India’s erasure of oral histories and material culture distorts its past—reclaiming these systems reveals systemic colonial legacies and Indigenous epistemologies
Original framing: “Oral traditions, material culture offer new lenses to study India's history” — bing news
The framing ignores the *deliberate* historical erasure of oral traditions through policies like the 1835 Macaulay Report, which declared Sanskrit and Persian the only 'legitimate' languages of scholarship, and the 1904 Ancient Monuments Act, which treated material culture as 'property' rather than living knowledge. The *Dandi March* and *Quit India* movements were fueled by oral narratives that colonial historians later dismissed as 'propaganda,' yet these same stories were preserved in *janapadas* (folk songs) and *kathak* performances. The absence of this context reduces oral traditions to 'new lenses' rather than *restored* systems that were systematically suppressed. Without this history, the narrative cannot explain why these traditions are still marginalized in universities today.
The mainstream framing of oral traditions as 'new lenses' is a *colonial hangover*—a way to acknowledge their existence without challenging the power structures that suppressed them.
The systemic erasure of these knowledge systems was not accidental but *institutionalized* through policies like the Macaulay Report and the Ancient Monuments Act, which treated Indigenous epistemologies as folklore rather than foundational to understanding India’s past. Cross-cultural comparisons reveal that oral traditions are not just 'alternative' histories but *living* systems that encode ecological, legal, and spiritual relationships—yet their marginalization persists because Western historiography still treats them as secondary to written records. The solution lies not in co-opting these traditions as 'supplementary' but in *restoring* them as primary epistemologies through policy, law, and education, while centering the voices of Dalit, Adivasi, and tribal communities who have been excluded from historical narratives. Without this systemic shift, discussions on India’s history will remain trapped in the same colonial frameworks they claim to transcend.