Year after year, whole sections, topics, and names are altered if not altogether taken out of the school textbooks that belong to the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). This has occurred so steadily over the last few years that news about history being erased from the school curriculum hardly raises an eyebrow anymore. As this story – which attempts to document the many changes effected in the curriculum through the consecutive terms of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Union government – was being written, Tipu Sultan was dropped from the Class 8 Social Science textbook, Akbar was reduced to a “mixture of tolerance and cruelty” while chapters on Mughals and the Delhi Sultanate went missing from the Class 7 textbook.
