Parents often worry about what their children are watching. Few pause to ask what their children are learning from what they watch. Today, the confusion is not accidental. It is structural. School textbooks have quietly shifted away from chronology to themes. Children are taught about “culture”, “ideas”, “beliefs”, but not about sequence. They do not learn who came before whom. They do not learn that the Harappan cities flourished before the Vedic hymns were composed. They do not learn that the Dharmashastras came centuries after the Vedas. Time is flattened. Everything becomes “ancient India”. This may appear harmless, even progressive. But it creates a vacuum. When chronology disappears, imagination rushes in. And imagination, when unanchored, is easily shaped by power, pride, and popular culture. Into this vacuum enters cinema. Grand, spectacular, emotionally charged cinema. Bollywood does not merely entertain. It claims authenticity. It claims to show “our truth” and “our history”. And when children lack chronological grounding, they have no tools to question these claims. Consider what is being presented. The new 4000-crore Ramayan promises to show not as a layered narrative that evolved over centuries, but as a fixed historical event. A visual language is imposed that carries its own politics. North India is framed as the centre of civilization. South India is cast as the land of the “other”, the rakshasa, rendered almost as monstrous beings. Casting choices reinforce this. Ram is a North Indian actor. Ravan is predictably South Indian. Sita is detached from eastern geographies like Bihar or Bengal. One waits to see whether Hanuman will be linked to Karnataka or Andhra, because that is where later traditions locate Kishkindha. Now imagine a child watching this. On one side, podcasts casually claim that the Mahabharat happened 3000 BC, and the film claims Ramayana happened 5000 years ago (so in 3000 BC). Both at same time, and before pyramids! Then the films depict advanced architecture, flying machines, explosions, domes that resemble Persian-Islamic forms, and visual motifs borrowed from medieval or even early modern art traditions.
Without chronology, the child cannot ask the obvious questions. Where is the archaeological evidence of such cities from 3000 BC? The Harappan civilization came only after 2500 BC and they did not even have horses.. Domes emerge much later, in Persian and Islamic architecture. Gunpowder enters India roughly 600 years ago, transmitted through Central Asian and Islamic networks, ultimately from China. The visual language of these films borrows freely from these later periods, but projects them into a mythical past. So what is being communicated? Not history, but a collage of memories, desires, and borrowed aesthetics presented as fact. The deeper concern is not the film. It is the absence of questioning. Why are children not asking these questions? Because they are not trained to. And more importantly, because parents themselves are often uncomfortable with questioning. There is a growing insistence that mythology must be treated as history. That every story must be defended as fact. That doubt is disrespect. But mythology does not need this defence. Mythology is powerful precisely because it is not bound by historical verification. It speaks of values, anxieties, aspirations. It evolves. It absorbs. It uses metaphors to reflect society. History, on the other hand, demands evidence. It demands chronology. It demands the discipline of asking: what came first, what came later, and how do we know?
When we collapse mythology into history, we do disservice to both. We reduce mythology into a brittle claim that can be easily challenged. And we dilute history into a narrative that serves identity rather than inquiry.
There is also a social cost. When narratives repeatedly position one region as civilized and another as demonic, one community as divine and another as inferior, children internalize hierarchies. These are not innocent images. They shape how future citizens see each other.
Parents must recognise that curiosity is not rebellion. It is intelligence. A child who asks, “Did India have gunpowder 5000 years ago?” is not being disrespectful. The child is thinking. The real question is: are we encouraging that thinking, or silencing it? What we are witnessing today is not just confusion between myth and history. It is a struggle over who gets to define the past. If children grow up without chronology, they will accept whatever is presented to them, whether by textbooks, films, or political rhetoric. If they grow up with curiosity, they will question all of it. And that is perhaps what truly worries those who prefer myth to masquerade as history.
Devdutt Patnaik
The writer is an acclaimed and renowned mythologist who writes on art, culture and heritage.
