Gemini on who built the lens on India's past, Google Gemini

Thapar largely groups these figures into two camps: the Orientalists (who were fascinated by Sanskrit and antiquity, though often romanticized it) and the Utilitarians/Imperial Administrators (who held deep disdain for Indian society and wrote history to justify British rule).

Sir William Jones (1746–1794): A judge of the Supreme Court in Calcutta and founder of the Asiatic Society (1784). Jones was the quintessential Orientalist. By proving that Sanskrit was structurally related to Greek and Latin, he birthed comparative philology (the Indo-European language family). While he genuinely admired ancient Indian literature—translating Kalidasa’s Shakuntala—he worked almost exclusively with Brahmin pundits to codify "Hindu law" for the East India Company.

Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900): A German philologist at Oxford who edited the massive 50-volume Sacred Books of the East without ever setting foot in India. Müller popularized the Aryan theory, fatally sliding from a linguistic category ("Indo-European speakers") into a racial one ("the Aryan race"). He also cemented the cliché of the Indian as an "otherworldly philosopher" obsessed with metaphysics and incapable of pragmatic politics or historical consciousness.

James Mill (1773–1836): The ultimate Utilitarian armchair historian. Mill also never visited India—and absurdly boasted in his preface to The History of British India (1817) that never having seen the country made him more objective. Mill did arguably the greatest structural damage to Indian history by dividing it into three communal eras: Hindu, Muslim, and British civilization. He championed the theory of "Oriental Despotism," arguing that India was a stagnant, irrational society ruled by tyrants since time immemorial, making British colonialism a benevolent, modernizing rescue mission.

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859): Pushing Mill’s disdain into policy, Macaulay’s infamous 1835 Minute on Indian Education claimed that "a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia." His goal was to create an intermediary class of Indians who were "Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect."

Alexander Cunningham (1814–1893): The first Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). Unlike the pure text-scholars, Cunningham followed the 5th- and 7th-century travelogues of Chinese Buddhist pilgrims (Faxian and Xuanzang) to physically locate stupas, cities, and coins—helping rescue Buddhism from near-erasure in the textual record.

Vincent Arthur Smith (1848–1920): An Indian Civil Service officer whose Early History of India (1904) was the standard textbook for decades. Smith wrote history from the perspective of a colonial district collector: whenever India lacked a massive, centralized authoritarian empire, he portrayed it as falling into "chaos and anarchy." The subtext was obvious—without the iron fist of the British Raj, India would fracture again.