The other day in Goa, at the Museum of Goa, Pilerne, historian and author Manu S. Pillai was in conversation with journalist Seema Mustafa for a program about syncretism of religion, when Seema enquired him about the weight of Historian’s Burden. That observation arrived like a stone dropped in still water: what is the responsibility of a historian?For Seema Mustafa, the former president of the Editors Guild of India, asking it is not idle. In the last 15 years, silence has thickened in India. Writers who once argued boldly now hesitate. Historians too have fallen quiet. Perhaps they have grown weary of shouting into storms, perhaps they are wary of reprisals. They are, after all, citizens before they are scholars, and citizens bleed. Yet, their silence is heavier than most, for when those entrusted with the memory of a people choose caution, something larger than courage is lost, the chance to guard truth from corrosion.Manu S. Pillai does not answer with slogans. His words are careful, measured and witty. The historian, he says, must do two things: write and engage. To write without engaging is like drawing maps that nobody reads, the world charted but useless. For too long, India’s historians wrote largely for one another, locked in the cloisters of the academy. Knowledge, pressed into footnotes and technical prose, became a private hoard, sealed away from the very people whose lives had produced it.The responsibility of a historian is a question that gets asked often, but never more urgently than in times when silence grows heavy, when fear reshapes the contours of public speech. Seema Mustafa posed it, Manu S. Pillai’s reply came without grand flourish. He mentioned that knowledge written but not shared was like seed sown in a sealed jar, it could never take root in the imagination of the people. And history, in truth, was already living among the people, not only in libraries.History, he explained, operated on two levels. One was austere, the discipline of the scholar: to examine context, to read carefully, to understand without judgment. The other was history as inheritance, as emotional currency, by which communities defined themselves, polished their heroes and sharpened their boundaries. Every group carried its own archive of memory, sometimes at odds with another’s.The example Pillai offered was Bhima Koregaon. For the nationalist lens, it was a humiliating defeat: the Peshwa army, guardians of an Indian polity, vanquished by the East India Company’s forces. Yet, within those Company forces marched large numbers of Dalit soldiers. To Dalit communities, the battle was remembered as their own triumph, an anti-caste victory, a breaking of shackles. Both readings existed, both were true in their way, and both were needed to understand the weight of that single day in 1818.The audience at the Museum of Goa, Pilerne, during a conversation between historian and author Manu S. Pillai and journalist Seema Mustafa on the syncretism of religion. Photo: Nilankur DasThis doubleness, he argued, was not an exception but the condition of history itself. Power, however, never seeks complexity; it seeks control. Politicians of every stripe, today one party, tomorrow its rival, appropriate selective versions of the past to shore up legitimacy. When historians retreat, when they keep to their silos, they leave a vacuum. And vacuums are always filled by voices more interested in myth than in truth.Could empathy, Seema pressed, offer a way out of this bind? Could history, told with generosity, bind together a society unravelled by polarisation? Pillai was cautious, but not dismissive. He pointed to Germany after the Nazi regime, where generations of children were schooled rigorously in the horrors of the Holocaust. Yet even there, he noted, fatigue had set in. Some began to feel too burdened by ancestral guilt, as though remembering had become a ritual of self-flagellation. The lesson was clear: empathy mattered, but empathy must also free, not imprison. History’s purpose was not to resurrect wounds as weapons but to acknowledge them as facts, then move forward.And yet optimism was hard to summon. If history’s broad arc shows anything, it is that humanity repeats itself endlessly. Power thrives on division, on pouring salt into old scars. Healing seldom comes from governments; it comes, if at all, from people themselves, from civil society, from those willing to hold one another’s stories without turning them into slogans.Pillai spoke, then, of his own village in Kerala. His house there is tended, in his absence, by a man descended from Dalits once bound to his family’s soil. Both men know this history; neither denies it. But they choose to live differently in the present, aware of the asymmetry that still exists, but also of the dignity that comes from acknowledging the past without letting it dictate the present. Such gestures are fragile, easily undone, but they are also where reconciliation begins.The conversation drifted toward the history written in post-independence India, the narratives that filled school textbooks. Were they too “Congress-fied”? Pillai resisted this easy accusation. Those historians of the 1960s and 70s had lived through Partition; they had seen blood run in the streets, neighbours turned to enemies. Their histories were not conspiracies of erasure, but attempts, conscious or not, to construct a narrative of unity from the ruins. Every historian is a creature of time and circumstance. History is rewritten not because earlier scholars lied, but because new generations read the past through different wounds, different hopes. To denounce one skew while replacing it with another was futile. What was lost in this pendulum swing was balance, sobriety, nuance and maturity.And then came a story from further back; about a king ruling in Thanjavur at the turn of the 18th century. He had presided over a court where Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, and Sanskrit mingled. He wrote a play too, in Telugu, a parody of caste. It was performed publicly in temples. Today, such a text would invite outrage, perhaps prosecution. But in that earlier time, a king could fund Vedic schools, build temples, and yet also lampoon the hypocrisies of caste.The story served as a reminder: the past was never as rigid, never as solemn, as our present imagines it. Our ancestors laughed. They erred. They mixed bloodlines and cultures. To purify the past was not only to falsify it, but also to imprison the present, to script the future into the same straitjacket.So what, then, is the responsibility of the historian? To speak, certainly. To write, yes. But more than that: to hold complexity when politics demands simplicity, to insist on nuance where ideology insists on clarity. The task is not to sanctify the past, nor to condemn it, but to open it like a window, to air and argument. To remind us, in short, that the past is not a single story carved in stone, but a chorus of voices, layered and human, as fractured and as whole as we ourselves are. The historian’s task is not to defend one version of truth against another, but to insist that truth itself is plural, fragile, alive. The past is not a monument. It is a river. To dam it is to kill it. To follow its course is to discover, again and again, that it has many mouths.But politics prefers mutilation. Parties of every colour rummage through the past for trophies, stripping away context until what remains is a usable myth. A pliant history makes for obedient citizens. A complex history breeds questioning minds. And so historians are pushed to the margins, their pages drowned by the drumbeats of power.Still, optimism falters. The arc of history bends, yes, but often it bends back into circles. Scars are reopened, divisions rehearsed. Governments rarely heal; they divide because division feeds power. Healing, when it comes, begins elsewhere, in households, in small gestures of recognition, in quiet refusals to carry old hatreds forward.Nilankur Das is a columnist at O Heraldo, Goa, and curator at the Museum of Goa for MOG Sundays.