The video of a young vlogger complaining about a guide named Abdul giving wrong information about the carvings of Shiva and Parvati on and inside the great rock-cut Kailashnath Temple at Ellora in Maharashtra predictably went viral recently. But, not entirely for all the right reasons. For, if Abdul had provided erroneous explanations for the depictions of the god and goddesses for 50 years as asserted, that it had gone unnoticed for so long is equally worrisome.

Many people who have hired tour guides at historical spots have noticed them making fanciful assertions, mostly to titillate their customers. In the case of intricate Hindu, Buddhist and Jain sculptures, guides often simplify complicated concepts to retain the attention of usually distracted tourists. At least that is the charitable conventional explanation. Yet the vlogger’s contention is that such wrong information also serves to mislead and misguide the unwary.

That, of course, is possible only if the people are clueless and hence swallow whatever is dished out to them with confidence. Foreign tourists mostly fall into that category. Sadly, though, that is indeed the case more often than not, even with Indian tourists these days. Generations of boring teaching of history and a disdain for India’s past cultivated by slanted narratives has led to a wilful ignorance even among those Indians with degrees to prove an ‘elite’ education.

In the case of the Kailashnath Temple, despite his protestations to the contrary, the vlogger was primed to the idea that the guide spouted incorrect explanations because he was from another faith. But even guides of the same faith—also caste, region, and any other marker of commonality—have been known to be equally cavalier in their explanations. Perhaps those guides are getting away with it because people assume they know the intricacies of their own faith.

The popularity of “mythologists" in India is also linked to this continued reign of uninformed guides too. Their audiences are primarily clueless about........

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