Indian Government's Cultural Revisionism and Harvard Critic's Global History of Culture

The Narendra Modi-led government in India is attempting to expunge the Mughal Empire from public consciousness through textbook revisions, viewing the Islamic empire as incompatible with its vision of a Hindu nationalist future. This selective erasure targets a period that profoundly shaped Indian languages, culture, and society, with Hindi itself deriving from Persian. Harvard-based literary critic Martin Puchner's 2023 book 'Culture – A New World History' argues against such ownership of culture, examining artifacts from the Chauvet Cave paintings (c. 35,000 BCE) to Katie Paterson's Future Library (2014–2114). Puchner traces cultural entanglement through Queen Nefertiti, Plato, King Ashoka, the Kebra Nagast, Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book, Tenochtitlan, Hokusai's The Great Wave (1831), and Wole Soyinka's dramas. He posits that culture evolves through messy encounters between civilizations, not through pure ethnic or national identities. The book explores how cultural choices emerge after erasures, examining Buddhist iconography, script standardization, myth creation, and syncretism. In India, where history is viewed through a right-wing Hindu lens, this engagement with the past has become highly selective, sidelining inconvenient narratives. Puchner notes that cultural destruction often comes from purists, but culture survives unpredictably as a 'broken chain' repaired by each generation.