Who wrote India’s history

Introduction

For decades, a small circle of historians shaped how Indians learned their past: in school textbooks, university syllabi, and the bodies that fund research. They wrote the NCERT textbooks that millions of children read. The same people taught at the country’s top universities, ran the body that funds historical research, and led the main association of historians. Their version of the past, built on Marxist ideas of class and economics, on a “composite culture” of Hindus and Muslims, and on a soft account of medieval conquest, became the official version of India’s history for decades.

That version was protected less by evidence, and more by power. Whenever a government tried to change it, the old establishment fought back, and whenever the government changed, the textbooks changed with it. The Janata government moved against the old books in 1977 and fell before it could finish. The Ayodhya dispute in the 1990s showed these historians openly taking sides. The Vajpayee government replaced the textbooks in 2002; the UPA threw the replacements out in 2004 and handed the field back to the old ‘ecosystem’. Since 2014, the BJP government has rebuilt the curriculum with slow changes.

Each one accused the last of distorting history, and each one made its own mistakes. This article traces how one school of historians came to control India’s past, who was kept out, how its hold was challenged, and what the new rewrite has got right and wrong. Behind it all is one simple question: who wrote India’s history, and who should?

The colonial inheritance, 1947–1960

When India became independent, it did not start writing its history from zero. It took over three older ways of telling India’s story. The fight among these shaped everything that came later.

The British way

The first way came from the British. In 1817, James Mill wrote a book titled “The History of British India”, without ever visiting India. He split Indian history into three parts: a “Hindu” period, a “Muslim” period and a “British” period. He said the first two were times of backwardness and bad rule, and that the British ended them. His book was used to train British officials who came to rule India. Later historians rejected his low opinion of India, but his three-part division stayed. School syllabi kept moving from “ancient” to “medieval” to “modern” India, roughly matching Mill’s Hindu, Muslim and British periods. A second project became more important.

Between 1867 and 1877, two British officials, Henry Elliot and John Dowson, published eight volumes known as “The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians.” These were English translations of medieval Persian court records. Elliot openly said why he was doing it. He said, “They will make our native subjects more sensible of the immense advantages accruing to them under the mildness and the equity of our rule.” In simple words, these translations would make Indians realise how much better off they were under gentle and fair British rule. It was propaganda fed to Indians for years, as it made it easier for the British to rule. Many nationalist historians tried to break this narrative, and that was the second way.

The nationalist way

The second way came from Indian nationalists and historians, mostly in response to the British. In the 1880s, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, an Indian writer, complained that Bengalis had no history written by themselves, only what foreigners had written about them. A whole generation of Indian scholars set out to write India’s own history. In 1884, R.G. Bhandarkar wrote the book titled “Early History of the Dekkan”. He pieced together the story of ancient kings from old texts and inscriptions. In 1902, G.S. Sardesai began his Marathi history of the Marathas, Marathi Riyasat, published in many volumes over the years. His English New History of the Marathas followed in 1946–48. In 1909, V.D. Savarkar wrote “The Indian War of Independence of 1857”; it was one of the first books written by an Indian on the 1857 revolt. It mattered because, at the time, Indians mostly studied books written from the British perspective, but Savarkar called the 1857 revolt a national freedom struggle, and Britain banned the book. Between 1912 and 1924, Jadunath Sarkar wrote “History of Aurangzib” in five volumes. It was the history of the Mughals, especially Aurangzeb, based on Persian records. In 1914, Radha Kumud Mookerji described ancient India as one united land in his book named “The Fundamental Unity of India”. Four years later, in 1918, R.C. Majumdar wrote “Corporate Life in Ancient India”, one of his early major works. In 1923, H.C. Raychaudhuri wrote “Political History of Ancient India”, a reconstruction of ancient dynasties. In 1924, K.P. Jayaswal wrote “Hindu Polity”, in which he argued that ancient India had republics and public assemblies. Between 1935 and 1937, K.A. Nilakanta Sastri wrote “The Colas”, two volumes on the Cholas and South India. From 1936 to 1942, R.C. Majumdar served as vice-chancellor of Dhaka University. In his view, ancient India was a great civilisation, and the medieval period was a long struggle between foreign conquest and Indian resistance.

At independence, it looked as if the nationalist way would be adopted as India’s official history. In 1938, K.M. Munshi started the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in Bombay. It took up a huge project: an 11-volume History and Culture of the Indian People, edited by R.C. Majumdar. The idea was a complete history of India, written by Indians, as big as the famous Cambridge histories. The volumes came out between 1951 and 1977. Many books were available by the time of independence, but they still did not make it into our school history textbooks. But why? The next section explains that.

The third way

In 1947, the third way was less loud, but it would take over India’s historical institutions. It had three roots. Aligarh: In 1927, historian Mohammad Habib wrote a book on Mahmud of Ghazni. He argued that Mahmud attacked Indian temples for their wealth, not for religious reasons. This claim, that the Islamic conquest was about money rather than religion, later became propaganda that ran through India’s textbooks for decades. Mohammad Habib’s son, Irfan Habib, later spread this idea further. He became the leading figure of the Aligarh school of historians.

