NCERT’s tame revision and distorians’ loud outrage: Why Bharat is still in search of its true history

The recent storm over changes in NCERT’s history textbooks has reignited an old and unresolved debate: Who owns Bharat’s history, and who has the right to narrate it? Critics—largely from the academic and media establishment—have slammed the revisions as politically motivated, accusing the government of “saffronisation” and ideological distortion.

But this outrage, however loud, sidesteps a deeper truth: For decades after Independence, Bharat’s historiography—particularly what entered school curricula—was crafted not by a plurality of scholarly voices, but by a small coterie of Marxist and Nehruvian intellectuals who captured the country’s academic institutions and think tanks through political patronage and interference. Such was the stranglehold of Leftist historians such as Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra, Irfan Habib, and R S Sharma that there was no space for historiography other than the one rooted in economic determinism—a worldview that was dismissive of Bharat’s civilisational achievements and ethos.

This intellectual monopoly romanticised Islamic invaders, ignored indigenous resistance, and downplayed Bharat’s ancient (Sanatana) accomplishments. Babur was, thus, portrayed as a curious naturalist and a doting father (Nehru called him a “renaissance prince”), Akbar as a liberal genius, and Aurangzeb as a misunderstood ruler. In contrast, Hindu figures like Krishnadeva Raya, Maharana Pratap, and Shivaji were relegated to the margins. Even native empires of repute such as Vijayanagar, Ahom, and Karkota were reduced to footnotes. The guiding ideology seemed to be: De-sacralise Bharatiya civilisation and sanctify its conquerors.

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The NCERT Controversy

The latest controversy surrounding the NCERT textbook of Class VIII centres largely around Akbar, long celebrated as a liberal visionary. His policies of religious tolerance and Rajput alliances have always dominated textbook narratives. So, when the revised syllabus now includes unsavoury details such as the 1568 massacre at Chittorgarh—where over 30,000 civilians were killed after the fort had already fallen—it’s seen as an assault on his legacy.

There is no denying Akbar was an able ruler, far ahead of many contemporaries, especially in the Islamic world. But glorification should not come at the cost of truth. The Chittorgarh massacre was not a battlefield tragedy—it was an act of vengeance after a successful siege. To hide such acts is distortion; to justify them by citing plunders by Hindu rulers is lazy scholarship. A massacre is not just a plunder, and inventing false equivalences to cover up omissions is intellectual dishonesty. No historical figure—however revered—should be above scrutiny.

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If Akbar has been over-glorified, the Mughal dynasty as a whole has often been portrayed as the pinnacle of Bharatiya civilisation. This historical approach needs recalibration. Yes, the Mughals built a vast empire, set up uniform law and order machinery across the subcontinent, and promoted art and architecture. But they were also foreigners, as 17th-century French traveller François Bernier observed, who needed large standing armies even in peacetime to suppress dissent.

Babur’s own memoir, Baburnama, revels in violence against “infidels”, as it mentions how he would, after a battlefield, build “a tower of infidels’ skulls”. Jahangir, the lover-boy Salim of Mughal-e-Azam, ordered the killing of Arjan Dev, the fifth Sikh guru, in the very first year of his reign. Shah Jahan, romanticised for building the Taj Mahal in memory of his wife, Mumtaj Mahal, oversaw the construction of this “monument of love” while famines ravaged the countryside. Such was the destitution at that time, as Abdul Hamid Lahori writes in his biography of Shah Jahan, that “dog’s flesh was sold for goat’s flesh and the pounded bones of the dead were mixed with flour and sold”. As for Aurangzeb, he institutionalised bigotry by reviving jizya, banning Hindu festivals, and demolishing temples. These accounts aren’t fringe—they come from the Mughals’ own court chronicles.

To question this kind of lopsided narrative is not communalism—it’s historiographical integrity.

Slow and Cautious Reforms

Despite media alarmism, the NCERT revisions are neither sweeping nor comprehensive. They are excruciatingly slow and excessively cautious, to the extent of appearing apologetic. The textbooks continue to uphold a worldview where invaders are humanised, native resistance is sidelined, and Bharatiya civilisational achievements are ignored, if not totally dismissed. Rather than boldly rewriting history with balance and authenticity, NCERT often appears hesitant—fearful of pushback from entrenched guardians of the academia, of being branded communal and Islamophobic, and of challenging globally palatable ‘secular’, Leftist narratives.

The outrage against textbook revisions is less about defending historical objectivity and more about resisting a long-overdue correction. For decades, history writing in the country has been filtered through a narrow ideological prism—one that celebrated foreign invasions, concealed Islamic brutality, and undermined Sanatana ingenuity and fightback.

Bharat, even after more than seven decades of its Independence, is still in search of a history that’s truly its own. A history where Akbar is studied not as a saint, not as a villain, but as a ruler with his strengths and weaknesses intact. A history where the Mughal empire is examined for both its splendour and its savagery. And more importantly, a history that is truly Bharatiya in nature, after being rescued from the vice-like grip of Leftist historians, who in reality are distorians… err, eminent distorians.

The time has come to challenge these distorians—and expose their hollow intellectual halo. Only then will their iron grip be slackened. And Bharat’s history will be salvaged for good.

P.S.: The Leftist intellectuals hijacked the history of Bharat in the 1960s by proposing to write from the “people’s perspective”. Romila Thapar, in fact, went a step ahead when she, in 1962, promised to come up with a new way of history writing that would let the readers know “what the elephant keeper of the emperor Ashoka thought of his edicts” or what the lives and thoughts of the masons who built the Taj Mahal were. More than six decades later, Thapar’s grand promise remains unfulfilled. The Left-dominated history of Bharat is today stuck in a soulless, ideologically obsessed terrain where neither the story of the king nor the ‘lives and thoughts’ of the masses are told effectively.

The writer is the author of the book, ‘Eminent Distorians: Twists and Truths in Bharat’s History’, published early this year by BluOne Ink publications. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.