TO THOSE THAT CLAMOUR FOR NARRATIVE CHANGE

TO THOSE THAT CLAMOUR FOR NARRATIVE CHANGE

It is important that those who clamour most that the history of India should be rewritten or written correctly should themselves read up whatever has already been well chronicled and not quote in debates and discussions fictitious stuff which make them laughing stock as so-called historians who are in essence the upholders of the banner of the political dispensation of the day.

This statement of mine is thereby not to be misinterpreted as coming from someone who believes that the current narrative of Indian history is at all accurate and that adjustments to it by way of rectification of anomalies ought not to be done. Far from it. What is here being implied is that few read whatever material is already available and it is these who clamour the most for greater factual availability. In other words, there is a tremendous deal of insincerity involved in all this clamouring and people ought to be diligent enough to probe a bit more into whatever is there as of now in the books of history. That will do the country a world of good for it will raise the average intellectual standard of the polity.

However, amendments to the narrative and addition of left-out material must be executed and history must be intelligently provided to the people increasingly in the form of finely tuned audio-visual presentations. This will help the common man who is unused to heavy reading with easy access to historical information.

Let this be done, but let those who clamour so much for the cause of narrative change show some mettle in intellectual pursuit of data already there before them. This is the minimum one can expect from potential amendment-movers and historical course-changers of the day.

Written by Sugata Bose [Sugata Bose]