography. Delhi: D.K. Publications. p. 201

E

• For those unfamiliar with modern Indian history: the Marxists, already pushy for acquiring as much power in the institutions as they could grab, were handed a near-monopoly on institutional power in India's academic and educational sector by Indira Gandhi ca. 1970. Involved in an intra-Congress power struggle, she needed the help of the Left. Her confidants P.N. Haksar and Nurul Hasan packed the institutions with Marxists, card-carrying or otherwise. When, during the Emergency dictatorship (1975-77), her Communist Party allies threatened to become too powerful, she and her son Sanjay removed them from key political positions but, in a typical instance of politicians' short-sightedness, they left the Marxists? hold on the cultural sector intact. In the good old Soviet tradition, they at once set out to falsify history and propagate their own version through the official textbooks. After coming to power in 1998, the BJP-dominated government has made a half-hearted and not always very competent attempt to effect glasnost (openness, transparency) at least in the history textbooks. This led the Marxists to start a furious hate campaign against the so-called 'saffronization' of history.
  • Koenraad Elst. Ayodhya, the Finale (2003)

• Most importantly, for the ancient period, Indian Marxist and other anti-Hindu historians posit a massive conflict (between Aryan invaders and natives) in spite of the total absence of either textual or archaeological evidence for such conflict; while for the medieval period, they wax eloquent about an idyllic “composite culture” and deny a massive conflict spanning centuries (viz. between Muslim invaders and Hindu natives), against the copiously available evidence for this conflict, both textual and archaeological. This observation is entirely correct: both ancient and medieval history have been rewritten in the sense of belittling and blackening Hindu civilization and extolling its enemies.
  • Elst K. Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate, (1999)

• For her class of people, a “professional historian” is a historian with academic status. They are very status-conscious and constantly pull rank, especially when faced with informed arguments. For a scholar, this is weak, but for sophomores, it is uppermost in their minds: climbing the status ladder. When you know the academic circles, you become far less inclined to be over-awed by academic status: many professors have obvious ideological prejudices and bend their findings to suit their presuppositions. Moreover, in many countries to some extent, and certainly in India, scholars in the humanities are selected for ideological conformity with the dominant school. After nearly half a century, this has led to a situation where a post of “eminence” is simply equivalent with ideological conformity, at least passively (not raising your head), often actively (furthering the dominant paradigm).
  • Elst, K. Forever Ayodhya, 2023, Aryan Books International

• But the negationists are not satisfied with seeing their own version of the facts being repeated in more and more books and papers. They also want to prevent other versions from reaching the public. Therefore, in 1982 the National Council of Educational Research and Training issued a directive for the rewriting of schoolbooks. Among other things, it stipulated that: "Characterization of the medieval period as a time of conflict between Hindus and Muslims is forbidden." Under Marxist pressure, negationism has become India's official policy. (...) India has its own full-fledged brand of negationism: a movement to deny the large-scale and long-term crimes against humanity committed by Islam. This movement is led by Islamic apologists and Marxist academics, and followed by all the politicians, journalists and intellectuals who call themselves secularists. In contrast to the European negationism regarding the Nazi acts of genocide, but similar to the Turkish negationism regarding the Armenian genocide, the Indian negationism regarding the terrible record of Islam is fully supported by the establishment. It has nearly full control of the media and dictates all state and government parlance concerning the communal problem (more properly to be called the Islam problem).
  • Koenraad Elst. Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam, 2002.

• What the BJP government claims to offer, what all scholarly historians want, and what is loathed by the Marxists who have dominated the cultural and educational establishment since decades, is glasnost: openness, an end to the dead hand of Marxist dogma in Indian history-writing. However, it is quite wrong to say that the Sangh Parivar takes this job "very seriously". It took three years before relieving leading Marxists of their influential positions (Prasar Bharati, NCERT, IHC). Most of its new nominees were not up to the job, some because of ill-health (e.g. K.S. Lal and B.R. Grover, both now deceased), some because they had never functioned in an academic setting. It should not be forgotten that for decades, at least since ca. 1970 when the Marxists led by P.N. Haksar and Nurul Hasan were given a lot of effective power in this sector in return for their support to Indira Gandhi, distinctly non-Marxist young historians found their access to an academic career blocked by the Marxist hegemons. Of the new textbooks, some are impeccable and are welcomed as undeniable improvements, e.g. Meenakshi Jain's presentation of the Muslim period, arguably the most sensitive and controversial part of the series. Some of the others, by contrast, have been criticized or ridiculed even by fair-minded observers.
  • Koenraad Elst: The Struggle for India's Soul A reply to Mira KAMDAR by Dr. Koenraad ELST, in : The Problem with Secularism (2007) by K. Elst

• The facts concerning the persecution of Hindus in the pre-modern age were a matter of consensus until recently. For contemporary political reasons, the Congress movement under Mahatma Gandhi and especially under Jawaharlal Nehru thought it opportune to minimize or deny this painful history. They invented a history of Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai totally at variance with the information given in the primary sources. The job of rewriting history in this sense was subsequently taken up in right earnest by the post-independence generation of vocal Marxist scholars, who gained firm control of the guiding history institutions under Indira Gandhi. For those unfamiliar with modern Indian history: the Marxists, already pushy for acquiring as much power in the institutions as they could grab, were handed a near-monopoly on institutional power in India's academic and educational sector by Indira Gandhi ca. 1970. Involved in an intra-Congress power struggle, she needed the help of the Left. Her confidants P.N. Haksar and Nurul Hasan packed the institutions with Marxists, card-carrying or otherwise. When, during the Emergency dictatorship (1975-77), her Communist Party allies threatened to become too powerful, she and her son Sanjay removed them from key political positions but, in a typical instance of politicians' short-sightedness, they left the Marxists' hold on the cultural sector intact. ...After coming to power in 1998, the BJP-dominated government has made a half-hearted and not always very competent attempt to effect glasnost (openness, transparency) at least in the history textbooks. They ordered the writing of new history textbooks for the schools. This led the Marxists to start a furious hate campaign against the so-called "saffronization" (hinduization) of history... Since some ignorant dupes of these Marxists denounce as "McCarthyist" anyone who points out their ideological inspiration, it deserves to be emphasized that "eminent historians" like Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma and Irfan Habib are certified as Marxists in standard Marxist sources like Tom Bottomore's Dictionary of Marxist Thought . During the official historians' Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute in 1991, the pro-mosque team's argumentation and several other anti-temple pamphlets were published by the People's Publishing House, a Communist Party outfit. One of the recent textbook innovations most furiously denounced as "saffronization" was the truism that Lenin's armed seizing of power in October/November 1917 was a "coup d'état". And in early 2003, while they were unchaining all their devils against glasnost , the Marxists ruling West Bengal deleted from a textbook a passage in which Mahatma Gandhi's biographer Louis Fischer called Stalin "at least as ruthless as Hitler". Such are the true concerns of the "secularists" warning the world against the attempts at glasnost in India's national history curriculum. History falsification comes in different forms and has concentric lines of defence and attack. At the time of unlimited "secularist" self-confidence and belligerence, this went as far as to deny that any Islamic persecution or oppression of Hindus had taken place. When that proved untenable, it was claimed that intolerance had admittedly existed but that it had been unrelated to Islam, that it was a general phenomenon typical of the medieval period.
  • Koenraad Elst: Religious Cleansing of Hindus, 2004, in: Elst, K. The Problem with Secularism (2007)

F

• One of the main purposes of history books, as taught in different countries in the world, is to instill a sense of national pride and honor —in short, to inculcate a sense of patriotism and nationalism. Whether it is the United States, Great Britain, Russia, Germany or China, this is certainly the case today and has been so as long as these countries have existed as modern nations... However, India is a strange and unique country in which history books are often anti-national in nature. India has largely kept intact the British approach to Indian history devised in the colonial era. Students of such textbooks come away apologetic or confused about their country and its traditions. Textbooks in Marxist ruled states of India like West Bengal and Kerala leave their students with a sense of the greatness of Communism... History books in India try to ignore the dominant Hindu ethos of the country and its history before the Islamic period... The real danger in India is not the arising of a chauvinistic nationalism like that of Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy...but a lack of national spirit and historical consciousness that keeps people alienated from their roots and the country divided.
  • Hinduism and the Clash of Civilizations: Dr. David Frawley,2001. quoted in S. Balakrishna, Seventy years of secularism.

