Re-Thinking 'Never Again'

History for Peace
May 31
9 min read

History for Peace conference

26, 27 June 2025

Vidyashilp Academy, Bangalore

Historical consciousness—the way societies understand and interpret their past—plays a significant role in shaping present conflicts. Many global disputes today are rooted in historical grievances, collective memory and the way history is taught and perceived.

History plays a crucial role in shaping our sense of belonging. It connects us to our roots, showing where we come from and how our ancestors lived. It forms the foundation of cultural identity, helping us understand traditions, languages, and customs that have been passed down through generations.

History also reveals collective struggles, achievements and shared experiences, fostering a sense of solidarity among people who identify with a particular historical narrative.

However, History also contributes to many global disputes today––disputes that may have taken shape to right historical wrongs, to assert one’s own identity at the risk of encroaching upon another’s. Whose historical injustice deserves redressal? How do we identify an act of historical injustice in the first place? When history continue to be a mobilizing factor for violence, the idea that history is a discipline that allows us to learn from our past mistakes––the rallying call after the Second World War that such horrors would occur ‘Never again’––seems to be merely a theory.

At this conference we will address the urgent need to self-reflect on the why, how and what of teaching History to move towards a well-developed and honest approach that lays the foundation of shaping a historical consciousness in our young that builds empathy and understands the need and importance of reconciliation between warring factions.

This conference seeks to explore the fundamental question, "What is History?" by engaging scholars and educators in a multidisciplinary dialogue. Key themes include the objectivity of historical narratives, the influence of culture and power in historiography and the evolving perspectives on what constitutes historical truth. Through keynote speeches, panel discussions and workshops, the conference aims to deepen the discourse on history's purpose and relevance in today's world with a special focus on the high school classroom.

PROGRAMME

Day 1

26 June 2025

Opening Address: Kalai Selvi, Principal, Vidyashilp Academy

Vidyashilp School

Introducing History for Peace

Meena Megha Malhotra, Director, History for Peace.

Keynote Address: Tanika Sarkar

Tanika Sarkar is a historian of modern India with an expansive body of work that spans themes of nationalism, caste, women and gender in the colonial and postcolonial periods. Her published work includes Bengal 1928-34: Politics of Protest; Hindu Wives, Hindu Nation; Rebels, Wives, Saints: Designing Selves and Nations in Colonial Times; and more recently, Hindu Nationalism in India. She has worked on extensive readers such as Caste in Modern India and Women and Social Reform in Modern India. She has also co-edited volumes with Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Humeira Iqtidar, Amrita Basu among others. Her most recent publication is Religion and Women in India: Gender, Faith and Politics 1780s–1980s (Permanent Black and Ashoka University, 2024).

Dr. Sarkar graduated from Presidency College and did her Masters from Calcutta University before finishing her PhD. at Delhi University. She has taught at Indraprastha College and St. Stephen's College before joining the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU where she retired as Chair of Modern History. She has held the post of Visiting Professor at numerous universities including Yale University, University of Chicago, University of the Witwatersrand and Göttingen University to name a few.

India before Islam: Notes from Teaching the History of Religion in Early India

Naina Dayal

These days, a peaceful, tolerant Hindu-Buddhist ancient period is often contrasted with a violent Muslim/medieval phase of Indian history. The latter is portrayed as a period of conflict between indigenous religious traditions and Islam. I draw attention to a range of interactions between the belief systems of early India, which included hostility and persecution. I also look at how rulers engaged with the religious plurality of their times. And finally, I explore how ‘religious’ texts of different traditions made fun of holy men and women. This is important to remember at a time when allegations of ‘hurt sentiments’ can make it difficult to write and teach about our complex pasts using a range of sources instead of taking pride in a single ‘glorious’ past.

Naina Dayal teaches early Indian history at St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi. She has published on Puranic Hinduism, the Sanskrit epics and the Pali Jatakas. Her research interests include the period c. 320 BCE to 300 CE, and the history of Delhi in the 20th century.

Plenary Workshop

Reflections on the morning

Parallel Workshops

[GROUP A]

The AI We Need: Nurturing ‘Authentic Intelligence’ and Criticality in the Classroom

Shahnaaz Khan

The workshop will engage with understanding, evaluating and interpreting the use of Large Language Models and Generative Artificial Intelligence to make sense of our histories, societies and the human condition. As more students use these models to ask relevant social and historical questions, the workshop will take educators through an experiential and critical engagement with what these tools offer, how they present their answers, and how one can approach complex issues and contexts through a critical lens. The aim is to empower educators with the tools needed to enhance student understanding of the pros and cons of such tools in making sense of the world we live in. To continue to be critical readers of information; nurturing human intelligence that is reflexive, responsible and resilient.

Shahnaaz Khan is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. She has also been a Social Science and Political Science teacher at Shiv Nadar School, Noida, along with experience in the nonprofit sector on human rights research and advocacy in India and in the UK. Her academic and professional work has centered on understanding social identities, marginalisations and the impact of dis/misinformation in fragmenting societies, and on policies which address these issues. She has also worked on research on the political economy of edtech during Covid-19 and has co-authored papers forthcoming.

[GROUP B]

What if? – Lessons for the History Classroom

Sunita Biswas

History, we know, is an account of the things that actually happened and not what almost could have happened, but did not. So, imagining an alternate history seems pointless speculation and has been dismissed by many historians for this reason. However, the moment we say that this battle, or that treaty, affected the course of history, we imply that if it had not happened the course might have been very different. In this workshop we will look at how, by making such implications explicit, the students’ insights into casualty and pre-determinism are deepened, as they study the role of historical context in decision making to understand that alternative outcomes were always possible. These lessons go beyond History to think critically about alternate outcomes of current issues.

