History in History: Interpretations of the Indian Pasts Tracing the evolution of Indian historical perspective, this book delineates four main historical periods. During precolonial times, history was primarily a ‘morale’ or a construction of eternal values that the future generation would inherit from their forebears. The colonial period is discussed in two chapters: one on the ‘imported history’ of India that Orientalists believed to have been ingrained in native minds, and a second register of different nationalist ideologies where the past was projected onto the present and the future. And finally in post-independence India, the past has turned into a ‘battlefield’ with different factions struggling to create their own historical interpretation of the Indian nation.