"India needs to begin to revisit its own history. And, what better place to start than by starting with the story of India's freedom struggle, he said while delivering the keynote lecture at the 14th Netaji Subhas Memorial Lecture at FICCI.
Sanyal said that if one reads conventional, official history books, one will get the impression that India's freedom struggle was a uniquely peaceful one.
"Basically, we gently suggested to the British that they should leave, and they politely left," he said.
However, he said, there is a completely different story to be told about an armed resistance to the British, going back over a long period of time.
"False narratives never get replaced merely by criticism and these can only be replaced by a new narrative, which needs to be written down. Changes in the textbooks can only happen at the end of this process. Somebody has to actually write down the alternative story," he said, adding that many stalwarts like Bose led from the front in the armed freedom struggle.
"But the writing of the new narrative itself takes effort and we are not, I am afraid, putting in enough efforts. Please take up one section of Indian history and simply look at the evidence and rewrite it," he suggested.
Brig RS Chhikara (retd), founder and Chairman of Netaji Subhas Bose-INA Trust, said that the trust had submitted a few ideas to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and had his assurance for organising a tourism circuit for patriotic pilgrimage, which will include INA Memorials at Delhi, Kolkata and Kohima, and improvement of existing memorials at Moirang and Cuttack.
( With inputs from IANS )