The Hindu : Rewriting history

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Mar 25, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Rewriting history — I

By R. Champakalakshmi

History is now under serious threat due to the attempts to create an official (parallel) history by political command.

REWRITING HISTORY is an exercise which the historian is (should be) constantly engaged in. It means revising, re-interpreting and re-visiting the areas of one's research interests as a historian, or refining one's methodology of historical analysis and seeking answers from the sources to different sets of questions and problems that confront the historian. In short, it belongs to the realm of historiography and as such is a serious, rigorous exercise, which can be undertaken only by trained, competent and committed historians with genuine concerns in keeping the discipline of history strictly academic. At the same time it also needs to be undertaken with a sense of responsibility when writing or rewriting a textbook.

Textbook writing is no easy task. It is time-consuming and requires a relative mastery over the subject. To make it interesting and authentic, years of research and teaching have to be brought to bear on a narration that provides an intelligible overview of centuries of historical development which is intended for young minds seeking knowledge. Both at the academic level and the popular level, history writing cannot be treated lightly. When history is rewritten, the questions to be asked are who is doing the rewriting, who is sponsoring it, why and how it is being done.

History is now under serious threat due to the attempts to create an official (parallel) history by political command, a history that tries to subvert and even destroy the academic discipline of history as a social science and at the popular level indoctrinate the common man and school children with communal notions of the past — a glorification of a Hindu nation with a hoary past. The implications of these deliberate attempts to "re-write" history with a politically motivated agenda are dangerous in many ways. A new and awesome nexus is being set up between education, politics and religion (NCERT, CBSE, Government and RSS) to carry out a specific agenda, contrary to the secularism envisioned by the Constitution and holding a pluralistic and multi-cultural country like India together.

First, such attempts try to put the clock back by disregarding nearly 50 years of Indian historiography exploring themes that have enriched the understanding of Indian society and the Indian nation. The historians of this tradition shared a vision of the Indian nation derived from an open, democratic, secular and progressive state which was to promote a modern scientific outlook in civil society in independent India.

The NCERT textbooks, now under attack, were written and periodically revised, due to advance in knowledge, by competent and conscientious scholars committed to secular values, historians whose efforts translated the above vision into a reality. Their attempts were to remove colonial and communal bias or relative ignorance from the existing textbooks and not to introduce Left or nationalist bias. Such efforts are being undermined by the attempts of communal forces to rewrite history and use textbooks as instruments to further their vision of a narrow, sectarian and "fundamentalised" Hindu nation.

One of the major accusations against the textbooks is that they were written by Leftist historians. This is no doubt a reflection of the failure on the part of the political propagandist to comprehend and differentiate good history from bad and indifferent history. The confrontation is not between Leftist and Rightist historians, but between professional historians and politicians sympathetic to the "Hindutva" persuasion. (Those at the policy-making levels of the NCERT echo the politician.) More deplorable is the attribution of the textbooks to "intellectual terrorism unleashed by the Left", which is "more dangerous than cross-border terrorism" and the warning that both types of terrorism will be countered effectively.

Hence, the new and more dangerous trend is the attempt to use Government institutions and state power to attack scientific and secular history. This is seen in the use of official apparatuses available to the Government in facilitating their introduction of the National Curriculum Framework, without due and wide consultation of the academia and in direct disregard of the National Policy on Education . Institutions both at the national level (ICHR, New Delhi and IIAS , Shimla) and the regional level are packed with supporters of a particular political ideology and agenda to implement these changes in a "ham handed" fashion. Appointments to their highest offices down to the nomination of members, who willingly fulfill their ideological needs, are made without even a pretence of justifying such overt actions, apart from banning textbooks. However there are more inexplicable and covert actions such as the embargo virtually banning the publication of the volumes of documents on the project "Freedom Struggle", and the more recent closing down of the newly set up Kerala Council of Historical Research, within six months of its inception. This was done by a peremptory order of the Kerala Government stating no reason, evidently under pressure from the Central Ministry, for such a council with an impressive membership would have been inconvenient to them due to its strong secular orientation. A similar act has brought to an end the Ekalavya Science Programme (Madhya Pradesh), which was being run by committed young scholars (NGO-Education), and which poses a threat to their Social Science wing too.

Few people would be aware of the National Open School set up by the previous Government, for which new courses on history were prepared by competent historians from several universities after deliberations for over a year, all of which were shelved (or destroyed?) under its new Director (appointed by the present Government), obviously because they do not project the official view of history.

The National Curriculum Framework prepared in violation of all acceptable norms and procedural requirements virtually seeks to take history out of school textbooks until class X and has brought in major changes in the curriculum without wide consultation and ignoring the need to discuss such initiatives in Parliament and the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE), a body which includes among its members the Education Ministers of all States and Union Territories.

Despite a Supreme Court stay on its introduction, the NCERT is showing undue haste in carrying out "additions and changes in the syllabi" ostensibly to meet the criticisms from the academic world, in order to implement them by the next school session.

The CBSE has now taken on a new role of doctoring the contents of prescribed books with a directive that there should be no discussion on the passages that have been deleted from the textbooks.

Infringement of freedom of speech and discussion makes nonsense of education. Discussion and exploration of ideas is the primary function of schooling.

(The writer is former Professor, Centre for Historical Studies, JNU.)

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