Who Writes Our Past?

HISTORY TODAY IS NO LONGER CONFINED TO archives or classrooms. It has moved into the public arena, where political actors, courts, media platforms, and social networks all compete to interpret it. The past is not merely studied; it is mobilised. Textbooks are revised, historical figures are reinterpreted, events are viewed through new lenses, and inherited narratives are either affirmed or challenged. What changes is not the past itself, but the meaning that we attach to the past. What is contested is not only factual accuracy but the authority to define meaning. In this environment, history becomes a struggle over identity, belonging, and legitimacy.

The writing of history is shaped not only by evidence but by perspective, by the questions we ask, the sources we privilege, and the silences we sometimes inherit. Above all, it is shaped by power. The struggle over history is in many ways a struggle over identity and belonging over how a people understands itself, how it situates itself in time, and how it chooses to define its place in the world. Interpretation has always shaped historical understanding, but what is distinctive today is the speed and scale at which simplified narratives circulate. Assertions outrun arguments; conviction over­whelms evidence. Instead of the past informing the present, the present increasingly reshapes the past to suit contemporary anxieties. This inversion risks replacing historical inquiry with historical assertion.

This is why debates over history have become so charged. They are framed in terms of restitution, recognition, and redress—understandable impulses in any society confronting inherited injustices. But when the past is approached primarily through the lens of present grievances, it can be flattened into a vocabulary of accusation. Monuments, places of worship, and public memory become proxies for modern identity politics. They are asked to bear the weight of contemporary resentments, even when their historical meanings are layered and complex.

The danger lies in judging historical actors by modern standards and isolating events from their contexts. This distorts the past and impoverishes the present. History becomes a tool for drawing boundaries rather than understanding processes. Instead of illuminating how societies evolve through encounters, conflicts, and accommodations, it becomes a means of defining who belongs and who does not. Such simplification narrows the past and constrains the future.

A more responsible engagement with history demands fidelity to evidence, re­spect for context, and intellectual seriousness. It requires acknowledging that societ­ies evolve through interaction, not isolation. India’s past exemplifies this complex­ity. As Nehru observed, India is a palimpsest—a layered, cumulative civilisation. As Gandhi insisted, coexistence is not merely a fact but an ethical principle. A confident nation does not fear complexity; it embraces it.

The question of who writes our history is therefore crucial. Historians do, but so do institutions, politicians, educators, judges, social media warriors, and society at large. This makes their responsibility greater, not lesser. The past has always been wielded to shape the present. British accounts of India, for instance, did not simply document the subcontinent; they interpreted it through the lens of empire. They emphasised division over continuity, stagnation over dynamism, and in doing so constructed a narrative that justified imperial rule. India was presented as a barba­rism in need of ‘civilising’ and a chaotic nation in need of governance, rather than one with its own long tradition of political, social, and intellectual life. Such imperial narratives were not incidental to the colonial project. They served a central purpose: they legitimised British conquest, rationalised our subordination, and taught the colonised to see themselves through categories devised by their rulers. Political domination was reinforced by narrative domination.

The nationalist movement responded not only politically but intellectually. Think­ers from Naoroji and RC Dutt to Phule, Ranade, Gokhale, Tilak, Gandhi, Nehru, Savarkar, and Azad sought to recover a sense of civili­sational confidence and historical selfhood. They challenged imperial interpretations and reasserted India’s agency. But the process of reinterpretation did not end with independence. Each generation revisits the past, reshaping it in light of its own concerns.

This interplay between interpretation and identity brings us to the idea of “national history”. Every nation, in one way or the other, constructs a narrative about its past. It does not do so merely to remember but to create a sense of continuity, to connect generations, to define identity, and to give meaning to the present. A national history, therefore, is never just a chronicle of events. It is a story a society likes to tell itself about who it is, who we are. But such a story can be told in different ways. It can be expansive, accommodating complex­ity, acknowledging the many strands that have contributed to a nation's evolution. Or it can be selective, narrowing the past into a more simplified account that privileges certain experiences while overlooking others. The difference between the two is not merely academic. It shapes how citizens understand their place within the nation. It influences whether the nation is imagined as a shared inheri­tance or as the property of a favoured few.

India’s past does not lend itself easily to a single linear narrative. It is not the story of just one people, one language, or one faith unfolding in isolation. It is instead the story of a civilisation that has evolved through interaction, through encounter, through exchanges, through adaptations over some centuries. History becomes central to how we imagine our nation itself. For the way we narrate our past influences the boundaries we draw in the present, the lines between inclusion and exclusion, between belonging and otherness. If the past is presented as singular and homogeneous, the nation too begins to be imagined in those terms. If, however, the past is understood as layered and diverse, the nation can be seen as capacious, able to accommodate multiple identities without anxiety.

