Leftists, Communists, Marxists, Nehruvian, Congressi, Secularists, and colonialists – the people who dominated India’s history writing spaces and inserted their biases in the books, are slowly being sidelined by the Modi government. The history of India that was written in the last seven decades has many layers of the aforementioned biases and the re-telling of India’s story is essential.
As the masses become aware, people like Sanjeev Sanyal, Vikram Sampath, and Bibek Debroy are making attempts to re-tell the Indian history without the aforementioned biases, and now PM Modi has taken it on himself to encourage such writers.
During the foundation stone laying ceremony of Maharaja Suheldev Memorial, PM Modi said, “History of India is not just what was written by those who enslaved this country and those with a slave mentality. India’s history is that too which the common people of India have kept in the folk stories of India, that which has been carried forward by generations.”
“Today when India is entering the 75th year of independence, there can be no bigger an occasion to remember and take inspiration from the contribution of such great men (Maharaja Suheldev), their sacrifice, struggle, valour and martyrdom,” he added.
PM Modi also cited the example of Subash Chandra Bose, continuing the government’s effort to revive the legacy of Netaji, and said, “The India of today will not forget the people who in the name of writing history have done a disservice to the people who (Subhash Chandra Bose) shaped history. India of today is making the amendments now.”
Indian history is severely distorted as foreigners ruled the nation for almost 800 years. Firstly, Muslim invaders came to the country and established their rule. They interpreted ancient Indian history by their standards and made it the official version.
Then came the Britishers who started rewriting Indian history to suit their own narrative. The transition of the British East India Company’s rule to the rule of the British crown further magnified the need to introduce a British inclined education system. This education system was used to create human resources required to aid British imperialistic rule over India. Even different commissions were set up for this purpose.
T.B. Macaulay, who is considered to be the for-bearer of the western style of education, had indicated towards the biases that still prevail in the Indian education system. “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, -a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population,” said Macaulay.
After the British left India, the Marxist historians took over and inserted Marxist bias in Indian history. The most prominent Indian historians, whose books are standard textbooks on Indian history, have accepted that they belong to the Marxist school of historiography. Romila Thapar (Ancient History), Satish Chandra (medieval history), and Satish Chandra (India’s struggle for independence) are certified Marxists.
Indian history is inserted with Mughal, British, and Marxist biases. The need of the hour is to reclaim the lost legacy of India and rewrite history from the Indian perspective. Significantly, PM Modi is personally concerned about Indian people reclaiming their history from the Mughal, British, Nehruvian, and Marxist apologists, who did not give significance to the people like Suheldev or the revolutionaries who fought for its independence.