Communalist Historiography

Communalist historiography India refers to the interpretation of India's past primarily through a religious community lens — framing historical change as the product of conflict between Hindus and Muslims rather than as a complex, multi-layered story shaped by economics, culture, caste, and syncretic exchange. It selectively marshals evidence to portray religious identity as the supreme motor of history.

What Is Communalist Historiography?

Communalist historiography treats religious community — Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh — as the primary unit of historical agency. It reads India's medieval and early modern periods predominantly as arenas of inter-religious struggle, suppressing extensive evidence of coexistence, shared cultural production, and syncretic devotion. Two distinct but parallel strands emerged in colonial and post-colonial India:

• Hindu communalist historiography — portrays medieval Muslim rulers as foreign oppressors who violated a primordially Hindu civilisation, framing Indian history as a story of Hindu resistance and ultimate recovery.
• Islamist communalist historiography — frames Indian Muslims as a historically separate nation whose cultural, political, and religious identity is fundamentally incompatible with coexistence in a Hindu-majority polity, thereby providing historical justification for partition politics.

Both strands share a defining methodological flaw: the selective use of evidence. Testimonies of Hindu-Muslim cultural exchange are dismissed or ignored, while accounts of conflict are amplified, decontextualised, and universalised. The result is a history that reads twenty-first-century communal categories back into a pre-modern world in which such identities operated very differently.

How Did V.D. Savarkar Shape Hindu Communalist History?

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar's foundational text Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (1923) provided the ideological scaffolding for the Hindu communalist school of history. Savarkar defined Hindutva not merely as a religious label but as a civilisational and quasi-racial concept: a Hindu is one for whom India is simultaneously pitrbhumi (fatherland) and punyabhumi (holy land). By this definition, Muslims and Christians — whose holy lands lie outside India — could never be fully Indian, regardless of how many generations their families had lived on the subcontinent.

Savarkar's historical narrative constructed the medieval period as a civilisational war in which Hindu kings were defenders of the nation and Muslim sultans were external aggressors. This framing had several concrete historiographical consequences:

• Rulers such as Mahmud of Ghazni, Alauddin Khalji, and Aurangzeb were reduced to one-dimensional destroyers of temples and Hindu culture.
• The collaborative administrative systems, shared artistic traditions (Mughal miniature painting, the ganga-jamuni tehzeeb), and economic integration of the medieval centuries were rendered invisible.
• Figures of cross-community devotion — the Bhakti and Sufi saints — were either ignored or their significance for inter-religious harmony was denied.
• Medieval history was periodised into a "Hindu golden age," followed by a "dark age of Muslim oppression," followed by British rule — a schema that R.C. Majumdar later popularised in the multi-volume History and Culture of the Indian People (Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1951–1977).

What Was the Islamist Communalist Counterpart?

The Islamist communalist strand, articulated by figures associated with the Muslim League and the two-nation theory, made parallel but inverse arguments. It framed Indian Muslims as a historically distinct nation whose civilisation was incompatible with a united India. Historians sympathetic to this view emphasised the separateness of Islamic civilisation on the subcontinent, downplaying the hybrid Indo-Islamic cultural synthesis — Hindustani music, Urdu poetry, Mughal architecture — and the degree to which Indian Muslims were overwhelmingly descended from local converts rather than from Central Asian immigrants.

Both communal strands reinforced each other in a dialectic of mutual antagonism: each found in the other's extremism a justification for its own. Together, they helped produce the atmosphere of communal polarisation that culminated in Partition and its accompanying violence in 1947.

How Does Communalist History Distort the Medieval Period?

A central criticism of communalist historiography concerns its treatment of medieval India. Rigorous modern scholarship demonstrates that the medieval centuries were characterised by profound syncretism and integration, not simply conflict:

• Syncretism in devotion: The Bhakti movement — Kabir, Mirabai, Ravidas, Tukaram — and the Sufi orders — Chishti, Qadiri, Suhrawardi — created shared devotional spaces drawing followers across community lines.
• Administrative and military collaboration: Rajput nobles served as generals and governors under the Mughals; Hindu bankers and merchants were integral to the Mughal revenue and trade system.
• Shared artistic and intellectual traditions: Hindustani classical music, Mughal miniature painting (incorporating Persian, Central Asian, and Indian elements), and the emergence of Urdu as a literary language are products of synthesis, not of civilisational opposition.
• Temple destruction in proper context: Where temples were destroyed by medieval rulers, modern historians — most rigorously Richard Eaton in his study of temple desecration — demonstrate this was overwhelmingly a political act targeting royal legitimacy symbols, not a systematic religious programme. Hindu kings similarly destroyed the temples of rival Hindu dynasties.

Communalist historiography systematically collapses this complexity into a binary of oppressor and oppressed, projecting twentieth-century communal categories onto a pre-modern world where they did not exist in that form.

Academic Critiques: Thapar and Bipan Chandra

The most sustained academic dismantling of communalist historiography was undertaken by secular-nationalist and Marxist historians associated with Jawaharlal Nehru University from the 1960s onward.

