Correcting the Record

The nomination of Meenakshi Jain to the Rajya Sabha marks the ascent of an unapologetically indigenous view of Indian history into the political mainstream.

When the President of India nominated Dr. Meenakshi Jain to the Rajya Sabha, it marked the quiet culmination of a decades-long intellectual insurgency. For years, Jain has challenged what she and others have seen as the ideological monopoly of the Marxist reading of Indian history. Now, the establishment is finally listening.

A former fellow at the Indian Council of Social Science Research and a one-time member of both the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library and the Indian Council of Historical Research, Jain is no stranger to academic corridors. Yet for much of her career, she stood at odds with the prevailing orthodoxy. Her meticulously sourced works have long provided a counterpoint to the ‘canonical’ histories written by the Marxist clique of Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib and D.N. Jha among others - historians who, for decades, exercised editorial and institutional control over how Indian history was taught, debated and even litigated.

Jain’s fiercest intellectual battles have been fought against this cabal of ‘eminent historians.’ Steeped in Marxist theory and steeped further still in post-colonial guilt, they insisted India’s past be read through the prism of class struggle, syncretism and secular accommodation. In their telling, Islamic invaders were repackaged as administrators, not conquerors while temple destruction was painted as exaggerated or incidental. Indigenous religious practices, including temple worship, were either marginalised or dismissed as Brahminical constructs.

Few pushed these claims further than D.N. Jha. In works that gained disproportionate traction in supposedly progressive English-language publications, Jha argued that India’s temple tradition was overstated, that meat consumption (including beef) was integral to Vedic society, and that the idea of “sacred space” was a later fabrication. Such theses often relied on selective textual readings and conspicuously ignored regional and archaeological data.

Nowhere was this intellectual sleight of hand more consequential than in the Ayodhya dispute. Irfan Habib, appearing as an expert witness, flatly denied the existence of a pre-Babri temple at the Ram Janmabhoomi site even in the face of mounting archaeological, literary and administrative evidence.

According to Jain, this was ideological distortion masquerading as scholarship. In The Battle for Rama (2017), she accuses these historians of misrepresenting or suppressing evidence, manipulating inscriptions, and ignoring a vast corpus of court documents, colonial reports and traveller accounts that affirmed the existence of a Ram temple at the disputed site.

Jain’s rebuttal was forensic in its detail. In Rama and Ayodhya (2013), she charted a painstaking chronology of how the Janmabhoomi tradition was deeply embedded in Hindu consciousness well before the 20th century. She traced how British-era administrative records acknowledged the Ram Janmasthan, and how efforts to distort the narrative only began in earnest in the late 1980s, coinciding with the political mobilisation around the temple. According to Jain, even a significant section of Muslims recognised the legitimacy of the Hindu claim until they were persuaded otherwise by left-leaning historians who promised to fabricate counter-evidence.

To her critics, Jain is a partisan scholar whose work dovetails too neatly with the current regime’s ideological interests. But even they admit she has raised uncomfortable questions that the old guard long evaded. Her scholarship, while rooted in a civilisational frame, is rarely polemical in tone. In Sati: Evangelicals, Baptist Missionaries and the Changing Colonial Discourse (2016), she examined the colonial fixation on the practice not as an altruistic campaign but as a tool for religious and political dominance. In Parallel Pathways (2010), she investigated Hindu-Muslim relations between 1707 and 1857, revealing how political power shifts rather than theological animus often underpinned communal strife.

Her 2019 book, Flight of Deities and Rebirth of Temples, chronicled the looting, desecration, and often miraculous recovery of Hindu icons across centuries, offering a civilisational narrative of cultural resilience. Her most recent work, Vishwanath Rises and Rises (2024), centres on the Kashi Vishwanath temple’s history. It recounts waves of destruction, especially under Aurangzeb in 1669, and the remarkable efforts by Ahilyabai Holkar and the Marathas to rebuild.

To her admirers, Jain is a historian who writes not with rage but with quiet resolve. She has reclaimed India’s past from those who, for decades, presented it as a procession of conquerors, class struggles and syncretic miracles while airbrushing out atrocity, resistance and revival. In 2020, she received the Padma Shri, confirming her status as a public intellectual of national importance.

Her nomination to the Rajya Sabha is the logical next step. As Parliament increasingly becomes a forum for civilisational debates over temples, textbooks and the very idea of India, Jain is likely to bring with her not just scholarship, but a sharpened historical consciousness.