By Saumya Aanchal
Diya Kumari, a senior leader from India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), recently claimed that the most significant achievement of her tenure as deputy chief minister in the state of Rajasthan, has been changing the inscription at the Haldighati memorial. Haldighati, a mountain pass in the ancient Aravalli Hills of Rajasthan, occupies a crucial position at the intersection of medieval and modern South Asian history, signaling the divergent ways in which the past has been mobilized in India and Pakistan. It was here, on June 18, 1576, that the famous battle took place between the forces of Maharana Pratap, the Hindu ruler of Mewar, and the Mughal army. The Mughals, a Muslim dynasty of Turkic-Mongol origin, ruled much of the Indian subcontinent between the 16th and18th centuries.
The battle is one of the most talked about episodes in Indian history and a symbol of Hindu resistance against Mughal expansion. Historical accounts, including those by modern Indian historians like Satish Chandra and Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, describe the battle as intense but “indecisive.” The Mughals held the field at the end of the battle, but Pratap’s forces continued to resist Mughal rule for many years despite being significantly outnumbered. Diya Kumari gleefully declared that the plaque now affirms Pratap’s ‘victory’ at the Battle of Haldighati. Though this statement might seem symbolic, many observers argue that it encapsulates a broader ideological project.
Since 2014, the BJP has used its institutional influence to reinterpret history through a Hindutva lens, portraying India as an exclusive Hindu civilization. This effort goes beyond scholarship, reshaping how history is taught, remembered, and practiced, with narratives of Hindu pride framed as native resistance against foreign Muslim oppression and the BJP as custodian of this indigenous legacy.
Supporters see these revisions as correcting omissions by earlier historians who, they argue, downplayed Hindu victories or overlooked figures like Maharana Pratap. For them, heroic retellings reclaim dignity and offer empowerment in a time of economic insecurity and social fragmentation.
Symbolism and Narrative Construction
On a comparative scale, this politics of memory is neither new to the world nor to South Asia. In Sri Lanka, Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism has long drawn on archaeology and ancient chronicles like the Mahavamsa to legitimize Sinhalese dominance and portray Tamils as outsiders, turning contested histories into civilizational truths. Within India, similar processes unfold in different ways. In Tamil Nadu, excavations at Keezhadi have been taken up in popular and political discourse as evidence of an ancient, independent Tamil civilization, often framed against a pan-Indian or Sanskritized past. Such cases show how fragile traces of history can be mobilized for identity politics, converting ambiguity into cultural legitimacy.
This dynamic also shaped India’s own nation-building. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India, imagined museums as spaces of national education, meant to preserve artifacts and narrate the story of a modern, plural India. At the other extreme lies outright erasure: the Taliban’s demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 revealed how heritage could be violently destroyed when deemed incompatible with dominant ideology. Across these examples, the past is never preserved; it is constantly reshaped to serve projects of identity, legitimacy, and power.
However, history cannot be reshaped based on emotion or ideology.
Turning complex events into simplified stories of victory and defeat risks turning the past into Manichean polarities, encouraging emotional identification with the past, diminishing analytical approaches, and ultimately turning history into political propaganda. The danger of such “emotional histories” lies in legitimizing feelings themselves as tools of authority.
Political theorists have long noted how memory is used in politics. Jan-Werner Müller, for example, argues that populist movements often promote a single, clear-cut version of history to define who belongs and who does not. In What Is Populism?, he explains that populist leaders claim to represent the “real people,” while elites or minorities are cast as outsiders or enemies. Simplified historical narratives framed as struggles between heroes and villains help sustain this claim.
Viewed in this light, the altered inscription at Haldighati is more than a reinterpretation of a battle’s outcome. It is part of a larger strategy to draw boundaries between those who accept this narrative and those who question it. The change reshapes how visitors engage with the site, reframing a shared space as explicitly Hindu and embedding ideological messages into everyday encounters with heritage. This polarized materialization of history is central to populist memory politics: it transforms debate into a test of loyalty, where dissent is seen not as legitimate disagreement but as betrayal.
Institutionalizing Selective Memory
The materiality of memorials makes political polarization even more powerful. Texts can be debated, but when claims are etched into stone or landscapes, they gain a sense of permanence.
Memorials, monuments, and sites rooted in nature lend history a tangible quality, translating narratives into physical acts. In Turkey, the rehabilitation of Ottoman heritage has not only taken textual form but also material, through mosque restorations, museum exhibitions, and even urban redesigns, presenting history as concrete and lived. Such practices do not merely revisit history; they present it as a physical reality that embodies collective identity.