Mixing of cultures: In 1922, Tara Chand wrote Influence of Islam on Indian Culture. He argued that Hindu and Muslim traditions had blended into one shared culture. This became an early basis for what was later called “composite culture”. Tara Chand appears again later in this story, in the government’s official history of the freedom struggle. Marxism: R. Palme Dutt’s India Today (1940) and D.D. Kosambi’s An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (1956) explained all of Indian history through class: rich against poor, owners against workers. Kosambi’s book became a model for the historians who later built JNU and wrote the NCERT books.

At the centre of this story was India’s first education minister, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. He held the post from 1947 to 1958, and under his ministry the official history of the freedom movement was taken from Majumdar and handed to Tara Chand. The two men had already clashed over the revolt of 1857. Majumdar refused to call it a “national war of independence”, the view the government wanted to present at its centenary. So in 1957, India got two histories of the same revolt: the government’s official book, Surendra Nath Sen’s Eighteen Fifty-Seven, carrying a foreword by Azad, and Majumdar’s own account, published separately. In simple words, the state had picked its historian.

Azad himself understood how much the control of history mattered. In his memoir, India Wins Freedom, published after his death in 1959, he ordered about 30 pages to be sealed for 30 years. When they were finally released in 1988, they contained sharp criticism of Nehru and Sardar Patel over Partition. The fact remains that, in the first decade of independence, the government decided whose version of India’s freedom struggle would become official.

Building the establishment, 1961–1977

The decisive years came in the decade and a half after 1961, when the state built the institutions that would shape history teaching and research for the rest of the century. The politics of the time helped decide who would run them. After Nehru’s death in 1964 and Lal Bahadur Shastri’s death in 1966, Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister. When the Congress split in 1969, her government survived in Parliament with the support of the Communist Party of India. During those years, left-leaning economists and academics gained real influence in the government. An eminent Marxist historian and professor at Aligarh Muslim University, Saiyid Nurul Hasan, became close to Indira Gandhi, and she made him India’s Education Minister. So, when the new institutions needed historians, the people chosen came largely from one school of thought. Most of them belonged to Communist and pro-Islamic ideologies. They were scholars, but they were moulded around a common view that always downgrades Indian and Hindu identity, which we will discuss later in the article.

Different institutions were set up to give a young country a shared account of its past: NCERT to write national school textbooks, JNU’s Centre for Historical Studies to train a new generation of historians, and the ICHR to fund and direct historical research.

NCERT, 1961

In 1961, India was a young country with deep divisions. It had lived through Partition only fourteen years earlier, and riots and language agitations were breaking out in several states. The government believed that schools could help hold the country together, and that textbooks were the place to start.

In this context, the National Council of Educational Research and Training was set up in 1961 to prepare national school textbooks and guide school education across the country. Around the same time, a government committee on “emotional integration”, chaired by Sampurnanand, recommended that textbooks be reviewed to promote national unity. A few years later, the Kothari Commission (1964–66) pressed for high-quality textbooks prepared at the national level.

So from the very beginning, NCERT’s history books had a purpose beyond teaching facts: they were meant to build a national unified identity. To write them, NCERT turned to a group of academic historians: Romila Thapar for the younger classes, and R.S. Sharma, Satish Chandra and Bipan Chandra for the senior ones. Their books, written from the late 1960s onwards, would shape how generations of Indians understood their past.

JNU, 1969–70

If NCERT was going to write the books, someone had to train the people who wrote them. That job went to a new university. After Nehru died in 1964, the government decided to build a new central university in Delhi in his name. M.C. Chagla, the Education Minister, introduced a bill in the Rajya Sabha in September 1965, and it became law as the Jawaharlal Nehru University Act in December 1966. JNU was never meant to be a neutral institution. Its founding law directed it to “promote the study of the principles for which Jawaharlal Nehru worked during his life-time,” including national integration, social justice, and secularism. In simple words, the university was built to carry forward one man’s worldview, and the law itself made that clear.

The timing tells its own story. JNU was formally opened on 22 April 1969. The same year, the Congress split, and Indira Gandhi’s government became dependent on the Communist Party of India to survive in Parliament. The Left was suddenly closer to power in Delhi than it had ever been. A year later, in 1970, JNU’s Centre for Historical Studies launched its postgraduate programme. Who built it? S. Gopal, Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra, and Satish Chandra. All of them, in different ways, shared the Nehruvian and Marxist view of India’s past.

Within a few years, the Centre became the most powerful history department in the country. It trained the scholars who would go on to fill universities, research bodies and textbook committees for decades. Several of its founders wrote the NCERT textbooks, and several later led the Indian History Congress. The campus itself soon became a fortress of the Left.

ICHR, 1972

Training historians was one part of the job; funding them was the other. That’s where the Indian Council of Historical Research came in.

