Insiders to Premodern South Asian History

By invoking a racialized Indian identity, Hindu nationalists not only devalue academic studying of sources and evidence but also dismiss the lived experiences of the historical actors whose voices they misappropriate.

“In claiming legitimacy from the past, that past itself is converted into an assemblage of what is most desired in the present.”

• Romila Thapar, 2016, On Nationalism

There are insiders — people who participate in and thus have personal, experiential knowledge — to many subjects that occupy humanities scholars. These include specific cultures, religions, societies, ethnic and racial groups, genders, ideologies, philosophical positions, and political movements. Scholars who study these subjects without belonging to the group(s) in question  must contend with being “outsiders” and negotiate tensions that can arise when their scholarly arguments differ from the perspectives of insiders.

But history is different, especially premodern history that is definitionally beyond, really before, current human experiences. Put bluntly, there are no living insiders to the deep past. Still, groups of people regularly lay claim to specific parts of ancient history as their history within social, religious, and political contexts. In this essay, I first lay out key dynamics and problems of the insider/outsider dichotomy within the discipline of history, especially regarding identity claims.

Then, I explore a virulent set of insider claims regarding premodern South Asian history that emanate from Hindu nationalists who forge their political selves by using and abusing the past. In closing, I advocate for respecting the insiders of premodern history — those who lived through it — by accurately recovering their stories.

Hindutva ideologues suggest a racialized Hindu identity — embodied and carried in blood — as a replacement for studying sources and evidence, the bases on which historians reconstruct the past. Hindu nationalists still commonly use the rhetoric of blood today to create their identity and write history into themselves, thereby reinforcing their identity-based claim to unique historical insights.

Insider-Outside Problems and Historians’ Identities

The insider/outsider paradigm is fraught within all humanities disciplines, especially by flattening both categories. This arises especially poignantly in religious studies, wherein scholars hold a  range of views about the proper positioning of scholars (outsiders) vis-à-vis practitioners (insiders). Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Wilfred Cantwell Smith was one of the stronger advocates that scholars ought to concern themselves with whether their analyses were acceptable to members of the tradition in question.

Cantwell Smith contended in an oft-cited passage: “no statement about a religion is valid unless it can be acknowledged by that religion’s believers.” He further  specified in another publication: “No statement about Islamic faith is true that Muslims cannot accept. No personalist statement about Hindu religious life is legitimate in which Hindus cannot recognise themselves. No interpretation of Buddhist doctrine is valid unless Buddhists can respond, ‘Yes! That is what we hold’.”

Cantwell Smith’s position was arguably a  justifiable pushback against dismissive Orientalist attitudes that had failed to account at all for non-Western religious practitioners and represented an admirable  liberal humanist desire for consent between researchers and subjects. But it seems hard to maintain given the internal diversity of religions. For example, a lay Japanese Zen Buddhist and a Sri Lankan Theravada nun are likely to disagree on the merits of scholarly statements regarding Buddhist texts, practices, and foci.

Put another way, one is an insider to one specific corner of a religion, not the entirety of the tradition. The extent of a given religion’s (or culture’s or society’s) internal diversity — and thus the fallacy of claims to be an insider to the fulltradition — becomes even clearer once we introduce the element of time. Arguably, a lay Japanese Zen Buddhist in 2025 CE and a Sri Lankan Theravada nun in 100 CE  would not even recognize each other as co-religionists.

The insider/outsider dichotomy is more stark temporally for premodern history than for religions. The category of historical “insider,” while uncommon, holds water in referring to those who lived through events and so served as eyewitnesses. But, in 2025, there are no living historical insiders for the nineteenth century and earlier, and, while the dates shift as time passes, that general idea is constant.

In a sense, the lack of living insiders to the vast majority of human history is a critical part of what it means, definitionally, for history to be the past. And, yet, some of us claim parts of history as our own on identity grounds. Often, identifications of one’s own history based on shared ethnicity or nationality are benign, such as (speaking for myself) the banal observation that American history is my history. But, for some, claims on specific histories operationalize identity in such a way that the historian — the narrator of the past — begins to be presented as akin to an insider.