G

• ‘A breed of cerebral czars’ [has ensconced themselves in positions of control] ‘individuals with whom certain institutions have become far too incestuously associated, who not only have the power to hand out tenures but also to send their followers abroad through several new fellowships’... ‘Academic feudalism,’ says a lecturer at JNU, ‘is so acute in History because there are so many opportunities now.’ Academic feudalism – that is, the relations that develop between an influential professor and his protégés – takes many forms. ... Sometimes, the feudal lord treats his followers as ideological allies to further the cause of liberalism or Marxism-Leninism on committees and in the university generally. And sometimes academic feudalism manifests itself as a power-sharing arrangement between a particular teacher and his students to keep ‘outsiders’ out of the staff room. ... In JNU, an eminent nationalist historian, Professor Bipan Chandra, was so well known for placing his students in departmental posts that others did not even bother to apply if they did not have his support. Tripta Wahi, convenor of the Delhi University Teachers’ Association (DUTA) and lecturer at Hindu College, DU, says that the appointments made by the senior historian could not be challenged by anyone because of his reputation. ‘Yet the people he has placed in my college are totally mediocre. In fact they are third divisioners whose only claim to fame is that they do not teach any school of History which is at variance with their teacher.’ …Academic feudalism is often the result of doctrinal strife which sometimes spills over into bitter personal animosities … Consequently, a student of DU complains, ‘We have to be very careful. If a post-modernist tutor thinks our work is too traditional he may not recommend us for a scholarship abroad. But if we happen to fall under the supervision of an old-fashioned Leftist who thinks us too post-modernist, he may give us a bad mark…’
  • Sagarika Ghose, ‘The politics of history,’ quoted from Arun Shourie  : Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud, 1998 (2014), HarperCollins

• In the late Sixties and early Seventies, historical research got entangled in the larger politics of the state in which the Congress under Indira Gandhi and the Communist Party of India found themselves on the same wave length. The establishment of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) in 1969 under the chairmanship of Prof. R. S. Sharma was largely the result of this politics. Besides being an eminent scholar, Prof. Sharma's sympathy for the Left ideology in general and for the CPI in particular was well-known. His close association with the then Education Minister and CPI sympathiser, Nurul Hasan, was common knowledge. During his chairmanship, there were allegations from many historians that ICHR was being used for propagating history from a Marxist standpoint. The nexus between ICHR and NCERT was also mentioned in the same vein. [….] During the Emergency, people watched with dismay the camaraderie between the Congress and the CPI and in that context the role played by the Left historians was not overlooked. [….] At the micro- level, it was the Left-oriented historians versus the rest. [….] The battle apparently looked like one between ‘secular’ and `communal’ historians but behind the facade was the realpolitik of the Congress and the CPI, on the one hand, and the Janata bandwagon, on the other.
  • Ghosh, Partha S. “The Rewriting of History”, The Hindu, July 15, 1998.

• With regard to the problem of communalism whether it be Hindu- Muslim, Vaishnava-Saiva or Shia-Sunni it may be assumed that the people of India have come of age. If that is so the historians of India should neither look for forces of communal synthesis nor for those of conflict; they should just look for facts as they unfold themselves in the historical process. If they only look for facts supporting synthesis they may be good nationalists but they would at the same time be inverted communalists. Let history be our psychoanalyst. Once we are able to accept ourselves for what we are we will be able to give the right direction to our present and future. … A historian’s commitment to history must remain untouched by his loyalties, political, religious or others.
  • S.P. Gupta “A Critique of R.S. Sharma’s In Defence of “Ancient India’”, printed by the National Museum, New Delhi. quoted in Rosser, Yvette Claire (2003). Curriculum as Destiny: Forging National Identity in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. University of Texas at Austin.

• The whole tenor of this tendentious scheme for "national integration" becomes fully explicit in the following fiat from the Ministry of Education: “Characterisation of the medieval period as a dark period or as a time of conflict between Hindus and Muslims is forbidden. Historians cannot identify Muslims as rulers and Hindus as subjects. The state cannot be described as a theocracy, without examining the actual influence of religion. No exaggeration of the role of religion in political conflicts is permitted… Nor should there be neglect and omission of trends and processes of assimilation and synthesis.” [...] The only way which this ruling sees out of what it calls “the communal strife” is that Hindu history should be substantially diluted and tailored to the needs of Islamic imperialism, and that Muslim history should be given a liberal coat of whitewash or even made to pass muster as national history. This has been the main plank in the platform for “national integration”. Hitherto this Experiment with Untruth was confined mainly to Muslim and Communist “historians” who have come to control the Indian History Congress, the Indian Council of Historical Research, and even the University Grants Commission. Now it has been taken up by the National Integration Council. The Ministry of Education of the Government of India has directed the education departments in the States to extend this experiment to school-level text-books of history. And this perverse programme of suppressing truth and spreading falsehood is being sponsored by a state which inscribes Satyameva Jayate on its emblem. ... But that is about all that can be said in commendation of the scheme sanctioned by the National Integration Council and sponsored by the Ministry of Education. The rest is recommendations for telling lies to our children, or for not telling to them the truth at all.
  • Sita Ram Goel, The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India (1994)

• This caravan loaded with synthetic merchandise has, however, continued to move forward. Eight years later (1982), it was reported that “History and Language textbooks for schools all over India will soon be revised radically. In collaboration with various state governments the Ministry of Education has begun a phased programme to weed out undesirable textbooks and remove matter which is prejudicial to national integration and unity and which does not promote social cohesion. ... It was pointed out by the leftist professors that the major cause of “communal trouble” was the “bad habit” of living in the past on the part of “our people”. Most of the politicians knew no history and no religion for that matter. They all agreed with one voice that Indian history, particularly that of the “medieval Muslim period”, should be re-written. That, they pleaded, was the royal road to “national integration”.
  • Sita Ram Goel, The Calcutta Quran Petition (1986)

H

• The significant feature of Professor Habib’s Marxist interpretation of medieval Indian history is not that Marxism has absorbed Islam but that Islam has absorbed Marxism.
  • Peter Hardy in Philips, Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon. Quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

• There may, however, be other supplementary explanations of the neglect of medieval Muslim history in South Asia. It was not expedient soon after the banishment of Bahadur Shah and the destruction of the last vestiges of Mughal culture at Delhi and at a time when it was hoped to conciliate the British politically, to remind the world of the power which Muslims had once enjoyed in South Asia and to provoke fears that the loss of this power was so much regretted that the Muslims must always be fundamentally disloyal. In any event, for those who had lived through the sack of Delhi and the repression of the Muslim aristocracy thereafter, it was perhaps too painful to study a South Asia in which Muslims had been all-powerful. Furthermore, it must be remembered that Sir Saiyid Ahmad and the Aligarh school were, as some of their descendants still are, resolutely non communal in politics. To study the history of medieval India, particularly with the methods of history dominant in historical writing on South Asia in the late nineteenth century, with its literal reliance on ‘authorities’, could only have resulted in antagonism between Hindus, whose pusillanimous ancestors were, in medieval Muslim histories, usually being sent to hell, and Muslims whose virile ancestors were always doing the despatching. Sir Saiyid and the Aligarh school were educationists not politicians; they conceived the differences between Hindu and Muslim as of the same order as those between Catholic and Protestant in nineteenth-century England; nothing should be said to prevent the growth of a sense of nationhood transcending religious differences. Finally, it is possible that the balance of the history curriculum at Aligarh, with its emphasis upon English and European history, was tilted against the study of medieval Muslim history. Nor, one suspects, was this tilting of the balance regretted at Aligarh in the period before 1914. Only in the study of western history and of the western approach to history could Muslims discover and understand the new world pressing in upon them. In sum then, the interests of the western-influenced Muslim intelligentsia in South Asia before the nineteen-twenties were more Islamic than Indian and more religious than historical. �
  • Peter Hardy in Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon. by Philips, C. H. (Cyril Henry), 1912- [2] also in E. Sreedharan - A Textbook of Historiography, 500 B.C. to A.D. 2000-Orient blackswan (2019) also in QASMI, A. (2019). A Master Narrative for the History of Pakistan: Tracing the origins of an ideological agenda. Modern Asian Studies, 53(4), 1066-1105.

• In approaching Muslim historical writing on medieval Muslim India in the nineteen-twenties it must be remembered that Muslim historians were immigrants into an already settled colony. By 1925 Elphinstone, Elliot, and Dowson, Stanley Lane Poole, William Irvine, Henry Beveridge, Wolseley Haig, Vincent Smith, and W. H. Moreland among the British, and Sir Jadunath Sarkar, Ishwari Prasad, and C. Vaidya among the Hindus, had mapped out the territory and staked their claims. Either the Muslims had to challenge the whole land settlement or be content to prospect in the interstices of existing homesteads; whichever course they chose to adopt they were obliged to adapt their behaviour and modify their attitudes in relation to the existing settlers. Moreover, since they had been taught to use the same tools as those earlier settlers their own economy tended almost inescapably to conform with or to complement that which they found in being. That is not to say that Muslim historians of the nineteen-twenties and later did not challenge existing conceptions of medieval Indian history; they did, but often by merely asserting their opposites. They proposed to correct optical illusions about medieval India by prescribing different pairs of spectacles, not by advising therapeutic methods which would change the capacity of the eyes themselves.
  • Peter Hardy in Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon. by Philips, C. H. (Cyril Henry), 1912- [3]

• Modern Muslim historiography on medieval India, in English, is in its methods and in its concepts clearly not sired by Muslim historiography in India before Sir Saiyid Ahmad Khan's day. It is a response to western thought, as mediated by the British, not a convolution within Muslim culture itself. It is imitative, not original. That is not, of course, to imply that the relation between western and modern Muslim historiography on medieval India is simply that of seal and wax impression, However, modern Muslim historical writing has taken over the idea that history is a form of critical inquiry into the past from evidence and not merely a repetition of testimony and authority. It assumes that the object of history is to answer questions about human actions performed in the past. It employs the academic critical apparatus of footnotes, appendices, bibliography, and is clearly a very sophisticated form of activity.
  • Peter Hardy in Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon. by Philips, C. H. (Cyril Henry), 1912- [4]

