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        All history is bunkum, wrote a well-known critic. Two seemingly unrelated events this week has raised some serious questions on the relevance of history, and more importantly how reliable it is. In England, World War II Prime Minister Winston Churchill has been cut from a list of key historical figures recommended for teaching in English secondary schools. The radical overhaul of the school curriculum for 11 to 14-year-olds is designed to bring secondary education up to date and allow teachers more flexibility in the subjects they teach. Elsewhere in India, the nation's first Prime Minister Jawharlal Nehru hit the headlines after Paulina Mountbatten (daughter of Lord Mountbatten and Edwina) revealed that Nehru's affair (she described it as a platonic love) with her mother had impacted India's Kashmir policy. While there is a honest debate in Britain on whether dropping of Churchill from school curriculum is right or not, in India, on the contrary, there has been a marked, and even intransigent, reluctance to re-evaluate the stature of Nehru in the light of new and dramatic revelations. Having anointed him as an icon, political and vested interests, are loathe to change their perception even though there is increasing reason to believe that Nehru had many failings and may not deserve the heroic status that he enjoys now.

        This brings us to the question of the necessity of history at all at a time when the future seems to be unfolding faster than ever before. And do we need to know of the past, when we live in the present and are concerned only about the future? Given all the desirable and available branches of knowledge, why insist-as most educational programmes do-on a good bit of history? There can be no easy answers to this. Any subject of study needs justification: its advocates must explain why it is worth attention. Most widely accepted subjects — and history is certainly one of them — attract some people who simply like the information and modes of thought involved. But audiences less spontaneously drawn to the subject and more doubtful about why to bother need to know what the purpose is. In a society that quite correctly expects education to serve useful purposes, the functions of history can seem more difficult to define than those of engineering or medicine. History is in fact very useful, actually indispensable, but the products of historical study are less tangible, sometimes less immediate, than those that stem from some other disciplines.

        The question of why we should study history also entails several subsidiary issues about what kind of history should be studied. Historians and the general public alike can generate a lot of heat about what specific history courses should appear in what part of the curriculum. Britain seems to be doing precisely that. But we India, with a Left-fixated academia, have not only distorted and vulgarised history so far, but also insist on continuing to be so. Surely, history will not be kind to the historians of India.