India, July 24 -- Few countries inhabit their past as turbulently as India. A medieval mosque, a school textbook, a television serial, a translated paragraph, a campus lecture, even a dead emperor can become the occasion for a national argument. Professional historians claim interpretive authority over the past. Politicians seek legitimacy from it. Popular writers dramatize it. Religious movements sanctify it. Television simplifies it. Social media weaponizes it. Somewhere amid all this, the public is left asking a deceptively simple question: who owns the past?

Shaan Kashyap's Who Owns the Past? How Historians (Re)Wrote India's Past and Present, 1870-2020 enters precisely this crowded battlefield. It begins modestly enough with school t...