The ICHR was set up on 27 March 1972 under the leadership of Saiyid Nurul Hasan, the Union Education Minister. It was founded to fund historical research. Hasan wasn’t an ordinary politician. He was a Marxist historian himself, who had headed the history department at Aligarh Muslim University and served as president of the Indian History Congress. The Indian History Congress is India’s largest association of professional historians, which holds a national conference every year. Through the 1970s and 80s, its leadership came largely from left-leaning historians.

And who became the ICHR’s first chairman? R.S. Sharma, one of the authors of the NCERT history books. Two more centres completed the network. The first was Aligarh Muslim University’s Centre of Advanced Study in History, led by Irfan Habib, which built an influential school of Marxist economic history of Mughal India. The second was Delhi University’s history faculty. R.S. Sharma, who was already the author of the NCERT book on ancient India and the ICHR’s chairman, joined its history faculty in 1973.

So by the mid-1970s, the same school of historians held the main centres of history in India: JNU in Delhi, Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh, Delhi University, and the ICHR that funded research across the country. In other words, anyone who wanted to study, teach or research history at the top level had to pass through institutions run by Marxist historians. Their biased view of Indian history was presented as the final word, without considering other perspectives.

The same names, everywhere

What stands out is not any one appointment, but how the same people held so many roles at the same time. Let’s take them one by one.

R.S. Sharma wrote the NCERT Ancient India for Class 11. He was the ICHR’s first chairman from 1972 to 1977. He had headed the history department at Patna University and also taught at Delhi University from 1973. He was general president of the Indian History Congress in 1975.

Bipan Chandra wrote the NCERT Modern India for Class 12. He was also one of the founders of the JNU centre. He became a member of the UGC and later chaired the National Book Trust from 2004 to 2012. He also served as general president of the History Congress in 1985. Irfan Habib did not write a school textbook, but he chaired Aligarh’s Centre of Advanced Study. He was chairman of the ICHR from 1986 to 1990, and was president of the History Congress in 1981.

And above them all was Nurul Hasan. He became education minister in 1972, but before that, he was a distinguished professor and head of the history department at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). He had been a member of the Rajya Sabha since 1969. He was a member of the Indian National Congress (R), but was deeply connected to the Communist Party of India. His maternal uncle, Syed Sajjad Zaheer, was a senior leader of the Communist Party of India in the 1930s. Zaheer founded the Progressive Writers’ Association and, after Partition, moved to Pakistan. He co-founded the Communist Party of Pakistan and became its general secretary. In 1951, he was arrested there in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case, along with the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. It was a failed plot by army officers led by Major General Akbar Khan, working with communist leaders, to overthrow Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan’s government. Zaheer was convicted by a special tribunal. He spent four years in jail before Nehru granted him Indian citizenship, and he returned to India to continue his work with the CPI. Hasan shared his uncle’s Marxist outlook. He founded the ICHR and had earlier been general secretary, and later president, of the same History Congress.

Now read that again. The people who wrote the school textbooks also trained the next generation of historians, decided which research got funded, sat on the bodies that regulated universities and led the profession’s main association. In simple words, they decided which kind of history was being taught and written in India, they set the exam, wrote the textbooks and controlled the academia in Indian history.

Expertise or capture?

This question runs through the whole story, so let’s talk about it first. Their followers say these were simply the best historians India had. They brought rigorous, evidence-based methods to a field full of myth. They were published by leading presses, and they earned international reputations on merit. But that’s not the whole truth. How is it possible that leftist historians came to control appointments, funding, syllabi and textbooks all at once? Their version of the past never faced any real competition inside the institutions.

Arun Shourie, a former Union minister, counted Thapar on the ICHR’s council four times and Habib five times. Moreover, the ICHR’s own Towards Freedom project ran for 26 years and, by a later chairman’s count, consumed four crore rupees of public money with little to show. When the same people keep coming back, the question is: is that merit or a closed club?

What they wrote

So what did this school actually teach? The historians argued among themselves over plenty of things. But their work shared a clear framework, running from the research monograph to the Class 11 textbook. First came economics. They explained change in Indian history mainly through land, labour, trade and class, not through religion or rulers. R.S. Sharma’s Indian Feudalism (1965) and Irfan Habib’s The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1963) are the landmark works of this approach.

Then came the idea of “composite culture”. The meeting of Hindu, Muslim and other traditions was presented as the main story of the medieval centuries. Bhakti and Sufi saints, shared art and shared languages were brought to the front. In the ancient period, the Vedic Aryans were presented as invaders from outside the subcontinent who settled among an older population. The senior textbooks stated this with confidence despite little evidence to support it.

On conquest, the tone was restrained. Temple destruction and forced conversion were mentioned, but explained mainly by politics and plunder. The focus was on portraying invasions by Islamic rulers as a matter of politics, not religion. Satish Chandra’s NCERT Medieval India said temples were targeted “partly to justify the conquest and partly to seize the fabulous treasures they were supposed to contain.” It described Sultanate religious policy as one of “broad toleration”, with “occasional lapses”. The Sultanate’s “religious policy” means how Muslim rulers treated Hindus: whether temples were destroyed, jizya was imposed, and people could worship freely. Satish Chandra argued that these were just occasional lapses. In simple words, he turned centuries of temple-breaking into a footnote, a few bad days in an otherwise tolerant age.

