The Mythmaker Historian: Meenakshi Jain and the Right-Wing Rewriting of India’s Past
Behind the façade of scholarly inquiry lies a project of distortion, where Meenakshi Jain’s works serve not as academic contributions, but as instruments of the BJP’s saffronized historical imagination.
In a political climate increasingly hostile to academic rigor and pluralist memory, Meenakshi Jain’s rise is not just symptomatic—it is strategic. Her nomination to the Rajya Sabha in 2025 by the BJP-led government, following her earlier appointment to the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) and her receipt of the Padma Shri in 2020, signals a deepening of the project to institutionalize Hindutva’s historical narrative. Far from being a genuine scholar engaged in rigorous historiography, Jain functions as an ideologue whose works distort, erase, and selectively interpret the Indian past to suit the political ambitions of the Sangh Parivar.
The Pretence of Scholarship
Despite being trained in political science—not history—Meenakshi Jain has been projected as a historian of national importance. Her credentials, as highlighted in her doctoral work on caste and politics, offer little indication of any expertise in ancient or medieval Indian history. Nevertheless, she has authored textbooks and works on topics such as Ayodhya, Sati, temple destruction, and the Bhakti movement—fields that demand serious historiographical training, source criticism, and methodological awareness, all of which are conspicuously absent in her writings.
Jain’s elevation is not based on her academic contributions, peer-reviewed publications, or participation in global historiographical debates. Rather, it stems from her unwavering allegiance to the Hindutva project of “rewriting” Indian history. Her alignment with revisionist outfits like the now-defunct Makhanlal Chaturvedi National University and the RSS-backed Vidya Bharati network places her not among serious historians, but among ideologues tasked with the reinterpretation of India’s complex past through a singular, majoritarian lens.
Textbook Revisionism: The NCERT Debacle
Jain’s most visible intervention in public education came through her authorship of the NCERT textbook Medieval India, which replaced earlier works by historians like Romila Thapar and Satish Chandra. As philosopher Martha Nussbaum pointed out, Jain’s narrative reduced medieval Indian history to a simple dichotomy of Hindus versus Muslims—good versus evil—with no space for nuance, syncretism, or internal contestations within religious communities.
Sociologist Nandini Sundar rightly called attention to how the textbook entirely omits the cultural, architectural, and administrative achievements of the Sultanate and Mughal periods, instead focusing only on violence, temple destruction, and religious oppression. This is not just omission—it is historical negationism, aimed at demonizing an entire millennium of Indo-Muslim cohabitation to sustain the Hindutva myth of eternal Hindu victimhood.
John Stratton Hawley of Columbia University critiqued Jain’s misrepresentation of the Bhakti movement, arguing that her thesis—that it arose in opposition to Shankaracharya’s monism—is deeply flawed. By ignoring the movement’s egalitarian response to caste hierarchy and Islam’s influence on popular devotionalism, Jain dismisses both social history and religious plurality.
Ayodhya: Cherry-Picked “History” for a Temple
In her books Rama and Ayodhya and The Battle for Rama, Jain attempts to provide scholarly justification for the construction of the Ram temple at the disputed Babri Masjid site. Although Pralay Kanungo of JNU described the work as more “subtle” than earlier Hindutva tracts, he admitted that it was still marred by cherry-picked references, selective interpretations, and a lack of scholarly coherence.
Crucially, Jain draws heavily from Puranic and other religious sources to historicize the Ramayana myth as geography, often ignoring counter-evidence or the diverse regional and sectarian versions of the Ram narrative. She does not grapple with archaeological ambiguities or the role of colonial and postcolonial political mobilizations in constructing Ayodhya’s symbolic value.
Her work thus exemplifies the communalization of heritage—where contested sites are weaponized in support of Hindu majoritarian claims, cloaked in the guise of “cultural restitution.”
Sati and Civilizational Rhetoric
In Sati: Evangelicals, Baptist Missionaries, and the Changing Colonial Discourse, Jain attempts to reframe the abolition of sati as a colonial-Christian imposition on indigenous Hindu traditions. While colonial motives were undoubtedly layered and complex, Jain’s book is a classic case of false equivalence, portraying 19th-century Hindu society as uniformly misunderstood and victimized by missionaries.
What Jain deliberately suppresses is the long Indian tradition of internal critique—figures like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, and even orthodox Brahmin leaders engaged in fierce debates over the legitimacy of sati. To erase these voices is not just bad history—it is an act of ideological sabotage, designed to promote a civilizational pride that resists any introspection.
Flight of Deities and the Invention of a Persecuted Hindu Past
In Flight of Deities and Rebirth of Temples, Jain constructs a narrative where idol desecration and temple destruction under Muslim rulers are portrayed as central, defining experiences of Hindu history. While instances of iconoclasm and temple repurposing did occur, Jain inflates them into a civilizational trauma, stripped of political, regional, and dynastic contexts. This plays directly into the RSS’s invented victimhood, creating a fictional Hindu past that is eternally under siege.
Serious historians such as Richard Eaton have long demonstrated that temple destruction was often politically motivated, aimed at royal patrons, and not uniquely Islamic. Jain ignores this body of work, relying instead on selective anecdotes, hagiographies, and ideological assumptions to stitch together a manufactured “history of Hindu suffering.”
Padma Awards and Rajya Sabha: Political Rewards for Ideological Loyalty
Meenakshi Jain’s Padma Shri and recent Rajya Sabha nomination must be seen not as recognitions of academic excellence, but as state-sponsored endorsements of her ideological service. Her career trajectory mirrors the BJP’s strategy of rewarding propagandists with institutional authority, be it in the ICHR, NCERT, or Parliament.
This is part of a larger saffronization project that includes rewriting textbooks, renaming cities, erasing Muslim heritage, and institutionalizing Sanskritized, casteist narratives as national history. Jain is not a neutral historian; she is a foot soldier in the Hindutva project of cultural homogenization, cloaked in the pretense of academic work.
Dangerous Distortions, Not History
Meenakshi Jain’s writings are not merely flawed—they are dangerous. They weaponize history to construct an exclusionary nationalism, vilify minorities, and undermine the very principles of India’s pluralist legacy. Her ascent signals a dark moment for Indian historiography, where loyalty to ideology trumps academic integrity, and where history becomes a battleground for political ends.
As India hurtles toward a future where dissent is criminalized and facts are optional, figures like Jain remind us of the stakes involved in the battle for memory. It is not just the past that is being rewritten—it is the future that is being compromised.
Hasnain Naqvi is a writer and former member of the history faculty at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. He writes on history, culture, politics, religion, memory, and pluralism in South Asia.
