Book review: The past, the republic and the historians who shaped them both

Independent India has produced many public intellectuals, but few have mattered as much as its historians. Governments have risen and fallen arguing over their books. Courts have summoned them as expert witnesses. Political parties have denounced or embraced them. Schoolchildren have unknowingly inherited their quarrels. Yet, despite their extraordinary influence on public life, historians themselves have rarely been made the subject of history. Shaan Kashyap's Who Owns the Past? does precisely that—and in doing so, offers a strikingly original political history of the Republic itself.

There is a striking scene halfway through the book. It is January 1981. Irfan Habib, already India's best-known medieval historian, is not arguing over the Babri Masjid, Marxism or Mughal history. He is talking about attendance registers.

In an interview to The Indian Express on 13 January 1981, Habib complains that criminal gangs have captured Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). Students who never attend classes are allowed to sit for examinations. Hostels have become sanctuaries for hooligans. Employers have started treating AMU degrees with suspicion. “Even Muslim firms advertising jobs have blacklisted the AMU,” Habib says, and how “AMU graduates need not apply” became a common insult. It is an extraordinary interview—not because it is ideological, but because it isn’t. Habib is describing administrative collapse. Within weeks, however, the argument is no longer about the university.

Habib is beaten on campus. He is denounced as a “Russian agent”, a “Communist dog” and an enemy of Islam. Student leaders insist that the real conspiracy is against the university’s minority character. The Vice-Chancellor suspends Habib before the inquiry against him has even begun. Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra, Sumit Sarkar, the Indian History Congress and the social intelligentsia rally behind him. Newspapers fill with petitions and counter-petitions. The country’s most celebrated historian has become the centre of a national political controversy.

A few accounts of the event that have been almost forgotten stop there. Kashyap doesn’t. He asks a question that is both obvious and strangely absent from four decades of writing on the episode: what happened to the university? If Habib’s original grievance was about criminalisation, academic decay and institutional collapse, did any of those problems disappear after historians successfully defended him?

The answer is uncomfortable. Habib won the argument over academic freedom. AMU lost the argument over institutional reform. The liberal intelligentsia mobilised magnificently to defend one of its finest historians, but almost nobody returned to the questions that Habib himself had raised. The hero survived. The institution did not.

That single chapter captures what makes Who Owns the Past? one of the more unusual books on India’s history wars. The easy version of Indian historiography has become tediously familiar. Marxist historians monopolised history. Hindu nationalists challenged them. The battle continues. Depending on one’s politics, either the monopolists or the challengers become the heroes. Kashyap rejects that script almost entirely.

His protagonists are not ideologies but controversies. Instead of asking who wrote the best history of medieval India, he asks how historians themselves became public actors—summoned into courtrooms, dragged into textbook battles, recruited into political campaigns and transformed into symbols that often eclipsed their scholarship. The result is a history of historians who stopped being merely historians.

The Ayodhya chapter is where Who Owns the Past? becomes genuinely provocative. Most readers will expect the familiar choreography: either a defence of the historians associated with the Babri Masjid movement or a celebration of those who challenged them. Kashyap does neither. Instead, he reconstructs the intellectual world in which professional historians entered the dispute convinced that historical evidence could settle what had already become a political and civilisational conflict. He revisits the celebrated JNU booklet The Political Abuse of History (1989), not to dismiss it, but to show the confidence with which its authors believed that the historian could distinguish myth from history and thereby rescue public life from communal mobilisation.

The complication arrives from an unexpected direction. It does not come from Arun Shourie, Sita Ram Goel or the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. It comes from within JNU itself. Kashyap recovers the neglected intervention of historian Majid Hayat Siddiqi, who refused to sign the celebrated booklet and instead questioned its underlying assumption. Siddiqi accepted the need to resist communal politics yet warned that historians commit a category mistake when they enter political controversies as historians rather than as citizens. Historical facts, he argued, are always mediated by interpretation and by the conventions of a professional community. They cannot simply be presented to society as incontestable public truths. The peer group, he memorably observed, often speaks only to itself.

