When I was an undergraduate student at St Stephen's College, Delhi, in the early-1970s, some seniors used to regale me with stories about the history lectures in the Arts Faculty. There was a professor who, it seems, wore his ideological beliefs on his sleeve. He would make no bones about the fact that he expected his students to regurgitate the so-called "Marxist interpretation" that he was vocal in espousing. "There are two interpretations of history", the professor, a disciple of the venerable Professor R.S. Sharma, used to say, "the bourgeois interpretation and the Marxist interpretation. And the Marxist interpretation is the correct one."

More than three decades have lapsed since the time the coterie of Left historians first coerced students into toeing what they deemed to be the "correct" line. At that time, the whole thing seemed a monumental joke-"You must read Marx to score marks", the silly professor used to say. There were, no doubt, interesting Marxist historians like Edward Thompson, Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm, whose writings on European history was obligatory reading. However, the suggestion that the whole gamut of human experience could be reduced to either an unending class struggle or economic determinism was crass. Marxist historiography was an interesting intellectual current but it was just one of the numerous intellectual inputs that went into the study of history.

It seems that most of us underestimated the skulduggery that accompanied S. Nurul Hasan's stint as Indira Gandhi's Education Minister from 1969 to 1977, particularly during the Emergency years. In trying to achieve intellectual hegemony, the Indian Left subordinated the battle of ideas to the campaign to secure control of academic institutions. The role of "friendly" governments was quite crucial in this respect. When new institutions like the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi and the Centre for Studies in the Social Sciences in Kolkata were established in the early-1970s with generous government endowments, their faculties were filled by academics who spoke the same language and shared the same political assumptions. The Left intellectuals quite rightly calculated that faculty control would have a multiplier effect.

It is no exaggeration to suggest that by the early-1990s, the Left dominance over Indian history writing was complete. Alternative perspectives and dissenting voices were either stifled or marginalised. Nor was this dominance confined to institutions of higher learning. Through some deft use of political power and patronage, even the teaching of history in schools was modified to suit a larger ideological perspective. Predictably, this ideological regimentation spread to other spheres and one of the worst affected was the English-language media which began trotting out a sectional view of history as common sense. Anything which deviated from the parameters of "progressive" thought was deemed illegitimate and subjected to both scorn and condescension.

One of the features of this Left conquest of history was the wholesale doctoring of the past to suit a political objective. Having decided quite early that "communalism", a euphemism for nationalism, was the real enemy of progressivism, the Left historians tried to reinvent the historical memory of the Indian people. Their main focus was Medieval Indian history, particularly the Indian encounter with Islam. This bloody chapter of Indian history was sought to be both sanitised and falsified. It was somehow made out that documentation of bigotry and iconoclasm in the name of religion was an insignificant footnote and that anyone who suggested otherwise was guilty of creating disharmony among communities in contemporary society. The word "secular" was distorted beyond recognition to effect a strange alliance between the Left and Islamism.

Predictably, this warped thinking generated a fierce backlash politically. By the mid-1990s, the Left was in political retreat-partly a consequence of the ignominious collapse of the Soviet "fatherland". However, the political setbacks of the Left did not produce a corresponding intellectual reaction. This was due to the failure of Indian nationalism to pay sufficient heed to the battlefield of ideas. It is, therefore, both reassuring and refreshing to read this dissection of Indian Marxist chicanery by Shankar Sharan. Apart from analysing the Marxist agenda for what it really is, he has helped resurrect the contributions of those Indian historians who anticipated this challenge in the first two decades after Independence.

This book is a valuable addition to the arsenal of Indian nationalism.