Saisudha Acharya: ‘The discipline of history isn’t as easy as people make it out to be’

Saisudha Acharya on why the discipline of history isn’t as easy as people make it out to be

Saisudha Acharya’s History Unpacked book series was conceived when she was teaching at the alternative school her son attended. “We weren’t restricted by textbooks, so it allowed me to try to get them to read other stuff,” says the Bengaluru-based author and educator, whose second book of the series, History Unpacked: The Why, When and What of Medieval India (Duckbill), was released earlier this year.

She soon discovered that these children, who were growing up reading Geronimo Stilton and Diary of a Wimpy Kid, avoided things that did not have many pictures or were not funny. “While I did try to get them to read the things I had grown up reading, it proved to be a challenge because the reading culture had changed,” believes Saisudha, who fell in love with history in high school, discovering historical fiction and narrative non-fiction along the way. “History was something that started as a side interest, and I started teaching it in 2016.”

It was then that she began looking for an Indian equivalent of Horrible Histories, a series of illustrated history books published in the United Kingdom by Scholastic that blended fact and humour. While she occasionally did find Indian history books that did that, “there was nothing that covered everything I wanted to do in the classroom,” says this former financial markets professional, who holds a degree in economics from the University of California, San Diego. “That is when it started: with me thinking about how to convert stuff into this format.”

An illustration from History Unpacked: The Why, When and What of Ancient India | Photo Credit: Rohit Bhasi

Saisudha is also the author of The Untaught Historian, a blog she started in 2022 to record things that did not fit into her classroom lessons. “It started with some parents telling me that they were listening to my online classes during COVID-19. And then, one suggested I start a blog.”

Writing the blog made her start thinking about ways to retell history for children that went beyond “this is what happened.” Children, she says, would enjoy lively debates when she brought them into the classroom and would ask to learn more about topics such as conflicts among various schools of thought and the biases historians bring to their work.