If we do not learn from history, history will repeat itself.
But what if the history itself is a carefully constructed web of lies?
That question has haunted generations of Indians who grew up reciting textbook chapters that painted invaders as benevolent unifiers, ancient Indian achievements as mythical, and uncomfortable facts as communal poison. In 1968, the towering historian R. C. Majumdar stood before a gathering of scholars in Srinagar and delivered what he called his possible “swan-song.” His message was clear, uncompromising, and prophetic: history must remain an eternal quest for truth. Anything less turns the discipline into a handmaiden of politics.
Majumdar reminded his audience of the classical standard. Niebuhr demanded that a historian be able to say before God that nothing false had been written. Ranke insisted the task was simply “to show what actually occurred.” Kalhana, India’s own ancient historian, required a detached mind free of bias. Sir Jadunath Sarkar declared he would seek truth whether pleasant or unpleasant, even if it struck at the glory of his country. In a 1937 letter to Rajendra Prasad, Sarkar wrote that national history must neither suppress disgraceful episodes nor whitewash them. Prasad agreed: a historian who deliberately distorts facts under the impression of doing good to the nation ultimately harms it.
Majumdar then turned his gaze to post-Independence India and saw those ideals collapsing. He accused successive governments of pressuring historians to produce narratives that served “national integration,” the myth of eternal Hindu-Muslim fraternity, and the elevation of non-violence into a historical constant.
Majumdar pushed back against modern attempts to claim that non-violence (ahimsa) was a constant guiding force throughout Indian history. He pointed out that classical political treatises, religious texts, and standard royal practices—such as Ashvamedha sacrifices, Digvijaya (conquests), and celebrations of warriors victorious in hundreds of battles—flatly contradict this notion.
Officials, he said from personal experience, cared little whether statements were true; they simply condemned any account that clashed with the preferred political image. Some professional historians themselves began treating objectivity as a “false dogma.” Presidential addresses at the Indian History Congress spoke of history’s “mission” to lead humanity toward higher ideals, to omit “ghastly aberrations,” and to judge every fact by the criterion of progress toward liberty. In Majumdar’s words, the old phrase “History is past politics” was being replaced by a new one: “History is present politics.”
This is precisely the environment in which many of us were educated. From Class VII to Class X, we were required to write essays explaining why Akbar was the greatest of sultans - even while knowing the documented record of forced conversions, the treatment of women from the families of his own commanders, and the scale of temple destruction under later Mughals. We celebrated the Quit India Movement as the decisive blow against British rule while the Naval Mutiny of 1946 and the INA trials that truly shook imperial confidence were relegated to footnotes. We were taught that 1947 was the glorious dawn of freedom rather than a carefully managed transfer of power in which Mountbatten’s continued influence and the lingering role of British intelligence remained unexamined.
The same textbooks ignored or downplayed the scientific achievements of our own civilization. The *Vaiśeṣika Sūtras* of Kaṇāda, formulated centuries before Newton, already articulated principles of motion that map remarkably onto the three laws of classical mechanics. Ancient Indian thinkers discussed atoms and molecules long before modern science claimed the discovery. Texts such as the *Vaimānika Śāstra* were dismissed as fantasy. Meanwhile, the destruction of Nālandā by Bakhtiyār Khaljī is treated as a minor episode, yet a railway junction still carries his name. Place names across Delhi continue to honour invaders while the defenders of the land are often airbrushed from memory. Knowledge of Sanskrit and Indian texts was systematically extracted and shipped to European libraries; Max Müller’s project was not pure scholarly curiosity.
Majumdar saw this pattern clearly. “It is very sad,” he wrote, “that the spirit of perverting history to suit political views is no longer confined to politicians, but has definitely spread even among professional historians.” The result has been a quiet cultural self-belittlement. Generations grew up apologising for their own past, embarrassed by their heritage, and trained to view any proud assertion of civilisational continuity as dangerous nationalism.
Yet truth has a stubborn resilience. An awakening is underway—not the manufactured kind directed from above, but the quiet, individual kind that begins when a student refuses to behave like a blind sheep. It begins when one notices the contradictions between primary sources and prescribed textbooks, when one discovers that Chandragupta Maurya’s resistance to Alexander is more complex than the simplified “Sikander” narrative, when one learns of the roles played by figures such as Syama Prasad Mookerjee in keeping large parts of the country within India. It continues when young people start asking why certain chapters of medieval history are endlessly reinterpreted to remove religious motivation while British colonial excesses are examined with clinical honesty.
Majumdar’s final words in that 1968 address remain the clearest compass we have:
“History, divorced from truth, does not help a nation—its future should be laid on the stable foundations of truth and not on the quicksands of falsehood, however alluring it may appear at present. India is now at the cross-roads and I urge my young friends to choose carefully the path they would like to tread upon.”
The choice is still before us. We can continue treating history as a political tool—selectively forgetting temple destructions, forced conversions, civilisational achievements, and the real drivers of independence—or we can return to the Rankean and Sarkarian standard: establish the facts first, without fear or favour, and only then draw moral or political lessons.
A nation that cannot look its own past in the face will remain a nation of confusion. A nation that reclaims the courage to seek truth, however bitter or glorious, recovers its self-respect. The historians of the future will not be measured by how well they served the slogans of their age, but by how faithfully they recorded what actually occurred.
The crossroads remains open. The path of truth is steeper, but it is the only one that leads anywhere worth going.
Jai Hind.
Jai Bharat.
For the people of Bharat... Here's the original book where R C. Majumdar has been critical of the way the History of Bharat is written.
Go to page 16 and discover it on your own...
And this is the write-up of my own awakening...
