What is History - Regional Conference, Chandigarh

megha malhotra
Jul 21
11 min read

Updated: Jul 28

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PROGRAMME

Day 1

6 August 2025

Opening Address: St Kabir School

Introducing History for Peace

Meena Megha Malhotra, Director, History for Peace.

Keynote Address:

Notes from the Trenches: Challenges and Opportunities for History in India's 21st century Digital Commons

Anirudh Kanisetti

The ubiquity of mobile internet has fundamentally transformed how young Indians consume information—while, at the same time, making reliable historiography challenging to find online. Public historian Anirudh Kanisetti discusses the state of history learning in 2025, and why pedagogy and classrooms are ever-more important in an age where emotion and opinion seem poised to overpower facts.

Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian specialising in ancient and early medieval India. He is the author of Lords of the Deccan: Southern India from the Chalukyas to the Cholas; and Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire. He writes the Thinking Medieval column for ThePrint and hosts two podcasts: Echoes of India and YUDDHA: The Indian Military History podcast. Anirudh is currently Honorary Fellow at the Deccan Heritage Foundation.

He has won the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar, the Ramnath Goenka Sahitya Samman, and Tata Literature Live's Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award. He was an Open Mind of 2022, and on the New Indian Express' 40 Under 40. Anirudh was formerly Editor at the MAP Academy, where he worked on the Encyclopedia of Indian Art. Prior to this, he was Associate Fellow at the Takshashila Institution. His work has received grants from Princeton University, MAP Academy and the India Foundation for the Arts.

History and Childhood

Krishna Kumar

Children's curiosity about the past grows parallel to the development of their sense of time. The teaching of history as a school subject does not respond to this intellectual trajectory. Children remain vulnerable to the bits and pieces of information about the past to which they are exposed. What can schools and teachers do to enable children to distinguish between sense and nonsense in history?

Krishna Kumar is Honorary Professor of Education at Panjab University, Chandigarh. For most of his academic career, he taught at the Central Institute of Education, Delhi University. He served as Director of NCERT from 2005 to 2010. He is a bilingual author, columnist and children’s writer. Some of his books In English are Politics of Education in Colonial India; Education, Conflict and Peace; Prejudice and Pride; Battle for Peace; The Child’s Language and the Teacher and Thank You, Gandhi. His books in Hindi include Raj, Samaj aur Shiksha, Vichaar ka Dar, Choori Bazaar mein Larki, Padhna zara Sochana, and Bhasha ki Sanjeevani. He writes a column on poetry teaching in Cycle.

History as Pedagogy? Reflections on writing history books for children

Debarati Bagchi, Anwesha Sengupta

The paper reflects on our experiences of writing history books for middle school children. Between 2022-24 we have been engaged in a project titled Revisiting the Craft of History Writing for Children. As a part of this project nine illustrated history books were produced covering various topics of social, political, cultural and economic history. As a part of the writing and dissemination processes, we held numerous workshops with children, parents, and teachers. In this paper we discuss the diverse responses we received in these workshops. As historians how do we methodologically engage with these responses is the question that this paper addresses. We reflect upon how the experiences of writing and editing books for children and engaging with various publics have shaped our understanding of history as pedagogy.

Debarati Bagchi is a Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Director at the Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies, Delhi. Debarati’s PhD dissertation (Delhi University) titled ‘Many Spaces of Sylhet: Making of a Regional Identity’ explored the agrarian and cultural histories of frontiers and borderlands in colonial Northeast India. Post-PhD, Debarati’s area of research shifted towards the history and sociology of education. She has completed two postdoctoral projects, one on the connection between language and mass education and the other on education and urban transformation. Currently, she is part of the focus area Education and Learning at MWF Delhi. She works in the field of child pedagogy, public history and the history of production and regulation of textbooks in India. She has written and co-edited a series of alternative history books in Bengali for middle school children.

Anwesha Sengupta teaches history at the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata. Her areas of interest include partition, decolonization, popular movement, gender, urban history, and public history. She has written and co-edited a series of alternative history books in Bengali for middle school children.

Plenary Workshop

Reflections on the morning

Parallel Workshops

[GROUP A] TEACHERS

Creating Historical Consciousness: The Role of the Teacher

Shivangi Jasiwal

Whose story is being told? What voices are missing? What is excluded? What is being presented as ‘history’ and what is forgotten? What could be the consequences of excluding certain voices, events or perspectives? Such questions are central to cultivating historical consciousness. Historical consciousness is not just about ‘knowing’ history. It entails a critical engagement with and an awareness of the complex relationship between past, present and future, and involves a deeper understanding of how historical narratives are constructed. What would developing historical consciousness mean for teachers and students in the classroom? The workshop shall explore the essential role teachers play in shaping historical consciousness among students through their choices in content, pedagogy and classroom discourse. It aims at prompting inquiry into how teachers’ assumptions, approaches to teaching, and curricular choices could reinforce or challenge students’ way of thinking about- ‘What is history?’. Fostering historical consciousness is not merely an exercise in cultivating academic skills among students; it is to prepare them to think critically about the world beyond the classroom, and engage thoughtfully with the information they encounter, whether in media, public discourse or daily life, rather than accepting it uncritically.

