On the 6th and 7th of August 2025, History for Peace conducted its regional conference at St Kabir Public School in Chandigarh discussing 'What is History'. The conference explored how different actors––students, historians, institutions, the government etc.––interacted with the past and lent the past different meanings. How many of these could we call 'history'? In the same vein, the conference also explored the pedagogy of history, how to do public history and the urgency of such an endeavour in the present.

Anirudh Kanisetti explored how the politics of history-writing becomes marred with the politics of the present in his talk, ‘Notes from the Digital Trenches’. He began his talk with an excerpt from Horace Miner’s paper on the Nacirema culture. The paper explored the culture’s quest for the ideal body and its performance of group ritual activity. This was nothing but a great academic in-joke to turn the anthropologist’s gaze––often exoticizing an other––onto the American culture (Nacirema being nothing but American spelt backwards). Yet this indictment of the anthropologist’s gaze, which given the discipline’s origins is often a colonial gaze, makes us wonder––did we ever move past a colonial perspective? He notes how we keep projecting the contemporary onto the past and questions whether the discipline of history supports the seeing-ourselves-in-the-past project. The looming role of the government and its interventions in the discipline’s discourse further re-asserts the colonial paradigm of history writing. 

Anirudh Kanisetti | Notes from the Digital Trenches

Kanisetti skilfully maps a series of events––the Prime Minister’s visit to Gangaikondacholapuram, Amish Tripathi’s recent novel The Chola Tigers (about Rajendra Chola helming an ‘indigenous’ army out to avenge Ghazni’s sacking of Somnath and restore the sanctity of ‘Bharat’) and the personal backlash he faced for using the term Brihadeshwara temple (a Sanskrit term), not Peruvudaiyar (a Tamil term) in a recent project with the MAP Academy to digitally reconstruct the Brihadeshwara temple drawing attention to the bright colours that must have adorned the facade of the towering structure. He shows how when viewed together they show the machinations of an echo-chamber that is designed to curate a ‘national’ culture. In this instance, this national culture revolves around appropriating kings in the name of decolonization. Kanisetti questions the nature of this decolonization––why choose these kings? Who is constructing this ‘indigenous’ category? What is so offensive about a Chola King using a Sanskrit word for a temple? Were these not part of the cosmopolis they inhabited that was different from our own?

An information eco-system floating on the algorithms of social media platforms guides our navigation through the world around us. Yet, Kanisetti affirmed his strong belief that even on such platforms there are voices that can critique the powers that be. He highlighted the role of Facebook in mobilizing the Arab Spring and how Chinese media control continues to be subverted by new ways of critique like via Toad King memes. Therefore, he asserts that the same platforms can summon powerful voices of dissent in novel ways. 

Krishna Kumar spoke about the peculiarity of teaching a subject like history to children, whose ability to grasp the past changes as they grow older. His talk, ‘History and Childhood’ grappled with this idea––how history is taught and conceptualized in the syllabus does not match how children conceptualize time. When children are in their primary years, they are able to satisfy natural curiosities which emerge from what they experience around them––Why is the sky blue? Why does it rain? Why do seasons change? Therefore, in a child’s primary years, science and geography responds to their curiosity. 

Krishna Kumar | History and Childhood

One cannot expect a nuanced idea of the past––that each thing has a past of its own––in a four- or five-year-old. In fact, at that age, the earliest memories are borrowed memories i.e. those narrated by our parents, family, etc. Kumar points out that it is only from the age of eight onwards––perhaps more so from the ages of ten and eleven––that we begin to perceive biological time. Therefore, Kumar questions the framework that begins in the distant ancient past because that sense of time, as cognitive psychology has attested, simply cannot be grasped by a child of eleven or twelve. 

Learning something before one is ready for it can be a great hindrance. Therefore, Kumar advocates teaching through experience, doing history rather than knowing history. Hence, he encourages pedagogical approaches that teach questioning rather than simply knowing the past. Living with questions and deferring one’s curiosity enables one to achieve a certain perspective on time. Kumar argues that technology has led to burgeoning impatience, that patience is a virtue that once more must be cultivated. Learning history and understanding the past is key to accessing a historical consciousness and a sense of the collective. 

