A History of India as it Happened written by François Gautier - Book Review

The Historylogy Podcast · Sep 18, 2026 · 4m

We dig into François Gautier's "A History of India as it Happened: Not as it Has Been Written," a 2013 revisionist counter-history that puts colonial and Marxist historians on trial. Gautier, a French journalist who has lived in India since the 1970s, argues that everything from the Aryan invasion theory to accounts of Islamic conquest and British rule has been softened, distorted, or deliberately denied. We ask what he gets right about the biases in older historiography, where his own certainty runs ahead of the evidence, and why a book this short can't carry five thousand years without…