• Modern Muslim historiography on medieval India has been chiefly a form of Islamic apologetic, justifying the ways of medieval Muslims to the modern world and, in the process, commenting on the future of Muslims in South Asia as the authors see it. It will have been noticed that Muslim writing on medieval India tends to concentrate upon such figures as Akbar and Aurangzib and upon the period when Islam made its first political impact upon South Asia, There is an urge to discuss such questions as ‘whether Akbar stood for Hindu-Muslim unity, whether Aurangzib was a ‘communalist and if so whether he was governed by religious or political considerations and whether the Ghorid conquest of north India was ‘a good thing’ or ‘a bad thing’. There is too the desire, not always of course conscious, to establish that whatever Muslims did in medieval India was right if not in terms of religion then in terms of politics.
  • Peter Hardy in Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon. by Philips, C. H. (Cyril Henry), 1912- [5]

• Modern Muslim writing in English on medieval India is an expression of the Muslim urge in modern times either to accept terms from, or to come to terms with, or to impose terms upon, twenticth-century South Asia. With the possible exceptions of Ibn Hasan’s and Abdul Aziz’s work on the Mughals and Muhammad Bashir Ahmad’s work on the administration of justice in medieval India, interest in the past is not really academic. The practical intentions of the historians are underlined by their interest more in the similarity than in the dissimilarity between past and present; in the search for uniformity rather than for the diversity in the human past. ‘They tend to regard the past as valid and the interests of the people of the ppast as valid only in relation to the present. They award the ‘verdicts of History’. They tend to assume the existence of eternal entities in human history, of which events are but the expressions—such entities as nation, lass, autocracy, democracy, Hindu-Muslim antagonism, toleration and equality—regarding them almost as causative factors outside the historical process instead of as convenient linguistic descriptions of human behaviour. Tt may reasonably be alleged that, in practice, itis impossible to jump into the skins of other people of one’s own time, still less of time past; the his- torians under discussion do not, in general, appear to make that aim even their ideal, What matters is where the history of South Asia is proceeding. What matters is to write a significant abridgement of the past which can be thrown at the heads of one’s opponents, not an encyclopaedia of the past which cannot be thrown at anyone's head because itis so firmly and weightily anchored in its own milieu.
  • Peter Hardy in Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon. by Philips, C. H. (Cyril Henry), 1912- p. 307-9

• It is perhaps impossible to sustain completely (on present evidence) the hypothesis that Muslim historical writing on medieval India is completely controlled by political considerations. It may be no mere coincidence, however, that works emphasizing the community of interests and the cultural intercourse of Hindus and Muslims tended to appear in the nineteen-twenties, that works emphasizing their polarity in religion and thought but suggesting that political co-operation had been and could be secured, tended to appear in the nineteen-thirties, and that works emphasi- zing theseparate political achievements and destiny of the Muslims in South. Asia tended to appear in the nineteen-forties, The situation of Aligarh today may also be not unconnected with the appearance there of Marxist interpretations of medieval history. It is interesting to speculate—for I can attempt no more—whether any of the attitudes of medieval Muslim historiography have been carried over into modern Muslim historiography on medieval India. There appears to be the same intense consciousness of Islam as the unique, vital, final way of life and thought. There is the same inarticulate premiss that the writing of history should justify the ways of Muslims to men. There is the same assumption that history is purposive, teleological; there is the same urge towards a universal schematic view of history. May not the personification of ‘the Muslim doctrine of equality and toleration’ or ‘the Quranic con- ception of God’ as ‘a revolutionary force of incalculable value for the attainment of human welfare’ and their treatment as final causes in history be the consciousness of the sovereignty of God in modern dress? The significant feature of Professor Habib’s Marxist interpretation of medieval Indian history is not that Marxism has absorbed Islam but that Islam has absorbed Marxism.
  • Peter Hardy in Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon. by Philips, C. H. (Cyril Henry), 1912- p. 307-9 and in and in E. Sreedharan - A Textbook of Historiography, 500 B.C. to A.D. 2000-Orient blackswan (2019

• Even more unexpected is the divorce of the Muslim part of the history of medieval India from the study of Islam as a religion and as a system of thought in its wider extra-Indian setting. Thus, the discussion of the posture of the sultans of Delhi and of the Mughal padshahs towards the Muslim religious establishment—of such questions as whether, for example, the Delhi sultanate was in any sense a theocracy or whether Akbar’s religious activities were unislamic, was kept isolated from a general consideration of the background of Islamic ideas on government as they had developed historically and from a consideration of the actual currents of religious thought and feeling in the Muslim community in Akbar’s time. In such a standard work as Vincent. Smith’s Akbar, The Great Mogol, no attempt is made to examine what constituted orthodoxy and unorthodoxy among Muslims of that time, or to describe the content of the religious controversies in which Akbar was involved in the light of developments in Muslim thinking outside India. It seemed to be assumed that Indian Islam was more Indian than Islamic and that it was proper to interpret the aspiration of Islam to be both a religious and a political order as in practice an aspiration merely to be a political order.
  • Peter Hardy - Historians of medieval India_ studies in Indo-Muslim historical writing. (1960)

J

• Without weighty grounds, we must not push aside unanimous Indian tradition; else one practises scepticism, not criticism.
  • Hermann Jacobi. Quoted in R.P. Kangle, The Kautiliya Arthasastra, Part III - A Study; 1965, University of Bombay.

K

• By ‘established’ historians I mean self-proclaimed secular, progressive or left historians who have established an academic empire and try to stifle any voice of dissent or truth. At times, they obfuscate matters.
  • Kishore, Kunal (2016). Ayodhyā revisited. (Preface)

• “History and Language textbooks for schools all over India will soon be revised radically. In collaboration with various state governments the Ministry of Education has begun a phased programme to weed out undesirable textbooks and remove matter which is prejudicial to national integration and unity and which does not promote social cohesion....” Accordingly, “Twenty states and three Union Territories have started the work of evaluation according to guidelines prepared by the NCERT....”
  • Coomi Kapoor, Indian Express, January 17, 1982. Quoted from Goel, Sita Ram (2001). The story of Islamic imperialism in India. ISBN 9788185990231

L

• But the worst effect of partition has been that 1947 has tended to produce two historiographies based on territorial differentiation. Comparing the works of Ahmad Ali entitled Culture of Pakistan with Richard Symond's The Making of Pakistan (London, 1950) on the one hand and Humayun Kabir's Indian Heritage and Abid Hussain's National Culture of India on the other, W. Cantwell Smith says that the Pakistani historian 'flees from Indian-ness, and would extra-territorialize even Mohenjodaro (linking the Indus-valley civilisation with Sumer and Elam) as well as the Taj (yet though left in India, the monuments and buildings of Agra and Delhi are entirely outside the Indian tradition and are an essential heritage and part of Pakistani culture, - p.205), and omits from consideration altogether quite major matters less easily disposed of (such as Asoka's reign, and the whole of East Pakistan) The Indians 'on the other hand seek for the meaning of Muslim culture within the complex of Indian 'unity in diversity' as an integral component.'27 So, after 1947, besides the 'objective' and 'apologist', 'Secular' and 'Communal' versions, there are the Pakistani and Indian versions of medieval Indian history.
  • K.S. Lal, The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India, with quote from: Philips, Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon

• Marxist history also lays claim to be counted as objective history. The phrase ‘objective history’ is very attractive, but sometimes under this appellation, all shadows are removed and medieval times are painted in such bright colours by Marxist historians as to shame even the modern age. At others, modern ideas of class-conflict, labour-exploitation and all that goes with it, and many other modern phenomena and problems are projected backwards to fit in the medieval social structure. The word ‘religion’ is tried to be eschewed because it is thought to be associated with bitter memories. If the medieval chronicler cries out ‘Jihad’, it is just not heard: but if he cries aloud persistently, it is claimed that he never meant it. The Marxists or leftists read into history what they think history should be. All this makes the content of Marxist history dubious, needing it to be buttressed by brochures, statements and booklets under a number of signatures. Often, Marxist writers work in groups, mutually admiring each other’s discoveries.
  • Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 3

• It would normally be expected that historical writing on Muslim rule in medieval India would tell the tale of this discrimination and the sufferings of the people, their forced conversions, destruction of their temples, enslavement of their women and children, candidly and repeatedly mentioned by medieval Muslim chroniclers themselves. But curiously enough, in place of bringing such facts to light there is a tendency to gloss over them or even suppress them. Countries which in the middle ages completely converted to Islam and lost links with their original religion and culture, write with a sense of pride about their history as viewed by their Islamic conquerors. But India's is a different story. India could not be Islamized and it did not lose its past cultural anchorage. Naturally, it does not share the sense of glory felt by medieval Muslim chroniclers. But some modern “secularist” writers do praise Muslim rule in glowing terms. All historians are not so brazen or such distortionists. Hence the history of Muslim rule in India is seen through many coloured glasses. It is necessary, therefore, to take a look at the “schools” or “groups” of modern historians writing on the history of medieval India so that a balanced appraisal of the legacy of Muslim rule in India may be made.
  • Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 1