Consider, for example, projects to narrate nationalist versions of history. In South Asia, such calls date back to the nineteenth century when Indians pushed for greater participation in the intellectual project of reconstructing South Asian history hitherto dominated by Europeans. For example, in 1880, the Indian thinker Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay exhorted his fellow Bengalis: “Bengal must have her own history. Otherwise, there is no hope for Bengal. Who is to write it? You have to write it. I have to write it. All of us have to write it. Anyone who is a Bengali has to write it.”

Bankimchandra sought to cultivate a community identity through retellings of the past that could only be carried out effectively from a nationalist viewpoint. Such calls for nationalist history are recurrent in modern South Asia, and professional historians hold a  range of views on their legitimacy and potential pitfalls.

Still, many Indian nationalist historians shared the foundational principles of professional historians (and, indeed, some individuals belonged to both categories), including emphasizing primary sources, critical reading skills, historical causality, and an ethical commitment to accuracy. But one brand of nationalism departs severely from these norms in its treatment of the past. It suggests identity — being an insider — as a replacement for historical training: Hindutva or Hindu nationalism, a political ideology of Hindu supremacy and a cultural movement towards Hindu dominance.

Hindu Nationalist Claims on History

Hindutva is a modern phenomenon, dating back 140 years at the most (and 100 years more robustly), which has long centered premodern history in its internal narratives. Consider, for example, that V.D. Savarkar — a major early twentieth-century articulator of Hindutva ideology — frequently wrote about India’s ancient past. His final major work, penned in 1963 and titled Bharatiya Ithihastil Saha Soneri Pane (translated as Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History, 1971), centers around, in his words, “the historic periods of our national life.”

Savarkar’s first five epochs date to pre-colonial times, which were, at the work’s publication and for us, beyond living memory. Yet, Savarkar recounted these epochs as a “ national duty” since he envisioned the nation of India that he projected into the deep past as continuous with the one that existed in his present. Savarkar cherry-picked his past, including by focusing on moments of violent conflict as part of his   agenda to encourage a muscular, aggressive stance for Hindus.

Savarkar and many Hindu nationalists following him saw the ancient past as alive in the present in a peculiar way that collapses time and, thus, implausibly opens the door to direct access to history. One recent example is the 2021 Hindu nationalist apology published by J. Sai Deepak titled India, that is Bharat. Bharat is a Sanskrit-derived name for India that is often  preferred by Hindu nationalists for its exclusionary overtones.

Throughout the book, Sai Deepak develops the idea of Bharat as a civilization that exists in the past, present, and future through a mashing together of history and the present into a single civilizational construct. Repeatedly,   Sai Deepak heralds Bharat as a “living civilisation” whose “civilisational identity” is both ancient and readily available to be “reclaimed” by twenty-first-century Hindu nationalist Indians. Sai Deepak’s means to this reclamation is “decolonisation,” which he uses unconventionally to mean proclaiming Hindu exceptionalism, insularity, and social and political domination.

There is much to say about Sai Deepak’s regressive argumentation, including that it helps him posit that India need not play by any established set of global standards and, in fact, can reject, as foreign and inferior, the    health of democracy, freedom of the press, academic freedom, and other metrics that have precipitously declined since 2014 under Hindu nationalist rule. For my purposes here, it is especially noteworthy that Sai Deepak’s civilizational construct was designed to render the past as part of the present.

Historians understand that societies are not static, but Hindu nationalists imagine precisely the opposite, proclaiming that key features of their civilization never change. Sai Deepak phrases this as “  I ndic civilisational consciousness,” and he frequently considers it within discussions of history throughout his India, that is Bharat. Sai Deepak’s idea of an Indian (meaning, for him, a far-right Hindu) mindset that is always constant, everywhere and at every time the same, stems from the old Orientalist trope of an unchanging India.

Historically, Hindu nationalists borrow extensively from British colonial ideas , and so the overlap regarding the classic trope of “static India” is hardly surprising. At a basic level, the fiction of an unchanging past helps Hindu nationalists construct Indian civilization as a singular entity. The claim of civilizational unity also, ironically, emboldens Hindu nationalists to change the past to suit their present-day interests. Savarkar phrased this as “conjecture,” embracing supposition as part of his analytical method to offer a “history in full” that can be used as a lens for interpreting Hindutva. Here, we glimpse how far Hindu nationalists depart from the methods of historians, who attempt to avoid misinterpreting the past or anachronistically misunderstanding it. Hindutva ideologues do both freely — changing the past to suit their present — based on claims of their direct experiential knowledge of timeless Indian civilization.

