India Today

SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT

People often wonder why history, once written, is not cast in stone—why it undergoes revisions at all. But philosophers of history have always understood it to be a dynamic process. R.G. Collingwood, for instance, wrote these words in The Idea of History: “Each age writes its own history”; and “each age must reinterpret the past in the light of its own preoccupations”.

The problem with Marxist historiography and its relationship with history is much more curious than what that interpretive latitude grants naturally to historians of every epoch. Since the 1960s, textbooks in India were written by Leftist historians like Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma, Irfan Habib, Satish Chandra,

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