Romila Thapar demonstrated that the very concept of a unified "Hindu community" throughout Indian history is an anachronism. Pre-modern Indians organised their identities around caste, sect, region, and occupation, not a pan-Hindu religious solidarity. The homogeneous "Hindu community" is, in Thapar's analysis, a product of colonial census categories and communalist construction — not an ancient social reality.

Bipan Chandra's landmark essay collection Communalism and the Writing of Indian History (1969), co-authored with Romila Thapar and Harbans Mukhia, directly confronted the communalist interpretation. Chandra argued that communalism — the belief that members of a religious community share identical political, economic, and social interests in opposition to another community — is a modern, colonial-era ideology that arose in the nineteenth century, not an ancient feature of Indian civilisation. Projecting it into the medieval past is therefore an ideological act disguised as historical scholarship.

Chandra identified three structural distortions in communalist history:

1. Essentialising of religious communities as permanent, monolithic, internally homogeneous blocs — ignoring enormous intra-community differences of caste, class, region, and sect.
2. The Hindu–Muslim–British periodisation of Indian history — itself a British colonial invention — treats religious identity as the sole criterion for historical periods, erasing all other dimensions of change.
3. Selective use of sources: eleventh-century Persian court chronicles celebrating conquest are treated as objective evidence of Hindu suffering, while records of coexistence, syncretic practice, and joint cultural production are discounted or ignored.

Why Is Communalist Historiography Dangerous for a Democratic Polity?

The dangers of communalist historiography extend well beyond academic debate into the realm of democratic governance and social peace:

• It fuels communal violence by providing historical "grievances" — real or manufactured — that inflame inter-community tensions and justify acts of retributive violence.
• It corrodes constitutional values: India's Constitution commits the republic to secularism and fraternity. A history that foregrounds permanent civilisational enmity between communities undermines those civic foundations.
• It distorts public policy: When political agendas are driven by communal historical narratives, rational policy on education, cultural institutions, and minority rights is displaced by identity mobilisation.
• It impoverishes historical imagination: By reducing the past to a single dimension — religious conflict — it erases class, gender, caste, and regional diversity from public consciousness.
• It is weaponised in textbook controversies: Debates over school curricula in India have repeatedly involved attempts to embed communalist narratives in state-mandated textbooks, shaping how millions of children understand their national past and their fellow citizens.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the core argument of communalist historiography in India?

Communalist historiography argues that Indian history is best understood as a record of conflict between religious communities — primarily Hindus and Muslims. It treats religious identity as the primary motor of historical change and portrays the medieval period as an era of Muslim oppression of Hindus (in the Hindu communalist variant) or as evidence of irreconcilable Hindu-Muslim difference (in the Islamist variant).

How did Savarkar's Hindutva influence historical writing?

Savarkar's Hindutva (1923) defined Indian nationhood in Hindu civilisational terms, effectively excluding Muslims and Christians. This framework influenced historians like R.C. Majumdar to interpret medieval Indian history as a story of Hindu resistance to Muslim conquest, suppressing evidence of syncretism, administrative collaboration, and shared cultural production that characterised the same period.

What did Bipan Chandra argue about communalism and history?

In Communalism and the Writing of Indian History (1969), Bipan Chandra argued that communalism is a modern, colonial-era ideology — not an ancient feature of Indian society. Projecting communal categories onto the pre-modern past distorts history. He identified the essentialising of religious communities, the Hindu-Muslim-British periodisation scheme, and selective use of sources as the three structural distortions of communalist historiography.

Was the medieval period in India purely one of Hindu-Muslim conflict?

No. Modern scholarship demonstrates extensive Hindu-Muslim syncretism through the Bhakti and Sufi movements, Mughal-Rajput political alliances, shared artistic traditions (Hindustani music, Mughal miniature painting, Urdu poetry), and integrated economic networks. Temple destructions, where documented, were primarily political acts targeting rival royal legitimacy — not a systematic religious programme — as historian Richard Eaton's research on temple desecration conclusively demonstrates.

How is communalist historiography relevant to UPSC preparation?

Communalist historiography features directly in UPSC GS Paper I (Indian History — medieval and modern periods), and in the History Optional paper on historiography. Candidates are expected to identify and critique communalist approaches, understand the distinction between communalist, Marxist, and nationalist historiographies, and apply secular-critical frameworks when answering questions on medieval India and the origins of communalism.

Sources and Further Reading

IGNOU study materials for MA History (MHI-01: Ancient and Medieval Societies; MHI-04: Political Ideas and Ideologies) provide the most accessible curriculum-aligned treatment of communalist historiography and are the recommended starting point for UPSC candidates.

• Thapar, Romila; Mukhia, Harbans; Chandra, Bipan. Communalism and the Writing of Indian History. People's Publishing House, 1969.
• Chandra, Bipan. Communalism in Modern India. Vani Educational Books, 1984.
• Savarkar, V.D. Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? 1923.
• Thapar, Romila. The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities through History. Aleph Book Company, 2014.
• Eaton, Richard M. "Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States." Journal of Islamic Studies 11(3), 2000.
• Majumdar, R.C. (ed.). History and Culture of the Indian People. Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1951–1977.