‘History’ as the BJP’s Intellectual Crutch
The recent criticism of Dhurandhar has pointed to a familiar pattern: the packaging of history into over-simplified narratives of Hindu valour and external threat. From naming its chief protagonists as Ajay Sanyal (a Brahmin), Sushant Sinha (a Bania), and Jaskirat Singh Rangi (a Jat Sikh), to misrepresenting administrative facts—such as portraying Prashant Kumar as Uttar Pradesh’s DGP during demonetisation instead of Javeed Ahmad—the film reveals which identities the right wing chooses to glorify and which it side-lines or obscures.
Yet such distortions are not merely about religious conservatism or anti-Muslim polarisation. They also perform a quieter function—re-inscribing Brahminical authority over knowledge and legitimising the capitalist dominance of mercantile communities, even as they mobilise broader Hindu identities against Muslims while exacerbating caste fissures among non-Brahmin non-Bania communities. In this sense, Hindutva deploys distorted or fabricated history to divert attention from governance failures or to manufacture social conflict.
Controversies on History to serve corporate interests
On December 22, while addressing a Bhil audience, BJP veteran and Punjab Governor Gulab Chand Kataria passed remarks about Maharana Pratap that were widely seen as condescending—ironically invoking a figure the BJP has long used for emotive mobilisation. He was criticised by Rajkumar Roat of the Bhartiya Adivasi Party, who stressed Pratap’s enduring place in Adivasi historical memory.
Unease has also surfaced within the BJP’s broader ecosystem. On January 2, speaking at an event attended by Rajnath Singh, Vishvaraj Singh Mewar cautioned for an end to the political misuse of history.
Kataria’s comments also carried a political subtext in a region where mining interests are largely controlled by Jain and Agrawal business groups, while tribal-agrarian communities like Bhils and Rajputs dominate demographically yet bear the disproportionate ecological and social costs. Together, Roat’s direct criticism and Mewar’s measured appeal signal growing discomfort with the appropriation of tribal and agrarian histories to serve entrenched economic and political interests.
Crucially, the RSS–BJP project today goes beyond appropriation. It increasingly involves the active invention of Hindu warriors, the rebranding of historical dynasties, and their institutionalisation through social media, popular literature, and state-backed infrastructure.
Understanding this is essential to grasp how both Hindutva and caste-based parties are together reshaping North India along caste-communal lines while steadily eroding historical literacy and public intelligence.
The Hindutva Factory of Manufactured History
While the RSS and its Maharashtrian leadership have enlisted sympathetic scholars to sanitise figures like Savarkar and produce grand panegyrics—through novels and high-budget films—on Shivaji, Sambhaji, and the Peshwas, the Hindutva ecosystem has simultaneously generated a stream of previously unknown “historical” figures in North India. These fabrications are deployed to exploit caste fault lines and deliberately flatten historical consciousness among targeted communities.
In recent years, BJP-aligned platforms have circulated stories of King Sudhanwa Chauhan, an alleged ruler of Mahishmati said to have governed an empire larger than that of the historical Chauhansthat of the historical Chauhans of Ajmer–Sambhar, and portrayed as a disciple of Adi Shankaracharya. Other inventions include Kirandevi, claimed to have threatened Akbar with a dagger in a Meena Bazaar for his alleged misdeeds.
None of these figures are supported by inscriptions, chronicles, or even local oral traditions. By contrast, owing to long periods of political dominance—comparable to the Mughals or the Sikhs—the Rajput past is unusually well documented across Hindu, Islamic, and Sikh sources, making such fabrications relatively easy to expose. The scholarly rejection of the sixteenth-century Prithviraj Raso by figures such as G.H. Ojha, Namvar Singh, and Cynthia Talbot, in favour of the contemporaneous Prithviraj Vijaya Mahākāvya by Jayanaka, illustrates this point. As Cynthia Talbot notes, despite more than a century of scholarly dismissal, claims of the Raso’s twelfth-century authenticity persist in popular culture.
The real targets of this strategy are communities that lacked sustained political dominance and now seek a martial or regal past in the absence of historical records.
