Rewriting ‘Old History’ for New India

Recent Inquiry Report ( Indian Express, June 19-22, 2022) bring to light proposals across the board to remove and replace school textbooks. The aim, reportedly, is to ease the load on school students who have suffered learning losses due to the extended shutdown during the novel coronavirus pandemic. However, the changes made in history textbooks specifically target certain areas of India’s past and will result in a conceptual shift in history teaching at the school level.

curriculum change

The government is currently making many changes in the syllabus. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth and Sports recently held its Report on improvement in the content and design of school textbooks (November 30, 2021). The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) is already in the process of formulating a new National Curriculum Framework, which will guide the curriculum of central and state educational boards. At the heart of this process is the rewriting of school textbooks. The Parliamentary Committee’s report notes at the outset that, ‘School textbooks are, in our education system, the easiest way to share the same story among millions of students through the diversity that defines our country’.

In the submitted report, discussions in NCERT and public statements by members of the ruling establishment, the need for rewriting history textbooks has been strongly emphasized, so as to remove ‘non-historical facts and distortions about national heroes’ Can go This in itself is not surprising, as history is at the center of today’s political discourse. The majority of political rhetoric is based on defaming India’s Muslims as ‘outsiders’ and ‘invaders’. It argues that the real story of India is rooted in ancient times, conceived of as having a glorious Hindu past. Violence – through attacks, fighting and bloodshed – is seen as a major vehicle of change. The victorious, masculine hero is celebrated, and defeat is seen as a humiliating infirmity. This history focuses on heroes and kings, rulers and armies, even though the craft of historiography has gone far beyond such understanding. However, the suggested changes establish it as the dominant perspective in history textbooks.

points of concern

This raises two points of concern:

One, it is a limited and unimaginative approach to school education in general and history education in particular. The discussion, especially the report presented, suggested that the use of audio-visual resources and digital content through QR codes would make school textbooks interesting for students. Such changes are welcome. But these are pedagogical techniques, carriers of material. It is when students are challenged within the realm of ideas that education becomes more engaging and a meaningful vehicle of change.

Second, the narrative demands students to suspend critical thinking about the world around them and make the past statistical and static in their imagination. For example, it is proposed to delete the description of some practices of Akbar’s court. These include translations of Sanskrit texts such as RamayanaWere Mahabharata: And this Rajatarangini In Persian, Akbar’s association with diverse social and religious practices in the empire, and a volume on the emergence of composite architectural traditions.

An example

Akbar’s armies built a grand empire stretching from Kashmir to the Deccan, from Kabul to Bengal. His court saw a gathering of administrators, military commanders, scholars and geniuses from regions across India and Central and West Asia. The administrative culture of the empire and the language of its politics emerged from engagements and differences in the courtly sphere.

The traditions of the Mughal court influenced the political culture of the states of the subcontinent. If you’ve ever wondered what our modern Indian languages ​​are, or the curved arches on houses and temples in villages and small towns, the answer is no that Mughal armies passed through these areas. Various traditions, courtly and popular, interacted to create new political, social and cultural forms. These populate our everyday practices, customs and traditions, languages ​​and food, artistic sensibilities, etc. However, this sense of history – as fluid, fractal and dynamic – is lost when Akbar is presented only as an emperor who won the battle.

Akbar is just one example. Proposed changes to textbooks censor diversity in our past, and reduce the space for exploring other histories, such as inequality – whether of race or gender, or stories of challenges to hegemony. Presenting the history of India as a saga of pride, reduces the chances of questioning it.

big narrative

The proposed changes to the history textbooks fit the broader narrative of this government. In a recent speech at Delhi University, the Home Minister announced that since 2014, a ‘New India’ is being prepared. This new India needs a new history. However, this new history casts the villains of certain communities and privileges into a fragmented historical narrative that is subject to the demands of community sentiment.

In 1947, when India was emerging from the shadow of colonialism, Indian historians were faced with the question of their role in building this nation. Four months after independence and in the midst of the events of Partition, in his presidential address to the Indian History Congress in December 1947, Mohammad Habib asked historians of newly independent India to write history that would create a ‘national community’, To rise above all distinctions of community and caste, where citizens were to be subject to national laws. His address was both poignant and prophetic.

Habib’s words resonate loudly today, when as citizens we see the idea of ​​the Indian nation being redefined, its constitution challenged. They ring even more strongly as history becomes the main battleground where this new idea of ​​the nation is being built, literally through blood and tears, by sword and bulldozer.

The stories of India’s past are complex and varied. It is an injustice to fit it into simple accounts of the golden and dark ages, of the great and the bad, of the sorrows remembered and imagined. The proposed rewriting of the history textbook aims to build future generations of Indians on a unity based on unhistorical ideas and lies.

Anubhuti Maurya teaches History at the Department of History and Archeology, Shiv Nadar University