Romila Thapar’s critique of the NCERT history textbook deletions—particularly regarding the removal of the Mughal period, portions on Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, and references to social inequalities—focuses on the dangers of politicising pedagogy and breaking historical continuity. She argues that these actions are not “rationalisation” but “rationing” of knowledge, designed to foster a narrow, ideological, and often inaccurate understanding of India’s past.
Ranjan Solomon
I share Romila Thapar’s views entirely. Her sharp criticism of the removal of Mughal history from NCERT textbooks is not merely an academic objection; it is a political warning of profound importance for India’s democracy, intellectual life, and moral future.
Speaking at the Kerala Literature Festival in January 2026, Thapar called the deletion of Mughal and Delhi Sultanate history from school textbooks “nonsense.” The bluntness of her words is deliberate. What is at stake is not a minor curriculum adjustment but the integrity of historical understanding itself. History, she reminds us, is not a menu from which governments may choose what suits their ideological appetite. It is a continuous, evolving process shaped by people, cultures, conflicts, and exchanges over centuries. To tear out entire dynasties is to rupture the story of India itself.
The Mughal period is not an isolated chapter that can be safely discarded. It is woven into the very fabric of Indian society—its administrative systems, architectural traditions, languages, legal frameworks, agrarian policies, and cultural synthesis. Remove it, and students are left with unexplained gaps: How did modern governance evolve? Why do our cities, monuments, cuisines, and idioms look the way they do? How did ideas of pluralism, court culture, and imperial administration develop? A history taught in fragments becomes incoherent, and incoherence breeds ignorance.
Thapar’s most crucial intervention, however, lies in exposing the political motivation behind these deletions. She rightly identifies them as attempts to reshape the past to suit a narrow ideological project masquerading as nationalism. This is not about improving pedagogy or reducing syllabus burden; it is about manufacturing a politically convenient memory. When history is filtered through ideology, it ceases to be a tool for understanding and becomes an instrument of control.
Thapar argues that history is a continuous, interconnected process. Deleting large sections (such as 300 years of the medieval period) creates unbridgeable gaps that confuse students and hinder a comprehensive understanding of how events are linked. She asserts that the deletions are not aimed at reducing academic burden (as claimed) but are a deliberate attempt to enforce a specific ideological, and majoritarian view of history, replacing critical inquiry with a “homogenous” narrative.
The danger here is twofold. First, it reduces history to propaganda. Second, it trains young minds to accept selective truth as the norm. Students are not encouraged to question, analyse, or understand complexity; instead, they are fed a sanitised narrative designed to produce conformity. This is what Thapar means when she warns against “closing the mind.” A closed mind is not curious, not critical, and not free. It is obedient. The prohibition of discussions on deleted topics in classrooms is a direct attack on critical thinking. She emphasises that education should encourage students to ask “why” and “how,” rather than passively accepting a singular, government-approved narrative.
Equally important is her warning about the rise of “pop history”—simplistic, sensational, and often false narratives circulating widely on social media. When professional, evidence-based history is pushed out of classrooms, it does not disappear. It survives in universities, research institutions, and international scholarship. What disappears is access to rigor for ordinary students. The result is a divided intellectual world: one where serious history continues elsewhere, while citizens educated at home are left with distortions, myths, and half-truths. By erasing or reducing content on diverse cultural interactions, the Bhakti-Sufi traditions, or uncomfortable aspects of social history (like caste), the deletions threaten to erode India’s secular, democratic, and pluralistic identity.
This should deeply concern anyone who cares about India’s place in the world. A country that teaches manipulated history to its children isolates itself intellectually. It raises generations unfamiliar with how historians work—with evidence, debate, contradiction, and revision. Instead of learning that history is contested and complex, students learn that it is fixed, unquestionable, and aligned with power. That is not education; it is indoctrination.
Thapar’s critique also carries an ethical lesson. The Mughal period, like all historical eras, includes achievements and failures, tolerance and violence, innovation and excess. To teach history honestly is not to glorify rulers or whitewash oppression, but to confront the past in its entirety. Selective deletion does the opposite: it replaces moral engagement with erasure. A society that cannot face its past honestly will struggle to deal justly with its present
Thapar’s overarching lesson is that for a democracy to thrive, its education system must foster independent thought, and that a “Nation” depends on drawing diverse people together, rather than segregating them through a filtered, divisive history.
___________
Ranjan Solomon is a writer, researcher and activist based in Goa. He has worked in social movements since he was 19 years of age. The views expressed here are the author’s own and Clarion India does not necessarily share or subscribe to them. He can be contacted at ranjan.solomon@gmail.com
