NEW DELHI: What is history? Do Indians who love Mahabharata and Ramayana need history? And how ugly can an academic debate at a memorial lecture get? These and more questions, asked and debated hotly and loudly, marked the first major event organised by YSSudershan Rao, the NDA government-appointed new head of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR).

The occasion — the seventh Maulana Abdul Kalam Memorial Lecture — produced a political, philosophical and personal slugfest that indicated an extremely fractious future for historiography in India.

Tuesday's memorial lecture could have passed as these things normally do — an invited academic presenting an argument and polite procedures such as opening and concluding remarks by ICHR members. But fireworks followed the keynote lecture delivered by Professor SN Balagangadharan of Ghent University, Belgium.

Balagangadharan's basic thesis was, first, pretty much all work of most Indian historians betrayed 'colonial consciousness' and, second, historyas a subject is a 'fetish'.

Balagangadharan said studying history was a vain and often motivated quest, and ancient texts like Mahabharata can suffice for 'understanding' the past. You don't really need history, the professor from Belgium argued, also incidentally critiquing the Indian Right's attempts to 'historicise' ancient texts.

Balagangadharan is also speaking at the World Hindu Congress being held in Delhi later this month. The VHP is the organiser of that event. The professor's thesis was red rag for many ICHR members present, with the notable exception of the ICHR head Rao, whose concluding remarks praised Balagangadharan.

Critics minced few words at the event. Notably, Rajan Gurukkal, ICHR member and former vice-chancellor of MG University, Kerala, called Balagangadharan "intellectually shallow" and his lecture, "exasperating".

Other historians protested the invited academic's basic credentials — Balagangadharan is a philosopher by training, and is director, Comparative Sciences of Culture at the Ghent University. But Gurukkal's clearly impassioned denunciation resulted in loud protests from some sections of the audience, and the former V-C had to cut short his critique. Already an unusually highdecibel academic gathering, the memorial lecture looked even more like a slugfest with ICHR head Rao taking a line sharply different from many of fellow council members.

Rao praised Balagangadharan for being ahead of his times, drawing an analogy with Gautam Buddha, and said ICHR must be a forum for different points of view. Reverberations of the heated academic fight continue. ET spoke to various academics and their comments were as sharp — and sometimes as personalised — as those heard at the event. Balagangadharan called his critics "goons" while responding to ET, and said, "If this is India, I'm ashamed to be Indian." He said his critics violated convention by attacking him during a memorial lecture. "Have they heard of science? They are just afraid of some questioning their intellectual competence."

His critics at the lecture were equally vocal. Gurukkal said Balagangadharan's thesis was "naive" and therefore he tried to "expose it".

"He presented a coherent lecture but it had little to do with history... His logic was to first create men of straw, demolish them and emerge victorious. No historian does that," said BP Sahu, professor of history at Delhi University and an ICHR member.