• And funny though it may sound it was decided to falsify history to please the Muslims and draw them into the national mainstream. Guidelines for rewriting history were prepared by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), and a summary of the same appeared in Indian Express datelined New Delhi, 17 January 1982. The idea was “to weed out undesirable textbooks (in History and languages) and remove matter which is prejudicial to national integration and unity and which does not promote social cohesion… Twenty states and three Union Territories have started the work of evaluation according to guidelines, prepared by NCERT.” The West Bengal Board of Secondary Education issued a notification dated 28 April 1989 addressed to schools and publishers suggesting some ‘corrections’ in the teaching and writing of ‘Muslim rule in India’ - like the real objective of Mahmud Ghaznavi’s attack on Somnath, Aurangzeb’s policy towards the Hindus, and so on. These guidelines specifically say: “Muslim rule should not attract any criticism. Destruction of temples by Muslim invaders and rulers should not be mentioned.” One instruction in the West Bengal circular is that “schools and publishers have been asked to ignore and delete mention of forcible conversions to Islam.” The notification, says the Statesman of 21 May 1989, was objected to in many quarters. “A row has been kicked up by some academicians who feel that the ‘corrections’ are unjustified and politically motivated…” Another group feels that the corrections are “justified”. This experiment with untruth was being attempted since the 30’s-40’s by Muslim and Communist historians. After Independence, they gradually gained strength in university departments. By its policy the Nehruvian state just permitted itself to be hijacked by the so-called progressive, secular and Marxist historians. .... Armed with money and instructions from the Ministry of Education, the National Council of Educational Research, University Grants Commission, Indian Council of Historical Research, secular and Stalinist historians began to produce manipulated and often manifestly false school and college text-books of history and social studies in the Union Territories and States of India. This has gone on for years. ... On the one hand, the government through the Department of Archaeology preserves monuments the originals of which were destroyed by Islamic vandalism, and on the other, history text-books are directed to say that no shrines were destroyed. Students are taught one thing in the class rooms through their text-books, while they see something else when they go on excursions to historical monuments. At places like Qutb Minar and Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque they see that “the construction is all Hindu and destruction all Muslim”. History books are not written only in India; these are written in neighbouring countries also, and what is tried to be concealed here for the sake of national integration, is mentioned with pride in the neighbouring Muslim countries. Scholars in Europe are also working on Indian history and untruths uttered by India’s secular and progressive historians are easily countered. .... Thousands of pilgrims who visit Mathura or walk past the site of Vishvanath temple and Gyanvapi Masjid in Varanasi everyday, are reminded of Mughal vandalism and disregard for Hindu sensitivities by Muslim rulers.
  • Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 3 (also in K.S. Lal, Historical Essays)

• And yet some writers delude themselves with the mistaken belief that they can change their country's history by distorting it, or brain-wash generations of young students, or humour fundamentalist politicians through such unethical exercise. To judge what happened in the past in the context of today's cultural milieu and consciously hide the truth, is playing politics with history. Let history be accepted as a matter of fact without putting it to any subjective interpretations. Yesterday's villains cannot be made today's heroes, or, inversely, yesterday's Islamic heroes cannot be made into robbers ransacking temples just for treasures. Nor can the medieval monuments be declared as national monuments as suggested in some naive 'secularist' quarters. They represent vandalism. No true Indian can be proud of such desecrated and indecorous evidence of 'composite culture'. 'History,' says Froude, 'does teach that right and wrong are real distinctions. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of humanity.' It is nobody's business to change this moral law and prove the wrongs of the medieval period to be right today by having recourse to misrepresentation of history. Manipulation in the writing of medieval Indian history by some modern writers is the worst legacy of Muslim rule in India.
  • Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 3 (also in K.S. Lal, Historical Essays)

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• [R.C. Majumdar restricts the term ‘nationalist historians’ to those Indians who in reconstructing their country’s history aimed at examining or reexamining] some points of national interest or importance...which have been misunderstood or misconceived or wrongly represented. Such an object is not necessarily in conflict with a scientific and critical study, and a nationalist historian is not, therefore, necessarily a propagandist or a charlatan.
  • R.C. Majumdar, ‘Nationalist Historians’, in Philips, ed., Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon. quoted from E. Sreedharan - A Textbook of Historiography, 500 B.C. to A.D. 2000.

• ...history, divorced from truth, does not help a nation. Its future should be laid on the stable foundations of truth and not on the quicksands of falsehood, however alluring it may appear at present. India is now at the cross-roads and I urge my young friends to choose carefully the path they would like to tread upon.
  • R.C. Majumdar, ‘Indian Historiography: Some Present Trends’, in Sen, ed., Historians and Historiography in Modern India, xxiii. quoted from E. Sreedharan - A Textbook of Historiography, 500 B.C. to A.D. 2000-Orient blackswan (2019) Panikkar, Survey of Indian History

• For more than 30 years, historians Romila Thapar, Satish Chandra, R.S. Sharma, Bipan Chandra and others enjoyed such great political backing from the Congress establishment that they convinced themselves that they, and they alone, possessed god’s gift of the ability to interpret India’s past. They operated as a cartel and prevented others from articulating alternative points of view.
  • Vijay Kumar Malhotra. (2001) ‘Cardinal principles’, Hindustan Times, 14 December quoted from (Routledge advances in South Asian studies 17) Guichard, Sylvie - The construction of history and nationalism in India_ textbooks, controversies and politics-Routledge (2010),93 (Malhotra 2001 HT)
  • Cardinal Principles” by Vijai Kumar Malhotra, December 14, 2001, The Hindustan Times; online copy at http://www.hvk.org/articles/1201/118.html

• It is an ominous sign of the time that Indian history is being viewed in official circles in the perspective of recent politics. The official history of the freedom movement starts with the premises that India lost indendence only in the eighteenth century and had thus an experience of subjection to a foreign power for only two centuries. Real history, on the other hand, teaches us that the major part of India lost independence about five centuries before, and merely changed masters in the eighteenth century.
  • R.C. Majumdar, History Of The Freedom Movement In India Vol. 1 [6] quoted from Elst, Koenraad (2014). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p. 310-311

• Political necessities of the Indians during the last phase of British rule, underlined the importance of alliance between the two communities, and this was sought to be smoothly brought about by glossing over the differences and creating an imaginary history of the past in order to depict the relations between the two in a much more favourable light than it actually was. … But history is no respecter of persons or communities, and must always strive to tell the truth, so far as it can be deduced from reliable evidence. This great academic principle has a bearing upon actual life, for ignorance seldom proves to be a real bliss either to an individual or to a nation. In the particular case under consideration, ignorance of the actual relation between the Hindus and the Muslims throughout the course of history - an ignorance deliberately encouraged by some - may ultimately be found to have been the most important single factor which led to the partition of India. The real and effective means of solving a problem is to know and understand the facts that gave rise to it, and not to ignore them by hiding the head, ostrich-like, into sands of fiction.
  • R.C. Majumdar, The History and Culture of the Indian People, Volume VI, The Delhi sultanate, Bombay, 1960, p. xxix. Quoted in Sita Ram Goel, The Calcutta Quran Petition (1986)

• It is very sad that the spirit of perverting history to suit political views is no longer confined to politicians, but has definitely spread even among professional historians. … It is painful to mention though impossible to ignore, the fact that there is a distinct and conscious attempt to rewrite the whole chapter of the bigotry and intolerance of the Muslim rulers towards Hindu religion. This was originally prompted by the political motive of bringing together the Hindus and Musalmans in a common fight against the British but has continued ever since. A history written under the auspices of the Indian National Congress sought to repudiate the charge that the Muslim rulers broke Hindu temples, and asserted that they were the most tolerant in matters of religion. Following in its footsteps, a noted historian has sought to exonerate Mahmud of Ghazni’s bigotry and fanaticism, and several writers in India have come forward to defend Aurangzeb against Jadunath Sarkar’s charge of religious intolerance. It is interesting to note that in the revised edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, one of them, while re-writing the article on Aurangzeb originally written by William Irvine, has expressed the view that the charge of breaking Hindu temples brought against Aurangzeb is a disputed point. Alas for poor Jadunath Sarkar, who must have turned in his grave if he were buried. For, after reading his History of Aurangzib, one would be tempted to ask, if the temple-breaking policy of Aurangzeb is a disputed point, is there a single fact in the whole recorded history of mankind which may be taken as undisputed? A noted historian has sought to prove that the Hindu population was better off under the Muslims than under the Hindu tributaries or independent rulers.
  • R.C. Majumdar, The History and Culture of the Indian People, Volume VII, Preface to The Mughul Empire, Bombay, 1974, p. xii. Quoted in Sita Ram Goel, The Calcutta Quran Petition (1986)

• I have approached the subject from a strictly historical point of view. It is an ominous sign of the time that Indian history is being viewed in official circles in the perspective of recent politics. (xxii-xxiii)
  • R.C. Majumdar History Of The Freedom Movement In India, vol I.

