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History in History: Interpretations of the Indian Pasts is not about the history of India but about the evolution of the conception of history in India. As a record and reconstruction of the past, as social perception and as an important part of national, group or individual mindset, development of this consciousness through the epochs differ not only in techniques, forms of socio-political organization and values but also by how people recall their past, inquiring the bygone times to understand their present and future.

Tracing the evolution of Indian historical perspective, this book delineates four main historical periods. During precolonial times, history was primarily a ‘morale’ or a construction of eternal values that the future generation would inherit from their forebears. The colonial period is discussed in two chapters: one on the ‘imported history’ of India that Orientalists believed to have been ingrained in native minds, and a second register of different nationalist ideologies where the past was projected onto the present and the future. And finally in post-independence India, the past has turned into a ‘battlefield’ with different factions struggling to create their own historical interpretation of the Indian nation.