Slightly rose-tinted Hindu-Muslim unity in Nehruvian textbooks by Left: William Dalrymple
Kolkata/IBNS: Acclaimed historian and writer William Dalrymple has justified the right-wing assertions that after independence, the government had left the responsibility to manage the academics of the country to the left, who presented a rosy picture of Hindu-Muslim unity in the history books.
Replying to a question on whether the right-wing is correct in alleging that after Independence, the academic part of managing India was given to the left, Dalrymple said, "It is true that the early Nehruvian textbooks were written by Romila Thapar and so on, many of whom were Marxists."
"Sometimes, those textbooks did sort of emphasise a slightly rose-tinted vision of Hindu-Muslim unity running through the whole of the Delhi Sultanate right through the Mughals," the Scottish historian, writer, art historian and curator with deep India connections said at Express Adda, a talk show organised by national daily Indian Express.
Dalrymple pointed out that such treatment of history "left room for the right-wing to say this isn’t history".
He, however, said that the Nehruvian historians were great historians, and their right-wing successors could not match their caliber.
"But the reality was that all those Nehruvian historians were great historians which the right-wing successors were not," concluded the writer who first came to Delhi in 1984 and lived in India on and off since 1989 spending most of the year at his Mehrauli farmhouse near Delhi. He spend his summers in London and Edinburgh.
His wife, Olivia, is an artist and comes from a family with prolonged India connections.
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