This reflects what Aleida Assmann describes as the creation of a canon: aspects of cultural memory deliberately preserved and repeated, forming the building blocks of national identity. Canons determine what is taught, displayed, and celebrated, shaping a society’s sense of the “real” past. The archive, by contrast, in Assmann’s understanding, contains messy, contradictory records: defeats and victories, minority voices, and uncomfortable truths. For instance, the Native American communities in the United States have shown how suppressed archives can re-emerge through heritage projects, oral history archives and museums. But preservation is rarely neutral. Museums often reframe Native histories as artifacts of a forgotten past, presenting indigenous culture as exotic for mainstream audiences. In this way, memory can be shaped to support stories of national progressivism rather than genuine cultural inclusivity.
A healthy democracy balances canon and archive. Archives serve as democracy’s memory bank, preserving diverse voices and evidence necessary for accountability. In India, institutions like the National Archives, state archives, and university libraries face increasing pressure through budget cuts and access restrictions.
When archives are sanitized or access restricted, citizens lose their capacity for critical thinking, essential for informed decisions. Democracy requires this archival foundation to maintain space for dissent and historical engagement.
However, this memory work is not happening organically but is carried out through various state institutions. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), for example, has faced scrutiny for alleged biases in research and monument interpretations. While the ASI’s official function is to preserve heritage, critics argue that under political pressure, it increasingly validates selective historical narratives. Similar concerns have been raised about school boards, university syllabi, and government cultural bodies. These attempts marginalize pluralistic perspectives and present a clean, triumphant vision of a homogenous past.
Legitimacy and Democratic Implications
Interestingly, this historical revisionism is not simply backward-looking. It is entwined with aspirations for modernity. The narrative of a resurgent civilization is often paired with a vision of a technologically advanced and geopolitically strong India.
The appeal lies in its emotional simplicity: the past was glorious, the present is awakening, and the future promises greatness, provided the nation remains united under a singular ideological vision.
In this imagery, dissenting historical voices, pluralistic narratives, or unresolved traumas are seen not as necessary aspects of democratic discourse, but as threats to unity.
However, the details of this promised progress often stay unclear or mostly just symbolic.
Grand infrastructure projects, renaming of cities, and ceremonial gestures frequently overtake substantive development or institutional reforms. In this process, older, plural monuments are “de-monumentalized” through neglect or reinterpretation, while new projects are “monumentalized” as symbols of civilizational pride.
The result is a shift where memory and identity are built into the physical landscape, turning architecture itself into a tool of political messaging.
Scholars warn that when memory is manipulated to serve ideological purposes, societies lose their capacity for self-reflection. This creates what Jan Assmann calls cultural amnesia, a selective forgetting that weakens public discourse. Excluding dissenting histories, particularly those of marginalized communities, weakens the pluralistic foundations of the republic and creates grounds for polarization. When communities feel their histories have been erased, the possibility of coherent identity and reconciliation diminishes. Memory becomes a zero-sum game rather than a shared resource for learning.
But why does history offer such distinctive legitimacy compared to other modes of political validation? Historical narratives provide what might be called “Ontological Legitimacy,” justifying who we are as a people, not just what we do as a state or government. It is rooted in identity, ancestry, heritage, or destiny, something that seems essential, natural, or eternal to a nation or group.
The BJP’s approach is distinctive in its civilizational scope reaching back millennia rather than focusing only on recent independence struggles of 1947. Similarly, in Pakistan, the origin story is anchored less in the Partition itself than in the idea of Islam and as the homeland of South Asian Muslims. In both cases, the partition of 1947 is muted, and history is reframed less as factual record and more as the “natural” expression of community identity, presented as revival rather than revision.
The Haldighati memorial captures the broader tensions in Indian democracy. The battle itself was a tactical stalemate, open to multiple interpretations. By unilaterally declaring Pratap’s victory, the BJP is asserting authority over historical truth itself. This symbolic act shows how democratic institutions can be eroded from within, where formal structures remain intact, but pluralism and critical inquiry are foreclosed.
History, as Pierre Nora reminds us, is not just a record of the past but a reflection of the present.
The modified memorial no longer invites debate; it imposes consensus. It signals a shift from historical engagement to ideological conformity, from archive to canon.
Whether Indian democracy can withstand this shift depends on citizens’ ability to reclaim such sites, not as instruments of propaganda, but as areas of contestation, reflection, and democratic renewal.
Saumya Aanchal is an independent researcher with an M.A in English Literature from Patna University (2022). Her research interest spans memory studies, political theory and art history.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
