India Through Lens of Marginalised https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws6Dakdv2tY Jun 25, 2025  
Audrey Truschke discusses her book on 5000 years of South Asian history, starting with the Indus Valley Civilization around 2600 BCE. She explains the choice of 5000 years, including a brief account of early human migration 120,000 years ago. Truschke emphasizes the importance of diverse voices, particularly women and oppressed castes, in her narrative. She critiques political appropriations of the Indus civilization and hig

https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/audrey-truschke-on-india-5000-years-of-history-on-the-subcontinent hlights the book's non-nationalist approach, covering historical connections, cultural exports, and the evolution of Hindu nationalism. I use the term “India” in its older geographical sense of the subcontinent, which includes parts of the modern nations of Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and Bangladesh. This practice may be uncomfortable for some readers who are accustomed to “India” meaning the modern nation, which covers only some of the Indian subcontinent, but I can live with that discomfort. In fact, challenging reader assumptions is important to shake everybody out of our collective tendency to write the present onto the past.

Audrey Truschke — Hindutva History and Other Modern Problems with the Indian Past https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCyL2wb5B3I

I survey in the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries. Millennia earlier, I elevate the voices of Buddhist women (rather than men) in capturing the early history of Buddhism on the subcontinent. I cover some highlights of civil rights movements in twentieth-century India led by Shudras and Dalits, which are far too often omitted in overview histories.

https://www.audreytruschke.com/

 Debunking Audrey Truschke's Malicious Narrative of Hinduism - Presentation & Analysis  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxUSNMfdLlk  Sangam Talk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk-L4eOLl98   When the 19th century began, no one was sure of who or what a Hindu was. But by the end of the 20th century, it seemed like the majority of India's population was Hindu since the beginning of time. This is the story of what happened in between...

India Ink https://www.youtube.com/@IndiaInkHistory 

 “Secular forces fixate on footnotes, Hindutva gets how Indians deal with history”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfWd25Dv5-8 Manu Pillai  is clear that “#Hindutva has understood and weaponised how Indians deal with history” in a way that the left has not. “#Secular forces are fixated on a footnoted version of history,” he says. This makes it quite unappealing to people looking to history to construct an identity.

Where does that leave the historian? Pillai agrees that he never thought he’d be in such a contentious field when he first started out. But in the end, he sees it as the price of being in the public eye. Historians are people too. The idea that a pure or virtuous history is possible, he suggests, may itself be an idealised position.

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