Taking up historian Sumit Sarkar’s observation that Indian historians rarely examined their own positions in society, Kashyap has produced a social history of historians themselves, the institutions they controlled, their interventions in public life, and the ideologies driving their craft.
Kashyap’s book stands out for its even-handedness, which has unsurprisingly attracted praise across ideological divides. It is an exceptionally well-researched work, distinguished as much by the engaging lucidity of its prose as by the courage required to write it in the present milieu.
Kashyap begins his story in 1872, when Sir Syed Ahmad Khan objected to ‘Itihas Timir Nashak’, a history textbook by Shiv Prasad, for what he considered was its unfair treatment of Muslims. India’s textbook wars evidently began long before today’s ideological camps acquired recognisable form! Kashyap follows colonial attempts to interpret India’s past in ways favourable to British rule as well as the evolution of Indian historical consciousness that developed against them during the freedom movement.
Secular rendering
The secular rendering of Indian history took root around the time of Partition and Independence, backed strongly by India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. This narrative sought to foster a national identity aligned with the Nehruvian ideal of ‘unity in diversity’. Backed by internationally renowned historians such as Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib, this interpretation also enjoyed considerable institutional influence for much of the post-Independence period. It however faced constant challenges from Hindutva groups, which conceptualised India not primarily as a secular nation but as a Hindu civilisation. This alternative perspective acquired considerably greater institutional traction after the Modi led government came to power in 2014.The post-Independence textbook struggles began early. Kashyap locates their origins in Communist Kerala in 1957, when the EMS Namboodiripad government became embroiled in disputes over lessons involving the Bolshevik Revolution and Maoist China.
The Congress-led central government, which remained in power for much of the post-Independence period, took steps to advance its secular, national-integration agenda. One early instance was the displacement of historian RC Majumdar from the writing of the official history of the freedom movement in favour of the state endorsed Tara Chand. More remarkable was a 1970 National Council of Educational Research and Training publication, the Screening Record Booklet, intended to help identify and excise from textbooks content considered detrimental to national integration. Laudable as that objective was, it raises a question running through Kashyap’s book: when do the state’s interventions of this kind become outright censorship?
Nationalist counter-offensive
The nationalist counter-offensive produced excesses of its own. Kashyap records how Sanskriti Gyan booklets associated with the RSS-linked Vidya Bharati school network renamed the Arabian Sea Sindhu Sagar and imagined a civilisational India extending beyond the country’s present borders. He also examines the interventions of Murli Manohar Joshi, Education Minister in the Vajpayee government, to promote a Hindutva interpretation of history.Kashyap also challenges the fiction of a unified secular Left. During the Ayodhya controversy, JNU historian Majid Hayat Siddiqi refused to sign the historians’ 1989 pamphlet The Political Abuse of History. He warned that professional historians risked compromising their scholarly authority when they entered active political and judicial disputes as historians rather than simply as citizens.
For Kashyap historians are neither neutral custodians of facts nor helpless victims of governments. They are public actors who sit on committees, author textbooks, control institutions and sometimes even become political actors themselves. The struggles within bodies like the Indian Council of Historical Research, the Indian History Congress, the National Council of Educational Research and Training among several others are well brought out by Kashyap.
Kashyap’s book covers in depth how, with each change of government, yesterday’s dominant interpretation is today’s target for correction. The conflict intensified as the BJP emerged nationally, culminating in the battles over “saffronisation” during the Vajpayee government and their reversal after the UPA took office in 2004.
Independent writing
History-writing in nineteenth-century India often originated outside universities, and Kashyap sees it returning to the public sphere through independent writers, many of whom are not professional historians. What matters most is historical thinking, which enables readers to distinguish evidence and interpretation from unsubstantiated assertion and misinformation. Anyone reading Kashyap will agree with that.India is unlikely ever to arrive at a single, permanently accepted account of its past, and Kashyap’s book tells us why. The greatest value of the book therefore lies beyond the evolving interpretations of India’s past. It is a valuable primer for history teachers, helping them appreciate that what they convey to students reflects a current historical interpretation, itself liable to change. A summary of the book’s major arguments would serve students and general readers well too, as a reliable guide to evaluate differing accounts of India’s past and to understand why they are so frequently revised.
The reviewer taught public policy and contemporary history at IISc Bengaluru and elsewhere
Title: Who Owns the Past? How Historians [Re]Wrote India’s Past & Present, 1870-2020
Author: Shaan Kashyap
Publisher: Vintage Books
Price: ₹799
Published on September 11, 2026