For a long time now, many in India have harboured the convenient belief that if they come across a historical argument that criticises something about the Indian past, they can successfully counter it simply by saying, “That is Marxist history.” It’s an intellectually lazy move, but it helps people skip the process of pausing for a moment and thinking more carefully about what they’re reading or hearing. No wonder we see it being used, gleefully, all the time.But what does “Marxist history” even mean?Let’s begin with the concept of “historiography”. Consider this quote from an article on Indian history: “It has been only in recent years that the influence of ideologies on the interpretation of Indian history has been recognized; perhaps now for the first time, a history of the changing interpretations of ancient India can be written.” This quote reads like a line from some podcast monologue by one of the many Hindutva-leaning writers of history who have attained popularity in recent years. After all, the public discourse in India has been lately dominated by the supposed rescuing of history, from the “nefarious ideologies” of “leftist” and “Marxist” historians, enacted by such non-historian influencers. So it might come as a surprise to many that the above quote is not part of any such recent rescue exercise, but is from an article which appeared in a scholarly journal more than half a century ago in 1968. It was written by a 37-year-old Indian historian named Romila Thapar.Titled “Interpretations of Ancient Indian History”, that article is a great resource to understand the basics of what academic historians call historiography, which is perhaps the most elemental of the research concepts one learns as a historian. Historiography has several related meanings, the most common being: the study of the different ways in which writers from different time periods or backgrounds etc. have written the history of a particular topic. It is, in short, the history of history-writing. A historiographical exercise focused on Indian history shows us, for example, that folks who were writing in the late 1800s produced narratives very different to the narratives of those who wrote in the early 1800s or the late 1700s. Besides, native Indian writers in the late 1800s produced a narrative of Indian history quite different from that of contemporaneous British writers, and Bahujan writers in the 20th century wrote histories substantially different from those of 20th-century elite-caste writers.In the 1968 article, Thapar examines how historians/writers since the late 1700s have interpreted and written the history of the Indian subcontinent (or South Asia as we better understand it today). To the East India Company-employed Orientalists and Indologists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the primary motivation for exploring and writing Indian history was the requirement that the Company’s “officers, in order to administer properly the territories which it had acquired, become familiar with the laws, habits, and history of the people they were governing”. Many Orientalists also had “a genuine interest in the culture of India”, although “the ancient Indian past was seen almost as a lost wing of early European culture. If the Orientalists tended to exaggerate the virtues they saw in Indian society [of the past], it was in part because they were searching for a distant Utopia to escape from the bewildering changes taking place in Europe.”Note how Thapar contextualises the historians and the history-writing of this time; that is, she finds meaningful connections between the personal, socioeconomic and political contexts of the history-writers on the one hand, and the kinds of history they wrote on the other. She then discusses the influential 1817 book The History of British India by James Mill, a book which was mostly disparaging about South Asia’s past: “Mill was a radical in the British context, and, as was the case with quite a few other radicals of this period, he tended to exaggerate the conservatism and backwardness of India in order to accentuate his own radicalism.”The lesson that historiography offers is that contrary to popular belief, history is not something natural, or something like a solid truth, just “out there” for any random person to go and grab it, or “uncover” or “discover” it. Instead, history – as we generally understand it – has to be actively and often painstakingly constructed from lots of different sources scattered all over, and then conveyed in a coherent form to the reader. Therefore historical accounts differ significantly depending upon many factors, including which sources were used and not used, how hard the researcher worked to ensure that they were comprehensive in gathering and interpreting their sources, and which elements of society, culture and politics were emphasised and which were neglected during the writing of the account.This fundamental fact, that different writers and scholars will write histories of the same region and period in very different ways, helps us better understand what “Marxist” history is, and also its strengths and weaknesses. Many serious historians will say that the primary goal of any historical analysis is to describe and explain how change (in a society, or a region, or a belief-system, or a profession, etc.) occurs. According to the scholar G. Aloysius in the book Nationalism Without a Nation in India, many of the early or “classical” Marxist (or Marxian) historians described the history of colonial India and of the social transformations in that period “rather mechanically as the transition from feudalism to capitalism”. By “rather mechanically”, Aloysius likely means to say that these writers were relatively less interested in people themselves, that is, in the ideas, activities and agency of people and communities; but instead favoured a “deterministic” approach in which societal etc. changes were considered as mainly an inevitable consequence of economic factors and “class struggles”, with little regard for human agency outside of the class struggle framework.Aloysius says that for a long time most Indian scholars influenced by Marxism were applying “an economic-reductionist approach in which power and politics are functions of economic change”, i.e., political events and changes are believed to be primarily dependent on economic factors, with little room for social, cultural and individual human factors. The scant attention paid to the agency of people themselves – as individuals and as members of families and communities – to bring about major changes in society and politics, is one of the strongest critiques of the Marxian approach to human history.But this is also an overused critique. It is important to note – contrary to the opinions of many detractors of Indian academic historians in general – that despite the above general remarks, there is no single and uniform “Marxist history” of India, and there is no one single way in which “Marxist historians” write history. Even Aloysius, despite not being a fan of this approach, writes that history-writing in the Marxist tradition has changed over time. He also points to exceptions: “Not that there were no honourable exceptions. For example, though S. K. Ghosh speaks of feudalism, it includes a definite cultural component, too.” (The book referred to is Suniti Kumar Ghosh’s The Indian Big Bourgeoisie: Its Genesis, Growth, and Character.) Aloysius applauds historians who wrote in the early post-independence period during the dominance of “nationalist” and Marxism-based approaches but nevertheless took their interpretations in different directions: “That the key to the understanding of power in India lay within society [as opposed to simply within economic factors or royal dynasties] was realized early enough by some historians and a good number of sociologists and is increasingly being accepted by others as well.”So in short, there is a supposed “classical” Marxism-inspired method of analysing and writing history, and then there are multiple different ways in which that method is actually applied by different scholars. But despite this clear complexity, and “the vast differences in their methods and assumptions” as Shashi Singh wrote a couple of years ago, most of India’s academic historians “are grouped as Marxists… What else could explain the branding of Romila Thapar and Harbans Mukhia – who have nothing whatsoever to do with the Marxist method – as Marxists?”Today in the Indian public discourse, one frequently comes across “Marxist” historians in a context of disparaging commentary. One hears people speaking of them as if these handful of scholars, with little real power anyway, have destroyed the entire country’s education system through their allegedly wrong and “biased” history-writing. Most importantly, there is a widespread misconception that Marxist historians “hate” Hindus and are “biased towards” Muslims – whatever that means. These are imaginary issues, and anyone who has carefully read the work of academic historians, Marxian or otherwise, is aware of the absurdity of such comments. This doesn’t mean that Marxism-inspired historical accounts are perfect – no historical account is perfect, for that matter – but rather that the imperfections of “classical” Marxian history-writing lie not in any imagined “love” for Muslims and Islam, but in its general predilection toward giving no or minimal importance to human agency and cultural factors, and instead taking “class struggle” and purely economic factors as almost the sole “motors” of historical change.In a recent article, the historian Vinayak Chaturvedi wrote how events on the ground in India in the early 2000s made him acutely aware of the limitations of Marxism-inspired scholarly approaches. Not that those perspectives led him to write incorrect or bad histories, but that they had their strengths and weaknesses, and that the weaknesses hadn’t been fully acknowledged by scholars due to “epistemological blinders”. Indeed, for a long time now many historians have been using a multiplicity of methods and perspectives in their work, and very few academic works can be described as being purely Marxist (or “post-modernist”, or “nationalist” etc.) While labels such as “Marxist” might have heuristic value as a convenient shorthand, they are actually meaningless in most contexts. To use Shashi Singh’s example from above, though detractors love to insult the historian Romila Thapar as a “Marxist” writer, there is little in her interpretations of Indian history that can be categorised as Marxian.The way I see it, we will have a more productive public discourse if we altogether stopped employing intellectually lazy shorthands like “Marxist history” and “Marxist historians” to dismiss any historical account we don’t like. Criticism is helpful and meaningful when it is specific. Instead of (or at least in addition to) asserting that a narrative is bad because it is Marxist or feminist or nationalist, etc., one needs to articulately explain why and how it is not a good narrative. And how do we know if something is a good, robust historical account? As any serious historian will say, that judgement is best based not on how much hatred or praise for particular individuals or groups the particular account contains, but on how comprehensive or selective it is, what evidence it uses and ignores, whether the evidence it uses is reliable, and finally, whether the arguments and claims it makes match well with the evidence.Kiran Kumbhar is a historian, teacher and former physician, currently affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania.In his column ‘Past Forward’, Kumbhar provides us with a rear-view mirror that ensures we drive straight ahead.