In my AP World History class, we learned about the Taj Mahal and other “important” buildings made by the Mughals, but never the vast, jaw-dropping temples or engineering feats built under Hindu rule.
I remember countless details about the Mughals, while the rest of India’s history felt compressed into what seemed like a single paragraph for a civilization of more than a billion people, shoved between histories and countries the course went in-depth for.
The problem isn’t that India is missing from the curriculum but that it is often taught largely through the people who conquered it. The curriculum makes it seem like India only matters once outside powers arrive, as if it hadn’t already been thriving for thousands of years before them.
India is one of the world’s oldest continuous civilizations, with roots in the Indus Valley stretching back roughly 5,000 years, and home to almost a fifth of humanity. Indian mathematicians developed the place value decimal system and the mathematical use of zero. As recently as the early 1700s, economic historians estimate, India made up close to a quarter of the world’s economic output before colonial rule reversed that. A civilization of that scale deserves more than a passing mention. Instead, American curricula often present Indian history as a handful of disconnected topics: ancient religion, the caste system, Mughal architecture and Gandhi. Students leave with little sense of India’s philosophical, scientific, political or economic contributions.
The way the course is structured helps explain why. The AP class begins in 1200 CE, cutting out the Indus Valley civilization, the Mauryan Empire, Ashoka, the Gupta Age and grand Hindu temples before the class even starts. The standard AP World textbook files all of ancient India into a “Prologue: History before 1200 C.E.” When the course begins, India is presented as part of “South and Southeast Asia,” through the Delhi Sultanate and later the Mughals, rather than as its own subject.
One class can’t teach everything, and AP World’s start date has its logic. But when one of the world’s oldest civilizations reaches students mainly through conquest and colonialism, the result is a distorted picture.
Ancient India is taught in schools. California teaches it to sixth graders, who analyze the Maurya Empire and Ashoka. Many states cover Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism, but almost always in middle school. Twelve-year-olds learn about river valleys and ancient religions, yet in the high school courses colleges actually weigh, much of India’s complexity disappears. In Washington, world history isn’t even a graduation requirement. A student can leave high school thinking of India mainly as a former British colony and a poor country.
I know what that does, because it happened to me. Christianity, Islam and Judaism continued to reappear throughout my education; Hinduism, when it appeared at all, came early and briefly, then faded away. As an Indian American, I grew up believing all of India was poor because poverty was the only part I was ever shown. The temples, the mathematics, the centuries when my family’s country was among the richest on Earth — none of it reached me.
The solution isn’t to erase the Mughals or the British. That history is important and needs to be taught, but it shouldn’t stand alone. Conquerors can’t be the only part of India’s history that students ever meet. A complete history includes Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim and colonial India as parts of one long story, not a single chapter replacing a whole history.
When we teach a civilization of more than a billion people through the people who invaded it, all students lose — not just Indian American students, but everyone who walks away with a more distorted understanding of one of the world’s most significant civilizations.
