Below is an essay I wrote in response to Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee’s reflections on the challenges of anachronism and presentism in historical writing, prompted by his reading of Speaking of History (his piece is here). My response first appeared on Scroll as Rejoinder: ‘The historian can understand the past only through her own concepts of the present’. Full text is reproduced below.

In my introduction to Speaking of History, I had hoped that the book might ‘spark curiosity and encourage readers to embark on their own wide-ranging readings and conversations’ about the past. An essay by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee—also a friend—published in Scroll.in, offers one such engagement. In this brief piece, I would like to respond to, and extend, his reflections on the problems of anachronism and presentism in historical interpretation.

In The Idea of History (1946), the philosopher-historian RG Collingwood wrote: ‘All history is contemporary history: not in the ordinary sense of the word, where contemporary history means the history of the comparatively recent past, but in the strict sense: the consciousness of one’s own activity as one actually performs it. History is thus the self-knowledge of the living mind. For even when the events which the historian studies are events that happened in the distant past, the condition of their being historically known is that they should vibrate in the historian’s mind.’

A corollary of this view is that the historian can understand the past only through her own concepts and categories of the present. It is only through these that she recognizes, interprets, and evaluates not only past societies in all their complexity, but even contemporary cultures different from her own. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein noted, ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’—a world that includes one’s sense of the past. Drawing on available evidence, the historian attempts an imaginative entry into the society she studies: to see the world, as far as possible, as its members might have seen it, and to grasp what it may have been like to live within it.

In What is History? (1961), EH Carr described history as ‘an unending dialogue between the present and the past’, a formulation that underpins all historical inquiry. Yet this inquiry—inescapably shaped by present concerns—unfolds within our own linguistic and conceptual frameworks, because these are all we have. Without them, the past remains opaque. With them, it risks distortion. This is because past societies inhabited conceptual worlds that could differ significantly from our own—though never so radically that we cannot still recognize the humanity we share with them.

The challenge of anachronism, then, may be framed as follows: how do we study a past marked by both continuity and rupture using present-day concepts, without assuming that their meanings and forms apply unchanged to earlier times? Anachronism arises when this distinction collapses—for instance, in assuming that ideas of loyalty, respect, or piety among the people of the medieval Chandela kingdom were broadly similar to those of modern Bhopal, or that expectations of political authority in that period closely resembled our own. The problem of anachronism does not lie in using modern categories to discuss the past. It arises when these categories are treated as timeless realities, rather than historically situated tools of analysis.

Presentism poses a related challenge: the tendency to let present-day concerns, moral frameworks, and values shape how we interpret and judge the past. One example would be to fault the Cholas for lacking modern ideas of human rights or feminism. Good historical practice tries to minimize both anachronism and presentism. While recognizing that neither can be fully eliminated, historians manage and discipline these risks through a set of methodological habits. The best that one can do is to make one’s interpretations and judgments self-aware, context-sensitive, grounded in evidence, and transparent in their reasoning as far as possible. I’ll say more on this ahead.

Historical interpretations

Bhattacharjee’s essay begins promisingly, with reflections on how certain kinds of historical analysis might furnish dangerous justifications for colonial conquest or feed into simplistic narratives of linear progress. He then turns to figures like Nehru and historians such as Edward Gibbon, as examples of thinkers who had identified periods of cultural decline in past societies. For Bhattacharjee, such arguments for decline tend to covertly ‘smuggle in a linear idea of modern history that connects to ideas of technological and ideological progress’. But this view is debatable. Identifying patterns of decline in specific domains—say, patriarchy, hierarchy, or forms of inquiry—is entirely compatible with seeing history as contingent and without any overarching design, which is, in fact, how I see it.

Bhattacharjee next raises the question of anachronism in historical writing, but this section soon runs into difficulty. It relies on rather facile charges of anachronism and a nervous shadowboxing with ‘rationalists’—a category in which he places me—whom he sees as single-minded proponents of positivism, true objectivity, and ‘linear progress’ (his persistent concern). This is puzzling, since in Speaking of History, both Romila Thapar and I repeatedly emphasize—as I also did in Indians—that all historical interpretation is necessarily subjective. One is left wondering whether the reader may be importing his own familiar ghosts into the text—including, not least, a rather facile and overly smug animus against modernity. But that, too, is par for the course. As JM Coetzee observed, ‘once a book is launched into the world it becomes the property of its readers, who, given half a chance, will twist its meaning in accord with their own preconceptions and desires.’

To my mind, any robust idea of objectivity or Truth in historical interpretations is untenable. What we emphasize instead is the careful use of relevant and credible evidence to build reasoned interpretations—yet always open to revision in light of new evidence or more persuasive arguments. I think good historical scholarship seeks to understand the past not with ‘a sense of “rational” superiority’, but through the disciplined use of reason, tempered by doubt, curiosity, and humility. It engages the past through continually evolving historiographical frameworks and questions shaped by our own time—for instance, by interrogating relations of power and knowledge in the past, or by recovering voices and perspectives long marginalized in the historical record.

