Selective Amnesia

History is often an inconvenient companion. It tells stories of grandeur but also tales of horror, conquest and cruelty. Today’s India, it seems, would prefer to forget the less savoury parts. This week, the new Class 7 NCERT Social Science textbook, reworked in line with the National Education Policy (NEP) and the 2023 National Curriculum Framework, has excised all references to the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals. In their place stand glowing chapters on ‘Indian ethos,’ sacred geographies and triumphant Central government schemes like ‘Make in India’ and ‘Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao.’

This is not the first time India’s rulers have tried to fashion the past to suit the present. In the early decades after Independence, the Nehruvian establishment, suspicious of nationalism and keen to forge a syncretic identity, instructed historians to tread carefully. A 1982 NCERT guideline explicitly cautioned against glorifying either Aurangzeb - the Mughal emperor synonymous with bigotry and destruction - or the Gupta Empire, often regarded as the zenith of India’s ancient past. As a result, generations of Indians grew up with an airbrushed version of history, where brutal invasions were reimagined as cultural exchanges and civilizational conflict was glossed over in the name of harmony.

But if Nehruvian history erred by whitewashing invasions, today’s policymakers commit the opposite sin by erasing them entirely. To remove the Delhi Sultanate and Mughals from textbooks is not an act of correction but of amnesia. It does not heal wounds; it denies that they ever existed.

The Mughals and the Delhi Sultanate were not minor episodes that can be edited out with a swipe of nationalist fervour. For better or worse, they reshaped the subcontinent. Their story is one of brutal conquest, religious intolerance (at least until Akbar) and cultural suppression. Precisely for these reasons, they must remain in the textbooks, not to be celebrated, but to be understood in full.

While India’s civilizational past, from the Mauryas to the Shungas to the Sātavāhanas, deserves fuller treatment than it was long given, pride must not come at the cost of truth. Sacred rivers and pilgrimage sites are no substitute for understanding how kingdoms rose and fell, how empires ruled, and how the scars of history continue to shape the present.

The instinct to sanitize history reveals an astonishing insecurity. A confident civilization does not fear its past but studies it. A confident democracy does not shield its citizens from unpleasant truths but equips them to grapple with them.

If the earlier government’s mistake was to minimize the atrocities of Islamic invaders, today’s error is to pretend that the invaders themselves were inconsequential. Both impulses are equally dangerous. History should neither be embalmed in sentimentality nor butchered for ideology.

Removing the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals from India’s classrooms will not change what happened. It will merely ensure that another generation grows up either ignorant of its past or vulnerable to distorted versions of it.