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For a long time now, many in India have harboured the convenient belief that if they come across a historical argument that criticises something about the Indian past, they can successfully counter it simply by saying, “That is Marxist history.” It’s an intellectually lazy move, but it helps people skip the process of pausing for a moment and thinking more carefully about what they’re reading or hearing. No wonder we see it being used, gleefully, all the time.

But what does “Marxist history” even mean?

Let’s begin with the concept of “historiography”. Consider this quote from an article on Indian history: “It has been only in recent years that the influence of ideologies on the interpretation of Indian history has been recognized; perhaps now for the first time, a history of the changing interpretations of ancient India can be written.” This quote reads like a line from some podcast monologue by one of the many Hindutva-leaning writers of history who have attained popularity in recent years. After all, the public discourse in India has been lately dominated by the supposed rescuing of history, from the “nefarious ideologies” of “leftist” and “Marxist” historians, enacted by such non-historian influencers. So it might come as a surprise to many that the above quote is not part of any such recent rescue exercise, but is from an article which appeared in a scholarly journal more than half a century ago in 1968. It was written by a 37-year-old Indian historian named Romila Thapar.

Titled “Interpretations of Ancient Indian History”, that article is a great resource to understand the basics of what academic historians call historiography, which is perhaps the most elemental of the research concepts one learns as a historian. Historiography has several related meanings, the most common being: the study of the different ways in which writers from different time periods or backgrounds etc. have written the history of a particular topic. It is, in short, the history of history-writing. A historiographical exercise focused on Indian history shows us, for example, that folks who were writing in the late 1800s produced narratives very different to the narratives of those who wrote in the early 1800s or the late 1700s. Besides, native Indian writers in the late 1800s produced a narrative of Indian history quite different from that of contemporaneous British writers, and Bahujan writers in the 20th century wrote histories substantially different from those of 20th-century elite-caste writers.

In the 1968 article, Thapar examines how historians/writers since the late 1700s have interpreted and written the history of the Indian subcontinent (or South Asia as we better understand it today). To the East India Company-employed Orientalists and Indologists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the primary motivation for exploring and writing Indian history was the requirement that the Company’s “officers, in........

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