Rewriting history in two leading democracies

novels and many screenplays, wittingly noted, “I think little of

people who will deny their history because it doesn’t present the

picture they would like. That’s the conundrum facing two

standout democracies on the opposite sides of the globe: American,

which prides itself as the oldest, and Indian, which boasts of being

the biggest. In both countries, attempts are being made to rewrite

national history to either expunge those parts of it that appear

incompatible with their respective nativist-nationalist narratives or

otherwise are allegedly too heavy and painful for students to

grapple with.

In India, the new textbooks on history and politics that were issued

to 12th graders earlier in April have been surgically edited to either

trim or expunge references to Islamic Rule of India; the secular

The vision of India promoted by Gandhi-Nehru has been glossed over

and attribution to Gandhi’s assassination by a Hindu extremist has

been dropped; British India, street and city names have been

swapped from Islamic to Hindu names.

Dinesh Prasad Saklani, director of the National Council of

Educational Research and Training (NCERT), which monitors

textbook content, justified the curriculum changes as being to

lessen the burden on frazzled students after the pandemic; to

circumvent repetition; and to reclaim the proud traditions of India.

What is lost in this crusade to reclaim the sublime past is that, in

the long arch of India history, conquerors, traders and migrants all

enmeshed in India, turning the subcontinent into the multi-ethnic,

polychrome, polyglot that it’s today. The Aryans, the progenitors

of Hinduism, themselves were invaders of India in the 16th

century.

In acceptance of India’s ethno-cultural diversity, the founders of

independent India fashioned the Constitution (1950) as a liberal

and pluralistic democracy; and BR Ambedkar, the British-

American trained polymath, a Dalit who served as the lead author

of the Constitution, presciently noted: “If things go wrong in the

new Constitution, the reason will not be that we had a bad

Constitution, what shall we have to say that Man was vile. like

Modi, Ambedkar came from Gujarat.

Americans, too, have periodically engaged in efforts to whitewash

those parts of national history that address what remains the

nation’s enduring social dilemma: race relations. In the early 20th

century, for example, the American historian Ulrich B. Phillips,

who largely defined the field of Southern history and slavery in the

United States, used the diaries and letters of plantation owners to

portray plantation slavery as essentially a school through which

Kindly masters taught practical skills to an inferior people. “The

history of the United States has been written by Boston and largely

been written wrong,” Phillips complained. “It must be written

anew before it reaches its final form of truth, and for that work, the

South must do its part.

William A. Dunning, Phillip’s mentor at Columbia University and a

staunch defender of the Old South, depicted the Reconstruction

the period which followed the Civil War as a disaster for the defeated

South and an ill-advised effort to incorporate the newly freed

African Americans into American political and economic life.

The works of these two professional historians greatly

influenced—and continue to influence—how white Americans

viewed African Americans. White Southerners viewed their work

as complete justification of their racist views. Every Southern

state adopted history textbooks that far surpassed the work of

Phillips and Dunning in excusing the use of violence to insure

continued White dominance. While the views of Phillips and

Dunning were totally discredited by professional historians by the

middle of the century, the state history textbooks remained in use

well into the 1970s, including in the Black schools of the

segregation era. There have been efforts anew to rehabilitate their

writings. Generations of historians trained by the two scholars over

their long careers have continued with the teachings of their

mentors.

Racial anxiety among Whites, especially those with less education

and in lower socioeconomic circumstances, fuels much of the White

supremacy. Like many authoritarian critics of history, they wish to

return to an imagined golden era of a White Christian nation.

Republican leaders across the nation are attempting to prevent the

teaching of the history of subjects they find unpalatable, especially

slavery, the segregation era, and the civil rights movement;

however, they are uninterested in developing a narrative based on

readily available primary sources. Such topics, they claim, portray

them and their children as racist and make them feel

uncomfortable.

White racial anxiety in America and Hindu perturbations about

demographics in India are informed by the “great replacement

theory.” Many whites believe that their political enemies are

deliberately attempting to replace them with African Americans

and non-white immigrants; for their part, many Hindus have

internalized the message that if the Hindus don’t produce more

Children India will turn into a Muslim State. In 2022, a study led

by Stephanie Kramer, a scholar who studies demographics of

world religions at the Pew Research Center, concluded that “as

many people convert to Hinduism as the number that leave the

faith.”

This imagined dread guides the current White supremacist and

Hindutva narratives in the two leading democracies; and this

substitution of political beliefs for facts presents American and

Indian democracies with what may prove to be their gravest

challenges. “Without debate, without criticism no administration

and no country can succeed,” John F. Kennedy shrewdly noted,

“and no republic can survive.”

This article is authored by Ravi Kalia, professor of history, City College of New York and Melton McLaurin, emeritus professor of history and former associate provost, University of North Carolina, Wilmington.