In July 2005, speaking at Oxford, Manmohan Singh cited Angus Maddison’s estimate that India’s share of the world economy had fallen from 22.6 per cent in 1700 to 3.8 per cent in 1952. The number appeared to confirm a familiar nationalist narrative of colonial impoverishment. But Singh complicated the story. In the same speech, he argued that independent India had inherited not only the economic consequences of colonialism but also institutions and political ideas that continued to shape the republic.
The ensuing controversy over this speech prompted historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam to raise a more fundamental objection. He remarked, “No one knows what India’s gross domestic product was in 1700.” Even if India’s global share did decline, three questions remain. Did British rule lead to that decline? What was the most plausible alternative to British rule? And is this even the most useful way to assess the impact of British rule in India?
These questions challenge assumptions rather than affirm them. They could be broadly called ‘historical thinking’ as they implicitly examine and explain who produced a historical source, when, for what purpose, and with what knowledge. It compares evidence, distinguishes events from patterns, intentions from outcomes and political claims from archival records.
Yet, India’s on-going history wars often proceed without this discipline. A temple, a clemency petition, a textbook deletion, or a colonial report is made to bear the weight of civilisational conclusions. The supposed divide between a predominant Marxist academy and a silenced Hindu public is now presented as the defining story of Indian history, which it is not.
Beyond Boundaries
The history of history-writing in India has rarely followed the tidy story now common in public debate. Since 2014, however, a growing number of ‘non-professional’ historians have presented India’s historiography as a fable of suppression followed by recovery. The historical record suggests something far more complex. It did not move from colonial history to a Marxist monopoly and then to a nationalist recovery after 2014. It developed within a crowded public sphere where regional scholars, religious reformers, archaeologists, schoolteachers, novelists, journalists, government committees and professional historians all competed to define India’s past.
The public field of Indian history was pluralist and assorted before professional historians became prominent, and it remained so after they did. In 1872, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan objected to Raja Shiv Prasad’s Itihas Timir Nashak, used in zilla and high schools in the North-Western Provinces. He criticised its treatment of episodes involving Muslims and an illustration of Qutb al-Din Mubarak Shah. The colonial government appointed a committee under E. Lethbridge in 1877 to examine school textbooks. The committee examined English histories, missionary publications, translations and vernacular books. It evaluated Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada, Sindhi and Bengali materials. In Bengal, schools chose their own books. In Bombay presidency, Gujarati readers wanted histories beginning with Gujarat and moving outward to India, Europe and the wider world. The first modern textbook controversy was already regional, linguistic and political.
Colonial-era history-writing was itself far from uniform. James Mill’s tripartite Hindu-Muslim-British chronology became influential, but John Clark Marshman’s History of India (1873) began with geography and moved through the Ramayana, the Sultanate and the Mughals without simply reproducing Mill’s scheme. G.U. Pope’s 1880 textbook similarly used ‘ancient India’ and included French and Portuguese as well as British power. Mountstuart Elphinstone concentrated on Muslim dynasties, while John Malcolm’s Memoir of Central India used legends and anecdotes alongside official knowledge to write about Ahilyabai. James Grant Duff’s work on the Marathas helped inspire regional historians such as Kaviraj Shyamaldas in Mewar. Roper Lethbridge and M. Prothero wrote widely used school histories that avoided Mill’s rigid periodisation.
The public field of Indian history was pluralist and assorted before professional historians became prominent, and it remained so after they did.
On the other hand, the Arya Samaj publicised a vedic account of India through figures such as Lala Lajpat Rai, Swami Shraddhanand and Bawa Chhajju Singh. Lajpat Rai’s 1915 account of the Samaj made its origin, doctrines and activities available to an English-reading public. Singh wrote on Dayanand Saraswati and his teachings and on The Ten Gurus and their Teachings (1903). Later, from the same group, Indra Vidyavachaspati in 1960 wrote a comprehensive volume on the history of the freedom struggle in Hindi.
The literary world was no less varied. Kshiti Mohan Sen’s Bharatiya Madhyayuger Sadhanar Dhara (1930) and Bharater Hindu-Mussalman Yukta Sadhana (1949) traced the spiritual and devotional worlds of medieval India. Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, shaped by Sen at Santiniketan, wrote on Kabir, Nath traditions and bhakti. Ramdhari Singh Dinkar’s Sanskriti ke Char Adhyay (1956) analysed Indian culture through Aryan, Buddhist-Jain, Islamic and European encounters. Syed Muzafer Ali’s The Geography of the Puranas (1966) treated Puranic descriptions of places and regions as evidence for changing geographical knowledge. Similarly, Qurratulain Hyder made a different form of historical writing possible in Urdu fiction. Aag Ka Darya (1959) and Kar-e-Jahan Daraz Hai (1979) move across large epochs through recurring figures, memory and human consciousness.
