THE GREAT INDIAN RETELLING

HISTORY is fiction in retrospect.

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The fact of India's independence struggle is indisputable.

But there are many readings they vary. As years go by, the versions multiply. And history begins to read like fiction.

There is a growing market for radical retelling. Audrey Truschke's India: A History of 5,000 Years takes the Mughals-long vilified in school textbooks as marauding invaders inimical to Hinduism and paints them as builders of culture, syncretism, and debate.

In liberal interpretation, Akbar is a version of Jawaharlal Nehru minus his proficiency in English. Akbar fought many wars, but the trend was to focus on his secular spirit. The founding of his religion Din-i-Ilahi (Faith of god), for example, is generally seen as an attempt to bring various religions together. A syncretic initiative, according to Truschke. But Din-i-Ilahi could be seen as a clever move to suppress Hindus.

This interpretation infuriates one set of readers and comforts another.

William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal does something similar for Bahadur Shah Zafar, recasting him from a weak, decadent ruler to a tragic symbol of cultural decline at the hands of the British in 1857. Here, too, the facts-the mutiny, exile to Rangoon-don't shift.

What shifts is the colour: from shame to martyrdom; a canonisation of sorts after more than a century.