Conservative Public History in India

Abstract This article explores the conservative turn in India’s public history, examining its shift from a pluralistic, regionally grounded tradition to a centralized, ideologically driven narrative under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Since 2014, public history has been increasingly reframed through the lens of Hindutva nationalism, marginalizing minority voices and emphasizing a singular Hindu civilizational past. This “saffronization” is reflected in curriculum reforms, state-sponsored monuments, and the commercialization of heritage. Through examples such as the Ram Mandir, the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor, and corporate-sponsored heritage sites, the paper shows how historical memory is being curated to support a narrow ideological project. Despite this, pluralist initiatives persist at the community level, including grassroots archives, urban heritage walks, and NGO-supported preservation efforts. These offer critical counter-narratives and underscore the ongoing contestation over India’s past. The paper argues that public history in India has become a terrain of political struggle, where historical representation is deeply entwined with questions of democracy, identity, and power.