INDIA’S HISTORY CANNOT BE reduced to a single thread. It is a confluence of influences—Vedic, Puranic, Buddhist, Jain, Bhakti, Sufi, Islamic, and more—that have interacted over centuries. The popular perception in northern India often traces the arrival of Islam to the subcontinent to the military ex­pedition of Muhammad bin Qasim in 712 CE. Yet the historical experience of southern India, particularly Kerala, tells a mark­edly different story. For centuries before the advent of Islam, Arab traders had been regular visitors to the Malabar coast. They travelled with the monsoon winds, settled temporarily along the coastline, married into local communities, traded in spices and other goods, and returned home when the winds shifted. This pattern of seasonal migration, trade and cultural exchange continued for nearly a millennium, creating deep familiarity and trust between the Arab world and the people of Kerala.

It was through these longstanding relationships that news of Islam first reached the region—not through conquest, but through conversation. The Arabs who had become part of Kerala’s social fabric brought word of developments in their homeland: the emergence of a Prophet, the message he preached, and the transformations taking place in Arabia. These accounts were not the proclamations of distant strangers but the stories of men who had lived among Keralites for generations. According to Kerala’s historical memory, these reports so intrigued a local ruler, Cheraman Perumal, that he resolved to travel to Arabia to meet the Prophet himself. He is said to have organised a fleet of 22 ships for the jour­ney. Many of these vessels were lost or stranded near the islands we now know as Lakshadweep and the Maldives, but the king is believed to have completed the voyage. Traces of this journey endure in unexpected ways: in southern Oman, near Salalah, stand coconut trees whose origins are attributed to the coconuts he is said to have carried with him from Kerala—an evocative re­minder, since the coconut is not native to the Arabian Peninsula.

This narrative, deeply embedded in Kerala’s cultural memory, may or may not be apocryphal, but it underscores a broader truth: Islam’s arrival in southern India was shaped not by force but by exchange, encounter, and curiosity. It is a story of maritime contact, commercial interdependence, and civilisational dialogue—an account that complicates the more familiar narrative of conquest and highlights the diversity of India’s historical experience. Conversion is a bitterly contentious subject today, but a few centuries ago the Zamorin of Calicut was so impressed by the seafaring skills of the Muslim community (epitomised in the famed and fearless Kunjali Marakkars) that he issued a decree obliging each fisherman’s family to bring up one son as a Muslim, to man his all-Muslim navy.

And when the Muslim community in that part of Kerala became numerous enough that they needed a place to worship, they went to the Zamorin, the local king, who said, “No problem. There is a dis­used temple. You can have it.” And so, the oldest mosque outside the Arab world, in Kodungallur in Kerala, is still dominated by an ancient Hindu lamp outside the mosque. The mosque has gone through five or six major renovations over the centuries, but it originated within a few decades of the lifetime of the Prophet.

These are stories that perhaps in the north people are not told, or do not know, or choose not to remember. The story of Cheraman Perumal, the early mosque at Kodungallur, and the blending of local and Islamic traditions illustrate how Indian Islam also developed through encounter, not imposition. The Bhakti cult, the poetry of Kabir, the legacy of Nizamuddin Auli­ya, the emergence of Sikhism, and the evolution of Hindustani/Urdu all testify to this synthesis. Architecture offers another example. What we now describe as Indo-Islamic architecture did not replace what came before; it built upon it, incorporating local materials, techniques, aesthetics, masons, sculptors, who were already in India, into new forms. The result was not a rup­ture but a layering of Indian architecture. One might think of the Qutub Complex, of Fatehpur Sikri, of Humayun’s Tomb, of the Taj Mahal, not merely as monuments of various dynasties, but as evidence of a civilisation in conversation with itself.

What emerges from this narrative is not a story of separate strands moving in parallel but of continuous engagement. Tra­ditions did not merely coexist, they shaped one another. Influ­ences were not simply added, they were absorbed, transformed, and made part of a larger whole. What unfolded in India was a transformed and interwoven history that resists black-and-white retelling. There is a profound difference between ac­knowledging episodes of conquest and plunder, and reducing an entire historical era to conquest alone; between recognising moments of violence and conflict, and collapsing centuries of social, artistic, linguistic, and administrative exchange into a narrative defined solely by violence. To do so is to overlook the far larger processes of interaction, adaptation, and mutual influ­ence that shaped our society over a long period of time.