Sen did not erase Hindu tradition; Dinkar did not erase ancient India; Hyder did not separate Muslim experience from Indian history; Ali neither dismissed the Puranas nor mistook them for geography. They exemplified a wider Indian tradition of historical writing beyond the academy.
Professionals and Amateurs
Professional historians in India were only one set of actors in a crowded historical public, working alongside rather than replacing other producers of historical knowledge. The All-India Modern History Congress of 1935 brought together universities, government agencies, the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, the Kashi Nagari Pracharini Sabha, the Rajwade Samshodhan Mandir and regional research societies. In 1938, the Indian History Congress considered a publishing a ‘scientific and comprehensive history of India’. Its committee included R.G. Bhandarkar, Jadunath Sarkar, Mohammad Habib, K.A. Nilakanta Sastri and D.V. Potdar. Today, some of these names are pitted against each other.
Historical scholarship has never been static. New sources, new methods and new questions have repeatedly altered the interpretation of India’s pasts.
Soon after 1947, professional historians pressed for an official history of the freedom struggle, and the Indian state responded by sponsoring the project. In 1952, the government constituted a board of editors that included Syed Mahmud, Narendra Dev, S.N. Sen, N.V. Potdar, Mohammad Habib, R.C. Majumdar, K.A. Nilakanta Sastri and Balwant G. Mehta. Majumdar became director and completed a first draft in 1954. This board represents the intellectual pluralism of Nehru’s India. It is difficult to imagine such an ideologically diverse body being constituted under later governments.
However, differences over interpretation soon ceased the collaboration. Majumdar’s draft was rejected in 1955, and he abruptly withdrew from the project. Tara Chand’s government-sponsored history appeared in 1961, while Majumdar published his own account the following year. Tara Chand emphasised synthesis and accommodation; Majumdar assigned greater weight to conflict, including communal conflict. Such historiographical contestations long predated its recent Hindutva rediscovery.
Never Static
The truth is that historical scholarship has never been static. New sources, new methods and new questions have repeatedly altered the interpretation of India’s pasts. As Romila Thapar observed way back in 1968, historians do not simply accumulate facts; they reinterpret existing evidence in the light of changing questions. This process has produced successive schools of interpretation—from Orientalist and nationalist histories to Marxist, regional and social histories—each revising earlier conclusions while remaining accountable to evidence.
The on-going debates over history textbooks and public memory should be seen in this longer historical context. School curricula inevitably reflect political and social choices about what to include, what to emphasise and how to interpret the past. These choices are legitimate subjects of public debate, but they acquire scholarly credibility only when they are supported by reliable evidence and historical reasoning.
It is true that India needs more regional history and more serious works on Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS). But the claim that these themes were suppressed by a few Marxist historians until 2014 requires the disappearance of scores of scholars, regional archives and vernacular publics, journalists and popular writers. We cannot forget how physicist Samarendra Nath Sen wrote two massive volumes titled Bigyaner Itihas in the 1950s, or even before that, Bibhutibhusan Datta and Avadhesh Narayan Singh wrote History of Hindu Mathematics (1935, 1938). Such examples are in hundreds, if not thousands.
Many recent popular history writers argue as though this earlier world of scholarship never existed. The omission is neither accidental nor inconsequential; it is often deliberate. They wish to establish that Marxist historians monopolised the discipline, and Hindu civilisation was silenced, which they have recovered. This plot offers villains, victims and redemption, but it is unhistorical!
India did not move from a silenced Hindu public to a liberated civilisational history in or after 2014. It moved from a long tradition of competing historical narratives to a politics that increasingly portrays history as having been monopolised by a single school. Historical thinking offers a way out of this false binary. What impedes it is not a lack of evidence, but the growing preference for ideological certainty over historical inquiry.
(Views expressed are personal)
Shaan Kashyap historian and translator. He is the author of Who Owns the Past? How Historians [Re]Wrote India’s Past and Present, 1870–2020
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(This story appeared in Outlook magazine’s August 31 issue, 'Whose Idea of India?', in which India’s noted public intellectuals, policymakers, cultural practitioners, political leaders, scholars and economists write in detail about the idea of India they believe can best secure the nation’s future as we celebrate 80 years of independence.)