The habit did not end with Satish Chandra. The Class 12 NCERT book Themes in Indian History (Part II) told students that “all Mughal emperors gave grants to support the building and maintenance of places of worship”, and that even temples destroyed in war were repaired with grants under Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb. When an RTI applicant, Shivank Verma, asked NCERT for the source of this claim, and how many temples these emperors had actually repaired, NCERT replied: “The information is not available on the files of the Department.” In simple words, the book was teaching lakhs of students a flattering claim about Aurangzeb that NCERT itself could not back with a single document.

And modern history was told as the story of a secular national movement led by the Congress, with communalism, Hindu and Muslim alike, as its enemy. Bipan Chandra’s Modern India judged Syed Ahmad Khan, often seen as the father of the two-nation idea, “basically not a communalist”. In other words, the old textbooks told the freedom struggle as a story of the secular Congress fighting the British, with Hindu and Muslim communal groups treated as equally guilty villains.

This framework didn’t stay in school books. Thapar’s Penguin History of India (1966), Sharma’s and Habib’s monographs, and India’s Struggle for Independence (1988) by Bipan Chandra and his colleagues became standard reading for undergraduates and civil services aspirants alike. These were not marginal works; they were published by major presses, reviewed internationally and taught abroad. That was exactly what made them so powerful.

Why their version reached so far

Here’s the thing about textbooks. An academic book is read by a few hundred specialists or experts, who argue with it, but a school textbook is read by millions of children who have no other source and no reason to doubt it. For children, it is not about one perspective, bias or ideology; it is the reality they are learning. And that was the goal of these leftist historians. It was never about winning an argument with other historians. It was about shaping how an entire generation understood its own past, before anyone could teach them to ask questions.

The numbers show the scale. NCERT already prints five to six crore textbooks a year, and in October 2024, former Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan announced plans to triple that to 15 crore. Its books are prescribed in CBSE schools, and in 2026 alone, about 24.8 lakh students from 27,339 schools sat the CBSE Class 10 exam. Beyond CBSE, state boards “either adopt or adapt” NCERT’s syllabi and books or build their own on its framework, as the government told the Rajya Sabha in 2015. And because the civil services exam treats NCERT books as the baseline, a framing written in the 1970s can still shape how an IAS officer thinks in 2026. That is why the bookshops of Delhi’s Mukherjee Nagar still sell “old NCERT” by the stack.

The dissenters

So, was there no one who saw the past differently? Of course there was. There was never a shortage of historians with other views. What they lacked was a seat inside the institutions captured by Marxist historians.

R.C. Majumdar, the most respected historian of his generation, had already been pushed out of the government’s official history of the freedom movement, as we saw earlier. From then on, the country’s best-known historian wrote from the outside. He spent his final decades criticising what he saw as a secularist rewriting of the medieval period, one that downplayed temple destruction and rehabilitated rulers like Mahmud of Ghazni and Aurangzeb. K.S. Lal wrote on the population and policies of the Sultanate, including Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India (1973), and argued that conquest and conversion had been far more violent than the textbooks admitted.

Sita Ram Goel and Ram Swarup worked completely outside academia. Through their small publishing house, Voice of India, they brought out works like Goel’s ‘Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them‘, which compiled the medieval chroniclers’ own boasts about destroying temples. In other words, they used the conquerors’ own words as evidence against the textbooks.

Goel did not stop at books. He took on the establishment historians directly. Romila Thapar had cited three inscriptions as evidence that Hindu rulers had destroyed Buddhist monasteries. Goel went and looked them up. By his account, two had nothing to do with Buddhist sites at all, and the third, which scholars had already doubted, told a very different story from the one claimed. He wrote to Thapar asking her to point to any further evidence, and challenged the Marxist historians to name a single Hindu text that ordered the destruction of other faiths’ places of worship. He never got an answer. Goel published the exchange in the appendix to the second volume of Hindu Temples.

Notice the irony. When Islamic rulers destroyed Hindu temples, these historians explained it away in terms of politics and money, not religion. But when it came to Hindu rulers and Buddhist sites, the same historians suddenly found religion everywhere. As Arun Shourie pointed out, R.S. Sharma’s NCERT textbook blamed the Turks’ destruction of Nalanda on “greed” in three lines, but gave Hindu rulers going against Buddhists a paragraph six times the length,  and their motive was called entirely religious.

Others came from different directions. Dharampal, in The Beautiful Tree (1983), used British-era surveys to show that pre-colonial India had a far wider network of local schools than either colonial or Marxist accounts allowed. Dilip K. Chakrabarti, an archaeologist at Cambridge, attacked the colonial assumptions that still influenced Indian archaeology and history in ‘Colonial Indology’ (1997). And B.B. Lal, a former director general of the Archaeological Survey of India, led excavations at sites linked to the epics, including Ayodhya, and became a central figure in the debate over what lay beneath the Babri mosque.