• Political necessities of the Indians during the last phase of British rule underlined the importance of alliance between the two communities, and this was sought to be smoothly brought about by glossing over the differences and creating' an imaginary history of the past in order to depict the relations between the two in a much more favourable light than it actually was. Eminent Hindu political leaders even went so far as to proclaim that the Hindus were not at all a subject race during the Muslim rule. These absurd notions, which would have been laughed at by Indian leaders at the beginning of the nineteenth century, passed current as history owing to the exigencies of the political complications at the end of that century. Unfortunately slogans and beliefs die hard, and even today, for more or less the same reasons as before, many Indians, specially Hindus, are peculiarly sensitive to any comments or observations even made in course of historical writings, touching upon the communal relations in any way. A fear of wounding the susceptibilities of the sister community haunts the minds of Hindu politicians and historians, and not only prevents them from speaking out the truth, but also brings down their wrath upon those who have the courage to do so. But history is no respecter of persons or communities, and must always strive to tell the truth, so far as it can be deduced from reliable evidence. This great academic principle has a bearing upon actual life, for ignorance seldom proves to be a real bliss either to an individual or to a nation. In the particular case under consideration, ignorance of the actual relation between the Hindus and the Muslims throughout the course of history,—an ignorance deliberately encouraged by some,—may ultimately be found to have been the most important single factor which led to the partition of India. The real and effective means of solving a problem is to know and understand the facts that gave rise to it, and not to ignore them by hiding the head, ostrich-like, into sands of fiction. (p. xxix.)
  • R.C. Majumdar, Volume 6: The Delhi Sultanate [1300-1526]

• It is thus quite clear that both from purely academic and practical standpoints, the plain duty of a historian of India is to reveal the truth about the communal relations in the past, without being influenced in any way by any extraneous factor. This conclusion is fortified by other considerations. It is now a well-known fact that a few powerful dictators who dominated Europe in the recent past emphasized the need of re-writing the history of their countries to suit their political actions and ideals. This is undoubtedly a great tribute paid to history for its formative influence upon mankind, but cuts at the very root of all that makes history an intellectual discipline of the highest value. There are ominous signs that the same idea is slowly invading democratic countries also, not excluding India. This world tendency to make history the vehicle of certain definite political, social and economic ideas, which reign supreme in each country for the time being, is like a cloud, at present no bigger than a man’s hand, but which may soon grow in volume, and overcast the sky, covering the light of the world by an impenetrable gloom. The question is therefore of paramount importance, and it is the bounden duty of every historian to guard himself against the tendency, and fight it by the only weapon available to him, namely by holding fast to truth in all his writings irrespective of all consequences. A historian should not trim his sail according to the prevailing wind, but ever go straight, keeping in view the only goal of his voyage—the discovery of truth. (p. xxx)
  • R.C. Majumdar, Volume 6: The Delhi Sultanate [1300-1526]

• Such disclosures may not be liked by the high officials and a section of the politicians, but it is the solemn duty of the historian to state the truth, however unpleasant or discreditable it might be to any particular class or community. Unfortunately, political expediency in India during this century has sought to destroy this true historic spirit... It is very sad that the spirit of perverting history to suit political views is no longer confined to politicians, but has definitely spread even among professional historians... Although the statements are based on unimpeachable authority, there is hardly any doubt that they will be condemned not only by a small class of historians enjoying official favour, but also by a section of Indians who are quite large m number and occupy high position in politics and society. It is painful to mention, though impossible to ignore, the fact that there is a distinct and conscious attempt to rewrite the whole chapter of the bigotry and intolerance of the Muslim rulers towards Hindu religion" This was originally prompted by the political motive of bringing together the Hindus and Musalmans in a common fight against the British but has continued ever since. A history written under the auspices of the Indian National Congress sought to repudiate the charge that the Muslim rulers broke Hindu temples, and asserted that they were the most tolerant in matters of religion Following in its footsteps a noted historian has sought to exonerate Mahmud of Ghazni’s bigotry and fanaticism, and several writers in India have come forward to defend Aurangzib against Jadunath Sarkar’s charge of religious intolerance. It is interesting to note that in the revised edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, one of them, while re-writing the article on Aurangzib originally written by Sir Wiliam Irvine, has expressed the view that the charge of breaking Hindu temples brought agamst Aurangzib is a disputed point. Alas for poor Jadunath Sarkar, who must have turned in his grave if he were buried For, after reading his History of Aurangzib, one would be tempted to ask, if the temple-breaking policy of Aurangzib is a disputed point, is there a single fact in the whole recorded history of mankind which may be taken as undisputed? A noted historian has sought to prove that the Hindu population was better off under the Muslims than under the Hindu tributaries or independent rulers. “While some historians have sought to show that the Hindu and Muslim cultures were fundamentally different and formed two distinct and separate units flourishing side by side, the late K. M Ashraf sought to prove that the Hindus and Muslims had no cultural conflict.” But the climax was reached by the politician-cum-historian Lala Lajpat Rai when he asserted that “the Hindus and Muslims have coalesced into an Indian people very much in the same way as the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes and Normans formed the English people of today.” His further assertion that “the Muslim rule in India was not a foreign rule” has now become the oft-repeated slogan of a certain political party. I have discussed the question in some detail elsewhere”” and need not elaborate the point any further.
  • RC Majumdar ed., Volume 7: The Mughul Empire [1526-1707] (xii-xiii, preface)

• In a 1942 article entitled “ ‘Histories’ of India,” K.M. Munshi wrote, “Most of our histories of India suffer from a lack of perspective. They deal with certain events and periods not from the Indian point of view, but from that of some source to which they are partial and which by its very nature is loaded against India.”
  • K.M. Munshi, Akhand Hindustan, New Book Co., Bombay, 1942, p. 113. in The Problem of Indian History by Michel Danino* (Published in Dialogue, April-June 2012, vol. 13, no. 4)

N

• Of quite a few casualties of the standards of academic integrity at the hands of self-styled 'secular' academics, those in the field of medieval Indian historiography happen to be the worst.
  • Harsh Narain, The Ayodhya temple-mosque dispute: Focus on Muslim sources (1993)

• The most important assumption was that Indian history was just a collection of unrelated events, like a series of migrations and conquests, owing their origin to external stimuli. It did not reveal the organic growth of a nation or a civilization, marking the stages of development or decline. The people are not an active force bringing about changes like the renaissance and reformation, or producing a revolution at some stage. It was a procession of exotic and colourful characters, autocratic kings and emperors just having their way without encountering resistance from the people. ...a long series of invasions…[acted] upon the unresponsive masses [and] political and historical upheavals [were] not products of conditions within society, representing certain trends or movements among the people. […] It was as though India was simply a geographical entity, providing an empty stage for odd characters to appear and move about for some time before their mysterious disappearance.
  • Narayanan, M.G.S., Chairman, Indian Council for Historical Research, The Eurocentric Approach to Indian History in Colonial and Communist Writing: the Case for Reinterpretation November 2001, New Delhi, text of speech available at: http://ifihhome.tripod.com/articles/mgs001.html

• There was a general tendency to condemn and denigrate everything Indian, calling it Hindu and communal, without realizing the fact that the label ‘Hindu’ did not represent a religion in the Semitic or Western sense, but a whole civilization which possessed institutions and outlook entirely different from those of the Western civilization. [….] Western standards, capitalist or communist, were applied indiscriminately to Indian history for evaluating the developments in all walks of life. This was evident in the way terms like religion, state, class, empire, nation, law,justice, morality, etc. were used in the analysis and interpretation of the past in India.
  • Narayanan, M. G. S. Eurocentric History vs. the Indian Perspective, Chairman’s Column, ICHR Newsletter, Vol. 2, January-June 2002,, quoted from Rosser, Yvette Claire (2003). Curriculum as Destiny: Forging National Identity in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (). University of Texas at Austin.

• We are aware of the fact that certain historians professing to project the Marxist ideology have been in the habit of claiming infallibility and monopoly of wisdom, branding all other historians as reactionary and communal and treating them as untouchables. This intellectual fascism has to be discouraged. What they were enjoying for some time was not a monopoly of wisdom but a monopoly of power in several government bodies and universities. This has come to an end happily. Historical research must now gather new momentum in this country so that our people are eventually liberated from the hegemony of Eurocentric history and enabled to develop their own independent Indian perspective.
  • Narayanan, M. G. S. Eurocentric History vs. the Indian Perspective, Chairman’s Column, ICHR Newsletter, Vol. 2, January-June 2002,, quoted from Rosser, Yvette Claire (2003). Curriculum as Destiny: Forging National Identity in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (). University of Texas at Austin.

