Who Writes India’s History?
A civilisation defends its history not by silencing uncomfortable narratives, but by creating generations strong enough to question every narrative.
History is not merely a record of what happened. It shapes how societies remember themselves, understand their origins and interpret contemporary conflicts. Historical scholarship is therefore a form of intellectual power.
The controversy surrounding Manan Ahmed Asif’s The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India deserves examination—not through personal attacks or censorship, but through evidence and competing scholarship.
Published by Harvard University Press in 2020, Asif argues that “Hindustan” existed for centuries as a geographical, political and civilisational concept encompassing diverse communities. He contends that European colonial scholarship gradually displaced it with “India”, a process he calls “political forgetting”.
This argument cannot simply be dismissed.
British colonial historiography was not created in an intellectual vacuum. East India Company officials and European Orientalists collected manuscripts, translated Sanskrit and Persian works, mapped territories and classified Indian society while Britain expanded its political control. Knowledge and imperial authority frequently reinforced each other.
Asif also challenges the tendency to organise India’s mediaeval history around Muslim rulers and Hindu society. His interpretation centres on seventeenth-century historian Muhammad Qasim Firishta, whose history presented Hindustan as a connected geographical space spanning regions from Lahore and Delhi to the Deccan, Bengal and Malabar.
For Asif, this demonstrates an intellectual conception of Hindustan long before British India.
But fascinating arguments must withstand criticism.
Rejecting the idea that India’s mediaeval history was simply a thousand-year Hindu-Muslim war does not require accepting that religious conflict was insignificant. India’s history records conquest, warfare, discrimination and destruction of religious institutions. It also records Hindu commanders under Muslim rulers, Muslims serving Hindu kingdoms, commercial cooperation, cultural exchange and long periods of coexistence.
Both conflict and accommodation belong to India’s past. The danger arises when an ideological framework selects one and suppresses the other.
Colonial scholars can legitimately be criticised for imposing European categories on India’s past. But modern scholarship must also avoid projecting twenty-first-century ideas of secularism, minority identity and majoritarianism backwards onto mediaeval societies.
A seventeenth-century historian recognising multiple communities within Hindustan does not automatically establish modern constitutional secularism. Historical pluralism and modern political pluralism are related, but not identical.
This brings us to Western academic influence.
Asif is a professor of history at Columbia University, and his academic work has received support from major foundations. These are disclosed relationships. There is no evidence that such foundations financed The Loss of Hindustan to undermine India or that Harvard or Columbia sponsored it to create political instability. Turning institutional association into conspiracy without evidence would itself violate scholarly standards.
But who possesses the intellectual authority to define India’s past for the world?
During colonialism, London became an important centre from which India’s history, laws, communities and languages were classified. Today, American and European universities, journals, foundations and publishing institutions exercise considerable influence over international discussions of Indian nationalism, caste, religion, minorities, Hindutva and communalism.
That does not make Western scholarship anti-India. Universities contain competing traditions and have produced outstanding research on India. But intellectual concentration deserves scrutiny wherever it occurs.
The stakes are particularly high for younger Indians. A scholarly argument that once travelled slowly through books and universities can now move within hours through social media. A complicated 300-page argument can become a ten-second slogan:
“India was invented by the British.”
“Muslims were always foreigners.”
“India never existed before colonialism.”
“India has always been one homogeneous civilisation.”
All are dramatic. None adequately describes the complexity of Indian history.
Historical interpretation has entered the algorithmic battlefield. Young people increasingly encounter fragments selected by social-media systems before they encounter original sources. Academic theories, political propaganda and historical evidence consequently circulate together, often without distinction.
India’s response cannot be censorship or intellectual isolation. India must answer scholarship with scholarship.
Universities should strengthen Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Pali, Prakrit, Marathi, Tamil and other primary-source studies. Historians should return to manuscripts, inscriptions and contemporary records rather than merely choosing between colonial, nationalist, Marxist or postcolonial interpretations.
Students should read Asif. They should equally read historians who disagree with him.
The purpose of education is to teach young Indians to distinguish historical evidence from interpretation, interpretation from ideology, and scholarship from political mobilisation.
No single intellectual system should monopolise the interpretation of history—not colonial historiography, nationalist narratives, postcolonial theory, political governments or elite Western universities.
India’s history should neither be dictated from foreign campuses nor prescribed by political authority at home.
A civilisation does not defend its history by silencing uncomfortable narratives. It defends itself by creating generations intellectually strong enough to question every narrative—including those carrying the world’s most prestigious academic labels.
(The writer is an advocate, legal, geopolitical and public policy analyst. Views personal.)
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