On 11–12 April, the Indian History Forum convened a two-day National History Conference at the India Islamic Culture Centre in New Delhi, bringing together over 30 historians, scholars and public intellectuals and more than 300 delegates. The turnout itself was telling. History is no longer confined to archives and academic monographs; it has entered the public agora with renewed interest. Social media, popular writing, and visual culture have expanded access to the past but they have also transformed the way history is produced, circulated, and contested.
This democratisation of historical discourse is not without consequence. While it has widened participation, it has also enabled the rapid spread of selective narratives, myths, and ideological mis-/re-interpretations. In today’s India, arguments about the future are increasingly fought through the past. School history textbooks are rewritten, courtrooms are drawn into disputes over places of worship, and televised debates replay medieval episodes as if they were breaking news. History, once the domain of scholars, has become a political instrument.
The challenge, therefore, is not simply about what history is, but about how it is written, by whom, and for what purpose.
Ibn Khaldun and the Foundations of Critical History
More than six centuries ago, Ibn Khaldun, in his classical work Muqaddimah, laid the foundations of a scientific approach to history. He departed from earlier traditions of storytelling and insisted that history must be subjected to critical scrutiny, rational analysis, and contextual understanding.
Khaldun was among the first to systematically question historical sources. He warned against uncritical acceptance of reports, highlighting tendencies towards exaggeration, bias, and reliance on authority. For him, historical claims had to be tested against logic, empirical possibility, and knowledge of social conditions.
His most enduring contribution, Ilm al-‘Umran, or the science of human social organisation, recasts history as a form of social science. To understand historical events, he argued, one must examine the underlying structures of society: economy, culture, environment, and power relations. Climate shapes behaviour, geography conditions political possibilities, and economic activity influences state formation. These insights led to the development of environmental history and economic determinism in historiography.
Khaldun’s work reminds us that history is not merely a record of events; it is an inquiry into patterns, causation, and social dynamics.
What Is History? Competing Theories
Theoretical debates in historiography further illuminate these dynamics. E.H. Carr, in What Is History, argued that history is a conversation between the past and the present. Facts do not speak for themselves; they are selected, assigned significance and interpreted by historians.
In contrast, Leopold von Ranke emphasised that the task of the historian is to present the past “as it actually happened” (wie es eigentlichgewesen), based on careful study of primary sources and archival evidence. He believed that history should be written with objectivity and neutrality, free from moral judgment or present-day bias. Marxist historians, following Karl Marx, contend that history is driven by material conditions and class struggle, where economic structures shape social and political life. E.P. Thompson, in his landmark work The Making of the English Working Class, posits that the working class was not simply created by economic forces but was actively shaped by people’s lived experiences, culture, and struggles. Michel Foucault asserted that history is shaped by power and discourse, where what is accepted as “truth” is produced by systems of knowledge and institutions. He rejected the idea of a single objective history, showing instead how power determines what is recorded, remembered, and legitimised as history.
Postcolonial approaches, particularly Subaltern Studies led by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, challenged elite-centric histories focused on kings, courts, and state power, seeking instead to recover the voices and agency of marginalised groups. In parallel, feminist historians such as Joan Scott critiqued the male-centric framing of history as “his story,” foregrounding gender as a critical category and exposing how women’s experiences had been systematically rendered invisible in historical writing.
The National History Conference 2026 explored Muslim contributions to India’s history, science, and civilisation. It is important, however, that such engagements situate these contributions within diverse historiographical frameworks rather than treating them as a homogeneous category. By engaging multiple schools of historical thought, the discussion moves beyond conventional narratives to bring into focus the experiences of diverse Muslim communities, including women, marginalised castes and classes, and regional histories that extend beyond the dominant emphasis on the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal period.
History as Narrative: Ideology and Interpretation
If Khaldun established the need for methodological rigour, modern historiography has emphasised that history is never entirely neutral. As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss suggested and as later interpreted by Hayden White, history is never only the history of something; it is always history for something. That is, historical narratives are shaped by the purposes they serve.
As Beverly Southgate in the book History: What & Why? noted, “Ideological components of historical accounts have long been recognised, as it is said Homer’s seemingly naïve account of the Trojan war long ago was criticised as having politically motivated, as has been written for a particular political purpose in the first century AD.The Greek orator Dion Chrysostom questions the whole truth of Homer’s account. Notoriously unreliable, he asserted, the opposite of what actually occurred.”