Bhattacharjee objects to the very use of modern concepts in describing the past, which indicates his underlying belief that such usage can be avoided. He does not consider whether these concepts are being applied with care and awareness of their shifting meanings. When I (and many historians) refer to ‘secular subject matter’ in ancient art, or to ‘secular inquiries into nature,’ I am not importing modern secularism wholesale into the past. Rather, I use ‘secular’ heuristically—to indicate that the subject matter is not religious, or that inquiry does not rely on scriptural or divine explanation. The usage is contextual and analytical, not literal or fixed. Seasoned readers of history recognize this.

The same applies to modern terms like ‘state’, ‘religion’, or ‘class’. These are unavoidable tools of description, but informed readers do not assume that their meanings remain identical across time—or even across societies today, as Romila Thapar herself has often pointed out in the case of ‘religion’. Their application across time rests on the understanding that concepts have histories of their own. At best, they bear a family resemblance to earlier formations, not exact equivalence. This is an implicit and widely recognized aspect of historical method. ‘Hinduism’ too is a modern category. When used to describe earlier beliefs, it should be understood as an analytical convenience rather than an eternal (sanatan) entity or a self-conscious identity widely shared across the subcontinent.

The question of language

After all, our conceptual world is bounded by language—and language itself evolves with the world it describes. Our language is necessarily of our time, so how sensible is it to expect fixed meanings across time? When I use a contemporary term like ‘sex-positive’ to describe a society of a thousand years ago, does any thoughtful reader assume that this concept existed in identical form then? Rather, the reader will recognize that I am using a modern term to convey, in accessible language, a certain ease with sexuality in that time. But Bhattacharjee thinks differently and his rejection of such usage misconstrues the problem of anachronism. Elsewhere, he objects to describing Akbar’s policies as reflecting ‘secular tendencies’, while himself readily describing them with terms like ‘tolerance’ and ‘syncretism’—which are equally modern categories. In doing so, he inadvertently illustrates the impossibility of avoiding modern conceptual language.

Similarly, in asking about the quality of life or degree of freedom experienced by medieval devadasis, I’ve simply engaged in historically grounded, empathetic inquiry—drawing on available sources and their known horizons of life. Bhattacharjee concedes that ‘the exploitation of devadasis within a religious and caste structure is well documented’ yet resists any attempt to reflect on its impact on their lives—on the grounds that we cannot ‘judge their condition better than perhaps they did’. This I find bewildering. My own critique of caste inequities in the past draws not only on my ethical sensibilities but also on a long history of internal critiques within the subcontinent, alongside all the shared and recurring human struggles against it across millennia. It is not, as Bhattacharjee presumes, an unreflective imposition of modernist values into the past. He even believes that we must confine our critiques ‘against existing notions and practices of caste’. Ambedkar must be turning in his grave.

Likewise, to speak of a decline in liberal or egalitarian practices in a given period is not necessarily to hoist modern meanings of these terms into the past. Rather, it acknowledges that struggles for greater liberty or equality—while not identical to modern ones—have existed in earlier societies, and their historical changes and trends can be meaningfully studied, compared and discussed. These are not instances of crude anachronism but of historically informed analysis using conceptual tools that are necessarily modern—which is all we have access to—yet applied with an awareness of their shifting meanings and contexts. 

Bhattacharjee also resists evaluative judgments about the past. Yet these have a legitimate place in historical interpretation—provided their basis is clear. Historians routinely characterize past social practices and institutions as unjust, oppressive or corrupt. If there is a problem of presentism here, it lies less in the act of judgment itself, more in how it is grounded: in the evidence used, the context considered, its purpose and the transparency of arguments. But Bhattacharjee is not inclined to consider all that. Instead, he suggests that even comparative philosophical judgments—such as calling Madhyamaka more sophisticated than Advaita—amount to presentism. He also appears to read historical analogies as literal equivalences, which is odd in a seasoned writer.

One may well disagree with my historical interpretations, but the grounds on which my friend objects to them are less coherent than he assumes. Charges of anachronism and presentism are often easy to make and may themselves reflect unacknowledged presentist commitments. Too often, they rest on an insufficiently examined—or flawed—understanding of the problem.

Bhattacharjee’s essay has its moments, but much of it seems to me directed at straw targets. He misses the deeper challenges posed by anachronism and presentism: whether they can ever be fully avoided, how far they can be disciplined, how major theorists of history have grappled with them. He gestures towards it near the end but does not pursue it. A fuller engagement with these questions would have made for a more illuminating essay. That said, I’m grateful to him for providing me an occasion for these reflections—and I’m already looking forward to our next beery outing!

(Sent to Scroll on 03 April ’26, where it was published on 12 April ’26)