In ‘History as Pedagogy? Reflections on writing history books for children’ Anwesha Sengupta and Debarati Bagchi reflected on their experience of writing history books that were not meant for the academic community but had a much younger audience in mind. Troubled by the way the discipline was being preyed on by non-experts and how these non-experts were commanding young impressionable audiences, wielding history like a sword to swing election results, Sengupta and Bagchi, as professional historians, decided to write for a different non-academic audience. This marked the beginning of the Itihase Hatekhori (First History Lessons) project. Hatekhori literally implies initiation into writing with a piece of chalk, almost a ritual practice in Bengal. This project was envisaged as an initiation into complex historical concepts and a historian’s world. 

Anwesha Sengupta and Debarati Bagchi | History as Pedagogy?

Over three years, nine books were published––three each year. They were originally written in Bangla, then translated into Assamese, Marathi and now, English with further translations planned too. The Bangla books also feature illustrations by patachitra artists, Ranjit and Sirajudaulla Chitrakar. For Sengupta and Bagchi, the process of writing books like this was new––it involved workshops with students and teachers, where students as the primary stakeholders were often the harshest critics. The books, spanning across a variety of topics––from the Partition (Desh Bhag), to rivers (Nadir Chola) to clothes and attire (Poshak Ashak)––showed how one engaged with history in different ways i.e. it did not have to be history of events, it could also take more longue duree approaches or explore themes like nation, nationalism, belonging and borders through rivers or clothing. 

These books were also directly engaged with how a historian practises her craft. Instead of long intimidating bibliographies, the books carry a page ‘And Finally’ that explains how the historians who authored these books found their sources, introducing the idea of verifiability and source reliability. Alongside the books, Sengupta and Bagchi worked with their team to curate games. The card game based on their book, The World of Tea, for example, is based on the idea of understanding labour welfare. Through the project, Sengupta and Bagchi were trying to create a history book that could be a pleasure-read and discuss themes that emphasize not only that everything has a history but why it is important to learn about these histories. 

On the second day, the audience learnt about archaeology, how its findings work to build a sense of historical consciousness, institutions that are state- and privately-funded that practise archaeology and the politics of practising archaeology in contemporary India. Supriya Varma in ‘Archaeology, Media and Politics’ introduced the discipline as one which looks at things in use and disuse and emphasized that neither was archaeology simply a source for writing history, nor was the discipline confined to the ancient past. Varma drew attention to how institutional setups had contributed to the impression that archaeology and mining archaeological evidence became irrelevant with the suffusion of textual sources in later time periods but emphasized how crucial archaeology could be to studying material histories––for recreating households, settlement patterns and more–––for the medieval, early modern, colonial and even contemporary periods, citing her recent attempts to do an archaeology of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. Historical archaeology is then a discipline that integrates textual, oral and material sources and studies them intertwined with histories of colonialism, nationalist historiography and more to construct a sense of the past. 

Supriya Varma | Archaeology, Media and Politics

Varma outlined how archaeology of ‘deeper pasts’ had come to mean an archaeology of ‘origins’ and hence, a race to be the first. In South Asia in particular, this was largely politically motivated and the early periods were held to be  key to understanding ‘what defines us’. This understanding of the deep past often blurred lines with the quest for building a historical justification for modern territorialities of the nation state. This could easily be understood by looking at how the Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology Departments play a dominant role as compared to university departments that conduct research based on the needs of the discipline and intellectual curiosity, not the demands of the state. Furthermore, she outlined how the language question and the debate about the origins of iron had been mined to create a divide between the north and the south of India with the who-did-it-first debate at its fulcrum. She pointed out how the race to be the first to have iron and hence, the first to be more urban and ‘civilized’ had obscured more interesting conversations––What kind of iron was being produced and how? What role did iron play in society? Who had access to iron? Did that hierarchize society? Who acquired specialization in iron production and how? 

Even touching on the current debate about the site of Keeladi in Tamil Nadu, Varma laments how archaeology has transcended archaeologists and has moved into the domain of politicians. She shows how whilst it  is impossible to evaluate the ‘truth’ of the Keeladi dates unless the complete reports are published, that at the heart of Amarnath Ramakrishna’s transfers lies the issue of identity-politics leveraged above the discipline. If Ramakrishna and Ajay Kumar’s dating of the urban settlement at  Keeladi is to be believed then urbanization in the southern areas of the subcontinent was not part of a ‘civilizing process’ from the Aryan north; the second urbanization in the south of India predates what was considered the second urbanization in the north. However, a scholarly discussion on this is impossible while the report, its authorization and more remains tied to the domain of non-experts, whose passionate speeches may bring votes but only tarnish the discipline. 

