The Curators of Conquest

Inconvenient Truths – the NCERT Textbook Row

India’s schoolbooks are finally lifting the veil on a past too long buried in euphemism and ideological amnesia. Our four-part series examines the roots of India’s textbook wars and the historiographical battles that have resulted in this distortion.

Part 3

Mocked by Marxists and disdained by nationalists, colonial-era historians still matter in India’s history wars.

In the ideological crossfire between India’s Marxist historians and the defenders of Hindu civilisational memory, the British Raj remains a common enemy – a bogey reviled on both sides, though for starkly contrasting reasons.

As the recent NCERT textbook revisions reignite debates over ideological distortion in Indian historiography, they also underscored a deeper truth that history must embrace complexity rather than serve as a cudgel to suppress inconvenient truths.

Yet, long before this curricular churn, it was a band of intensely inquisitive colonial British ‘amateurs’ from the much-reviled East India Company - soldiers, scholars, adventurers, civil servants, judges - who took the first real steps toward such complexity in Indian historiography.

By painstakingly translating and collating Persian chronicles, they preserved with surprising honesty the grandeur, the literature, the Islamic arts, as well as the brutality, the resistance and eventual unravelling of medieval Muslim rule. It is their work that remains the closest India has ever come to facing its past honestly.  At a time when the very word ‘Empire’ is treated as an expletive, these redoubtable Company men alongside brilliant European scholars did more than just chronicle the rise and fall of Islamic dynasties and their splendour. They unearthed, translated and preserved vast swathes of India’s pre-Islamic past: from Hindu mythology and ancient epics to Sanskrit philology and Vedic rituals. In doing so, they laid the scholarly groundwork for future generations to rediscover a civilisational history long buried under neglect and distortion.

Thomas Babington Macaulay - the man many Indians love to hate - boasted that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India.” His infamous 1835 Minute on Indian Education has today become a byword for colonial disdain, ushering in an era where English replaced Sanskrit and Persian in formal instruction.

Detractors have long dismissed colonial historians as apologists for empire who wrote history merely to justify British dominion, while dividing Hindus and Muslims and portraying British rule as a civilising balm for India’s ‘benighted’ Hindu masses.

That is true. James Mill’s History of British India (1817), penned without setting foot in the subcontinent, crudely caricatured Indian civilisation as stagnant and irrational. In 1842, Lord Ellenborough’s vainglorious decision to ship the so-called ‘Gates of Somnath’ from Ghazni to Agra was an early, clumsy attempt to fashion the British as avengers of ‘Hindu humiliation.’

Yet to reduce the vast corpus of colonial-era historical writing to ideological propaganda is an act of bad faith. For every Macaulay and Mill dismissive of India’s civilisational wealth, there were others like William Jones, Horace Hayman Wilson, Georg Bühler and Aurel Stein who had a genuine love for India’s literary and religious traditions. Many Company officials and European scholars - fluent in Sanskrit, Persian or Prakrit - were far more interested in chronicling India’s past than in merely justifying its present subjugation. Their work, grounded in texts and inscriptions, laid the scholarly foundations upon which later Indian historians like Jadunath Sarkar, K.A. Nilakantha Sastri, R.C. Majumdar among others would build.

A great starting point is William Muir. His magisterial Life of Mahomet (1858-61), an erudite work steeped in Arabic and orthodox Islamic sources, remains one of the most detailed 19th-century accounts of Islam’s founder and an exemplar of how to rise above one’s prejudices, no matter what one’s religion or creed. It is essential reading for any thinking person today.

His four-volume masterwork drew not only on traditional Islamic sources like Ibn Ishaq and al-Tabari but also presented a sophisticated chronological and theological analysis. While Muir was certainly shaped by his evangelical background, his reading of Arabic sources was serious and his admiration for many of Islam’s reforms clear, as was his condemnations of the religion which he scrupulously based on sources that spoke for themselves.

In a 2021 essay in the London Review of Books, the Oxford-educated, Pakistani-British Marxist Tariq Ali lavished praise on fellow Marxist Maxime Rodinson’s biography of Muhammad while contrasting it with Muir’s “prejudiced” depiction.

