A casualty of this warped thinking is the writing of history. Till the 1950s, India had a vibrant tradition of historiography that combined empirical rigour with compelling prose. The narrative tradition may seem dreadfully old-fashioned today but it captured the romance of history and made it appealing to general readers. The tradition of history-writing India inherited from the British was infinitely superior in every respect to the turgid, Marxist, post-modernist drivel being produced from today’s "detoxified" institutions.