It is unfortunate that history only gets looked at when there is a road renaming on the cards. Arguably, the average Indian learnt more about Aurangzeb – good or bad, depending on who they read or followed on Twitter – just because he was evicted from a premier New Delhi boulevard in August 2015. Audrey Truschke need not have even written her recent academic whitewash of the Emperor, such was the torrent of opinion and argument on his behalf.

Now another Delhi road and roundabout faces an imminent name change and once again it has been preceded by the clamour of the ignorant. Why should Teen Murti Road and Chowk be named after Haifa, indignantly inquired people who I thought were intelligent and well read. The suspicion was that it was once again an insidious plot to wipe out a Nehruvian legacy, just the way his sway over the sleeveless bundi coat has been usurped by a non-family PM.

Every day at rush hour that road and roundabout are clogged with Gurgaon traffic. As they wait for the police to let them inch forward, it is unlikely that very many bother to look at the three statues around an elegantly designed cenotaph, ringed by greenery. And part of the blame for this benign ignorance can be put on the renaming of the Imperial Service Cavalry Brigade Memorial as “Teen Murti”, thereby snuffing out a tale of extraordinary valour by Indian troops.

The All India War Memorial’s renaming, at least in popular parlance, as just India Gate was perhaps done with the same intention – of ridding a newly independent nation of colonial baggage, never mind if it meant the suppression of a historical event that saw Indians lay down their lives, albeit as Imperial soldiers. A basic distaste for war, or memorialising it in any apparent way, could also have played a role in the deliberate demilitarization of India Gate.

Only Indira Gandhi reneged on this unspoken pact when she commemorated India’s 1971 victory over Pakistan by reiterating India Gate’s war memorial status and erected “Amar Jawan Jyoti”. Yet very few of the millions who throng there know that it also honours and lists the Indian soldiers who died fighting in “France and Flanders Mesopotamia and Persia East Africa Gallipoli and elsewhere in the near and the far-east”, the north-west frontier and the Third Afghan War.

We are eager to vent our emotions for the modern day successors of those brave soldiers but earlier tales of valour live on only in the hearts and minds of regiments and their families. My late father, AK Ray, who played a pivotal role as the main liaising diplomat in the 1971 War left behind a gripping unpublished account of it. One line was particularly poignant. “One can recall history, but not live its passions again. They die with those who lived with them and in them.”

And it is very evident in the case of “Teen Murti”, where only the 61st Cavalry regiment still faithfully remembers the gallant horsemen who fell in far-away Haifa in 1918. But the description of that battle in ‘History of the British Cavalry’, written, ironically, by a British nobleman, the Marquess of Anglesey, should make all Indians wonder how a memorial to that magnificent military feat – at considerable human cost – was downgraded to a numerical notation of statuary.

“By 3 p.m. the battle was over and victory complete,” wrote Anglesey. “Without a doubt this was the most successful mounted action of its scale in the campaign. It was won by a weak brigade of only two regiments and a single 12-pounder battery pitted against 1,000 well-armed (Ottoman) troops who had so far seen no action. These occupied a naturally formidable defensive position with an impassable river on one side of a narrow defile and a steep hill on the other.

“…. The speed and daring, dash and boldness of the two Indian Imperial Service regiments, in conjunction with skilful flanking movements… were what made the action such a success. The speed and good order demonstrated by the leading squadron of the Jodhpores when it was forced to change direction under heavy fire, were other vital ingredients in what was almost certainly the only occasion in history when a fortified town was captured by cavalry at the gallop.”

Those who cavil about a possible Haifa Chowk , should know that the three bronze statues by Leonard Jennings represent the brave Hyderabad, Jodhpur and Mysore Lancers who were part of the 15 Imperial Service Cavalry Brigade ( later amalgamated into the 61st Cavalry) and detachments from Bhavnagar, Kashmir and Kathiawar. And the stone cenotaph commemorates Indian cavalry and armoured regiment soldiers who died in World War I in battles in Sinai, Palestine and Syria.

The timely capture of Haifa by Indian troops also led to the rescue of Bahai leader Abdu’l Baha, who was about to be executed by crucifixion on Mount Carmel by the Ottomans. But how many would know that fact here?

History textbooks today are replete with abstract data, and not enough riveting true stories. That is why drivers at the Teen Murti roundabout show no interest in the memorial and why this possible renaming also sparked ignorant protests.