History is among the most contentious of subjects across countries and cultures. Its revisionism is expectedly controversial, especially when ideologically inflexible or reactionary forces are in power. Ideological revisionism, as opposed to fact-based revisionism, is a slippery slope, as was seen in the recent controversy over the iconic Dancing Girl photograph in a Grade 9 school textbook. The NCERT, an autonomous institution, for reasons best known to its mandarins, decided that the Dancing Girl figurine, discovered in Mohenjo-daro dating back to 2600 BCE and a lasting symbol of the Indus Valley Civilisation, which millions of students have studied in Indian schools, needed to be covered up. Its latest edition of the........

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