P

• One of the issues that needs to be addressed as we seek to sort out the problems posed by the Marxist interpretation of history is what Koenraad Elst, the Belgian orientalist and Indologist, describes as negationism in India. Known for his writings on Indian history and Hindu-Muslim relations, Elst says that while negationism in Europe means the denial of Nazi genocide of the Jews and gypsies during World War II, the Indian brand of negationism deals with the section of intelligentsia “trying to erase from Hindu memory the history of their persecution by the swordsmen of Islam”.
  • A Surya Prakash, Islam and the lies of historians [7]

• Indian history is of necessity, predominantly the history of the Hindu people, for though other and potent elements have become permanent factors in India, the Hindus still constitute over eighty per cent of her population. Besides, what is distinctly Indian has so far been Hindu. Islamic contribution is not specially related to India and is a part of a world culture to which Muslims belong....In essence, therefore, the history of Indian effort towards the building up and maintenance of a specially Indian civilization has to be the history of the Hindu mind and its achievements.
  • K.M.Panikkar, quoted in E. Sreedharan - A Textbook of Historiography, 500 B.C. to A.D. 2000-Orient blackswan (2019) Panikkar, Survey of Indian History

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• Attention focussed too-and critically so-on the incremental and ad hoc processes by which India had acquired a cultural policy. The casual nature of Shankar's note to Chunder captures the amorphous, even protean,quality of cultural policy formation.It is more a loose aggregate of spontaneous decisions than a body of coherent doctrine expressing intent and subject to policy choice and guidance. Although the procedures used to commission, examine, and license the textbooks in question were exemplary by comparison to the procedure used to challenge them, cultural policy formation was, and remains, ad hoc. Policies are essentially outputs of particular bureaus or outcomes of bargains among officials,rather than the results of deliberate choices based on coherent formulations that provide policy guidance and are subject to public accountability....
  For a time, Nehru's The Discovery of India and Letters from Prison constituted a tacit statement of Congress's cultural policy, in part because those who might have objected were reluctant to challenge a prime minister who commanded wide political support. But Indira Gandhi's accession to power in the mid-1960s marked the beginning of a more articulate and aggressive left secularism in institutional arrangements, ideological formulations,and scholarship. Congress governments founded, funded, and favored the Jawaharlal Nehru University. Its nationally-recruited faculty and student body soon acquired a reputation for progressive perspectives.A progressive tone was imparted to many other national cultural institutions.Nurul Hasan, a leading Mughal historian of Marxist persuasion and former professor of history at Aligarh Muslim University,became education minister after Mrs. Gandhi's impressive electoral victory in 1971. When, after 1977, Janata intervened in textbook certification and appointments to cultural bodies, it did so in the name of rectifying a decade of partisan cultural patronage by Congress governments to secularist and soi-disant left academia. The anonymous memorandum to Prime Minister Desai alleged that progressive secularists had colonized independent government-funded research organizations-such as the Indian Council of Social Science Research, the University Grants Commission, and the Indian Council of Historical Research
  • Rudolph, L. I., & Rudolph, S. H. (1983). Rethinking Secularism: Genesis and Implications of the Textbook Controversy, 1977-79. Pacific Affairs, 56(1), 15. doi:10.2307/2758768

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• Professor D.P.Singhal asserts that, contrary to the general belief, Indians in ancient times did not neglect the important discipline of historiography. On the contrary, they were good writers of history. He states:
  “Ancient India did not produce a Thucydides, but there is considerable evidence to suggest that every important Hindu court maintained archives and geneologies of its rulers. And Kalhana’s Rajatarangini, written in twelfth century Kashmir, is a remarkable piece of historical literature. Despite his lapses into myths and legends, Kalhana had an unbiased approach to historical facts and history writing. He held that a true historian, while recounting the events of the past, must discard love (raga) and hatred (dvesha). Indeed, his well-developed concept of history and the technique of historical investigation have given rise to some speculation that there existed at the time a powerful tradition of historiography in which Kalhana must have received his training.”
  • Singhal, D.P. ‘Battle for the Past’ in Problems of Indian Historiography, Proceedings of the Indian History and Culture Society, Ed. Devahuti, D.K. Publishers, Delhi 1979. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 3

• The West Bengal Board of Secondary Education had issued instructions in 1989 that ‘Muslim rule should never attract any criticism. Destruction of temples by Muslim rulers and invaders should not be mentioned. (...) With the sway which Marxists have ensured over the education department, each facet at every level will be subjected to the same sort of alterations and substitutions that we have encountered in Bengal – all that is necessary is that the progressives’ government remains in power, and that the rest keep looking the other way.
  • Arun Shourie  : Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud, 1998 (2014), HarperCollins

• How does this concern square with the guidelines issued by their West Bengal government... - "Muslim rule should never atttact any criticism. Destruction of temples by Muslim rulers and invaders should not be mentioned?
  • Arun Shourie - Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

• In a word, no forcible conversions, no massacres, no destruction of temples. ... Muslim historians of those times are in raptures at the heap of Kafirs [sic] who have been dispatched to hell. Muslim historians are forever lavishing praise on the ruler for the temples he has destroyed, ... Law books like The Hedaya prescribe exactly the options to which these little textbooks alluded. All whitewashed away. Objective whitewash for objective history. And today if anyone seeks to restore truth to these textbooks, the shout, "Communal rewriting of history."
  • Arun Shourie - Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

• Thus, there are two points to remember. First, our friends are not just Marxists, they are also Macaulayites. Second, they are Marxists in a special sense. They are Marxists in the sense that they have thought of themselves as Marxists, in the sense that they repeatedly regurgitate a handful of Marxist phrases and assertions. But more than being Marxist historians, they have been establishment historians. Their theories and ‘theses’ have accorded not just with the ‘classics’ of Marxism-Leninism, they have accorded with the ideology of, which in terms of their theory means, the needs of Congressite rulers.
  • Arun Shourie - Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

• The tale contains an institutional warning also: for this is not the first time that the project to write the history of the freedom movement has been hijacked, and eventually derailed. In the Introduction and Appendix to his three-volume History of the Freedom Movement in India, Dr R.C. Majumdar recorded what happened to the original project – how at his instance the Indian Historical Records Commission passed a resolution in February 1948 that a history of the country’s struggle for freedom ought to be prepared;... how the first volume was prepared;... how the government.. alleged that there had been some differences in the Board about the content of the first volume which had been circulated; how suddenly the Board was dissolved; and the project handed over to a previous secretary of the education ministry; how some of the members become turncoats.
  The result? Mediocre volumes which no one reads, volumes which further what was then the official line… By contrast the British produced their version …. There was the Indian side to the events. This was available at the time in the recollections of those who had led the movement against the British – for many of them were still alive; it was available in their private papers. The Towards Freedom Project was to garner this record. As control over institutions passed to the Leftists, the entire project was yoked to advancing their line and theses.
  • Shourie, Arun (2014). Eminent historians: Their technology, their line, their fraud. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India : HarperCollins Publishers, citing R.C. Majumdar

• The Indian State instead of the encouraging objective rendering of the history have encouraged few vested interests to hijack the historical narrative. This has resulted in present situation where the history, which is taught in our schools and colleges, is the British imperialist-sponsored one, with the intent to destroy our history...
  An accurate history should not only record the periods of glory but the moments of degeneration, of the missed opportunities, and of the failure to forge national unity at crucial junctures in time. It should draw lessons for the future generations from costly errors in the past...
  It is disturbing to read the amount of intellectual investment that has been made by the forces that are inimical to our country. These forces have penetrated into our democratic institutions to hollow them from inside...
  The present work brings to fore the impunity with which NCERT was compromised during UPA regime. During both the terms of the ousted alliance, history has been totally rewritten to serve the purpose of divisive forces, which are trying to uproot Hindu ethos of the country. Young and impressionable minds of the children are being hijacked to be more prone to accept the narrative of breaking India forces. It is high time the history text books are rewritten with clear directions to the historians that the narrative of our country should be depicted with honesty. Our nation’s past is full of cultural, social, economic and scientific achievements. The current history text books not only undermine the achievements but instead burden the country’s children with inferiority complex and hatred for each other. The social dissonance that these books create should be rectified.
  • Subramanian Swamy. Foreword by Subramanian Swamy in Atri, N., & Sagar, M. A. (2017). Brainwashed republic.

• Like any other imperialism, Muslim and British Imperialisms also created a class of mercenaries and compradores - and here I am talking of intellectual mercenaries; they created a collaborationist tradition or school which endured even after the rulers had left. Marxist historians, for example, belong to the school of Hindu munshis whom the Mughal kings employed to eulogize their rule and their religion, and who wrote servilely to flatter their patrons and whose writings failed to reflect even remotely the feelings, fears, hopes and yearnings of their own subject fellow brothers.
  • Quoted from the preface by Ram Swarup in Gurbachan, S. T. S., & Swarup, R. (1991). Muslim League attack on Sikhs and Hindus in the Punjab 1947.

• Historical writing and political purposes are usually inseparable, but a measure of institutional plurality can allow some genuine space for alternative perspectives. Unfortunately, post-independence Indian historical writing came to be dominated by a monolithic political project of progressivism that eventually lost sight of verifiable basic truths. This genre of Indian history and the social sciences more generally reached a nadir, when even its own leftist protagonists ceased to believe in their own apparent goal of promoting social and economic justice. It descended into a crass, self-serving political activism and determination to censor dissenting views challenging their own institutional privileges and intellectual exclusivity.
  • Gautam Sen, quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Why I killed the Mahatma: Understanding Godse's defence. New Delhi : Rupa, 2018.

