History teaching requires revision more than textbooks

The Print

a day ago

After all, how often do Indian households encourage history as a job? A base-level problem here is: how do you support the study of history when it isn't even clear what a historian does?
Yet, despite this range of work, one question almost always follows when we explain what we do: 'Okay, but what is your real job?' The question says as much about our profession as it does about how history itself is perceived in India.
What does it mean to be a historian in India? Both of us have formally studied the subject. In the years we've spent working as public historians, we've told myriad stories of India's chequered pasts through heritage walks, museum trails, cultural events, podcasts, an annual journal, book reviews, articles, and social media posts. We've pored over archives and conducted on-ground research. We've also translated scholarship into language and experiences that anyone, from an academic to a casual listener, can connect with.
In childhood, history may occasionally bask in the dreamy, cinematic glow of Indiana Jones and Night at the Museum. Or Bharat Ek Khoj, Akbar-Birbal adaptations, the delightfully gory Horrible Histories, and Amar Chitra Katha. In adulthood, though, it either fades into collective amnesia, gets wrapped in nostalgia, or turns into a battlefield of contested claims. Where is the middle ground where we carry forward that childlike curiosity, tempered with adult discernment, to engage with the past with the depth and nuance it deserves?
A polarising debate has recently been sparked after yet another round of revisions in NCERT history textbooks. But more than textbooks, history teaching requires revision.
Also Read: Indus Valley to Mughal Empire—How illustrated history books guide us in polarising times
Updating isn't the problem
What do you remember from your history classes? For most, the answers fall into familiar buckets: rote learning of names, dates, dynasties, and wars. There was little room to explore the texture of lived experience, or to ask: how can this subject help me become a better thinker, a more reflective human? The discipline was frozen in time, and with it, many of us felt we too were trapped — learning about the past in a way that felt wholly disconnected from the present, let alone the future.
This is part of the reason historical studies aren't seen as foundations for sustainable careers. But paradoxically, history seems to dominate our headlines. It's everywhere: in TV debates, political speeches, social media threads. Everyone, it seems, has something to say about the past.
That's why the current debate on revisions matters. The problem isn't with 'updating' history. Our understanding of the past evolves as our present changes. Every historian is shaped by their time, drawing not only on the materials and theoretical bases available, but also on their own perspectives and questions.
So revisions themselves aren't the issue.
The real concern is how history textbooks are revised. If these changes were aimed at helping students approach the past critically, and provided them with the historian's toolkit — by introducing them to a range of sources, perspectives, and debates — then they would be fruitful.
More revisions, less reasoning
Our NCERT textbooks have been subject to regular revisions, with new theories and ideas inserted alongside scholars' evolving approaches to history. This exercise is necessary, so long as the emphasis remains on updations that accurately convey the latest reflections on continuities and changes over time.
Increasingly, however, sporadic revisions have become the norm. Since 2018, textbooks have been altered to remove sections on communalism in the 1940s, Mughal manuscripts, caste struggles, and popular movements.
When textbooks were revised during the Covid-19 pandemic, deletions were made on grounds of 'rationalisation'. It is perplexing that post-pandemic, too, the NCERT has failed to offer academic explanations for revising humanities textbooks. 'Rationalised' textbooks remain prescribed, with intermittent 'revisions' still trickling in.
In its latest revision of history textbooks for eighth grade students, the NCERT introduces Mughal emperors as 'brutal' and 'ruthless', Delhi Sultans' policies as 'public humiliation' for non-Muslims, and Maratha leadership as 'visionary'.
Earlier textbooks covered the most notable features of each of these polities, minus the adjectives. A reading of Our Pasts – II, the medieval history text prescribed to seventh grade students from 2007 to 2021, allows useful comparison. The text discussed administrative successes and failures, economic policy, and societal changes, and tested students' critical thinking skills based on their understanding of objective details.
The most telling aspect of the history textbook revision is the NCERT's inclusion of a 'Note on Some Darker Periods in History'. Here, a disclaimer reads that 'no one should be held responsible today for events of the past', which appears to be an admission of the provocative nature of the updated content. Students as young as the eighth grade — studying history as part of a wide curriculum spanning science, mathematics, and languages — ought to be introduced to history in a manner that shapes them into informed citizens, and perhaps, optimistically, stimulates deeper engagement with the discipline later in their lives.
The goal should be to teach students that history, and the humanities more broadly, are about thinking more, asking better questions, and becoming sharper citizens. What students need is not less complexity, but more clarity on how complexity functions.
But the kinds of revisions we're seeing strip that away. They remove the very skills that make historical thinking meaningful, and the result is a citizen who either dismisses history entirely or defends it without support, often overwhelmed by louder, ahistorical voices that dominate discourse.
Also Read: India's new search for Hindu warrior kings to celebrate. Vikramaditya, Suheldev to Agrasen
Teaching history for the future
Perhaps the most important revision we need is in how we frame history — it should be less a closed book of facts and more a lens to view the world.
In 2025, it's worth asking, how can we teach history as a subject that helps carve a path forward? How do we make sure students don't feel like history is either just for nostalgic glorification or adversarial defence? How do we make its dissemination promising enough for students to be able to say they wish to become academics, curators, conservators, archaeologists, museologists, or historians?
Through our public history platform Itihāsology, we repeatedly highlight the foremost issue with history as a school subject — that it is 'boring', unappealing to young learners. A lack of interest in history during the formative years of schooling manifests in detachment from scholarly debates, and an unfortunate turn toward distorted, coloured versions of the past in adult life. This becomes relevant because history frequently comes up in popular discourse and debates, with socially and politically active adults justifying current stances by drawing on the past.
Since the problem of subscribing to ahistorical renderings of the past is rooted in studenthood, the solution lies in devising more effective ways to communicate history to young learners so they grow up knowing there is indeed a future with a past — one that they need to protect from falling into the pit of homogeneity.
Eric Chopra and Kudrat B. Singh run Itihāsology, an educational platform dedicated to making Indian history and art inclusive and accessible. Views are personal.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)