Volume 52, Number 6 · April 7, 2005
India: The War Over History
By William Dalrymple
BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE
Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India
by James W. Laine
Oxford University Press,144 pp., $39.95
Ganesha: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings
by Paul Courtright
Oxford University Press,296 pp., $26.95 (paper)
Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300
by Romila Thapar
University of California Press,586 pp., $48.00; $18.95 (paper)
Beyond Nationalist Frames: Postmodernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, History
by Sumit Sarkar
Indiana University Press, 280 pp., $37.95
A History of India, Volume 2
by Percival Spear
Penguin, 304 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia
edited by David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence
University Press of Florida,384 pp., $59.95; $24.95 (paper)
The Myth of the Holy Cow
by Dwijendra Narayan Jha
Verso, 120 pp., $14.00 (paper)
History in the New NCERT Textbooks: A Report and Index of Errors
by Irfan Habib, Suvira Jaiswal, and Aditya Mukherjee
Kolkata: Indian History Congress, 129 pp., 50 rupees
In India, and among the Indian diaspora, a passionately contested battle is taking place over the interpretation of Indian history. Debates about rival versions of Indian prehistory or the struggles among the religions of medieval South Asia—the sort of arguments that anywhere else would be heard at scholarly conferences—have in India become the subject of political rallies and mob riots. Parallel with this there has been a concerted attempt by politicians of the Hindu far right to rewrite the history textbooks used in Indian schools and to bring historians and the writing of history under their direct control.[1]
Review, 4309 words
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