Their common complaint was exclusion. They said they were kept out of the top university posts, passed over for ICHR funding and textbook committees, and either ignored or dismissed in reviews. The establishment’s answer was that much of this work, especially what was written outside universities, did not meet ‘scholarly standards’. But one thing is beyond dispute: for three decades, leftist ideology completely dominated the most powerful institutions, and some historians who were not a part of this ideological club, who wanted to write about India with neutrality, were kept outside the mainstream ‘ecosystem’.

Flashpoints

Not everyone accepted this version of history. Four major fights stand out, and each one set up the next.

1977–79: the Janata Party challenge

The first open fight came quickly. In 1977, after the Emergency, the Janata Party swept to power, with the former Jana Sangh as one of its partners. Within months, Prime Minister Morarji Desai received an unsigned note calling for action against NCERT’s history books, usually attributed to Jana Sangh leader Nanaji Deshmukh.. Desai passed it on to the Education Minister. Books by Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra and R.S. Sharma were denounced as “anti-Indian.” According to Janata Party leaders, the books especially painted the ancient Hindu society negatively over caste oppression, made much of beef-eating in the Vedic age, treated the medieval Muslim rulers far too gently, and narrated the story of the freedom struggle through a Marxist lens that played down leaders who drew on Hindu ideas. In their view, a textbook that taught children to look down on their own civilisation was working against the nation, not for it. A committee of historians reviewed the books in late 1977 and backed them. Even so, the CBSE removed Sharma’s Ancient India from its syllabus in 1978. Leftist historians called it an attack on academic freedom. Then the Janata government collapsed in 1979, and the whole push collapsed with it.

The episode was short, but it set the pattern for everything that followed. The Congress came back to power in 1980, and the old books stayed.

1989–2019: Ayodhya

If one dispute turned historians into public fighters, it was Ayodhya. As the Ram temple movement grew in the late 1980s, historians at JNU’s Centre for Historical Studies published a pamphlet, “The Political Abuse of History” (1989). It argued that the claim of a temple demolished beneath the Babri mosque had no historical basis.

In 1990–91, the Chandra Shekhar government brought the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the All India Babri Masjid Action Committee to the table and asked both sides to submit evidence. Historians close to the establishment advised the Muslim side. The talks collapsed. According to Arun Shourie, the experts walked away from the meetings once the evidence started going against them.

In May 1991, four historians, R.S. Sharma, M. Athar Ali, D.N. Jha and Suraj Bhan, released “Ramjanmabhumi–Baburi Masjid: A Historians’ Report to the Indian Nation”. They concluded that no evidence showed a temple beneath the mosque. Several of the same circle later appeared in court as expert witnesses for the Muslim parties.

So what did the courts make of all this expertise? Not much. On the Allahabad High Court’s orders, the Archaeological Survey of India excavated the site in 2003. When the Supreme Court heard the case in 2019, the bench remarked on the 1991 report: “At the best, this report can be taken as an opinion.” It added that its authors “did not have the benefit of the archaeological evidence”. The final judgment relied on the ASI’s finding that the mosque was not built on vacant land and that the structure beneath it was not Islamic.

But the sharpest blow came from inside the profession. K.K. Muhammed, a former regional director of the ASI who had worked on B.B. Lal’s excavations at Ayodhya in the 1970s, wrote in his autobiography Njan Enna Bharatiyan that the dispute “would have been settled long ago” had the Muslim side not “fallen prey to the brain-washing by the Leftist historians”. In other words, an archaeologist, not a politician, was saying that the leftist historians did not just study the dispute; they helped prolong it. Ayodhya did lasting damage to the establishment’s claim to stand above politics.

1998–2004: the ICHR and NCERT round

This round began at the ICHR, where the leftist historians had been in charge for decades. The textbooks came next. In March 1998, Atal Bihari Vajpayee became the Prime Minister.

In June, the HRD ministry under Murli Manohar Joshi reconstituted the ICHR’s council. The leftist historians saw this as the start of a plan to rewrite history, but the answer was simple: the rewriting had already happened, decades earlier, and the people now leaving had done it. Arun Shourie’s Eminent Historians (1998) accused the old guard of running the ICHR as a closed shop and softening the record of medieval Muslim rulers in their textbooks.

The fight became more serious in February 2000. The ICHR recalled two unpublished volumes of its “Towards Freedom” series, a documentary history of the years before independence edited by Sumit Sarkar and K.N. Panikkar, from Oxford University Press. B.R. Grover, the ICHR chairman, said the project had eaten up “four crore rupees of the taxpayers’ money and 26 years”, and that the volumes already published were “full of errors”. He insisted the decision was not ideological.

