If there is anything that is safe in India, it is democracy

The term 'mother of democracy' is in fact a technical term that has been around for a long time

- PRATUL SHARMA

Q / The notion of India being the 'mother of democracy' gained currency after Prime Minister Narendra Modi began speaking about it. Is there sufficient historical and archaeological evidence to back it?

A/ What the prime minister has drawn attention to is the approach to decolonise the process of historical narrative that prevailed in this country.

To give you an example, the British were in India for just about 200 years. Now, for a country like India, with history of thousands of years, 200 years should have been inconsequential. But it was not so. The British delinked us from our legacies: our spiritual and cultural legacies. Basically, the idea is to have a decolonised approach to understanding issues.

Q/As you said, this is not a recent construct. Historians referred to it at the turn of 20th century. But it seems we lost it along the way.

A/ This is one of the big ironies of Indian history writing. I have been teaching history since 1977, and I remember that the books I read in 1975 or 1976 to take it up as a profession were [written by] R.C. Majumdar, Jadunath Sarkar, Radhu Kumud Mukherjee. There were 11 volumes of Majumdar's History and Culture of Indian People, a profoundly important narrative based on solid sources. Gradually, these volumes disappeared and you had a new set of writings.