The shrinking worlds of Indian history

Throughout India’s history, there have been attempts to reinforce a simplistic communal perspective that erases historical nuance and complexity.

In India, Bollywood — as described by director Helle Ryslinge in her documentary — makes cinema that is often “larger than life”. Chhaava, yet another Bollywood release about a Hindu king standing up to an evil Mughal emperor, and the post-cinema reaction videos which have come out on YouTube, proves exactly this. From wailing sermons, reverent chants to the glory of Shivaji and the erstwhile Maratha empire, down to the tearing of a cinema screen, the reaction to the torture and killing of Sambhaji by Aurangzeb in Chhaava reinforced a simplified Hindu-Muslim binary aligned with Hindu nationalist ideology, erasing historical nuance and complexity. 

Historical films are never just about the past; they are reflections of contemporary politics and ideologies. Chhaava, centred on Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj, has already sparked debates about its portrayal of history. Yet, rather than simply asking what the film gets right or wrong, perhaps we should ask: Why does such distortion happen? The answer to the question lies in understanding the result of a fundamental rift — between the conception of history outside academic confines, as opposed to its academic counterpart that strives toward ‘decolonisation.’ The national populace’s general mistrust towards the academic practice of many historians and archaeologists working in universities comes from the latter’s refusal to engage in the pursuit of a glorious Hindu nation that supposedly was. Any other historical undertaking would inevitably lead to derogatory tags like ‘urban naxal’, ‘Lutyens’ gang’ or ‘left-liberal’.

The roots of history’s politicisation in India trace back to the late 19th century, when nationalist movements first demanded that Indians reclaim their history from British colonial accounts. Until then, Indian history was dominated by British colonial frameworks, epitomised by James Mill’s influential The History of British India. Mill explicitly divided Indian history into three adversarial stages — Hindu, Muslim, and British — portraying Muslims as aggressive outsiders who corrupted a pure and ancient Hindu civilisation. In doing so, colonial historiography justified British rule as a supposed liberation from Muslim despotism, firmly embedding the Hindu-Muslim binary into historical consciousness. 

This simplified binary can be traced even further back to late 18th-century Orientalist scholarship. British Orientalists, working predominantly with upper-caste Hindu literati, sought original texts (‘ur-texts’) like the Manusmriti to codify Indian traditions. 

Moreover, colonial administrative practices did not allow for archival access in the colonies, thus prohibiting the growth of inquiry using the archives. In 19th-century colonial India, British administrators treated archival records primarily as instruments for bureaucratic efficiency, tax collection and land revenue management. Unlike in Britain, where archives became accessible symbols of government accountability, in India, archives and historical records suffered from administrative neglect. This neglect laid the foundation for India’s contemporary archival mismanagement.

The economic dynamics of British imperial rule further shaped the nationalist historical project. Following economic crises like the Union Bank collapse in Calcutta (1848) and the British Crown’s takeover of India (1857), the Indian mercantile class, particularly in the Bengal province, lost significant power.

Stripped of economic and political agency, the colonised middle class in India turned toward cultural domains, particularly history, as a means of resistance to colonial domination.

Intellectuals in India’s presidency towns crafted nationalist histories using myth, blurring the distinction between the two. Anyone familiar with Dakshinaranjan’s Thakurmar Jhuli would notice its resemblance to Grimms' Fairy Tales — both collections of folklore preserving cultural memory against the onslaught of modernity. 

In European imperial metropoles, folklore remained a literary pursuit, since ‘scientific history’ naturalised modernity as the culmination of enlightened civilisation. In contrast, Indian intellectuals, grappling with colonial subjugation, turned to mythic pasts. 

Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay typified this nationalist historiography. In 1880, through his Bengali magazine Bangadarshan, Bankim called on Bengalis to reclaim their martial heritage using ancient epics like the Mahabharata as historical sources. 

This carried over into the post-colonial period, shaping how the new republic envisioned its history. Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision of history in Discovery of India also played a role in framing India’s identity through ancient texts such as the Vedas, Upanishads, and epics like the Mahabharata and Ramayana. 

In this way, Bollywood cinema became a tool to create the image of a glorified Hindu past subjugated by Muslims, to which the Hindus mounted a heroic resistance to save their ‘civilisation’. This civilisation is one that is in the Hindu nationalist imagination, only slowly reviving and reclaiming the nation. 

In this instance, ‘reclaiming the nation’ is done through the inflamed riots in Nagpur city over the tomb of Aurangzeb — the Mughal emperor who is also the villain of Chhaava. 

It must be understood that history is complex and shaped by historical actors in each era. Our understanding of the past — or lack thereof — depends on whether we know how to think historically when we engage with history.

Thus, to deny the complexity is to deny honest appraisals of the past — one untainted by the distortions of Orientalism, colonialism, or even nationalism. An important place for such redressal to happen is the classroom, for which we need to restore public institutions that are accessible to all. 

Some academic historians have also taken up public projects such as Itihase Hatekhori (An Initiation into History), meant for introducing children to various subjects of history, and school engagement programmes by the Archives at the National Centre for Biological Studies, Bengaluru, which are commendable. Therefore, to reclaim history from a community that valorises itself while excluding others — and a governmental apparatus overtaken by the same ideology — we must bridge the divide over what defines legitimate sources of knowledge about the past, and a credible approach to history. To salvage the national imagination of India, we must save the ever-shrinking worlds of Indian history. 

(Soumyadeep Guha and Rohan Basu are researchers pursuing doctoral studies in History)