Kozhikode: History is a continuous process and cannot be taught in fragments, eminent historian Romila Thapar said on Saturday (January 24) at the Kerala Literature Festival, 2026. Criticising the removal of entire dynasties – or some families within them – as is being done to the Mughals in Indian history, is “nonsense”, she said.Speaking online at a session titled Women Writing History: Three Generations, at the ninth edition of the KLF, Thapar said that selectively excising periods or dynasties from the syllabus distorts historical understanding.“The kinds of things that are happening, where chunks of history are being thrown out of the syllabus, or we are told we don’t need to study them, are nonsense,” she said. “History is a continuous process. It is an evolution of people and cultures, of ways of behaviour and ways of thinking, of speech and thought. We cannot break that continuity by saying, ‘All right, we will throw this dynasty out, we take away the Mughals, or we will throw [someone else] out.’ It breaks history up, and then it makes no sense.”Also read: Why Is History So Controversial in Today’s India? Romila Thapar and Namit Arora ExplainThapar mentioned a number of issues ranging from the popular history being spread on social media by claiming to be legitimate history, to the central role of education in questioning the importance and existing knowledge of feminist history.Her remarks come amid recent revisions by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), which has altered the Social Science curriculum for Classes 7 and 8 for the 2025-26 academic year. The revised textbooks remove chapters on the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals from Class 7, and then reintroduce them in Class 8, though in a more compressed form and with language historians have objected to.Certain historical figures, including Raziyya Sultan and the Mughal empress Nur Jehan, are not reintroduced. The new Class 8 textbook also removes references to Tipu Sultan, Haidar Ali and the four Anglo-Mysore wars, while expanding coverage of the Marathas, including a full chapter on the Anglo-Maratha wars. NCERT officials have said that the deletions are in line with the National Education Policy (NEP), 2020 and aim to reduce syllabus “load”.At the same time, the NCERT is now focussing on adding more of religio-cultural rituals and passages on sacred sites in text books, along with teaching more of ancient Indian dynasties like the Maurya, Shungur and Satavahana dynasties, which were taught earlier as well.At the KLF session, Thapar also expressed concern over the growing influence of “popular history”, especially the kind that features on social media platforms, warning that such accounts often blur the border between opinion and evidence-based scholarship.Also read: NCERT Modules on ‘Partition Horrors’ Whitewash Colonial Britain’s Role“There is a difference between popular history and what professional historians write,” she said, urging readers to verify whether historical claims come from trained scholars or are merely circulated online without academic scrutiny.Reflecting on feminist history, the 94-year-old historian said that while she may not always have consciously written history from a woman’s perspective, she consistently attempted to introduce feminist insights into her work. She emphasised that writing feminist history always went hand in hand with women asserting autonomy and intellectual independence.“An autonomous woman is an absolutely essential component of any society,” she said, adding that being a feminist – standing for critical thinking and freedom – was as important as documenting women’s histories.The session also featured historians Kumkum Roy and Preeti Gulati, and was moderated by Malavika Binny of Kannur University. The speakers discussed how histories of gender, food and everyday life could expand historical narratives beyond dynastic and binary frameworks. They als spoke about countering curricular distortions through wider historical lenses – from gender and social processes to food histories – and stressed the need to engage with complexity rather than binary narratives of the past.The four-day Kerala Literature Festival concluded on Sunday and hosted over 400 speakers, including Nobel laureates Abdulrazak Gurnah and Abhijit Banerjee, astronaut Sunita Williams and author Kiran Desai.