Tailoring history

By Anjali Modi

MYSTERY CONTINUES to surround the names of the people who are writing the National Council for Educational Research and Training's (NCERT) history textbooks. Prof. R. K. Dixit, head of NCERT's Department of Education in Social Science and Humanities, said he ``could not remember the names''. The NCERT Director, Prof. J. S. Rajput, said there were ``many writers'' and that he did not want to expose them to ``controversy'' by naming them. This begs the question: why would revealing the names of writers of school history textbooks expose them to controversy?

The chance discovery, last week, of the names of the writers of the Ancient India textbook for class 11 - Prof. T. P. Verma and Prof. Makkhan Lal - seemed to confirm suspicions that the NCERT's choice of authors was driven by their support for the Ramjanmabhoomi movement rather than for their contribution to history writing. The NCERT denied this. But by withholding the names of writers (now of the remaining history textbooks) and the details of the guidelines given to them it has effectively stalled a debate on the teaching of history in school.It is, as one educationist put it, behaving with ``shocking and unprecedented opaqueness... treating education as if it is a defence secret''. This is, perhaps, because the NCERT and its master, the Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry, do not have an intellectual justification for their project.

Textbooks are only the final round of a process that began with the so-called `national curriculum framework' (NCF) and the new `syllabus'. The NCF is the NCERT's on-paper justification for new textbooks. The argument is that the NCF demands new textbooks which fulfil its goals of ``Indianisation, nationalisation and spiritualisation'' of school education.

But the NCF has not been accepted by the two bodies that must approve it - the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) and the States' Education Ministers conference. The HRD Ministry has not given them the chance to accept or reject it by the expedient measure of not convening a meeting of either.

And, in August this year, the Governments of nine non-NDA-ruled States - Delhi, West Bengal, Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Nagaland, Karnataka, Pondicherry, and Chhatisgarh - signed a statement rejecting the NCF saying it was a ``blueprint for lowering the quality of school education... and giving it a narrow exclusivist, sectarian and obscurantist orientation''.

Yet the production of new textbooks continues apace, albeit in secret.

Critics of the NCERT, who include both those who question the need to replace the existing textbooks as well as those who accept that there is a need for revised, updated and more inclusive histories, fear that the rush to produce new textbooks and the complete lack of transparency with which it is being done ``reflects what is happening in the Indian polity... where everything is dictated by the BJP-Sangh Parivar's goal of establishing a Hindu Rashtra''. The Sangh's version of history - which makes the claim that the nation is several millennia old and is the story of the struggle between `Hindus' and `foreigners' - is central to the myth-making for a Hindu Rashtra.

Hence, the concern about the new history textbooks. There is good reason for this concern. For the record, the BJP, when in Government in the States, speaks for itself. In Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat in the early 1990s, State-produced and approved textbooks showed a lack of concern for historical facts, asserting, for example, that the ``Harrapan and Vedic Civilisations were the same'', attributing practises such as jauhar and child marriage and superstition to ``fear of Muslims'' and explaining caste thus: ``Hindus tried to protect their religion and society by making their caste system''.

Statements of Prof. Rajput, who as head of the NCERT is the man entrusted with producing the new curriculum, syllabus and textbooks, also point to the fact that the driving force behind the new history textbooks is religion. The NCERT Director has shown scant regard for historiography or historical method and the premise that all professional historians begin with: history is not simply a statement of fact but a synthesis of different sources.

In order to discount the value of the existing textbooks, and assert that they ``denigrate minorities'', Prof. Rajput quotes from them selectively and out of context. A much-discussed example of this is the reference to Guru Tegh Bahadur in Prof. Satish Chandra's ``Medieval India''. Prof. Rajput has repeatedly quoted a couple of sentences from the textbook claiming that these hurt Sikh sentiments. What he fails to mention is that the quotation is from one of two conflicting 18th century sources that are presented in the textbook, and that Prof. Chandra's conclusion based on these two - `official' and `Sikh' - sources is favourable to Guru Tegh Bahadur rather than being critical of him.

By and large the re-writers are banking on the stridency of religious leaders and their political puppeteers (including, it turns out, the Congress Chief Minister and MLAs of Delhi) who can be relied on to generate enough heat on baseless claims of religious insensitivity to give the NCERT the justification for whatever history it is producing.

Earlier this year, Prof. Rajput, discussing the new history textbooks, said: ``If people believe in mythology, they should be allowed to...'' And here rests the `debate'. For, those like the Governments of the nine States which in August said the project of the HRD Ministry and the NCERT was to make education ``narrow, exclusivist, sectarian and obscurantist'', have chosen to do nothing.

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