The concluding address by Kanad Sinha discussed the making of myth and history along with how the former, comprising many literary sources, is used by historians of early India to write history. Sinha began his talk, ‘Myth, History and Historical Traditions: Understanding Early Indian Literary Sources’ by narrating to the audience the story of Angulimala––a formidable dacoit who wore a garland of severed fingers––gave up his violent disposition after an encounter with the Buddha. The story of Angulimala could be found in the Majjhimanikaya but the question the historian had to grapple with was this––Is this a myth? Other sources affirm other events from the Majjhimanikaya so are we to believe that the events narrated in the ‘Angulimalasutta’ actually occurred? Sinha explains that instead a historian instead of dwelling on the events would frame questions differently––what does the story convey? Why are these ideas of the Buddha relevant at a time when urbanization was at its peak? What does this tale tell us about a primarily oral tradition that was textualized much later? Was the ‘Angulimalasutta’ performed? This became Sinha’s entry-point to discuss the nuances of interpreting historical sources and much of this had to do with what was considered ‘history’.

Kanad Sinha | Myth, History and Historical Traditions

Scholar administrators of colonial India approached the then formalizing discipline of history with a Rankean positivist outlook and thrust that understanding onto the wealth of material they discovered in India. There is much to be grateful for––the sheer scale of the translation, publication and access to early Indian source material is thanks to the efforts of these scholar administrators but their scholarship and perception about India left lasting fissures. They propounded the view that prior to Kalhana’s twelfth century Rajatarangini, India had no sense of history. The colonial flirtation with the romance of spirituality in ancient India, spurned any actual quest for ‘history’ (with the exception of F. E. Pargiter’s Ancient Indian Historical Tradition which explored the Vedic tradition and the Puranic tradition, believing the former to be the work of brahmanas and lacking a historical consciousness, the latter to be about the kshatriya tradition preserved by suta bards). Many nationalist scholars, trained in the same positivist outlook, accepted the colonial proposition. In the meantime, efforts to include subaltern voices began to show a certain hesitancy with the empire of history, preferring to engage in dialogue with living traditions of myth-history rather than a discipline whose subjects were mute voices of the past. 

Did the presence of a religious tradition mean the absence of historical consciousness? Romila Thapar’s Past Before Us (2013) pointed to more secular origins of a historical consciousness from lineage based societies. This was embedded historical consciousness different from an externalized historical consciousness, the latter produced by state societies. Thapar skilfully showed that even the entire Occidental corpus of history––Thucydides, Herodotus, Tacitus and more––would not match the colonial criteria for admission into the academe of history. In short, there were many ways of understanding history outside the positivist pigeon-box championed by post-Enlightenment scholars. This brought Sinha to the question of the Mahabharata (MBh), a text that claimed itself a work of itihasa par excellence. Sinha explained that this itihasa was not then comparable to positivist history; it did indeed claim to be an authentic narrative of events but their authenticity lay not in their facticity but in their engagement with didactic themes of dharma, artha, kama and moksha. Therefore, the Mahabharata composed over centuries marking the culmination of the Vedic historical tradition and the birth of the Puranic one has important historical characters comprising the Kurus of the early Vedic. However, historians reading the Mahabharata to understand the transition from the Early Vedic to the Puranic, from clan-based to state-society must keep the itihasa tradition in mind. Therefore, Thapar shows us how the narrative sections of the MBh served clan society whereas the didactic sections (often later additions like served monarchic society. Sinha’s lecture illustrated this citing many examples from the Mahabharata repeatedly emphasizing that the discipline of history and itihasa could not be blurred but it would be wrong to suggest that there was no historical consciousness in the idea of itihasa. 

Workshops

The workshop, ‘Creating Historical Consciousness: The Role of the Teacher’, was conducted by Dr Shivangi Jaiswal. This workshop, although intended for history teachers, found a diverse audience that included English, social science and education specialists, all keen to understand the significance of cultivating historical consciousness among students across age groups. The first half of the day featured lectures that gradually transitioned into interactive discussions, with participants exploring how the ideas presented could translate into classroom practice. These exchanges—marked by debates, agreements, and disagreements—created a strong foundation for the collaborative activities that followed, allowing participants to reflect on their understanding of the concepts and issues discussed. 

The workshop sessions combined reflection and hands-on activities to deepen this engagement. Teachers began by identifying historical events they believed had a major impact on today’s world, followed by a group exercise on historical thinking. In collaborative discussions, each group selected a significant event to analyse further. Participants then chose a social identity connected to the event and wrote diary entries from that perspective. These exercises were designed to understand and reflect on the significance of historical empathy and critical awareness while highlighting the teacher’s role in helping students explore how history is not simply a record of facts but a constructed narrative shaped by voices, perspectives, and silences.

