Monikers make for alarmist headlines and also elide the reality. And anodyne handwringing or widespread navel-gazing, though making for indulgent introspection and stormy debates, seldom do enough to make us think.

Therefore, this time round, when “book police” and “textbook vigilante’ Dina Nath Batra got Orient Blackswan to put historian Sekhar Bandyopadhyay’s From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India under review, the lack of an outpouring of hysterical shock, grief and protests came as a welcome relief, for this would enable us to view things in the proper perspective.