How India’s history is taught to its schoolchildren has become one of the more contentious battlegrounds of the Modi era, with the National Council of Educational Research and Training revising textbook content in ways that have drawn sustained criticism from historians and welcome from government supporters. This article examines the specific changes and the arguments on each side.
The Specific Content Changes
NCERT has trimmed or entirely removed several chapters and sections covering Mughal-era history from its revised textbooks, changes documented in detail by Civilsdaily’s coverage of the revisions and BOOM’s fact-checking explainer on the specific content affected. Careers360’s reporting found that historical figures including Tipu Sultan and Raziya Sultan, the medieval Delhi Sultanate’s only female ruler, were removed from certain textbook editions, changes an opposition Member of Parliament specifically questioned NCERT about, with the Ministry of Education describing the changes as “contextual” rather than ideologically motivated, according to the same report. Coverage by The News Minute, in a piece titled “Omissions and revisions in Modi years: How NCERT textbooks are being rewritten,” documented a broader pattern of edits extending beyond Mughal history to other politically sensitive topics covered in school curricula.
Who Has Criticised the Changes
The criticism has come from a range of historians and opposition politicians. Prominent historian Romila Thapar was quoted, in coverage by Careers360 from the Kerala Literature Festival, calling the removal of Mughal content “nonsense,” arguing that “history must be continuous” rather than selectively edited for contemporary political comfort. Deccan Herald’s coverage of a broader historians’ critique carried the specific framing that the chapter removals were “driven by divisive and partisan agenda,” according to the historians quoted in that report. Kerala’s state education minister V. Sivankutty publicly called the changes an “injustice to students” and asked the central government to reverse them, according to Careers360’s reporting, illustrating how the textbook debate has also become entangled in broader centre-state political friction, covered in more detail in our earlier article on Modi’s impact on Indian federalism.
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The Government’s Framing
The Ministry of Education and NCERT have generally framed the changes as rationalisation rather than ideologically driven removal, arguing that textbooks needed updating to reduce curriculum overload on students and to better balance coverage across India’s full historical range rather than what supporters characterise as an earlier, disproportionate emphasis on specific historical periods at the expense of others. Time magazine’s coverage, in a piece titled “India’s School Textbooks Are the Latest Battleground for Hindu Nationalism,” presented this tension directly, noting that supporters of the changes frame them as correcting a colonial-era and post-independence historiographical bias, while critics see a politically motivated erasure of specific chapters of India’s shared, syncretic past.
The Uneven State-Level Rollout
Because education is a subject states also have authority over, the specific NCERT changes haven’t been adopted uniformly across the country. Careers360’s reporting found that Uttar Pradesh’s government schools formally adopted the revised NCERT textbooks, Mughal history exclusions included, from a specific academic session onward, while other states, particularly those governed by opposition parties, have in some cases continued using earlier textbook versions or developed their own supplementary state curricula, meaning what Indian schoolchildren are actually taught about this history varies meaningfully depending on which state, and sometimes which specific school board, they attend.
Why This Debate Extends Beyond Any Single Chapter
The specific content changes, whether limited to a few pages on Mughal-era rulers or extending further, matter to both sides less for their individual page counts and more for what each side believes they represent about how a nation’s shared historical narrative gets constructed and by whom, a genuinely difficult question that predates this specific government and will likely continue regardless of how any individual textbook edition is eventually resolved.
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The Broader Pattern Beyond History Alone
While Mughal-era history has drawn the most sustained attention, the revisions have also touched other politically sensitive subjects in social science and civics textbooks, according to The News Minute’s broader documentation of the changes, including how specific past events and periods are framed and contextualised for students. This pattern illustrates that the debate isn’t confined to a single historical era or dynasty, but extends to a wider set of questions about how India’s more recent and more distant past alike gets represented in the curriculum every schoolchild in the country encounters.
Why Textbook Debates Recur Across Different Governments
It’s worth noting that disputes over how history textbooks should represent contested periods of India’s past are not unique to this specific government, with previous governments, including Congress-led ones, having also revised NCERT curricula in ways that drew their own contemporaneous criticism from historians and commentators aligned with different political perspectives, suggesting that textbook content has functioned as a recurring political battleground across multiple governments rather than a phenomenon confined to this particular decade, even as the specific content and scale of the most recent changes have drawn unusually sustained and widely covered criticism.
Bottom Line
NCERT’s textbook revisions since 2014 have trimmed or removed content on Mughal-era history and other historical figures, changes historians including Romila Thapar have criticised as a partisan rewrite of India’s shared past, while the government frames the same changes as rationalisation and curriculum rebalancing, a dispute that has also become entangled in broader centre-state political friction as individual states choose whether to adopt the revised national textbooks or continue with earlier versions.
Disclaimer: This article is based on publicly available NCERT curriculum documents and news reports listed below. It is written for general informational purposes and does not represent an official statement from the Government of India, the Ministry of Education, or NCERT.
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