Shivangi Jaiswal is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Humanities, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. She is a historian with research interests in social and economic history of modern India, labour history, oral history, and history of ideas. She holds a PhD in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, with a thesis titled “Representing Labour: Dalits, Workers, and the State in India, 1942-52”. She was awarded Erasmus+ scholarship for a PhD exchange at the University of Göttingen, Germany, and the Charles Wallace India Trust Research Grant in the UK. As a Research Associate, she has previously worked with the Association of Indian Labour Historians, V.V. Giri National Labour Institute, Transnational Research Group (Poverty and Education) under the AIIS-GHIL Delhi Program. She has published in leading journals and edited volumes on labour history, oral history, and history of medicine. She has taught History, Global Politics and Theory of Knowledge in the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme, and conducted pedagogy workshops for History for Peace, a network of educators and civil society members in India.

[GROUP B] TEACHERS

Myth, History and Mirages: The Past Through History Paintings

Shreeja Sen, Sumona Chakravorty

Myth, History and Mirages: The Past Through History Paintings is a capacity building workshop for educators, which explores approaches to using History Paintings from DAG's collection of Modern and Pre-Modern Indian art as primary sources for teaching history in schools.

The term History paintings, in the seventeenth century, was used to refer to works of art which depicted scenes from classical history, Greek and Roman mythology and the Bible. The genre evolved during the eighteenth century to also include works which depicted modern historical narratives as well. Once considered the pinnacle of painting in Western art, History paintings from the eighteenth up to the first half of the nineteenth century, was one of the few ways in which the European public envisioned Empire overseas and have had a lasting impact on the (re)imagination of colonial pasts.

This workshop will equip educators with resources and frameworks to analyse how these artworks depict, interpret and sometimes construct historical narratives and use them as catalysts in the classroom to foster critical discussions about who writes history, the relationship between myths and historical chronicles, and how we envision the past.

Sumona Chakravarty heads DAG’s Museums Programme. Her work is participatory in nature, engaging diverse communities through art and collaboratively intervening in public spaces. Sumona is a graduate of the Srishti School of Art Design and Technology, Bangalore, with a Masters degree from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. She has been a Fellow in the ArtThink South Asia Program at Khoj, Delhi and at the Global Cultural Leaders Program, hosted by the European Union.

Shreeja Sen heads the Education initiative at DAG’s Museums Programme. Her research interests include urban visual culture in modern and contemporary South Asia, art history and aesthetics, and cultural geographies of urban India. She was a Felix Scholar (2020-21) and has an MA in History of Art from SOAS.

[GROUP A] STUDENTS

Thinking Historically: A brainstorming session

Debarati Bagchi, Anwesha Sengupta

Accumulating information about the past is not synonymous with historical consciousness. But, we have seen, the distinctions often get blurred in history classrooms, social media platforms and popular writings. How do we distinguish between curiosity about the past and historical consciousness? How can we think of the past and the contemporary by looking at time as an analytical category? What are the modes through which children and young adults engage with the past? As historians, how can we adhere to certain methods of writing and teaching history for children and young adults and introduce concepts of thinking like historians in them? The workshop will facilitate conversations between historians and senior school students around these questions and search for suitable answers. It will involve some interactive exercises where we will develop historical narratives from archival and other historical material.

[GROUP B] STUDENTS

Framing the Past

Cinema, Power and the Politics

Deeptha Vivekananda, Mayukhi Ghosh

The combination of emotional storytelling and powerful visual imagery make films a potent medium for mass appeal. Humans are wired to respond to stories and the ability of the moving image to engage viewers and grip the imagination makes them a powerful vehicle to influence perceptions.

Films evoke emotions. They leave a lasting impact. Often blurring the lines between fact and fiction, often bypassing the ability to think critically. This workshop looks at how the creative licenses and the craft of filmmaking are used to construct narratives that champion contemporary political agendas. Students will learn to read films critically, akin to how a historian reads ‘sources’.

The workshop is an exercise in showing how the inclusion of historical narratives in film is punctuated by the politics of the present. Participants will learn to critically interrogate a film’s historical claims as well as the politics behind them.

Deeptha Vivekanand is a story educator, curriculum designer, and professional storyteller specializing in the use of narrative as a pedagogical tool. She is the Storytelling and Reading Lead at St Kabir Public School, where she works to integrate storytelling with classroom learning across subjects.

