Accuracy and Corrections¶
A book about real people, real faiths and real history has to get the facts right and has to be fair. This page explains how Roots & Rivers is checked and lists the mistakes that were caught and fixed. Publishing corrections is part of being trustworthy.
How every chapter was checked¶
Each chapter went through five separate layers. Each layer was done by someone other than the chapter's writer.
- Sourced writing. Every number, date and name was checked against a source the writer opened, and logged. Claims that couldn't be confirmed were removed or softened.
- Structure checks by script. A checker confirms every chapter has its required sections, every concept from the learning graph, a 10-question quiz with balanced answers, 8 to 10 references and a working MicroSim.
- Independent fact-check. A fresh reviewer re-verified the claims, the quiz answers, the links and the MicroSim's text.
- Expert edit for nuance, balance and currency. A second pass, held to the standard of a scholar of South Asia, looked for oversimplifications that had become false, one-sided framing, and facts that had gone out of date, and updated them to October 2026.
- Plain-language edit with a fact guard. A final edit made the writing clearer, and a script compared every file before and after to prove that no fact, number, name or link changed.
Disputed questions (borders, death tolls, the origins of ancient peoples) are presented as disputed, with each side's view and with ranges where scholars give ranges.
What the checks found¶
Across the 22 chapters, the independent fact-check (layer 3) logged more than 100 problems and fixed them, and the expert edit (layer 4) logged more than 80 more fixes and updates. Every chapter had at least one real error after writing, which is exactly why the layers exist. Most were small: a rounded number, an "only" that should have been "mostly", a date one year off. A few were serious.
Notable corrections¶
| Where | What was wrong | Correction |
|---|---|---|
| Ch 1 | The Thar Desert was described as two-thirds in India | About 85% lies in India |
| Ch 1 | The Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna system was called the second-largest river system by water carried | It is third, after the Amazon and the Congo |
| Ch 2 | Varna and jati were blurred together | Rewritten to separate the textual varna idea from local jati groups |
| Ch 3 | The Whose Story? box on how countries remember Aurangzeb, Shivaji and Ahmad Shah Durrani made unsourced claims | Rewritten in careful, sourced wording |
| Ch 5 | The Guru Granth Sahib's other contributors were called "saints of the Hindu bhakti tradition, such as Kabir" | Kabir was born into a Muslim weaver family and is honored by Hindus and Muslims; the chapter now names bhakti poets and the Sufi saint Sheikh Farid |
| Ch 5 | The Golden Temple was said to welcome over 150,000 visitors a day | About 100,000 a day, per sourced reports |
| Ch 5 | Census figures for Pakistan and Bangladesh came from secondary summaries | Updated to the official 2023 Pakistan and final 2022 Bangladesh census figures |
| Ch 4 | "44 of Pakistan's 69 million people spoke Bangla" | 44 million was the population of East Bengal; most of them spoke Bangla |
| Ch 4 | The 1971 death toll was given as a single range | Now gives the range most estimates fall in, and notes that some estimates are far lower |
| Ch 6 | Thaana script was said to be "in use by the early 1700s" | The oldest surviving Thaana inscription is dated 1599 |
| Ch 8 | Ceylon tea was credited to the East India Company | Commercial tea in Sri Lanka was started by British planters in 1867 |
| Ch 9 | Ravi Shankar was said to have told George Harrison about the 1971 refugees in August | It was earlier in 1971 |
| Ch 12 | The oldest cotton at Mehrgarh was dated "about 8,500 years ago", which didn't match the sixth millennium BCE | Roughly 7,500 to 8,000 years ago, from the original 2002 study (also fixed in the quiz) |
| Ch 14 | Rabindranath Tagore was called the first person from outside Europe to win any Nobel Prize | He was the first from outside Europe to win the Literature prize and the first Asian Nobel laureate (Theodore Roosevelt won the Peace Prize in 1906) |
| Ch 14 | The English edition of Heart Lamp was dated 2024 in the Story Web sim | First published in English in 2025 |
| Ch 15 | India and Pakistan were said to have played no bilateral cricket series since 2007-08 | A short series was played in India in 2012-13 |
| Ch 17 | Potti Sriramulu's fast was said to last 56 days | He died on the 58th day |
| Ch 19 | Sri Lanka's 2024 result was called the "first single-party majority since 1977" | It was the first single party to win a two-thirds majority under proportional voting |
| Ch 19 | An unsourced "80% of Bangladesh's river water comes from outside" | Softened to "most", which is well established |
| Ch 20 | Nepali was called Nepal's "national language" | It is the official language; Nepal's constitution treats every mother tongue as a national language |
| Ch 20 | The 2009 Gurkha decision was described as being about pensions | It gave Gurkha veterans the right to settle in Britain |
| Ch 22 | The AP Stylebook's decision to drop the hyphen in terms like "Asian American" was explained with an unsourced story | Rewritten to match AP's stated reasons |
Found a mistake?¶
Please tell us. Use the error report form, or the sensitivity review form if something feels unfair to a community. Every report is read. Corrections made after publication will be added in the next section, with the date.
Corrections since publication¶
None yet. Version 1.0 was published on 22 October 2026.
What still needs a human expert¶
Automated and AI-assisted checks can't replace a scholar who has spent a career on a subject. These are the places where the reviewers asked for a human expert's eye first:
- The wording of the Partition and 1971 death and displacement ranges (Chapter 4).
- Kinship terms that vary by region and community, especially Sinhala and Bangla terms (Chapter 13).
- Official-language details for a few Indian union territories where sources disagree (Chapter 17).
- The current names of some festival processions that have recently changed (Chapters 7 and 22).
If you teach or research South Asia and can review a chapter, please volunteer. Reviewers who agree to be named will be credited here.