If you recently bought the e-book format of Romila Thapar’s book of essays, The Past as Present, you might see a note on the second page saying, “This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.”

A history book with a Bollywood fiction disclaimer?

Was this a juicy story about how historic analysis by “Marxist” academics was finally being seen as fiction? I am open to the possibility that the “Nehru-worshipping”, “Leftist” historians hired a dozen failed novelists and got them to write reams of alternate literature to fragment our collective Bhakti and pit Hindus against each other. What a story this would be. After all, what else do historians do all day? I’m genuinely curious. This happened, then this happened, then this…okay work done for the day.

Just consider the Indus Valley Civilisation. I’m sure I could prove that’s a fictional place. Have you ever seen check-ins on Facebook captioned, “feeling loved @ wrld’s 1^st city”? Also, wasn’t the supposed practice of sati a concoction, made up by anti-national scholars to humiliate the next generation of Hindus? And could there really be over a thousand versions of the Ramayana? It happened just once, people. Students of comparative literature might have researched multiple versions of the text. But that doesn’t really prove anything, does it? These evil historians, with their long, slimy tentacles, could have kidnapped half-girlfriends of half-writers for a ransom of fake literature.

And the archaeologists are on their pay rolls, too, I imagine. What a sweet deal. Getting paid to confirm some fake history conjured up in a Nehruvian dystopia. And you get to travel to some desert or some such, lie down in the dirt with a brush in your hand and pose for a photo. There’s your proof of a dig. And you get to keep the archaeology hats, too, I bet. Best job, ever. But I was not about to let them get away with it. I’m certainly opening this can of worms. Watch out sickular brigade, your days of debauchery and scholarship are numbered.

At this point, my editor had me email Aleph to check if we have a story. Within hours, I received a suspiciously grateful email from the publisher telling me it was an inadvertent error and thanking me for pointing it out. Story killed. Nothing finishes off a conspiracy theory better than an “oh-that’s-a-typo” explanation by the party at the centre of the possible storm. Honestly, I’m convinced but for any reporter out there who doesn’t buy this, dig deeper, get to the root of the rot. And to get an alternate point of view, you might want to reach out to a scholar friend. Mail him at dina.batraroxx@gmail.com.