That intervention allows Kashyap to sidestep the stale Left-versus-Right binary. His criticism is not that professional historians were wrong because the temple movement was right. It is that many historians overestimated what their professional authority could accomplish once Ayodhya had become a mass political movement. They fought a political battle with the language of disciplinary certainty. The consequence was not merely that they lost the dispute over Ayodhya. They also lost something of their own public legitimacy.

The author illustrates this with uncomfortable precision: historians who signed public statements as neutral “experts” were simultaneously associated with the Babri Masjid Action Committee; Romila Thapar defended her archaeological reading against SP Gupta’s criticisms; Irfan Habib challenged the evidentiary basis of the temple claim before and after the Supreme Court judgment. None of these interventions is caricatured. They are treated as evidence that historians had themselves become protagonists in the story they believed they were merely interpreting.

This has an unsettling contemporary resonance. As the disputes over Kashi, Mathura, Sambhal, Bhojshala and other contested sites continue to migrate between politics and the courts, Siddiqi’s forgotten warning acquires fresh relevance. Kashyap suggests that the enduring lesson of Ayodhya is not simply about the limits of historical evidence, nor about the triumph of faith over fact. It is about the limits of the historian's public authority itself. That is a far more difficult question—and one that extends well beyond Ayodhya into every future temple-mosque controversy the Republic is yet to confront.

The same archival instinct reshapes another familiar story about the NCERT textbook controversies. Almost every account dates the first history textbook controversy to the Janata government’s withdrawal of NCERT books in 1977. Kashyap goes looking through earlier newspapers and discovers that the consensus itself is historically wrong. The first major textbook controversy had erupted two decades earlier in Communist-ruled Kerala, where battles over education, religion and state power culminated in the dismissal of the EMS Namboodiripad government. By restoring Kerala to the story, Kashyap quietly dismantles a political myth shared by both Left and Right—those textbook controversies began only when “their” opponents entered power.

The book does not allow any government to monopolise either virtue or vice. It shows how Congress governments insisted that textbooks should promote “national integration” and screened them for communal content long before the BJP came to power. Later governments promised to "correct distortions" and claimed to produce balanced narratives. The rhetoric changed; the impulse remained familiar. Repeatedly, Kashyap returns to newspaper reports where Christians burnt textbooks in Maharashtra over representations of Jesus and St Paul, Sikh organisations demanded the withdrawal of NCERT books over the portrayal of their Gurus, and politicians of every persuasion discovered that history was too important to be left to historians.

This accumulation of episodes is what gives the book its force. None of these controversies is entirely forgotten. Most historians know about them individually. What Kashyap demonstrates is that they were never isolated eruptions. They formed a continuous political tradition. Every generation believed its own controversy to be unprecedented; the archive suggests otherwise. Every government announced that it was merely correcting the excesses of its predecessor; every opposition suddenly rediscovered academic freedom. History, one begins to realise, has been repeatedly rewritten in the name of preventing history from being rewritten.

That is why Who Owns the Past? is best read not as a history of historiography but as a political history of postcolonial India viewed from an unexpected angle. Elections come and go. Prime ministers rise and fall. Parties split, merge and disappear. Yet one institution after another—the Indian History Congress, NCERT, ICHR, AMU, state textbook boards, university departments, even courtrooms—reappears as a recurring theatre in which the Republic negotiates its deepest anxieties about religion, caste, nationalism and citizenship. Historians, in this telling, are less the subject than the thread that stitches these otherwise disconnected episodes together.

In the end, Who Owns the Past? is asking a question far more unsettling than the one posed in its title. Not who owns the past, but how did historians themselves become political actors whose careers, reputations and institutions came to shape the Republic's understanding of itself? Once that question is posed, the familiar binaries of Marxist versus nationalist, secular versus communal, professional versus amateur begin to look strangely inadequate. The book does not dissolve those categories; it historicises them. And in doing so, it offers something increasingly rare in India's history wars, that is not another verdict, but a deeper history of the trial itself.