“Who Owns the Past?” by Shaan Kashyap

History, or least the writing of it, does not remain confined to academia or historians; it can increasingly become a matter of public debate. When it comes to India, debates about the past can be bitter, not just in one-off spats but as a constant source of tension between the ends of the political divide. It is this history of history-as-tension that Shaan Kashyap writes about in Who Owns the Past? How Historians (Re)wrote India’s Past and Present, 1870–2020. He enumerates incidents of textbook controversies and involvement of historians, especially of Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, Mushirul Hasan, and Bipan Chandra, in public debates surrounding education and communalism.

Working chronologically through controversies from an 1872 protest against a colonial textbook through to the end of the first Modi regime in 2020, Kashyap goes period by political period, from colonial rule through the Nehruvian era, the Emergency, the Janata interregnum, the Ram Janmabhoomi years, the Vajpayee years, the two UPA governments from 2004 to 2014, and finally, the early Modi years from 2014 to 2020. Within each period, Kashyap moves between biographical details of specific individuals, resolutions of institutions such as Indian Historical Congress (IHC) or textbook committees, and press reporting.

Setting the political divisions through which Kashyap structures his argument, the book’s major contribution lies in documentation of relevant examples of what has been disturbing communities in India and their instances go as far back as 1872.

That year, Muslim reformer Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s objected to a Zilla-school history text by Shiv Prasad, Itihas Timir Nashak (History as a Dispeller of Darkness), on two counts: its treatment of the medieval ruler Kutab-ud-din Mubarak Shah, and its account of the execution of the Sikh leader Banda under Farrukhsiyar. Sir Syed felt that the account exaggerated Banda’s suffering while omitting the cruelties committed by Banda’s own followers against Muslims. While the colonial administration’s own lieutenant-governor found nothing seriously wrong with the book’s general tone, he promised that troublesome passages would be revised, and the text was in fact replaced by an alternative history in 1884. A controversy, in other words, that produced no formal finding of wrongdoing nonetheless produced a quiet capitulation.

A related, smaller case from Odisha makes a sharper point about the nature of these disputes. Kashyap describes how Pyari Mohan Acharya’s 1879 Odia history of the province, was attacked in the Calcutta press by Kalipada Banerjee over its account of the 17th-century invader Kalapahad’s desecration of the Jagannath temple. Kashyap notes that once again, the dispute was not regarding the historicity of the episode; his objection was to its manner of telling, its description, not its facts. This is a pattern the book returns to, implicitly, throughout: many of India’s history controversies are not, in their core, disagreements about what happened, but disagreements about how certain episodes should be narrated.

Kashyap offers a corrective to received wisdom about when India’s first post-Independence textbook controversy occurred. Conventional accounts place it in 1977-79, under the Janata government. Kashyap argues that this misses an earlier and, in some ways, more revealing episode: the 1958 row over Kerala’s textbooks under EMS Namboodiripad’s Communist ministry. The Union Ministry of Education, Kashyap shows, received press cuttings alleging that Kerala’s Grade 7 textbooks glorified the Chinese and Russian revolutions, describing land redistribution under the Soviets in terms so glowing that an entire rural society appeared to have been transformed almost overnight, and that a companion passage invoked the Chinese precedent as a pointed warning of what could befall Kerala too, if the opposition parties fail to unite against the ruling Communists. The episode is a useful corrective precisely because it complicates a tidy left/liberal-versus-right story: here it is a Communist state government, not a Hindu nationalist one, which is usually pulled up as an accused in instrumentalising history for indoctrination.

Nehru’s campaign of national integration—another example from a Congress-led government in independent India—was not free from such controversies over what should go into school textbooks and what should not. Discussing the 1970 screening of textbooks, Kashyap observes that the mandate that those involved in education and writing of textbooks was to consciously work towards cultivating a sense of pride and avoiding content that spoke of differences of caste and religion in Indian society.

Kashyap also takes aim at what he calls  the complicity of the “eminent” historians in these acts. As might be expected, the 1991 Babri Masjid controversy looms large. Kashyap holds them responsible for history becoming “a defensive terrain, not a site for healing or understanding”.

His analysis is not restricted to Hindu/Muslim dichotomy. He notes that those one might expect to uphold a liberal worldview were silent when Christians objected to depiction of St Paul as the founder of a distinct religious sect and India’s banning of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1989.

Kashyap claims that his intention is to walk the middle path between the left and the right; readers can judge this for themselves. By Kashyap’s own admission, the historians he takes issue with have already been called out by their peers.

Kashyap frames Who Owns the Past? as an examination of lives of eminent historians; few books assemble this range of textbook controversies, resolutions of academic bodies, and personal testimonies in one place. The corrective placement of the 1958 Kerala episode ahead of the 1977 controversy is a real historiographical contribution. Yet it suffers from an occasional slippage between chronicling a professional failure and rendering judgement on it, a slippage that leaves several of its most striking episodes, sitting somewhat awkwardly within an argument they do not straightforwardly support. Perhaps, too great a burden has been placed on one book: to document the various ways in which the discipline of history has been a source of controversy, to call out “eminent” historians on their hypocrisy, to make a case for why one doesn’t have to be trained in the discipline to write history, and so on. But those aspiring to write history and to those who read history will be nudged by Kashyap’s book to give thought as to what they expect from the exercise.