Meanwhile, NCERT, now led by J.S. Rajput, moved on three fronts. It brought out a new National Curriculum Framework in 2000 that stressed Indian knowledge traditions and value education. In 2001, it cut passages from the old books, including an account of Guru Tegh Bahadur’s execution and a line about plunder by the Jat rulers of Bharatpur. The government said this was about respecting community sentiment. On 23 October 2001, acting on NCERT’s instructions, the CBSE told schools to drop around ten passages from four books by Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma, Satish Chandra and Arjun Dev. Among them was Sharma’s account of early Jainism. Rajput said NCERT would consult religious experts before its books discussed any religion, and Joshi went a step further: such material, he said, “should be cleared by the heads of the religions concerned”.

Joshi made no secret of why he was doing this. In his view, the problem was not new; it went back to the British. He accused the old guard of following their British “predecessors”, who “always distorted Indian history”, and he objected in particular to the claim that Hindus ate beef in ancient India. “It’s time to bring out the truth,” he said in 2002. “I will not allow anyone to harm the image of my country.” In December 2001, he went further and called the leftist historians’ work “intellectual terrorism”, which he said was “more dangerous than cross-border terrorism”.

In response, the Delhi Historians’ Group brought out another pamphlet, ‘Communalisation of Education‘, and Bipan Chandra declared that history was “one item of the communal agenda on which they cannot compromise”. In simple words, Leftist historians, for the first time, saw their dominance in the institutions being broken. They were unable to accept the reality that the ICHR and NCERT were not their property, and that a government elected by the people could question what children were being taught. For decades, they had decided what counted as history; now, someone else was deciding on the basis of evidence, and they called it an attack on history itself.

From 2002, it published new books, including Makkhan Lal’s Ancient India, Meenakshi Jain’s Medieval India, and Hari Om’s Contemporary India. But here is the uncomfortable part for the Vajpayee government. The books tried to present a side of history captured by leftist historians earlier, but they had a few mistakes. For example, the first edition of Hari Om’s Class 9 book did not mention Gandhi’s assassination, but it was added in a reprint. Meenakshi Jain’s Class 11 book confused Muhammad Ghori with Mahmud of Ghazni, wrongly called Bakhtiyar Khalji a slave, and credited a remark about Muhammad bin Tughlaq to the wrong historian. The books also pushed Indian achievements like zero and the decimal system back to the Vedic age, centuries before they actually came. These were mistakes, and NCERT corrected them.

In 2003, the Indian History Congress published an “Index of Errors” in the new books. Its authors, Irfan Habib, Suvira Jaiswal and Aditya Mukherjee, concluded that the books were “beyond the realm of salvage” and “need to be withdrawn altogether”. Irfan Habib mocked some of the books’ claims about ancient Indian science as a “woolly-headed fantasy.”

NCERT director J.S. Rajput dismissed the Index of Errors as the work of scholars with “insufficient and colored knowledge.” The irony was that the critics were hardly neutral and were biased toward left-wing ideology. Even so, not all the charges were serious. The columnist Sandhya Jain went through the Index’s objections to Meenakshi Jain’s Medieval India and admitted a few real slips, such as confusing two Muhammads. But she showed that many of the “errors” were facts taken from respected historians, including J.S. Grewal, the same Grewal who would later sit on the panel that rejected the books. She called much of the Index hair-splitting, driven by motives that were “ideological rather than altruistic”.

The framework itself went to the Supreme Court. Petitioners, including the activist Aruna Roy, argued that it had been adopted without consulting the Central Advisory Board of Education and that it brought religious instruction into government schools. In Aruna Roy v. Union of India (2002), the Supreme Court rejected the challenge, ruling that the government did not have to consult CABE and that teaching about religions was not the same as religious instruction.

To be fair to Joshi, his tenure as an Education Minister was not only about the history books. Under him, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan was launched in 2001, and the 86th Constitutional Amendment made education a fundamental right for every child aged 6 to 14. In 2004, UNESCO awarded J.S. Rajput, the NCERT director whom critics loved to attack, its Jan Amos Comenius Medal for his work in education. Meenakshi Jain, whose book the History Congress wanted thrown out, was later awarded the Padma Shri and, in 2025, nominated to the Rajya Sabha.

The books survived the Court but not the new government. In May 2004, the UPA came to power, and in June 2004, the new government appointed a panel of historians, including J.S. Grewal, Barun De and S. Settar, who judged the books poor in content and presentation and advised against their use. In simple words, the first sustained attempt to break the leftist fort was undone as much by its own haste as by the UPA government. It is a lesson to remember because, as we will see, the books that came after it, between 2004 and 2014, downplayed temple destruction and the brave kings of India’s past.

2004–2014: the UPA reversal and NCF-2005

When the UPA came to power in 2004, it withdrew the 2002 books. But it did not simply bring back the old ones either. It asked the scientist Yash Pal, whose 1993 report Learning Without Burden had attacked rote learning, to lead a new curriculum framework. NCF-2005 changed not only what history children read, but how they were asked to read it.

