This book is about the production and consumption of specifically Indian history, framed by concerns with postmodernism and postcolonialism. Several parallel themes crosscut the book's central focus on the discipline of history: its intellectual history, its historiography, and its connection to memory, particularly in relation to the need to establish the collective identity of 'nation', 'community', or state, through a memorialization process that has much to do with history, or at least with claiming a historicity for collective memory. None of this can be undertaken without an understanding of the roles that history-writing and history-reading have played in public debates, or perhaps more accurately in public disputes.

The book addresses the question of the politics of historical production in India, while addressing the pitfalls of postcolonial consciousness in the domain of history-writing.

'This wide-ranging and polemical study unsettles many settled facts of professional historiography and does so with verve and brilliance. Looking back at the age of post-colonialism, post-modernism, post-truth, and many other posts, Benjamin Zachariah uncovers the self-deceptions, anachronisms, and memory lapses that enable historical narratives as well as styles of history-writing. His book is a salutary reminder of the public duty of the historian, and of history's complicated, but always necessary, relation with evidence and the archive. It should be essential reading.'