“Saffronization” of the History Curriculum in India Under the BJP

This essay examines the “saffronization” of history education in India under the Bharatiya Janata Party, analyzing how curricular revisions, textbook deletions, and popular culture together reshape historical knowledge to serve Hindu nationalist ideology. Drawing on the author’s experiences as a Kashmiri Muslim historian and schoolteacher, it argues that these interventions are not merely pedagogical but epistemological, redefining legitimacy, belonging, and authority within the nation’s past. The classroom emerges as a key site where state power, memory, and identity intersect, often producing silence, self-censorship, and exclusion. At the same time, it highlights everyday forms of resistance through alternative curricula, project-based learning, and student research initiatives. It ultimately contends that teaching history in contemporary India has become an ethical and democratic act.