Defence or Synthesis? NCERT's New Class 9 Text Rewrites What India's Medieval Centuries Were About

Every Generation Rewrites the Medieval Centuries

• This Time the Organising Word Is "Resistance" In 1817, James Mill divided India's past into Hindu, Muslim and British periods in The History of British India. He sorted seven centuries by the religion of those who ruled. For roughly two hundred years since, Indian historians have argued not only about what happened between the Turks and the Mughals, but about what that time should be called. The Class 9 textbook NCERT released this week is the latest answer to that old question. It gives the period 1000-1700 CE a single organising idea: Resistance and Resilience.

This Is Not the First Rewrite

The pattern is familiar. In 1977, the Janata government's objections to NCERT history books by Romila Thapar and Bipan Chandra became a national controversy. In 2002, a new curriculum framework brought new textbooks. In 2005, the National Curriculum Framework replaced them again.

In 2022-23, "rationalisation" removed the Class 12 chapter on Mughal courts. Each round claimed it was correcting a distortion and each was accused of introducing one. What changes each time is the lens, not the evidence.

For more than five decades, the dominant lens was composite culture: Sufi khanqahs beside Bhakti poets, Rajput mansabdars in Mughal service and a shared Indo-Persian courtly world. The new text looks at the same centuries and highlights a different thread:

• Lachit Borphukan's naval victory at Saraighat - the Ahoms' near six-century independence - Vijayanagara as proof that resistance was not only a northern story - the execution of Guru Arjan Dev and Guru Tegh Bahadur and the Sikhs' turn to armed confederacy - the Jat uprising of 1669

What Each Lens Reveals and What It Hides

NCERT's case deserves a fair hearing. Assam's Ahoms and the Deccan's Vijayanagara were long confined to a paragraph in narratives centred on Delhi and giving them chapters corrects that. Temple destruction, heavy taxation and persecution of the Sikh Gurus are documented events, not inventions.

The foreword also commits the book to critical inquiry and intercultural understanding. The critics' concerns are equally specific. Cooperation shrinks to a line: the Kachwahas of Amber appear briefly, while Mewar's resistance gets a full section.

Bhakti is recast as a defensive refuge for worship when temples were threatened, rather than as a meeting ground of ideas. Sufism is credited partly with spreading Islam. The Delhi Sultanate gets a single page. The removal of the French and Russian revolutions raises a separate worry.

For many students, those chapters were their only historical encounter with liberty, equality and revolutionary socialism as ideas.

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Where the parallel with Mill breaks down: Mill erased Indian agency. This text amplifies it and it does not remove cooperation entirely. The debate is therefore not colonial against national. It is about which true things a fourteen-year-old meets first and which ones they meet only in passing.

One detail in the book shows the problem clearly. It records that Todarmal and Man Singh, both Rajput grandees in Akbar's service, rebuilt the Kashi Vishwanath temple. The same site was later destroyed under Aurangzeb and restored by Ahilyabai Holkar.

A single temple therefore holds both collaboration and conflict. Which of those the textbook emphasises is a choice of framing, not a question of fact.

For the exam: UPSC has asked about Akbar's syncretism (2025), Sufi and Bhakti saints (2014) and Bhakti literature (2021). The candidate who scores is the one who can hold both lenses at once, name what each explains and say what each leaves unexplained.