In ‘Thinking Historically: A brainstorming session with students’ Anwesha Sengupta and Debarati Bagchi critically interrogated the relationship between past and history, raising the following questions––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 our young? Each student was given a paper chit and there was a statement written on it. They were to identify whether the sentence was more like a statement from a history book or a more general statement about the past. The students were then asked to justify/defend their position. This led to conversations about the historian's craft, of narrativizing the past in a particular way. Then the students were asked to write a paragraph using that sentence. Those who had received ‘general’ statements were asked to write a historical paragraph and vice versa. The objective was to show that meanings are rendered to information through narration by the historians.

Here are a few examples:

Example 1: My great grandfather preferred coffee over tea. This statement was identified as a general statement by the student. Then he added a few questions to this sentence like - was it common to drink coffee in those days? Was it common among people who were rich? How expensive was coffee? Was there any local plantation or was coffee imported from outside? If imported, what route did it follow? The student said that if he could find answers to these questions it would lead to history writing because it would tell us so much about habits, trade, cultures of not only the great grandfather but also of his time. 

Example 2: Akbar reigned between 1556-1605. This was identified as a statement from a history book. Then the task was to put it in a paragraph that was not from a history book. Someone wrote––Akbar reigned between 1556-1605. During his time lived a beautiful girl in a tiny cottage. This girl fell in love with a boy. The boy was also a good man who worked for Akbar. When this boy and girl got married Akbar joined their wedding party and celebrated.

Sumona Chakravarty and Shreeja Sen conducted a workshop on ‘Myth, History and Mirages: The Past Through History Paintings’  where they discussed the rise of the genre of History paintings and their usage in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century world. Did depicting the past historicize it or mythologize it? What were the politics of this representation? What was the role of the painter? Was he simply a mouthpiece of the empire? With this the workshop tackled not just the contours of depicting the past and reading the past through sources but also probed different pedagogic methods of introducing art to the history classroom.

One of these methods was ‘Images Without Context’ where participants had free reign to conjecture the meanings of the artwork prior to a formal introduction to the painting Chakravarty and Sen traversed through DAG’s library of Henry Singleton’s paintings and other artists’ depiction of the Anglo-Mysore wars to gauge what ‘history’ was being dramatically brought to life via these artworks. Another one of these methods was to have the participants imagine themselves as characters in the artwork and question what role they played in the drama of the piece, where their gaze was fixed and whether they would have been there when the actual event took place. 

In ‘Framing the Past: Cinema, Power and Politics’ students were made to look at period films from Bollywood and gauge why a particular theme was chosen, how it was depicted, how the audience reacted to it and the consequences films such as these had in contemporary India. Deeptha Vivekanand and Mayukhi Ghosh opened the workshop by showing a clip from The Legend of Bhagat Singh (2002) which criticized Gandhi’s inaction, accusing him of being selfish and not ‘doing enough’ to prevent Bhagat Singh’s hanging. This was followed by a discussion with students who echoed that they had ‘heard’ similar things at home, these clips were popular on social media etc. Students were asked how they would come to an opinion about Gandhi’s decision if they were a historian. Students were shown excerpts from A.G. Noorani’s scholarship and the work of academics like Chaman Lal, Aditya and Mridula Mukherjee to understand what sources they interrogated and how they reached a conclusion. 

Students were taken on a cinematic ride from the 60s to the present, looking at how various Bollywood films were responding to/being influenced by the pulse of the times. This included Upkaar (1967), Amar, Akbar, Anthony (1977), Bombay (1995) and even the recent Ram Setu (2022). Apart from what was shown, students were asked to think about why this is what was depicted, the emotions captured by the films and their capacity to influence action. Following this they were made to view scenes from the blockbuster Chhaava (2025) about Sambhaji’s kingship. They had to question what was shown and read anecdotes from historians that contextualized what was not shown. Students were asked if all perspectives had been entertained by the film, that in its prefatory scene advocated critical thinking when viewing such a film and consultation from a variety of sources. They were also asked about representations––in a film about great heroes and warriors, what about the common man in the eighteenth century caught in the midst of this turmoil? 

Reports by Anwesha Sengupta, Debarati Bagchi, Shivangi Jaiswal and Mayukhi Ghosh.