In recent weeks, protests have erupted in Rajasthan against changes made to NCERT’s Class 8 history textbook. These demonstrations – led not only by university students and civic activists, but also by members of erstwhile royal families – reflect a deep unease about how India’s historical narrative is being reshaped in school curricula.The protests were initially localised to Rajasthan, but their concerns are hardly parochial. The revisions have implications for how millions of students across the country – in states as varied as Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Jammu and Kashmir – encounter the histories of the regions in which they live. They also raise broader questions about whose histories are being amplified, whose are being truncated, and what political purposes, such editorial decisions, it may serve.Two striking asymmetries define the new Class 8 syllabus. First, entire chapters on the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal dynasty have been reduced to passing references, erasing centuries of cultural, political and architectural contribution. Second, the histories of Rajput dynasties across northern India – from the Tomars, Chauhans, Solankis of Northwestern India, to the Pratihars, Chandels and Parmars of Central India, and Gaharwars and Kalchuris of eastern India – have been compressed into two meagre pages. By contrast, the Maratha state is now allocated 22 pages.This is not simply “Hindus vs Muslims.” It is a case of selective glorification: privileging Maratha history while diminishing Rajput and Muslim legacies. To understand why, one must recognise that the roots of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Hindutva politics lie in the Maharashtrian Brahmin milieu, and this regional parochialism is now being projected as the “national story”.What has changed?The Class 8 history syllabus, which covers the early modern period, has undergone significant restructuring. The most conspicuous change is the disparity in space allotted to different regional histories and historical entities. Maratha history now receives an expansive 22 pages: a detailed, often celebratory narrative that focuses heavily on the military exploits of the Maratha confederacy, especially the Peshwa leadership in the 18th century.History of various Muslim dynasties, like the Delhi Sultanates and Mughal Empire, have been either omitted or reduced to very brief and caricatured accounts. The history of Rajput-ruled states across Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Jammu is confined to just two pages. These two pages largely emphasise on Mughal-Rajput alliances, but devote minimal space to other significant contributions by various Rajput clans and dynasties – such as the founding of cities and towns, architectural contributions, water management systems, the patronage of heterodox spiritual traditions and syncretic multi-ethnic multi-religious Rajput polities. Errors and silencesThe revised NCERT chapters are not only selective; they are also factually misleading. Maps depict the Maratha empire as stretching into regions never actually subdued. The Marathas’ longstanding service under the Deccan Sultanates and the Mughals is brushed aside.Yet contemporary evidence makes clear their integration into Mughal structures. As historian M. Athar Ali records in The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (p. 35), by 1679 there were 96 Maratha mansabdars serving under Aurangzeb, compared to 72 Rajputs. Some held the highest ranks: 12 Marathas commanded 5,000 men, 27 were ranked between 3,000 and 4,000, and 57 held ranks of 1,000. Shivaji’s father, Shahaji Bhosle, had long served Bijapur and even led its forces against the Kempegowdas of Bengaluru.Even the so-called “Maratha Empire” was never a unified state. It was a loose confederacy, in which chiefs like the Scindias, Holkars, Gaekwads and Bhonsles frequently acted independently, often fighting each other. At its peak, the Peshwas accepted Mughal titles such as Vakil-ul-Mutlaq and Amir ul-Umra, plundering north India and collecting tax in the name of the Mughal emperor.None of this fits the heroic narrative of Marathas as the “saviours of Hindu India,” so NCERT’s new syllabus passes over these realities in silence.From Bollywood to NCERTThe NCERT’s Class 8 revisions echo recent Hindi historical blockbusters: a Muslim villain, a Rajput collaborator, and a Maratha saviour. Films like Bajirao Mastani (2015) and Panipat (2019) recast Marathas as proto-nationalist heroes, while erasing the messy politics of alliances. Tanhaji (2020) sharpened this formula, and the latest release, Chhava (2025), continues it.In all, Muslims are vilified and Rajputs are reduced to token roles, their history subsumed under a Maratha frame. The NCERT textbooks have now started replicating this cinematic imbalance – turning Bollywood mythmaking into official history.Hindutva brigade’s Maratha supremacismThe reason for the imbalance lies in the intellectual genealogy of the RSS itself. The organisation, founded in 1925 in Nagpur, emerged