Mircea says the historian in India today has few options:

One can always be a card-carrying communalist, writing textbooks about Muslim invasions and finding a safe home in the arms of the BJP. One can be a righteous leftist going on about protest and resistance while the backyard burns from Naxalite murders and bombs. Or, one can try and walk the middle path, conscious that most historians are middle-class people working in that bastion of middle-class respectability: the university. If, however, one decides to label oneself as “liberal,” in an attempt to forge a happy compromise, more questions are raised about what gets left out in such a definition, and whether there is any serious message to the contemporary world of politics left to offer.