A Galaxy of Fiction against Phule–Ambedkarism
Manoshi Sinha Rawal’s 2019 book Saffron Swords, published by Garuda Prakashan also mainstreamed several such fabrications by presenting unsubstantiated valour tales as authentic history.
Endorsed by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, Ratan Sharda, and Union minister Kiren Rijiju, the book exemplifies how myth is laundered into legitimacy. Among the promoted figures are Rampyari Gujjari, Jograj Singh Gujar, and Harvir Singh Gulia, who allegedly mobilised an army of 40,000 in western Uttar Pradesh and defeated Timur-i-Lang—who is even claimed to have died from wounds inflicted by Harvir Singh Gulia. This narrative was publicly echoed by then Vice-President Jagdeep Dhankhar. When Alt News sought scholarly verification, historian Heramb Chaturvedi dismissed the claim as “absolutely absurd.”
The correlation between such martial myth-making among landed castes and rising anti-Dalit violence in western Uttar Pradesh cannot be ignored. These narratives offer a fragile sense of caste superiority within the Brahminical Varna (caste) framework, deflecting attention from structural inequality while undermining solidarities forged through Phule-Ambedkarite politics.
Progress for the Rich, Pride for the Poor & Erasure of Muslim Past
Hindutva’s historical fabrication increasingly materialises through state infrastructure. In July last year, Yogi Adityanath unveiled a forty-foot bronze statue of Raja Suheldev Rajbhar in Bahraich. The Caravan has documented how the BJP and Hindu Yuva Vahini mobilised Rajbhar OBCs through Suheldev’s legacy, further popularised by Amish Tripathi’s novel Legend of Suheldev (2020).
Yet the Sangh Parivar’s engagement with Suheldev is older. In 2003, a dubious text, Tulsī Dohā Śatak, was promoted by Rambhadracharya—later debunked by Namvar Singh—as falsely attributing temple destruction narratives to Tulsidas. No eleventh-century inscriptions of the Gaharwar or Kalchuri dynasties, which dominated the region, mention any ruler named Suheldev. His first appearance occurs in the seventeenth-century Mirat-i-Sikandari, where he is depicted not as a benevolent king but as an oppressive Hindu ruler. Thus, a fictional oppressive ruler is reinterpreted in later narratives as a historical Rajbhar king to draw OBCs away from Jatav-led Bahujan politics.
Similar processes are visible elsewhere. In 2000, India Post issued a stamp commemorating Maharaja Bijli Pasi, inaccurately presenting him as a contemporary of Prithviraj Chauhan. Prof. Badri Narayan analysed such inventions in Inventing Caste History. More recently, the Yogi government renamed Nihalgarh railway station—named after the town’s Nihal Khan, a Bhale Sultan chief—as Maharaja Bijli Pasi station.
Lucknow’s founding is variously attributed in official narratives to Lakshman, Lakhan Ahir, or Lakhan Pasi. As Sunita Sinha observes, this competitive deployment of “caste regal histories” by BJP responds to BSP’s Ambedkar Parks by substituting emancipatory politics with symbolic pride. This is approved with resounding applause by RSS leadership who have themselves promoted such works by likes of Bijay Sonkar Shastri.
These narrative interventions are not merely ideological; they are anchored in networks of patronage and publishing historically dominated by mercantile capital, which shapes both what histories are amplified and which identities are valorised.
Kshatriyaisation: From Arya Samaj to RSS
As early as 1907, Denzil Ibbetson described the Arya Samaj as a movement with strong political tendencies, rooted in shared interests of middle-class Brahmins and urban mercantile castes, and aimed at reshaping rural landed communities, which coexisted as both Hindus and Muslims. While Hindu–Muslim solidarities fractured, Hindu rural castes were also pitted against one another through competing Kshatriya claims—a project inherited and expanded by the RSS.