The 20th century ideologically motivated rewriting of history became more common. Regimes across the world recognised the power of historical narrative. In Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler argued in Mein Kampf that the pretence of objective history should be abandoned in favour of narratives that inspire national pride. History education was reshaped accordingly: inconvenient French resolution was minimised, while selective national achievements were amplified to cultivate ideological conformity.
Similarly, in the Soviet Union, the rewriting of the Russian Revolution, most notably the erasure of Trotsky and the elevation of Stalin, demonstrated how state power could reshape historical memory. In Britain, debates over school curricula have periodically emphasised patriotic interpretations of imperial history, while in Australia, the long-neglected histories of Aboriginal as ‘history-less’ communities have only recently been re-centred through oral traditions.
The representation of the “Orient” in Western scholarship has long been shaped by what Edward Said famously critiqued in his seminal work Orientalism as a system of knowledge intertwined with power. Said demonstrated how the East was not simply described but constructed through a European lens as static, irrational, and inferior in ways that justified colonial domination. This was not an innocent academic exercise; it was a political project that produced a hierarchy of civilisations, positioning Europe as modern and progressive while relegating the “Orient” to a timeless, backward other. Such representations shaped not only scholarship but also policy, governance, and popular imagination, leaving a lasting imprint on how the histories of Asia and the Middle East are written and understood.
A similar dynamic marked the historiography of Africa, which was long portrayed in colonial discourse as the “dark continent” a space presumed to be without history, civilisation, or agency. European explorers, missionaries, and colonial administrators produced accounts that marginalised indigenous knowledge systems and framed African societies through racialised theories, including pseudo-scientific claims about a superior human race, hierarchy and human development. These narratives were not merely descriptive; they functioned to legitimise exploitation and domination.
In the postcolonial period, African scholars and intellectual movements have actively challenged this legacy, reclaiming histories through oral traditions, archaeology, and indigenous epistemologies. Across Africa, historians have actively sought to reclaim narratives from colonial distortions. The 1965 International Congress of African Historians called for an “African philosophy of history” to counter portrayals of the continent as a “history-less” space, a deeply embedded colonial trope. The project of decolonising African historiography thus represents not only a recovery of suppressed pasts but also a broader critique of how knowledge itself is produced, validated, and institutionalised.
These examples underscore a central point: history is always entangled with power.
Colonial Historiography and the Indian Past
In India, colonial historiography played a decisive role in shaping modern understandings of the past. When James Mill authored The History of British India, he did more than narrate events, he reorganised Indian history into three periods: Hindu, Muslim, and British.
This classification was not merely chronological; it was ideological. It mapped political rule onto religious identity and produced a narrative in which: the “Hindu period” was ancient and civilizational, the “Muslim period” was despotic and oppressive, while the “British period” was modern and progressive.
This framework aligned with the moral logic of The White Man’s Burden, which framed colonialism as a civilising mission.
Such narratives did not remain confined to texts. They were institutionalised through educational curricula, knowledge production and purposefully rewriting of history gradually transforming fluid identities into rigid communal categories.
It is not implying that pre-colonial India was not free of conflict. But it was also marked by layers of coexistence – shared languages, cultural exchange, and everyday negotiation. The result was the consolidation of a Hindu–Muslim binary that continues to shape political discourse.
History is not a singular narrative
History is rarely a single, uncontested narrative; it is interpreted through different frameworks, ideologies, and methodological lenses. For example, to explain the decline of the Mauryan Empire, nationalist historians such as R.C. Majumdar and others attributed the decline to Ashoka’s embrace of Dhamma and non-violence, arguing that it weakened military strength, alienated Brahmanical elites, and contributed to ineffective successors and internal ideological divisions. In contrast, Marxist historians like D.D. Kosambi and R.S. Sharma locate the causes in structural economic factors – fiscal strain, huge bureaucracy, heavy taxation, weakening of local economies, and processes of decentralisation. Subaltern and social historians shift the focus further, highlighting local resistance, peripheral pressures, and the inability of a centralised state to integrate diverse populations. The same historical event thus yields multiple explanations, each shaped by the historian’s analytical lens.