She enjoys sharing folk and contemporary stories with audiences of all ages, and especially delights in helping students discover how stories shape the way they think, learn, and see the world.

As co-creator of the CBSE’s online training module Storytelling As Pedagogy, she has introduced educators to storytelling as a transformative approach to foster engagement, empathy, and critical thinking, while equipping them with practical tools to weave narrative into everyday classroom practice.

Her recent action research, published in A Learning Community of Reflective Educators, Routledge, 2024, focuses on building reflective teaching practices and supporting educators in using stories—both fictional and historical—critically. At the intersection of history, media, and pedagogy, Deeptha is particularly interested in how films employ the craft of storytelling to blur the lines between fact, fiction, and political agenda, making the case for why critical literacy is as essential as historical literacy today.

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.

Day 2

7 August 2025

Archaeology, Media and Politics

Supriya Varma

Archaeological excavations very often make front page news in the media. Usually this happens long before the data has been analyzed and published in academic journals. In fact, archaeologists are generally quite keen to talk to journalists about what they consider are the major findings. This is not just to quickly disseminate this information to the larger public but equally because of the curiosity that exists among people in knowing about what exists at these sites. Using some recent examples of excavations in India, the intertwining of archaeology, media and politics will be explored. There can be multiple dimensions of examining these relationships, but there is one which will be highlighted, and this concerns the impact of these reports on the public.

Supriya Varma has taught archaeology and history at several universities in the last three decades. Her research interests include varied themes such as land use, pastoralism, mobility, landscapes, waterscapes, urbanism, childhood, households, crafts, identities and heritage. Her earlier work focused on the Bronze Age and the Early Historic in South Asia but in the last few years she has been involved in archaeological projects of the more recent pasts.

Myth, History and Historical Traditions: Understanding Early Indian Literary Sources

Kanad Sinha

Understanding early Indian literary sources is a complex process that has to deal with two kinds of biases. On one hand, there is the prejudice derived from Colonial historiography, which argues that early Indians had no historical consciousness and therefore, produced no History and dismisses early Indian literature as mere religious myths. On the other hand, there is religious fundamentalism that claims the entire repository of early Indian religious literature as historical, without much methodological awareness and can hardly distinguish between fact and fiction. However, a brief survey of the historiography of early Indian history can help us understand how serious historical research, over decades, has created a robust methodology to decolonize our understanding of the past and make best use of early Indian literary tradition as sources of history. Romila Thapar, most notably, has presented the notion of ‘historical traditions’, or culture-specific traditions reflecting perceptions of the past, though not necessarily matching the methodology of the Occidental tradition named ‘History’. Using this methodology, one can understand the various perceptions about the past in early Indian textual traditions—initially embedded in Vedic, bardic, and Sramanic textual traditions and eventually externalized in historical biographies, royal inscriptions and regional chronicles. The lecture will illustrate the historical methodology to understand and deconstruct these various traditions—with examples from Vedic, epic, and Buddhist literature—and conclude with a discussion on how externalized histories, such as Kalhana’s Rajatarangini, often considered the oldest historical writing of India, is best understood as a culmination of the long history of early Indian historical traditions.

Kanad Sinha is Assistant Professor of Ancient Indian and World History in The Sanskrit College and University, Kolkata. He read History at Presidency College, Kolkata, and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and previously taught at various institutions including the St. Stephen’s College, Delhi and Udaynarayanpur Madhabilata Mahavidyalaya. His research interests include early Indian textual and intellectual traditions with focus on the itihasa-purana tradition, social and cultural history of early Indian cities, and the political ideas and institutions of early India. In 2016 and 2017, he received the Vijay Kumar Thakur Memorial Prize awarded by the Indian History Congress. He co-edited the anthology State, Power and Legitimacy: The Gupta Kingdom (New Delhi: Primus, 2018) with Kunal Chakrabarti. His monograph From Dāśarājn͂a to Kurukṣetra: Making of a Historical Tradition (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2021) has received the Karwaan Book Prize in 2022. He also contributes frequently to various Bengali and English dailies—including Anandabazar Patrika, The Telegraph, and Ei Samay, and writes literary as well as academic pieces for vernacular magazines. His Bengali essays have been published in the two volumes Valmiki, Vyasa, o Amra: Itihas-puran Bishayak Chhati Prabandha (Kolkata: Ektara, 2024) and India Banam Bharat Ebang Anyanya Prabandha: Itihascharcha o Itihas-tarjay Prak-oupanibeshik Bharat (Kolkata: Panchalika, 2024). He also has a collection of Bengali poems named Kenona Kuasha Aj Pratyeker Mane (Kolkata: Panchalika, 2023).