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The film Chhaava, centred on Maratha king Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj, has sparked debates about its portrayal of history. Yet, rather than simply asking what the film gets right or wrong, perhaps we should ask: Why does such distortion happen?

The answer to the question lies in understanding the result of a fundamental rift –– between conceptions of history outside its academic confines, as opposed to its academic counterpart that strives toward ‘decolonisation.’ The national populace’s general mistrust towards the academic practice of many historians and archaeologists working in universities comes from the latter’s refusal to engage in the pursuit of a ‘glorious Hindu nation’ that supposedly was. Any other historical undertaking would inevitably lead to derogatory tags like ‘urban naxal’, ‘Lutyens gang’ or ‘left-liberal.’

The roots of history’s politicisation in India trace back to the late 19th century, when nationalist movements first demanded that Indians reclaim their history from British colonial accounts. Until then, Indian history was dominated by British colonial frameworks, epitomised by James Mill’s influential The History of British India. Mill explicitly divided Indian history into three adversarial stages — Hindu, Muslim, and British — portraying Muslims as aggressive outsiders who corrupted a pure and ancient Hindu civilisation.

In doing so, colonial historiography justified British rule as a supposed liberation from Mus­lim despotism, firmly embedding the Hindu-Muslim binary into historical consciousness. This simplified binary can be traced even further back to the late 18th-century Orientalist scholarship. British Orientalists, working predominantly with upper-caste Hindu literati, sought original texts (‘ur-texts’) like the Manusmriti to codify Indian traditions. Their selective focus on Hindu religious texts as the essence of authentic Indian civilisation implicitly marginalised Muslims as historical intruders.

By presenting Hindu culture as India’s timeless and original heritage, Orientalism (ironically co-opted later by nationalist history) established the groundwork for the communal divisions that began perpetuating in the following decades, reinforced through governance mechanisms such as the census. Moreover, colonial administrative practices did not allow for archival access in the colonies, thus prohibiting the growth of inquiry using the archives.

In 19th-century colonial India, British administrators treated archival records primarily as instruments for bureaucratic efficiency, tax collection, and land revenue management. Unlike in Britain, where archives became accessible symbols of government accountability, in India, archives and historical records suffered from administrative neglect.

This neglect laid the foundation for India’s contemporary archival mismanagement, where invaluable documents routinely rot, disintegrate, or vanish altogether. The economic dynamics of British imperial rule further shaped the nationalist historical project. Following economic crises like the Union Bank collapse in Calcutta (1848) and the British Crown’s takeover of India (1857), the Indian mercantile class, particularly in the Bengal province, lost significant power. Stripped of economic and political agency, the colonised middle class in India turned towards cultural domains, particularly history, as a means of resistance to colonial domination. Strangely mirroring the Volk projects shaping European literary culture, intellectuals in India’s presidency towns crafted nationalist ‘histories’ using myth, blurring the distinction between the two.

Anyone familiar with Dakshinaranjan’s Thakumar Jhuli would notice its resemblance to Grimm’s Fairy Tales — both collections of folklore preserving cultural memory against the onslaught of modernity. In European imperial metropoles, folklore remained a literary pursuit, since ‘scientific history’ naturalised modernity as the culmination of enlightened civilisation. In contrast, Indian intellectuals, grappling with colonial subjugation, turned to mythic pasts, envisioning nationalist resurgence through the excavation, recording and thus recovery of the same.

Bankim Chandra Chattopa­dhyay typified this nationalist historiography. In 1880, through his Bengali magazine Bangadarshan, Bankim called on Bengalis to reclaim their martial heritage using ancient epics like the Mahabharata as historical sources.

However, rather than rejecting orientalist categories, Bankim and other nationalist writers embraced and reinforced them. Muslims continued to be depicted explicitly as foreign aggressors, deepening communal divides and further embedding colonial historiography’s simplistic Hindu-Muslim binary within Indian nationalism. This tendency carried over into the post-colonial period, shaping how the new republic envisioned its history.

Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision of history in The Discovery of India also played a role in framing India’s identity through ancient texts such as the Vedas, Upanishads, and epics like the Mahabharata and Ramayana. In these texts, he sought a ‘romantic’ vision of India that regrettably aligns with Hindu nationalist claims of cultural continuity, which was supposedly disrupted by Muslims and the British. These Hindu nationalist claims even permeated one of the supposed ‘secular’ institutions investigating history — The Archaeo­logical Survey of India (ASI).

This institution carried on its legacy of the early orientalist scholarship: they gave ‘scientific’ veracity to the search for texts that revealed the ‘origins’ of Indian civilisation by locating it in the earth and excavating it to reveal ‘ancient truths’. In postcolonial India, this explicitly became the search for a ‘Hindu past’ in service of a ‘Hindu nation’. While academic history came to be ‘decolonised’ (albeit incomplete), through interventions of Marxists, the Subaltern Studies and a rehabilitated Cambridge School, the ASI never shed its oriental roots. The efforts to identify locations mentioned in the Mahabharata and Ramayana, along with the Saraswati Heritage Project aimed at uncovering archaeological sites along the mythical Saraswati River referenced in the Rigveda — illustrate this tendency.

Therefore, it isn’t a coincidence that the former director of ASI, B.B. Lal, a part of the archaeology of the Ramayana Sites Project (1975-1985), argued that there existed a Ram temple below the Babri Masjid. His intellectual milieu is that of the long nineteenth century which has shaped ‘our’ historical thinking since – that of the community at large, and not necessarily the academic historian. There is a reason why fake WhatsApp histories prevail in community consciousness more than academic history. It is not merely because academic historians do not engage in the public sphere. In fact, the contrary is often the case.

Therefore, to reclaim history from a community that valorises itself while excluding others — and a governmental apparatus overtaken by the same ideology — we must bridge the divide over what defines legitimate sources of knowledge about the past, and a credible approach to history. To salvage the national imagination of India, we must save the ever shrinking worlds of Indian history.

This story was originally published in The Statesman, an ANN partner of Dawn.