Padmavati controversy once again exposes history's Achilles Heel

All we have are the outcomes and the spin and that passes for history

The current controversy over a Hindi film called Padmavati reminds me of something that happened 46 years ago. It was winter and some of us were sitting around in the cafe at the Delhi School of Economics waiting for a tutorial to start at 5 pm.

We had been joined by a visiting historian from Cambridge – the one on the Cam, not on the Charles. He asked us what we thought of the proposition that economists create more myths than historians.

Evidence-based economics had not yet come along and we had been taught that mathematical proof was enough. In the absence