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Showing posts from June, 2015

Concocted histories

Perhaps there is no other country in the world where history writing is as controversial as in India. History has been constantly politicized right from the time of British rule that it has become seemingly impossible to discern falsehood from the truth. This is not to say that history was never used as a propaganda tool in other parts of the world. We have the classic examples of Victorian England and Nazi Germany. But nowhere does  the ground situation offer scope for higher politicization than the countries of South Asia. And being a country of enormous proportions and varying multitudes each pursuing their own agenda, India was always a hotbed of distortions and falsifications. Traditions of history writing in India could be broadly classified into two schools - left wing Communist and right wing Hindu nationalist . Each school of historians have had their heyday in turn (currently, it is the ascendancy of the Hindu right) and each have introduced their own dosage of venom to pol