Ali quoted some of Muir’s controversial lines while dismissing him (as had Edward Said) as an imperialist, Islamophobic crank. Ali totally failed to acknowledge the Muir careful, source-based nature of Muir’s work - compiled meticulously from Islamic chronicles in Arabic, Persian and Urdu and collected from a variety of places long before the rise of archival history in British universities.

Indeed, it was British East India Company officials and scholar-administrators and not academic dons who first introduced rigorous methods to Indian history.

Sir William Jones, a judge in Calcutta, founded the Asiatic Society in 1784 and helped lay the foundations of Indology. The amateur but meticulous soldier-scholars of the Raj form another crucial pillar. As a political agent in Rajputana, Colonel James Tod fell deeply in love with the people he administered. His exhilarating Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1829–32), though criticised by many scholars for ‘romanticising’ Rajput valour and chivalry, was much more than a hagiography. Tod immersed himself in bardic tales, genealogies and oral traditions, giving the Rajputs not only a history but also a cultural identity. His empathy for his subjects was genuine as he saw them as kindred spirits to the Scottish Highlanders. His affectionate tone and painstaking documentation gave future historians a sense of Rajasthan’s epic continuity.

One can accuse Tod of ‘Social Darwinism’ or hit him with any other politically correct label, but his compilation of the Rajput clans and dynasties remains unsurpassed.

This blend of scholarship and sentiment extended to Joseph Davey Cunningham, whose A History of the Sikhs (1849) was the first comprehensive account of Sikh polity and the Punjab. Far from imperial flattery, Cunningham offered a nuanced view of Sikh governance, and his criticisms of British annexation of the Punjab led to his professional disgrace. Even ‘inadequate’ (though highly readable) histories like Grant Duff’s ‘History of the Mahrattas’ (1826) were the plinth on which future and far superior improvements would be made. Similarly, J.D.B. Gribble’s History of the Deccan (1896), while reflecting some colonial biases, was filled with exhaustive detail and admiration for Deccan polities. Then there was W. R. Pogson, whose 1824 account of the Bundelas chronicled the martial defiance of a little-studied dynasty in Central India. Like Cunningham, Pogson’s empathy for his subjects undermined the narrative of British benevolence and placed agency back in native hands.

Even a writer like G.B. Malleson, whose Decisive Battles of India (1883) reads like Kipling with footnotes, did not shy away from exposing deceit. He lambasted Robert Clive’s use of forgeries and manipulation at Plassey, undermining the heroic myths taught in British schools.

Aurel Stein, a Hungarian-born Orientalist, translated Kalhaṇa’s Rājataraṅgiṇī, the 11th-century Sanskrit chronicle of Kashmir’s kings. His translation, published in 1900, was a triumph of linguistic and archaeological scholarship. It offered early evidence of Kashmir’s deeply interwoven cultural history with the rest of India, offering the best literary rebuke to the shrill and smug assertions of celebrity activists and so-called ‘liberal’ academics that “Kashmir was never an integral part of India.”

One cannot forget Georg Bühler and Lorenz Kielhorn, two German Indologists who made significant strides in deciphering Indian inscriptions. It was Kielhorn who recovered and edited the prashasti of Vigraharāja IV, providing a rare Sanskrit royal eulogy that bolstered knowledge of early Rajput polity.

John Keay’s India Discovered (1981) is perhaps the best tribute to these men in pith helmets, as he recounts how these scholars – from William Jones to James Prinsep, Colin Mackenzie to Alexander Cunningham, laboured across a fractious land to uncover the glories of India’s civilization.

Their motives may have been mixed, but their contributions were real. Keay, hardly a cheerleader for Empire, admits that the Raj often did more to preserve India’s heritage than destroy it.

That both Marxists and nationalists now drink from the wells dug by those they revile is perhaps the greatest historical irony of all. Whatever their flaws and attitudes, they formed the intellectual scaffolding on which India’s national history was later constructed. Their rigour and relative impartiality deserve acknowledgement or teaching future Indian historians not just what sources to use, but how to use them.