The new books looked like nothing NCERT had published before. The middle-school series “Our Pasts” and the senior-school “Themes in Indian History” were built around sources. It was shown as one of the biggest improvements in Indian history teaching, but the “themes” approach meant some periods and regions barely got a mention: the Cholas, Vijayanagara, the Ahoms, the Marathas and the Northeast. The important parts of Indian history weren’t mentioned at all, or they were downplayed. According to an article by Swarajya in 2016, the Class 7 book gave students no sense of time. The Qutub Minar appeared alongside Chandela and Chola temples, Mahmud of Ghazni “pops up out of thin air” in a chapter on Indian kingdoms as if he were just another Indian king, and Akbar resurfaced only after the whole chronology from Babur to Aurangzeb was over. Prithviraj Chauhan was dismissed in a single sentence, with no mention that Muhammad Ghori was an invader.

The book said nothing about the torture and execution of Guru Arjan under Jahangir, Guru Tegh Bahadur’s execution on Aurangzeb’s orders, or the killing of Guru Gobind Singh’s young sons. Shivaji was called a “chieftain” rather than a ruler and did not get a chapter of his own; Maharana Pratap was missing from the account of Akbar, and Maharaja Ranjit Singh got one line. Tipu Sultan’s forced conversions and temple attacks were left out. According to RTI replies cited by Swarajya, material on Subhas Chandra Bose had been cut sharply, from about 1,250 words to just 87 in the Class 12 book. Moreover, the books included double standards. Questions at the end of chapters asked whether there were any Brahmins in a lower-caste hamlet, or whether women took part in Chola assemblies, while no such questions were asked about Muslim rulers. A whole sub-chapter on the Cholas was titled “Four Hundred Taxes”, while Alauddin Khalji’s tax of half the peasants’ produce went uncriticised. If you realise this, it was a pattern.

The biggest blunder came to light only years later. The Class 12 book, Themes in Indian History Part II, told students that “all Mughal emperors gave grants to support the building and maintenance of places of worship”, and that even when temples were destroyed in war, grants were later issued for their repair, “as we know from the reigns of Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb”. In 2020, an RTI applicant, Shivank Verma, asked NCERT what evidence this was based on. NCERT’s reply was simple: “The information is not available on the files of the Department.” In other words, a claim that whitewashed Aurangzeb, the emperor who ordered the destruction of the Kashi Vishwanath and Mathura temples, had been taught to millions of children for over a decade, and NCERT could not produce a single source for it. After the RTI reply, an activist sent NCERT a legal notice demanding that the claim be removed.

The political science books had the same problem. The 2012 Ambedkar cartoon row was not a one-off. When the UPA’s own committee under S.K. Thorat went through the books, it recommended 38 changes across six textbooks, including removing 21 cartoons it found offensive. So even a committee set up by the same government agreed that the books needed fixing. In simple words, the books that were praised as the best NCERT had ever published had been printed without the basic checks their own supporters later admitted were needed.

That is the real difference between the two governments. The Vajpayee-era books had mistakes, and nobody needs to hide that. But they were honest mistakes, like a wrong name or a wrong date, and they were corrected in later reprints. The larger story they told, of temples destroyed, invaders who came to loot, and kings who fought back, was based on evidence and was factually correct. The UPA government did something different. It did not just fix errors; it changed what Indian history meant. The brutality of Mughal rulers was played down, the Sikh Gurus’ sacrifices disappeared, Shivaji became a mere “chieftain”, and invaders were shown as if they were just another Indian king. In simple words, one side made mistakes while trying to tell the truth, and the other side weaponised the narrative to fit its own propaganda.

The counter-establishment, 2014–2026

In 2014, the BJP-led government came to power. Since then, the challenge to the old consensus has become something bigger: a sustained effort to rebuild the institutions themselves. Compare that with what happened in 2004. The UPA rebuilt the whole system in less than four years. After 2014, it took six years to roll out a new education policy, nine years to develop a new curriculum framework, and ten years before the first new textbook reached a classroom. The reason is simple: the old school had its people ready in every university and committee, while the new government had to build its own bench of scholars from scratch.

It started with leadership. The ICHR was dominated by leftist historians in its early decades, including R.S. Sharma and Irfan Habib, and since 2014 it has been led by Y. Sudershan Rao, A.P. Jamkhedkar and Raghuvendra Tanwar. Then came the school curriculum, rebuilt in three stages: a call for change, a round of cuts, and a full set of new books.

The call came in 2021, when a parliamentary standing committee chaired by the BJP MP Vinay Sahasrabuddhe reported on the content of school textbooks. It asked for more on women, regional kingdoms and the “unsung heroes” of the freedom struggle, and for a more balanced treatment across regions and periods. Many of its complaints were the same ones critics had been making about the NCF-2005 books for years.

While the committee was still collecting views, in July 2021, 117 historians, including Romila Thapar and Sumit Sarkar, told it that the claims of distortion were unsubstantiated and that any revision should follow scholarly consensus. Most of these historians belonged to the left ideology. Then came the cuts. During the COVID pandemic, when schools were shut and syllabi had to be squeezed, NCERT “rationalised” its books. It removed chapters and passages it said were repeated elsewhere or put too much load on students. The deletion that drew the most attention was the chapter on the Mughal courts, “Kings and Chronicles”, from the Class 12 history book, though other chapters on the Mughal period stayed.