Yet history is not written only by professionally trained historians. Popular writers and mass media also produce and circulate historical narratives – often in simplified, reductive forms. This is not inherently problematic; indeed, popular history plays an important role in democratising knowledge. The difficulty arises when complexity is collapsed into singular explanations. The causes of the Partition of India, for instance, are frequently reduced to the personalities of Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Such accounts overlook the layered realities: the impact of World War II, shifts in British imperial policy, the role of organisations such as the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS and the class interests within the Muslim League. The singular narrative of partition history has ignored the presence of alternative Muslim political formations from Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan in the North-West Frontier to Allah Bakhsh Soomro, among the most prominent Muslim leaders from Sindh, who opposed partition and mobilised largescale political resistance through the Azad Muslim Conference.This demonstrates that the Muslim League did not represent all Indian Muslims.
A similar level of complexity is evident in Bihar. While the League’s position strengthened considerably between 1937 and 1946, it did not go uncontested. Formations such as Mohammad Yunus’s Muslim Independent Party and the All India Momin Conference, led by Abdul Qayyum Ansari, advanced alternative visions of representation and nationhood, drawing support from regional elites and artisan Muslim communities. The political landscape in Bihar thus reflected a plurality of Muslim voices shaped by class, region, and ideology rather than a singular, unified endorsement of the League’s position.
Contemporary debates around historical figures further illustrate the role of ideology in shaping narratives. Aurangzeb is alternately depicted as a tyrant, an anti-Hindu ruler, or a pious ruler, depending on the ideological lens. Shivaji is similarly recast within communal binaries that obscure the complexities of early modern politics, including cross-religious alliances. Both portrayals are often driven by present-day ideological needs rather than balanced historical assessment. A closer reading of the evidence reveals a more complex picture: Aurangzeb was, above all, an emperor governing a vast and diverse polity, with a military and administrative structure that included significant Hindu participation. Likewise, Shivaji’s struggle cannot be reduced to a simplistic Hindu-Muslim binary; his forces included Muslim commanders, just as Mughal ranks included numerous Hindu elites.
The case of Tipu Sultan further underscores how selective readings shape public memory. Increasingly, Tipu is portrayed through narrowly curated narratives drawn from colonial records, often detached from their context. Such portrayals overlook his central role as a formidable challenger to expanding British power.
These examples underline a broader concern: when history is simplified to serve present political or ideological purposes, it risks distorting both the past and the present.
Pseudo-History and the Digital Age
Purushottam Nagesh Oak (better known as P.N. Oak), a former officer in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, advanced a series of widely discredited claims on subjects ranging from Christianity and the Vatican to the Ka’aba, presenting them as historical fact. In 1964, he founded the Institute for Rewriting Indian History, seeking to institutionalise these interpretations. The trajectory of Oak’s ideas offers a cautionary lesson in how pseudo-history can travel from the margins to the mainstream – gaining visibility and, at times, misplaced legitimacy in public discourse. Once dismissed as ludicrous claims and assertions such as recasting the Taj Mahal as a pre-existing temple are now recirculated with renewed confidence – amplified by social media ecosystems where repetition substitutes for evidence and virality mimics legitimacy. What was earlier fringe speculation increasingly surfaces in films, public campaigns, and even legal petitions seeking to reopen settled histories. This is not a harmless reinterpretation of the past; it is the politicisation of memory. When conjecture is normalised as fact, it distorts public understanding and risks sharpening communal fault lines. The task before scholars, institutions, and media is not to police inquiry but to defend standards insisting on evidence, context, and critical method. Without this, history ceases to inform; it begins to inflame.
There is also a lesson: today’s fringe claim, if repeated often enough, risks becoming tomorrow’s accepted history.
History as Responsibility
History is not always about what happened; it is also about why it happened and how we choose to understand it. It shapes identities, informs policy, and influences social relations. When history is reduced to ideological assertion or simplified narratives, it risks becoming a tool of division.
Recognising complexity does not entail evading uncomfortable or inconvenient truths. On the contrary, it requires situating them within a broader, textured account of the past. The selective erasure of entire periods, whether for political convenience or pedagogical simplification, does a disservice to historical understanding. It deprives future generations of the ability to comprehend the longue durée of social interaction, including the layered and shared histories that have shaped the subcontinent over centuries.
The task, therefore, is not to eliminate debate but to uphold the standards that make such debate meaningful: critical inquiry, evidentiary rigour, and openness to multiplicity. As Ibn Khaldun insisted, historical claims must be tested against reason and social reality.
In an age where the past is repeatedly mobilised to justify the present, the responsibility of historians and of society at large is to ensure that history serves as a means of illumination rather than incitement.
[Aftab Mohammad is a Delhi-based lawyer and senior public policy and governance specialist. He writes on international diplomacy, history, democracy and contemporary questions of law and justice.]