from a Marathi Brahmin milieu deeply nostalgic for the Peshwa era.As per a letter by Dr Rajendra Prasad to Sardar Patel: “Shri Dwarka Prasad’s statement brings out all this except one point, namely, that it is a Maharashtrian Brahmin movement.” About RSS’s true motives, the former President of India wrote in the same letter: “The real motive is not known nor is it known that this movement is for establishing a Peshwa Raj and not a Hindu Raj. If this point is brought out and if the secrecy with which they are carrying on the movement is brought out, the people in northern India will understand the true significance.”Richard Barnett noted that the Maratha polity’s increasing reliance on Brahmin elites, administrators and officials, which in the opinion of Tripurdaman Singh, strained Maratha ties with Rajput groups. Susan Bayly showed how expanding Brahman networks of priests, ascetics and service providers reinforced caste hierarchies by creating a more formally interlinked order. Amarjeet Singh stressed that under the Peshwas, the state became overtly Brahmin Pratipalak – protector of Brahmins. C.A. Bayly added that Brahmin administrators envisioned the Maratha state as a “classic Brahmin kingdom,” its ideology and administration revolving around Brahmanical norms. Jyotiba Phule’s scathing account of the Peshwas underscores that Hindutva’s hagiographic glorification of them is not only communal and regionally chauvinist but was already repudiated by Maharashtra’s own non-Brahmin voices.The Haldighati divergenceIronically, while Delhi’s intellectual corridors fixate on the Battle of Haldighati – often framed through sensational narratives – they sidestep textbook revisions that carry far greater educational weight. The 1576 clash, though etched in memory, was not a defining moment for either the Mughals or the Rajputs. It was essentially a contest between two great Rajput statesmen – Maharana Pratap of Mewar and Raja Man Singh Kachwaha of Amber – shaping regional destinies. The more recent revision of the Rakt-talai inscription by Diya Kumari, then MP from Rajsamand, should thus be read politically: as reconciliation between a descendant of Man Singh and her Rajput votebank whose ancestors once resisted him.Yet, Delhi’s media repeatedly returns to Haldighati’s statues and inscriptions while ignoring the Hindi film industry’s and NCERT’s systematic privileging of a Peshwa-centric history. A decade ago, Girish Shahane even cast Rajputs as “defeat-specialists” – a casteist caricature, nevertheless amplified by Brahmin writers under the guise of critiquing Hindutva. Here, the Hindutva onslaught on Muslim history was opportunistically used by Brahmin authors to launch an attack on the Rajput history and community, while Peshwa-Maratha supremacism escaped scrutiny despite its centrality to Hindutva and its cinematic and curricular normalization.Paradoxically, several ostensibly ‘anti-Hindutva’ authors from Brahmin backgrounds foreground Rajput-Muslim political alliances and syncretic spiritual traditions – not to acknowledge their complexity, but to recast them in tones of embarrassment, thereby mirroring the very interpretive frames of Hindutva they claim to oppose.This double standard persists: many Brahmin authors, while posturing against Hindutva, recycle discriminatory tropes against Rajputs but hesitate to deconstruct the Peshwa-Maratha axis of Hindutva thought. However, the place of Rajputs in Hindutva historiography can be best gauged from M.S. Golwalkar’s writings. Golwalkar, the RSS’s Marathi Brahmin chief, dismissed Rajput traditions as ‘durabalata’ (weakness) and Rajput valour as nothing more than ‘ek galat aur aatmaghati aakanksha ka prateek’ (a symbol of wrong and suicidal ambition) in Vichar Navneet (p. 286). It is this contemptuous vision – not Rajput or Mughal history – that NCERT now normalises.Hence, the obsession with a regional battle while ignoring the broader Hindutva revision is not a benign oversight: it suggests that the symbolic politics of a single battle of local significance, have come to overshadow the more consequential politics of textbook history that affects millions of people and different communities across different states. Hindutva’s parochial identityThe NCERT’s revisions to Class 8 history textbooks are, ultimately, part of a larger project to canonise Hindutva’s version of the past. However, what these revisions also reveal – and what is often missed in public debate – is that Hindutva’s vision is rooted in the parochial, caste-encoded politics of Maharashtrian Brahminism.By granting 22 pages to the Marathas while compressing Rajputs into two and erasing Muslim dynasties almost entirely, the textbooks enshrine a skewed vision of India’s history. To challenge Hindutva’s history project, it is not enough to demand inclusiveness. We must also expose the subregional supremacism that drives the distortion: the projection of a Maharashtrian Brahmin past as India’s national past.This is about the India the children are taught to imagine – and who they are taught to exclude.