NCERT’s explanation was simple: this was about reducing load, not about ideology. The opposition did not buy it. They argued that the cuts were chosen to suit the government’s view of history. Yogendra Yadav, an opposition leader, and Suhas Palshikar had been the chief advisers to NCERT’s political science textbooks since 2006. In June 2023, they wrote to NCERT saying that the books had changed so much they no longer recognised them, and asked for their names to be removed. But let’s be fair to NCERT here. The idea that Indian textbooks overload children did not start with this government. In 1993, the scientist Yash Pal wrote a famous report, Learning Without Burden, arguing exactly that, and the NCF-2005 books, the very books that were now being cut, were designed on his advice. In other words, the government was using the old establishment’s own argument against it.

And finally, the new books. Under the National Education Policy 2020 and the National Curriculum Framework of 2023, NCERT began replacing its books entirely. The new social science series is called Exploring Society: India and Beyond. The Class 6 book came out in 2024 and the first part of the Class 7 book in April 2025, covering ancient and early medieval India, with no Delhi Sultanate or Mughals. In July 2025, the Class 8 book came out, and it carried something no NCERT book had ever carried before: a “Note on Some Darker Periods in History”. The note says the violence and intolerance of the past should be studied honestly, and adds that no one living today should be held responsible for it. NCERT’s social science head put it simply: history “cannot be sanitised”.

At last, the book said what leftist historians had avoided. Babur becomes a “brutal and ruthless conqueror” who took pride in “towers of skulls”. Akbar’s reign is “a blend of brutality and tolerance”. Aurangzeb’s orders to demolish temples at Banaras, Mathura and Somnath are on record. Jizya is treated as a source of humiliation and pressure to convert, not just a tax. Shivaji becomes “a master strategist and a true visionary”, and the Sikh Gurus’ resistance to Mughal persecution gets its own space.

What the new books got right, and what needs to be fixed

So, is the new rewrite good or bad? The honest answer is: both. Some changes were long overdue. Others need serious rework.

Start with what is right. For decades, the old books mentioned temple destruction, forced conversion and the persecution of the Sikh Gurus only in passing, as “occasional lapses”. That was never true to the sources. The medieval chroniclers themselves recorded and celebrated these acts. Telling students what happened, while making clear that no one alive today is to blame, is not distortion. It is history. The same goes for the wider map of India’s past. Giving proper space to the Cholas, the Marathas, the Ahoms, the Northeast and the Sikh and Rajput resistance corrects a real imbalance, one that even neutral critics of the NCF-2005 books had pointed out. Calling Shivaji a ruler rather than a “chieftain”, and treating jizya as the discriminatory tax it was, are corrections the evidence supports. And cheaper books, printed in larger numbers, are simply good for students.

Now, what needs rework? First, the factual mistakes. A map that placed Jaisalmer inside the Maratha Empire should never have reached a Class 8 classroom. NCERT later removed it after significant backlash, but the damage was done: for weeks, critics used one wrong map to mock an entire book. The 2002 books lost the argument the same way, through a wrong name here and a wrong date there. Every chapter needs the kind of expert checking that would have caught these errors before printing, not after.

Second, the omissions. The new books are right to bring back what the old books hid: the temples destroyed, the Sikh Gurus’ sacrifices, the kings who fought back. But a book cannot correct one set of omissions by creating another. Tipu Sultan is the clearest case. His forced conversions and temple attacks were hidden for decades, and the new books should tell that part honestly. But leaving him out entirely only lets the leftist present him as a hero again. The stronger answer is to tell his full record.

Third, the evidence. The claims about Indian Knowledge Systems must meet the same standard of evidence as everything else. India’s achievements in mathematics, astronomy and medicine are real, and they were ignored for too long. But each claim has to come with its date and its source.

In simple words, the direction of the correction is largely right. The way it is being done often isn’t. And if the new side wants its version to outlast the next election, it will have to be more careful, more complete and more open than the side it replaced.

Conclusion: the problem is the monopoly

So, who wrote India’s history? For three decades after independence, the honest answer is: the leftist school of historians, holding almost every lever that mattered. The textbooks, the top departments, the funding body and the profession’s main association were all in the same hands. Their scholarship may have been remarkable, but they allowed their political biases to be reflected in their work. They tried to paint a version of the past that was not honest and tried for years to keep it as the only truth. The parts its authors found uncomfortable for their political leaning, from temple destruction to the persecution of the Sikh Gurus, were too unfairly played down.

Now the counter-establishment holds the levers. The real question is whether it will repeat the old mistake in reverse. The blunders of the new books, from a misplaced map to the removal of Tipu Sultan, show how quickly a correction loses credibility when it is careless. A history written to settle scores will be swept away by the next government just as easily as the old one was.

For a long time, the answer to “who wrote India’s history?” was a small circle with the state behind it. The better answer, for the next seventy years, should be: many people, arguing in the open, with the evidence on the table.