New Delhi: The NCERT’s new Class 8 Social Science textbook, in a chapter called ‘The Rise of the Marathas’, compares a raid carried out by Shivaji on the Mughal enemy camp in the dead of the night to a “modern-day surgical strike”.
The book describes Shivaji, the founder of Maratha Empire, as a “strategist and true visionary” while introducing Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, as a “brutal and ruthless conqueror, slaughtering entire populations of cities”.
Referring to Maratha kings as rulers who “established sovereignty”, it says about Shivaji, “…within his lifetime, his exploits had become legendary across India and beyond”.
‘The Rise of the Marathas’ adds that Shivaji raided his enemy’s camp at night “with only a few” soldiers. “This daring raid resembles the modern-day surgical strike,” it says, with “surgical strike” highlighted in purple.
Another chapter, ‘Reshaping India’s Political Map’, says Babur “enslaved women” and erected “towers of skulls made from the slaughtered people of plundered cities” when he entered the Subcontinent after being “thrown out of Samarkand (modern-day Uzbekistan)”.
Initially, the Mughals and the Delhi Sultanate were part of the Class 7 social science curriculum. However, the NCERT has now replaced those chapters with new ones on the Magadha kingdom, the Mauryas, the Shungas, and the Sātavāhanas.
Now, it is the Class 8 social science textbook that introduces students to the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughals, and the Marathas. In the textbook, named ‘Exploring Society: India and Beyond’, the NCERT has added what it has called a ‘Note on some darker periods in history’, along with a disclaimer.
The note says, “Understanding the historical origin of cruel violence, abusive misrule, or misplaced ambitions of power is the best way to heal the past and build a future where, hopefully, they will have no place.”
“No one should be held responsible today for events of the past,” reads the disclaimer.
ThePrint reached NCERT Director Dinesh Prasad Saklani for comment through calls and texts. This report will be updated if and when a response is received.
Speaking to ThePrint, Irfan Habib, a historian of ancient and medieval India said history depended entirely on facts, not religion, and that the past could not be changed, just by removing parts of it from the syllabus.
Habib added that no Constitution existed at the time, so all rulers ruled by the sword. Calling the revisions a part of political strategies, Habib said, “Rajputs, for instance, were equally cruel. There is no need to see it through the prism of religion.”
Dynasties would not have survived if the rulers were not good strategists or swordsmen, he added.
“This is a faulty and farcical way of going about making changes,” Habib said, adding that the distortion of history is a way of turning history into mythology.
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Shivaji was ‘careful’ not to attack religious places
The book claims Shivaji was always “careful” not to attack religious places and mentions a “retaliatory action” that involved Shivaji attacking Surat, which, it says, was a “great insult” to the might and prestige of the Mughal Empire.
In contrast, it describes the Sultanate period as one marked by political instability and the destruction of temples and seats of learning. During Alauddin Khilji’s conquests, “Hindu centres such as Srirangam, Madurai, Chidambaram, and possibly Rameshwaram” came under attack, the textbook says.
Discussing the Mughal Empire, the text says Akbar tried to intimidate the Rajputs during the Chittorgarh attack by proclaiming he had already occupied several “forts and towns belonging to the infidels” and “established Islam there”.
Akbar, once called ‘The Great Akbar’ in history textbooks, ruled with a “blend of brutality and tolerance”, the text says, adding: “Despite Akbar’s growing tolerance for different faiths, non-Muslims were kept in a minority in the higher echelons of the administration…”
‘Can’t selectively glorify or vilify historical figures’
Arvind Sinha, a retired history professor from Jawaharlal Nehru University, told ThePrint that history, as a discipline, should be rooted in objectivity, warning that “prejudice” not only distorts facts but also has a harmful influence on young minds.
“You cannot selectively glorify or vilify historical figures. For instance, Shivaji cannot be viewed as a hero in isolation, without acknowledging the historical context, including Aurangzeb,” he said, adding that rulers operated under different circumstances, something that needed to be understood, not judged.