To acknowledge this complexity is not to romanticise history or deny its conflicts. It is to resist the temptation to flatten it. Selective interpretation—highlighting episodes of conquest while ignoring centuries of coexistence—narrows perspective and sharpens communal boundaries today. It reframes a shared past as a contested one. The result is not clarity but distortion. The Battle of Haldighati illustrates this danger. It is often simplisti­cally cast as a Hindu–Muslim confrontation, Mughals versus Rajputs, but this misrepresents the facts. Akbar was not present; the Mughal forces were led by Raja Man Singh, a Rajput; and Maharana Pratap’s commanders included a Muslim general, Hakim Khan Sur. The conflict cannot be reduced to a religious binary. It was a political struggle within a complex, multi‑layered society.

Writing history is not merely an intellectual undertaking; it is also a civic act. The way a society narrates its past shapes how it understands itself, how it relates to its own diversity, and how it imagines its future possibilities. His­torical interpretation therefore carries consequences far beyond academia.

The Moplah Rebellion of the 1920s in Kerala illustrates this vividly. The episode has generated multiple, often compet­ing interpretations: a liberal reading that emphasises agrarian grievances and social tensions between Muslim peasants and Hindu landlords and resists communal narratives; a Marxist account that situates the uprising within broader class conflict; and a Hindu‑nationalist narrative that foregrounds communal violence. Each interpretation draws on evidence, each highlights a different dimension of the event, and each reflects the concerns of the community or ideol­ogy advancing it. The point is not that one version is ‘correct’ and the others ‘incorrect’ but that history, when approached seriously, resists singular explanations.

The task, then, is not simply to get the past ‘right’ in some definitive sense; there may be multiple ‘rights’. It is to engage with the past in a manner that enlarges our understanding rather than constricts it. A confident society does not fear complexity; it recognises that historical events can bear multiple meanings and that these meanings may coexist in tension. To insist on a single, flattened narrative is often a sign not of strength but of insecurity. A mature engagement with history requires intellectual honesty, a willingness to confront uncomfortable facts, and the civic courage to acknowledge that our past—like any nation’s—is layered, contested, and open to reinterpretation. When we ap­proach history in this spirit, we do more than reconstruct what happened. We cultivate the capacity to imagine a future worthy of the richness of our inheritance. Engaging with history should expand our understanding of the present, not limit it.

THUS MUSLIM POLITICS during the national move­ment cannot be reduced solely to the separatist politics of the Muslim League. Jinnah’s ideas differed from those of Maulana Azad, and in very different ways from those of Maulana Maududi; both differed from those of Allah Bux, the Sindh premier and opponent of Partition who commanded larger audiences than Jinnah in 1943, prompting his tragic as­sassination. Islam was not a monolith; its political expressions were diverse. A serious engagement with the past requires us to hold together these contradictions—to see history as a continu­ous process of interactions, not a sequence of disconnected episodes. When this continuity is overlooked, history becomes vulnerable to manipulation for present‑day political purposes.

Ultimately, the civic purpose of history is to help societies understand how they became what they are, and to imagine what they might yet become. Preserving the richness and openness of historical inquiry demands intellectual honesty and civic courage. History has always been shaped by interpretation, but today the struggle over interpretation has moved decisively into the public sphere. No longer mediated primarily by historians, the past is now contested by politicians, social media platforms, and public opinion. History is not merely studied; it is deployed. What is at stake is not only factual accuracy but the authority to define meaning. Competing narratives seek legitimacy in the present, using the past as a battleground for contemporary claims.

This shift has transformed the nature of historical debate. The question is no longer simply what happened, but what the past is made to signify today. Interpretation is not new, but the speed and scale at which simplified assertions now circulate—ampli­fied without the discipline of historical method—have eroded nuance. Assertions travel faster than arguments, and conviction often overwhelms evidence. The result is an inversion: instead of the past informing the present, the present increasingly reshapes the past to suit current anxieties and aspirations.

This explains why debates over history today carry such intensity. Who writes history, then? Not only historians: we all do. India’s story cannot be reduced to a single lineage or a single grievance. It is a confluence of influences—indigenous and foreign, harmonious and conflictual—that together form a shared inheritance. A more responsible engagement with history demands fidelity to evidence, respect for context, and intellectual seriousness. It requires acknowledging that societ­ies evolve through encounters, conflicts, accommodations, and exchanges—not through a single, unbroken civilisational thread. India’s past exemplifies this complexity.

A society that embraces the complexity of its past is better equipped to build a future worthy of its inheritance.