For Hindutva thinkers, the past remains alive, in part, through racial purity. Hindutva’s early articulators, like Savarkar, went in strong for the blood-and-soil rhetoric that was popular in other early twentieth-century contexts, especially Europe. Savarkar traced the Hindu  blood lineage back thousands of years to the aryans in an attempt to give Hindus a racial identity: “All Hindus claim to have in their veins the blood of the mighty race incorporated with and descended from the Vedic fathers.”

Savarkar further saw racialized Hindus as carrying memories of historical wrongs, proclaiming rhetorically: “Does not the blood in your veins, O brother of our common forefathers, cry aloud with the recollections of the dear old scenes and ties from which they were so cruelly snatched away at the point of the sword?”

In such statements, Hindutva ideologues suggest a racialized Hindu identity — embodied and carried in blood — as a replacement for studying sources and evidence, the bases on which historians reconstruct the past. Hindu nationalists still commonly use the rhetoric of blood today to create their identity and write history into themselves, thereby reinforcing their identity-based claim to unique historical insights.

Hindutva bases for claiming knowledge about the past — civilizational singularity mixed with crude racial science — do not depend on Hindu nationalists possessing historical knowledge. In fact, the Hindutva claim of being civilizational insiders through their bloodline often entails a devaluation of training and interpretation.

For instance, in 2020, the American Hindutva ideologue Rajiv Malhotra published his book titled   Sanskrit Non-translatables, which argued that key terms in the language of Sanskrit cannot be translated. In 2025, the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) — an  RSS-linked group based in Washington D.C. — promoted a  similar line of argumentation that even basic Sanskrit words such as murti (icon) and deva (god, cognate with English “divine”) cannot be rendered into English. Sanskrit can, of course,  be translated with roughly the same degree of difficulty as any other language, although it helps to know Sanskrit first.

Hindu nationalists rarely have either classical or academic training in Sanskrit and, overall, appear unbothered by their ignorance. Arguably, not knowing Sanskrit serves them well in claiming Sanskrit as a civilizational object rather than a communicative medium.

Embedded in the Hindutva use of Sanskrit as an icon more than a language is a rejection of humanities scholarship and scholarly attempts to interpret premodern Sanskrit sources. Indeed, both Malhotra and HAF, mentioned above, have attacked South Asia-focused scholars within the American academy for decades. As one scholar has put it, “Rajiv Malhotra approaches his critique of American academia with… a contempt for the humanities, its methods, and its scholars.” Scholars and many others have taken notice of Hindu nationalist assaults on academic freedom in recent years, and many scholars have paid a heavy price for doing our jobs. In this sense, Hindu nationalist claims on history are exclusivist claims that include the right to silence historians.

Honoring Historical Voices

 An additional, perhaps less appreciated, victim of Hindutva rewritings and dismissals of history are historical actors, i.e. “insiders” to the past, and I submit that we all lose when the far-right appropriates the voices of the dead. For some, the stories of historical figures offer a lineage of identity and material meaning, such as for the late Guyanese poet Rooplall Monar (d. 2024), who wrote:

Our ancestors carved those fields

Which have given us meanings

meanings to stand tall

This land is ours too.

History also matters for those who do not perceive themselves to be its direct descendants, especially for exemplifying the full range of human experiences and understanding the development of different societies. Scholars attempt to contribute to these projects by excavating the words, experiences, and contexts of historical actors, ranging from famous Indian kings like Ashoka and Aurangzeb to farmers and laborers whose names have been lost in time.

In contrast, Hindu nationalist civilizational claims on history adopt the insider perspective — which they imagine to be singular — as their own, erasing the diverse voices and stories of people who lived in premodern India. The contrast, then, between historians and Hindutva ideologues is not only having different approaches to the past but also that historians respect the many experiences of historical actors, whereas Hindutva ideologues advance their experiences as the only ones that matter.

Image Credit: Public Domain
DOI: https://doi.org/10.64452/frty8257