Sunita Biswas taught history at the middle and senior levels at Modern High School for Girls, Kolkata. For more than 30 years her aim has remained to share with her students her passion for the subject. She has taught different curricula across different schools. In the classroom she has always tried to instil a questioning, critical interest that goes beyond the textbook and the curriculum, and that stretches far beyond school. For this she encourages her students to delve into songs, pictures—still and moving— posters and advertisements, among other sources. She likes to use a multi-disciplinary approach, encouraging students to join the dots and use lateral thinking to engage with History.

Sunita is full-time Senior Consultant at History for Peace.

[GROUP C]

History’s Shadows

Mayukhi Ghosh, Meena Megha Malhotra

How do societies interpret, remember—and sometimes forget—their histories of injustice? This workshop explores the role of memory in shaping historical consciousness—focusing on how events like the Holocaust and the Partition of 1947 are remembered, reinterpreted, and transmitted across generations. Through the arts, oral histories and personal narratives, participants will engage with memory as a living force that shapes identity, ideologies and responsibility—in the personal and the public domain.

We will highlight how echoes of historical injustice—perceived or experienced—influence responses to current events, helping participants to draw powerful connections between the past and the present. The workshop aims to equip teachers with reflective strategies and classroom tools to encourage nuanced, critical, empathetic engagement with history.

Mayukhi Ghosh graduated from St Stephen’s College. She is currently Researcher and Programme Co-ordinator at History for Peace and is pursuing a Master’s in History at Presidency University, Calcutta.

Meena Megha Malhotra is Director History for Peace. She has been working in the field of peace building through the arts and education for almost two decades.

Day 2

27 June 2025

Angana Chatterji

Erasure/Counter-Memory: De-racializing Kashmir in India’s Historical Present

The living history of those affected by India’s post-1947 government of Kashmir resides at the margins of dominant memory. Unknown, unmarked and mass graves, enforced disappearances, gendered and sexualized violence, torture, and extrajudicial executions constitute a symbolic and manifest apparatus of present-day “lynching” in Indian-administered Kashmir. State forces are tantamount to the mob that targets and kills Kashmiri Muslim (predominantly) men for alleged offenses. Atrocities evidence the alignment of India’s national security with routine violence and the spectacular brutality of a protracted, undeclared war that authorizes drastic impunity outside the rule of law.

This talk examines India’s nationalist and racialized claims on Kashmir. In interdisciplinary dialogue with filaments of an uncontained archive that story majoritarian India as coextensive with nation-making, this talk examines the inheritance and evolvement of a project in alignment with colonial and new and racialized oppressions. I draw on approximately five hundred interviews that I have conducted since 2006, and a reading of over 1,200 legal cases and records from India-administered Kashmir. These narratives construct a genealogy of cultures-in-resistance through oral history and counter-memory, to locate and intervene on the preponderance of agency and resources for growing the Hindu Right movement in India through the erasure and subjection of Kashmir.

Angana P. Chatterji is Founding Chair, Initiative on Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights at the Center for Race and Gender, University of California, Berkeley. A cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scholar of South Asia, she is a Research Fellow at the Center for Human Rights at University of California, Berkeley, and the Center for Human Rights and International Justice Stanford University; a Global Fellow at the Center for Law and Transformation, Chr. Michelsen Ins stitute and the University of Bergen; and a Distinguished Fellow, Rafto Foundation for Human Rights, in Bergen, Norway. Dr. Chatterji’s

work since 1989 has been rooted in local knowledge, witness to post/colonial, decolonial conditions of grief, dispossession, agency, and affective solidarity. Her foundational investigations with colleagues in Indian-administered Kashmir includes inquiry into unknown, unmarked and mass graves. Chatterji’s recent scholarship focuses on political conflict and coloniality in Kashmir; prejudicial citizenship in India; and violence as agentized by Hindu nationalism. Her research also engages questions of memory and belonging, and legacies of conflict across South Asia. Chatterji has served on human rights commissions and offered expert testimony to Indian Commissions of Inquiry, United Nations, European Parliament, United Kingdom Parliament, and United States Congress, and has been variously awarded for her work. Her sole and co-authored publications include: Breaking Worlds: Religion, Law, and Nationalism in Majoritarian India (2021); Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India (2019); Conflicted Democracies and Gendered Violence: The Right to Heal (2016); Contesting Nation: Gendered Violence in South Asia; Notes on the Postcolonial Present (2012); Kashmir: The Case for Freedom (2011); Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present; Narratives from Orissa (2009); and reports: Access to Justice for Women: India’s Response to Sexual Violence in Conflict and Social Upheaval (2015); BURIED EVIDENCE: Unknown, Unmarked and Mass Graves in Kashmir (2009).

Janaki Nair

Should Indian school children develop ‘National Pride’ or ‘Historical Understanding’

Questions of a Teacher reading textbooks

In our times, we are increasingly being told that children should learn only about the achievements and glories of the past, in order to develop pride and a sense of belonging. As a result, some of the pedagogically creative aspects of the NCERT textbooks designed and taught since 2006 have been altered. What did those books attempt to do and how did they address the issues and concerns of the times? How do the proposed replacements match up to the challenges that have been posed to history teaching and learning?

Janaki Nair was Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. She has been a Fellow at the Madras Institute of Development Studies and Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore. She has written on the social, cultural and political history of modern India. Her publications include Women and Law in Colonial India (Kali for Women 1996) Miners and Millhands: Work, Culture and Politics in Princely Mysore (Sage 1998) and The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century (OUP 2005). She has also produced and directed 'After the Gold', a documentary film of the Kolar gold fields (Betcam Video 1997).