• It is true that in the decades in which India was ruled imperiously by the Congress, the task of writing history textbooks was allotted to Leftist historians who chose to view India’s past through a distorted lens. The most celebrated of these historians, Romila Thapar, has gone so far as to deny that Muslim invaders destroyed the temples of us idolatrous infidels. Undoubtedly, if she were writing about more recent history, she would deny that the Taliban blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan — and would say that they fell to pieces of their own accord.
  • Tavleen Singh, Fifth column: Cultural renewal Indian Express 2019

• Given what we have seen of Marxist historians even in this brief book, the brazen-faced distortions – to the point of falsehood – do not surprise me.... That these eminences were in control of journals, of history congresses, and university departments, had another immediate consequence: no one dared question their work. They hadn’t to explain their ‘theses’, they could serve up any concoction as ‘evidence’. In regurgitating the same assertions, they convinced themselves that they were being consistent; in arriving at the same reductionist explanations for diverse phenomena, phenomena millennia apart, they convinced themselves that they were fortifying the theory. In fact, all they were doing was repeating themselves. There was nothing new to be learnt as it had all been explained before! In a word, unquestioned, above being challenged, they slipped into shoddiness, and thus stagnation – Jha’s Address is an illustration of the kind of drivel that came to pass as scholarship.
  • Arun Shourie  : Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud, 1998 (2014), HarperCollins

• The consequences were inevitable. As new central universities were set up – fifteen in the last few years – the protégés of these eminences are the ones who have been appointed to key posts. They have continued teaching the same stuff. They have perpetuated the same patron-protégé relationships. They have used the same techniques of networking, mutual promotion, blackballing and the rest to keep scholars of other hues out. But what is it that they have been perpetuating? More than the line, which is much enfeebled by now in any case, they have been perpetuating mediocrity all round – no one must be brighter than the patron, remember; the touchstone is not academic excellence but personal fidelity to and personal service for the patron, remember. That these eminences were in control of journals, of history congresses, and university departments, had another immediate consequence: no one dared question their work. They hadn’t to explain their ‘theses’, they could serve up any concoction as ‘evidence’. In regurgitating the same assertions, they convinced themselves that they were being consistent; in arriving at the same reductionist explanations for diverse phenomena, phenomena millennia apart, they convinced themselves that they were fortifying the theory. In fact, all they were doing was repeating themselves. There was nothing new to be learnt as it had all been explained before! In a word, unquestioned, above being challenged, they slipped into shoddiness, and thus stagnation – Jha’s Address is an illustration of the kind of drivel that came to pass as scholarship.... They controlled such publications, and others, that of the ICHR, say: but the abysmal quality of articles in them ensured that the control amounted to little.
  • Arun Shourie  : Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud, 1998 (2014), HarperCollins

• Ideological commitment, or at least a predisposition towards the Left having become a necessary qualification for appointments, for prominence, the entire discipline came to shut its eyes to a pile of evidence on a whole range of issues. It was de riguer to declaim about ‘Hindu communalism’, ... Given their larger presence among the voters in West Bengal and Kerala, in a number of the constituencies that the progressives targeted, eyes had to be shut even tighter lest they spot communalism among Muslims: that had always to be portrayed as a reaction to Hindu communalism; it must never be talked of as something germane to the teachings or teachers of Islam. Even in regard to ‘Hindu communalism’, one had to make out that the ‘communalism’ among Hindus was the doing of one party, of one organization – the RSS – at the most of a few figures: it was not a characteristic of the mass of Hindus... Similarly, one may, indeed one must declaim about the inequities from which women suffer, but one must shut one’s eyes to what the Shariah provides in regard to women. How is it that while our feminists were so vigorous in denouncing the condition of women in Western societies, in India, they did not produce even a few worthwhile studies to explain the curious anomaly, one to which Maulana Wahiduddin Khan once called attention – that while Islam is said to give such high status to women, in every single Islamic society and country, women are in a pitiable condition? Yes, it was absolutely mandatory to denounce what was happening to the environment. But one must not see the incongruity of pouring scorn on the worship of trees, and rivers, on the veneration of nature in general, of such beliefs having been pilloried as ‘animism’ and superstition, and then lamenting the consequences when people began to look upon nature as others had been taught by their religions to do, that is, as something that had been created by God for the ‘enjoyment’ of man.
  • Arun Shourie  : Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud, 1998 (2014), HarperCollins

• Control had another, in a sense a final consequence. That they controlled journals, university departments, history congresses placed them in the controlling elite. They became parts, and very conspicuous parts of the very establishment that they had been traducing. They could not sustain the pose of martyrdom – they were not the ones who were defying censors and persecution. They were now the censors. They were the ones who were derailing and blocking the careers of others, they were the ones who were blackballing others, destroying their reputations. Everything about them and their positions spoke to their being part of the ruling establishment: the intertwining webs of connections with those in office; the manifest fact that they owed their positions and prominence to those connections; their membership of governmental committees and delegations; the schools and universities to which they sent their children; their perks and salaries. A professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University today gets around Rs 1,30,000 a month as salary with a dearness allowance. And there is the rent allowance (around 30 per cent of the salary if the person is not living on campus), and then the conveyance allowance. In a country where the poverty line is officially drawn at Rs 12 a day or Rs 360 a month, to get Rs 1,50,000 or thereabouts a month and write fiery essays on the immiserization of the poor comes across as a theatrical performance, the indignation is a bit too obviously worked up. Not the martyrs they would want us to take them to be, rather top dogs revelling in what Northcote Parkinson had called ‘underdoggery’!
  • Arun Shourie  : Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud, 1998 (2014), HarperCollins

• But these are not just partisan ‘historians’. They are nepotists of the first order. I had documented several years ago the doings of some of them in regard to the appointments in the Aligarh Muslim University. Their doings in the ICHR were true to pattern. How is it that over twenty-five years persons from their school alone had been nominated to the ICHR? How come that Romila Thapar had been on the Council four times? Irfan Habib five times? Satish Chandra four times? S. Gopal three times?…
  • Arun Shourie  : Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud, 1998 (2014), HarperCollins

• It is a matter of regret, however, that the historian is often undner pressure to suppress facts unpalatable to his own countrymen as well as those resented by other countries... WE feel that truth must be said though without a deliberate attempt to offend other peoples. Otherwise, the spririt of history is likely to be totally obliterated by unacademic considerations in the not distant future.
  • D.C. Sircar. Proc. All India oriental Conf. Ujjain 1972, Presi Address, pp 12-13 , quoted in Devahuti, D., & Indian History and Culture Society. (1980). Bias in Indian historiography. Delhi: D.K. Publications. p.42

• All in all the Marxist school is becoming a weapon for suicide rather than serving as a useful tool for the understanding of history.
  • BP Sinha, , quoted in Devahuti, D., & Indian History and Culture Society. (1980). Bias in Indian historiography. Delhi: D.K. Publications. p.,39

• Therefore, certain attempts made by some ultra-Marxist historians to justify and even whitewash tyrannical emperors of the medieval India may be tactical for purposes of popular secularism but totally unwarranted. Aurangzeb's misdeeds need not be given a face-lift...
  • Seshadri, K. Indian Politics, Then and Now: Essays in Historical Perspective. Pragatee Prakashan. p. 5.

• India, again; however completely the Indians themselves have forgotten their state history, we have after all more available material for Buddha’s time than we have for history of the Classical ninth and eighth centuries, and yet even today we act as though “the” Indian had lived entirely in his philosophy, just as the Athenians (so our classicists would have us believe) spent their lives in beauty-philosophizing on the banks of the Ilissus.
  • Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West

• National history, like every other history worthy of the name and deserving to endure, must be true as regards the facts and reasonable in the interpretation of them. It will be national not in the sense that it will try to suppress or white-wash everything in our country’s past that is disgraceful, but because it will admit them and at the same time point out that there were other and nobler aspects in the stages of our nation’s evolution which offset the former.. . . In this task the historian must be a judge He will not suppress any defect of the national character, but add to his portraiture those higher qualities which, taken together with the former, help to constitute the entire individual.
  • Jadunath Sarkar, ,19 November, 1937, Quoted in R.C. Majumdar, The History and Culture of the Indian People, Vol. 7, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay, 1984,

T

• Our real ties are with the Bharatavarsha that lies outside our textbooks. If the history of this tie for a substantially long period gets lost, our soul loses its anchorage. After all, we are no weeds or parasitical plants in India. Over many hundreds of years, it is our roots, hundreds and thousands of them, that have occupied the very heart of Bharatavarsha. But, unfortunately, we are obliged to learn a brand of history that makes our children forget this very fact. It appears as if we are nobody in India; as if those who came from outside alone matter.
  • Rabindranath Tagore: The History of Bharatavarsha. quoted in The Problem of Indian History by Michel Danino* (Published in Dialogue, April-June 2012, vol. 13, no. 4)

• ...the history of Bharatavarsha that we read and memorize for examinations is only something like a bad dream. Some people appear all of a sudden from somewhere and begin to fight and kill, the occupation of throne being the centre of the struggle between father and son and between brothers. One group may disappear but another comes in, and with the coming of the Pathans and the Moghuls, the Portuguese, the French and the English, the dream gets increasingly complex. In the read-hued image of Bharatavarsha suggested by this sequence of drams, one does not know where to look for the real land. This type of history-writing does not have any relationship with the real inhabitants of India, as if they do not exist; only those who have fought and killed among themselves to occupy her throne are real...A few people will surely emerge from the newly educated community and resolve not to make teaching a commodity to sell will accept is as a family profession...They will set up centres tools of modern learning in different parts of the country...I firmly believe that Bengal give birth to a few gurus of this type despite the English mercantile royalty's example and lesson.
  • Tagore's Bhāratavarsher Itihās (1903) quoted in Nationalism in the study of Ancient Indian History by Dilip K. Chakrabarti (2021) (p. 251 to 263)

