Utpal Kumar’s Eminent Distorians: Twists and Truths in Bharat’s History is a gripping and incisive critique of the ideologically entrenched post-colonial Indian historiography. The transfer of power in 1947 also marked the transfer of agency. The agency of writing objective history soon succumbed to political pressures and ideological entrapments. Therefore, the history project undergirded subjectivism, sycophancy and negationism.

The writers of objective history were cancelled. Antithetical voices were categorically suppressed. Their works were prevented from publication, circulation and readership. Political correctness overrode academic history. Any neutral assessment of historical personalities was portrayed as negative and divisive.

Distortion, misrepresentation, concocted conclusions and deliberate misreading constituted the core of oriental historiography on India and the historiography of the ideology-intoxicated Indian historians. Political expediency and ideological overbearing determined the nature, scope and character of history writing. Whitewashing and selectivism dominated the space of Indian history. Therefore, history became metahistory, inventing space for new approaches, new heroes, new causes and new villains, disregarding the weight of contrary evidence.

This inventiveness became a euphemism for Orwellian doublespeak. British historian David Starkey writes, “History properly told is the basis of our civilisation." History can be cathartic if factually told. It defines the sense of who we are.

Ambiguity and forced arguments, with no evidence to hold them, became normal in the new historiography. National history, Kumar argues, became inaccurate and partial. The non-partisan and non-ideological historiography of Jadunath Sarkar, R.C. Majumdar and others were allowed to dissipate on the sidelines of history writing. Therefore, Kumar proposes rewriting Bharat’s history, removing the ideological crust that has sat on it for decades.

The irrational mainstreaming and marginalising of historical events and personalities inseminated history with anomalies. Kumar’s book corrects the anomalies of history to unearth suppressed realities of Bharat’s story. The Sanskrit word itihasa, meaning it thus happened, lost its meaning in the narratology of history.

In Chapter 1, ‘Saraswati Sutra: How Harappan and Vedic Cultures are Two Sides of the Same Coin’, Kumar argues that the Aryan Invasion and migration theories were invented to portray Bharat as a land of invasions and migrations deficient of indigeneity and made into a........

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