PublicPast · Journal of Public History
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Somewhere in India today, a civil services aspirant is underlining a line in their notes: "The Indus Valley people worshipped a Mother Goddess." The sentence sits comfortably next to facts about drainage systems and granaries, presented with the same air of settled certainty. It will likely appear, in some form, on an answer sheet this year. What the aspirant is unlikely to know is that this "fact" is a nearly century old interpretive guess, one that the discipline of archaeology itself has long since been complicated, qualified, and in many cases abandoned. This editorial is about that gap, between what historians and archaeologists now understand about the Indus Valley Civilization, and what continues to circulate as unquestioned truth in India's civic and educational institutions.
A young student today can meet the past without ever opening a history book. A search engine supplies the first answer and a short video the first narrative, while a platform decides what appears next. Increasingly, the first "historian" a student talks to may be an artificial intelligence system. The shift looks ordinary, yet it raises a question that historians now have to answer. Who tells us the past when the historian is no longer the only interpreter of history?
