Union Minister Amit Shah the other day made a statement that we should write our own history and discard the history that covers Mughals etc as covered by Western historians.
Then last week we have NCERT editing our school textbooks to delete mention of the Emergency and the Gujarat riots.
Amit Shah probably is not aware that we did write our own history by those who lived in the courts of our own Indian rulers like Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj and others.
These were called Bakhars and were existing in Mughal times also. All these Bakhars tended to be laudatory in nature and it was a very difficult exercise to sift fact from fiction in these writings.
That is why we tended to follow the Western version of our history where fact predominated fiction though certain definite biases existed.
Thus we as Indians need to remain rooted in truth and fact while recording history that will stand the test of time. And therefore the Emergency and the Gujarat riots should be restored in our school textbooks.