He also drew parallels with Pakistani textbooks and their “ideological portrayals” that made thinking among students narrow.
“If you omit facts or twist them to suit a narrative, you are not teaching history, you are promoting propaganda,” he said, adding that the problem was not limited to any one political party. “Ideological influence, whether Marxist or Right-wing, has no place in History textbooks.”
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
Also Read: Aurangzeb is politics, not history. Indian Muslims must bury his ghost
Sure we should not see things from a prism of Religion. But we certainly can see it from point of view of ethnicity. The sultans were foreigners and didn’t see the native people equally. Violence done by them on us should be shown as wrong and violence done by us on their constituents should always be shown as right on account of them being in the wrong place.
Good to see long due changes in the academic system of India along with it this Article would be even more better if it referred to Our kings with their Titles like adding “Chhatrapati” or even “Chh.” Before Shivaji Maharaj’s name as these small changes would be slowly instill in the readers and would eventually become a non negotiable part in our entire new generation, which would further help in the widespread awareness of our nation’s true heroes
It seems even the Print does not allow comments to say anything against Shivaji
Clever backdoor propaganda by equating Op Sindoor with some raid of Shivaji. They are making school textbooks a joke. Also I am sure Maratha reign would be shown in these books as some golden period with no “dark periods.”
“Balanced history” is only reserved for Muslim rulers.
Absolutely one sided article – you only got irfan habib and one other jnu joker.
Indian history, right from the concoction of the Aryan invasion theory has been deliberately distorted, by colonialists, Christians and Islamic scholars.
As much as the current efforts might appear laughable if they weren’t so dangerously corrosive, Mr. Irfan Habib is hardly in a position to pass judgment. He, alongside Ms. Romila Thapar, has arguably inflicted more long-term damage on the teaching of Indian history than any regime or curriculum committee ever could. Their decades-long ideological project—to whitewash the atrocities of medieval invaders, to recast centuries of documented violence as benign cultural exchange—has been less about historical accuracy and more about pushing a political narrative. In their zeal to absolve present-day Muslims of any association with historical misrule—an association no serious person was proposing—they’ve instead insulted the intelligence and lived memory of generations of Indians. Simultaneously, their emphasis on internal divisions within ancient Indian society seems almost calculated to forestall any cultural resurgence or sense of civilizational pride. By swinging the narrative so far to one extreme, they’ve all but ensured that the backlash would not halt at the center but lurch hard in the opposite direction.
When it comes to the ongoing controversy around revisionist textbooks, one is left wondering what the current government truly hopes to accomplish. It is, of course, not novel for regimes—left or right-leaning—to reshape history curricula in their ideological image; this is a familiar phenomenon across time and geography. The effort to correct past distortions introduced by leftist historians is, in principle, commendable and perhaps even long overdue. However, when the pendulum swings so far that it results in the blatant rewriting of established historical facts, the credibility of the entire educational apparatus begins to erode. Students will no longer place faith in academic textbooks; instead, they will turn to WhatsApp forwards and YouTube ideologues to fill the resulting vacuum—a prospect far more dangerous than the ideological excesses of any single government.
Are we to believe that our collective national ego, even after 75 years of independence, remains so brittle and unformed that it cannot look its past in the eye? Is it truly necessary to paper over uncomfortable truths in order to sustain a fantasy of cultural infallibility? The past cannot be retrofitted to suit present-day insecurities. It is high time we step off this ideological seesaw, stop weaponizing history as a tool of political warfare, and instead teach our youth to confront the past honestly—so they may face the future with clarity and confidence.
The “Textbook History” pendulum is swinging to the other side. Textbooks during previous governments refused to acknowledge atrocities of Muslim rulers and almost entirely failed to mention achivements of Shivaji, Viajaya Nagar etc. The hue and cry of rewriting history should also hold earlier omissions accountable for this trend and neither can be justified.
Biased propoganda as expected from a true momin