• Those who expect from a people like the Hindus a species of composition of precisely the same character as the historical works of Greece and Rome commit the very gregarious error of overlooking the peculiarities which distinguish the natives of India from all other races, and which strongly discriminate their intellectual productions of every kind from those of the West. Their philosophy, their poetry, their architecture, are marked with traits of originality; and the same may be expected to pervade their history, which, like the arts enumerated, took a character from its intimate association with the religion of the people. It must be recollected, moreover,… that the chronicles of all the polished nations of Europe, were, at a much more recent date, as crude, as wild, and as barren, as those of the early Rajputs....
  • James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, Routledge and Kegan Paul (London, 1829, 1957), 2 vols., I quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 3

• “My own animadversions upon the defective condition of the annals of Rajwarra have more than once been checked by a very just remark: ‘When our princes were in exile, driven from hold to hold, and compelled to dwell in the clefts of the mountains, often doubtful whether they would not be forced to abandon the very meal preparing for them, was that a time to think of historical records?’ ”...
  • James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, Routledge and Kegan Paul (London, 1829, 1957), 2 vols., I quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 3

• “If we consider the political changes and convulsions which have happened in Hindustan since Mahmood’s invasion, and the intolerant bigotry of many of his successors, we shall be able to account for the paucity of its national works on history, without being driven to the improbable conclusion, that the Hindus were ignorant of an art which has been cultivated in other countries from almost the earliest ages. Is it to be imagined that a nation so highly civilized as the Hindus, amongst whom the exact sciences flourished in perfection, by whom the fine arts, architecture, sculpture, poetry, music, were not only cultivated, but taught and defined by the nicest and most elaborate rules, were totally unacquainted with the simple art of recording the events of their history, the character of their princes and the acts of their reigns?” [The fact appears to be that] “After eight centuries of galling subjection to conquerors totally ignorant of the classical language of the Hindus; after every capital city had been repeatedly stormed and sacked by barbarous, bigoted, and exasperated foes; it is too much to expect that the literature of the country should not have sustained, in common with other interests, irretrievable losses.”
  • James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, Routledge and Kegan Paul (London, 1829, 1957), 2 vols., I quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 3

• Much disappointment has been felt in Europe at the sterility of the historic muse of Hindustan. When Sir William Jones first began to explore the vast mines of Sanskrit literature, great hopes were entertained that the history of the world would acquire considerable accessions from this source. The sanguine expectations that were then formed have not been realized; and, as it usually happens, excitement has been succeeded by apathy and indifference. It is now generally regarded as an axiom, that India possesses no national history; to which we may oppose the remark of a French Orientalist, who ingeniously asks, whence Abu-l Fazl obtained the materials for his outlines of ancient Hindu history?[25] Mr. Wilson has, indeed, done much to obviate this prejudice, by his translation of the Raja Tarangini, or History of Kashmir,[26] which clearly demonstrates that regular historical composition was an art not unknown in Hindustan, and affords satisfactory ground for concluding that these productions were once less rare than at present, and that further exertion may bring more relics to light. Although the labours of Colebrooke, Wilkins, Wilson, and others of our own countrymen, emulated by many learned men in France [viii] and Germany,[27] have revealed to Europe some of the hidden lore of India; still it is not pretended that we have done much more than pass the threshold of Indian science; and we are consequently not competent to speak decisively of its extent or its character. Immense libraries, in various parts of India, are still intact, which have survived the devastations of the Islamite. The collections of Jaisalmer and Patan, for example, escaped the scrutiny of even the lynx-eyed Alau-d-din who conquered both these kingdoms, and who would have shown as little mercy to those literary treasures, as Omar displayed towards the Alexandrine library. Many other minor collections, consisting of thousands of volumes each, exist in Central and Western India, some of which are the private property of princes, and others belong to the Jain communities.
  • James Tod, Annals and antiquities of Rajast'han

• If we consider the political changes and convulsions which have happened in Hindustan since Mahmud’s invasion, and the intolerant bigotry of many of his successors, we shall be able to account for the paucity of its national works on history, without being driven to the improbable conclusion, that the Hindus were ignorant of an art which has been cultivated in other countries from almost the earliest ages. Is it to be imagined that a nation so highly civilized as the Hindus, amongst whom the exact sciences flourished in perfection, by whom the fine arts [ix], architecture, sculpture, poetry, music, were not only cultivated, but taught and defined by the nicest and most elaborate rules, were totally unacquainted with the simple art of recording the events of their history, the characters of their princes, and the acts of their reigns? Where such traces of mind exist, we can hardly believe that there was a want of competent recorders of events, which synchronical authorities tell us were worthy of commemoration. The cities of Hastinapur and Indraprastha, of Anhilwara and Somanatha, the triumphal columns of Delhi and Chitor, the shrines of Abu and Girnar, the cave-temples of Elephanta and Ellora, are so many attestations of the same fact; nor can we imagine that the age in which these works were erected was without an historian. Yet from the Mahabharata or Great War, to Alexander’s invasion, and from that grand event to the era of Mahmud of Ghazni, scarcely a paragraph of pure native Hindu history (except as before stated) has hitherto been revealed to the curiosity of Western scholars. In the heroic history of Prithiraj, the last of the Hindu sovereigns of Delhi, written by his bard Chand, we find notices which authorize the inference that works similar to his own were then extant, relating to the period between Mahmud and Shihabu-d-din (A.D. 1000-1193); but these have disappeared.
  • James Tod, Annals and antiquities of Rajast'han

• After eight centuries of galling subjection to conquerors totally ignorant of the classical language of the Hindus; after almost every capital city had been repeatedly stormed and sacked by barbarous, bigoted, and exasperated foes; it is too much to expect that the literature of the country should not have sustained, in common with other important interests, irretrievable losses. My own animadversions upon the defective condition of the annals of Rajwara have more than once been checked by a very just remark: "when our princes were in exile, driven from hold to hold, and compelled to dwell in the clefts of the mountains, often doubtful whether they would not be forced to [x] abandon the very meal preparing for them, was that a time to think of historical records?"
  • James Tod, Annals and antiquities of Rajast'han

• Communal interpretation is based on the notion that for the last thousand years Indian history has been dominated by a society which consists of a monolithic Muslim community and a monolithic Hindu community. And that these two communities have always been in a state of conflict. Therefore every historical event that takes place is to be explained by this conflict. This I think is absolutely primitive history. This is worse than colonial history. Because historical interpretation has now moved on to a position where we analyse an event in a multi-causal way.
  • Romila Thapar, "The Rediff Interview/ Romila Thapar". Rediff. 4 February 1999.

• Two modern British historians of India, while admitting the truth of this charge, have offered an explanation which may be stated in their own words: “Of general histories of British India, those written a century or more ago are, with hardly an exception, franker, fuller, and more interesting than those of the last fifty years. In days when no one dreamed that any one would ever be seditious to ask really fundamental questions (such as ‘What right have to be in India at all”), and when no one ever thought of any public but a British one, criticism was lively and well informed, judgment was passed without regard to political exigencies. Of late years, increasingly and no doubt naturally, all Indian questions have tended to be approached from the standpoint of administration: ‘Will this make for easier and quieter government?’ The writer of to-day inevitably has a world outside his own people, listening intently and as touchy as his own people as awift to take offence. ‘He that is not for us is against us’. This knowledge of an overhearing, even eavesdropping public, of being in partibus infidelium, exercises a constant silent censorship, which has made British-Indian history the worst patch in current scholarship.
  • Edward Thompson and G Garrat quoted in Volume 9: British Paramountcy and Indian Renaissance, Part 1 [1818-1905] Edward Thompson and G Garrat, Rise and Fulfilment of British Rule in India (xxiii-xxv)

W

• Muslim rule should never atttact any criticism. Destruction of temples by Muslim rulers and invaders should not be mentioned.
  • West Bengal. Circular, West Bengal Board of Secondary Education, 28 April 1989 (number Syl/89/1). Quoted in Arun Shourie - Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud, HarperCollins, 1998. Quoted in Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 8. Quoted in Rosser, Yvette In Saha, S. C. (2004). Religious fundamentalism in the contemporary world: Critical social and political issues. Quoted in Rao, R. N. (2001). Coalition conundrum: The BJP's trials, tribulations, and triumphs. quoted in Santosh C. Saha (Ed.), Fundamentalism in the Contemporary World: Critical Social and Political Issues, Lexington Books, Maryland, US, 2004, p. 273

• Apologists for Islam, as well as some marxist scholars in India have sometimes attempted to reduce Islamic iconoclasm..
  • Wink, André. Al-Hind the Making of the Indo-Islamic World: The Slave Kings and the Islamic Conquest : 11Th-13th Centuries. BRILL. p. 309.