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Excerpted from Romila Thapar’s Just Being: A Memoir, published with permission from Seagull Books.
LET ME THEREFORE TURN to how the controversy between professional historians and non-professional and some even fake “historians” has emerged in India and why some of us are attacked for the history we write.
This in time was converted into the contestation between the professional historian and the populist non-historian writers, each with a different agenda. Borrowing from the colonial construction of Indian history, and basing themselves on the ideology of Hindutva, the large number of authors of the pop version have propagated a communal history, glorifying events linked to Hindu groups and either denigrating or ignoring those linked to Muslim groups.
The blame for the recent confrontation between history and fake history has been placed on the professional academic historians who are said to write in such a dense and convoluted way that the general public cannot understand what they are saying. Therefore, the public prefers the easily understood writing of the populist non-historian writers, which is also easily available on social media.
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