Writing in Hans (March 1998), cultural critic Rajendra Yadav argued that landed OBCs sought Kshatriya status within the Varna system, not its dismantling, limiting the scope of caste transformation. Kshatriya history offers an easily appropriable symbolic resource for this which can be “gifted” to landed OBCs in exchange for collaboration towards Brahminical institutional and Bania capitalist hegemony.
The project of Kshatriyaisation has historically involved linking diverse castes to Puranic mythological figures or retroactively assigning them Rajput history and figures. For centuries, Brahmins and Banias functioned as the principal gatekeepers of Hindu mythological and historical narratives—largely enabled by royal patronage across regimes, irrespective of whether the ruling elites were Rajputs, Mughals, Marathas, Afghans, or Jats.
With the dissolution of the princely states and the consequent de-institutionalisation of the Rajput masses, the Brahmin–Bania intellectual elite decisively became gatekeepers defining Rajput history and identity itself. This monopoly over historical narration endowed them with at least two significant socio-political powers within public discourse.
First, through selective manipulation and strategic cherry picking of Rajput history, they could simultaneously vilify Muslims and shame Rajputs for past Rajput alliances with Muslim rulers —, thus imposing upon them a perpetual burden of dharm-raksha. Second, this control enabled the reassignment of Rajput kingship and symbols of martial legitimacy to other dominant castes, such as Jats or Gujjars, often in exchange for political alignment against both Muslims and Rajputs.
For instance, in Rajasthan, the projection of the uncorroborated Jhunjhar Singh Nehra serves to displace Nawab Mohammad Khan’s historical role as Jhunjhunu’s founder. Similarly, official claims attributing Churu’s founding to a Chuhru Jat lack contemporary evidence, while the erasure of local Muslim history continues to marginalise living communities. What unfolded at Rajasthan’s Gogamedi shrine recently exemplifies this.
At one seminar, Kapil Kapoor asserted that Emperor Harsha was a Jat, while Hindutva platforms routinely project Alexander’s contemporary King Porus and Yashodharman, a 6th century ruler of Central India, as Jat rulers—replicating Arya Samaj strategies of Vedic Kshatriyaisation.
The most contentious claims concern the Gujjars. Attempts to “Kshatriya-ise” them link early medieval Rajput dynasties to Gujjar origins. In 1997, NH-24 was renamed Gurjar Samrat Mihir Bhoj Marg, and in 2010, a statue at Akshardham identified Mihir Bhoj as a “Gurjar Samrat.” Right-wing political scientist Meenakshi Jain and archaeologist K.K. Mohammed have advanced similar claims, despite their refutation by Prof. Shantarani Sharma in Indian Historical Review.
In Fractured Forest, Quartzite City, Thomas Crowley notes that Gujjar history has been “retrofitted, made into a glorious (if doomed) struggle against vicious outsiders,” In his dissertation , Frank Charles Spaulding highlighted that “there were no traditions, written, oral or otherwise, among the Gujjars to suggest the existence of this medieval kingdom and of the contemporary Gujars’ link to it” (pg. 74), hinting at their recent origins. These competitive claims by Jats and Gujjars over Rajput dynasties, engineered first by the Arya Samaj and later by the RSS, have only fractured agrarian unity rather than empowering marginalised groups.
Conclusion
While Hindutva’s historical revisionism primarily fuels anti-Muslim polarisation, it also functions to manage Hindu society—countering Dalit-Bahujan movements, fragmenting agrarian solidarity, and substituting governance with spectacle. The manufacture of history has become an ideological crutch for policy failure, deepening caste and communal fractures while hollowing historical consciousness itself. In this process, history is reduced from a means of understanding the past into an instrument of control, competition, and political distraction.
(The author is a mechanical engineer and an independent commentator on history and politics, with a particular focus on Rajasthan. His work explores the syncretic exchanges of India’s borderlands as well as contemporary debates on memory, identity and historiography)
Disclaimer: The views expressed here are the author’s personal views, and do not necessarily represent the views of Sabrangindia.
Related:
Temple Leases, Food Morality: Rajasthan’s new Panchayat order
Rajasthan: Gogamedi, a Rajput-Muslim shrine and the politics of communal capture