n a "Letter from India" in the 28 May edition of The New York Times, Manu Joseph mentions that home minister Rajnath Singh, formerly a physics lecturer, "believes that ancient Hindu scriptures and a conversation with the poet Rabindranath Tagore helped Werner Heisenberg formulate quantum mechanics". He's referring to an article by his former colleague Hartosh Singh Bal, an account of a "long and meandering speech" Singh gave to the BJP's National Council meeting last year to make the case for greater investment in "Fundamental Scientific Research".

Singh spoke about the Vedic foundations for quantum mechanics, arguing that digital signals, which power all communications, were possible only because of the discovery of quantum mechanics (wrong), that the "principle through which quantum mechanics was found was (Heisenberg's) Uncertainty Principle" (also wrong), and that Heisenberg "learnt the Uncertainty Principle from the philosophy of Vedas of this country". He even cited Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics¸which mentions the 1929 meeting and says that "[this] introduction of Indian science brought Heisenberg great vision", as evidence. "This does not add up as evidence," Bal writes, "but would certainly have been of some interest in the context if Heisenberg had not already postulated the Uncertainty Principle in 1927, two years before that meeting with Tagore. Questions of causality have an important role in Quantum Mechanics, but even they cannot justify effect preceding cause by two years in the macroscopic world."

This is how the typical "India Fact", as Sidin Vadukut calls the various great feats we Indians constantly ascribe to our civilisation, gets created. Take a minor fact that somewhat compliments India, preferably backed up by a foreign source (generally of dubious standing) add oodles of hyperbole and leaps of reasoning to get a dramatic claim. These are then propagated through chain e-mails or Facebook photos or speeches like Singh's. Vadukut's The Sceptical Patriot, his first non-fiction work after the highly successful Dork trilogy, investigates the most well-known of these "facts" for historical verisimilitude to entertaining and fascinating results. He finds that the origins of many truths we hold self-evident are often shrouded in mystery, in large part because of the troubles with accurately triangulating historical facts.

So did India really invent the zero? Well, kinda. Depends on how you define "zero"; the Babylonians used a special symbol to denote an empty place inside a number, but it was Brahmagupta who first treated zero as a number. Were we the richest nation in the world before colonialism stripped us bare? Not really; data that suggests so, such as Angus Maddison's The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, multiplies an estimated per capita income with an estimated population to get estimated GDPs for nations along the years. India, which had a middling economy — with per capita income a little lower than the world average — but a massive population, thus tops the chart. Neither did colonialism cause this per capita income to significantly decrease, but stagnate, at a time when countries undergoing modernisation were making great leaps. Have we really never invaded another country in our history? Poppycock! The Cholas had a naval empire stretching throughout the Indian Ocean and made several brutal invasions of Sri Lanka.

There is a pattern to these claims, a consequence of the attitudes towards history of the Hindu Right, the primary propagators of such historical myth-making. It usually either involves a glorification of an ancient India before those damned foreign invaders came, or an exaggeration of the excesses of these invaders (such as the "fact" that the Taj Mahal was originally a Shiva temple that was razed to the ground). The point is to suggest that had it not been for the dastardly invasions, our great and ancient civilisation would have evolved into the greatest country in the world.

This view of history conveniently ignores the fact that this ancient civilisation wasn't exactly heaven on earth, that it had its own share of fundamental social issues that caused civil strife, that it had its own power structures that it was far better to be on the right side of. That although this period of history, which spans an entire millennium or two, saw innovations in science and technology, governance and culture, innovation wasn't the sole preserve of the Indians. In fact, the India that the Ghaznis and Ghoris invaded was a society that had ossified, was more concerned with preserving the traditions of the past than to create new ones.

Vadukut's book raises a pertinent question: why do we keep buying this tripe? He blames the way history is taught to children in our math-science-oriented education system. By reducing the study of history to a simple exercise of memorising and reproducing a series of facts that students believe will have no practical knowledge in the future, we have managed to create a generation for whom Indian history is a morass of dates and places and famous battles with little to no context. There is little study of post-independence history in schools, and what little there is of it papers over the dark times of the Republic — the war with China, the Naxalite movement, the Emergency — with the great emphasis on presenting a feel-good nationalistic narrative of a nation emerging from the dark shadow of colonialism.

What this does is remove the most important aspect of the study of history: using these past events to understand the world of the present. It deprives our students of the ability to critically examine current affairs or spurious claims like Singh's. Vadukut recounts an anecdote of a group of Japanese Hibakusha visiting a Chennai school to teach students about the dangers of nuclear weapons. When the survivors asked them whether nuclear weapons should be used, they said no. But when asked if they were fine with nuking Pakistan, they were all for it.

"I believe this is exactly the point of history," Vadukut writes. "When each generation approaches received wisdom with scepticism, perhaps it will reassess established notions of right and wrong, love and hate. Perhaps it will finally see mistaken priorities for what they are."