This article examines a report currently being considered by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education pertaining to school history books. It unpacks the misplaced bases of comparison used in the report. It also highlights the implications of the recommendations to erase or simplify histories of caste and gender, reducing the discipline to an account of “great men” and a few “great women,” as well as to “cleanse” sections of history to create a polarised notion of the past, locating these within the large-scale changes imminent in education at all levels.
