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Historian William Dalrymple a flutter last week by appearing to blame Indian historians for the rise of what he called “WhatsApp history” in India – fake narratives masquerading as history that are often spread to push political narratives, especially Hindutva.

“My personal bugbear is that the study of history in academia entered a long phase from about the ’50s through to the beginning of the present century, where academics only talked to themselves, and often did so in deliberately obscure language of the Subaltern Studies Collective and so on…” he said. “As a result, you’ve got the growth of ‘WhatsApp history’ and ‘WhatsApp University.’ It was the failure of Indian academics to reach out to general audiences.”

While Dalrymple’s criticism of India’s historians created a controversy, what is uncontested is the rise of “WhatsApp history”. One of the starkest cultural consequences of the mass accessibility of the internet in India is the proliferation of fake history.

Much of this has been crucial to the rise of...