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Inventing history

THE NEW TEXTS prepared by the National Council for Education, Research and Training (NCERT) for schools affiliated to the Central Board for Secondary Education are out now and even a cursory glance at them shows a whole lot of factual errors and erroneous notions being vended as truths. The Social Science text, for instance, describes Madagascar as an island in the Arabian Sea, identifies the Czars as a dynasty or a family (while "Czar'' in Russian means "the emperor"), includes Subramania Bharathi among those who spread their activities in England and other European countries (Bharathi had only sought asylum in Pondicherry, a French territory, for a short while and was never abroad) and states that Stalin was the first European ruler to enter into a peace agreement with Hitler (whereas the Munich Pact was signed much earlier between Hitler's Germany, France and England). All such factually incorrect statements in the school texts can certainly not be wished away as errors caused by oversight, as the mandarins in the NCERT are now doing. Instead, they reflect the level of scholarship and the lack of commitment to academic rigour on the part of those engaged in the exercise.

There are also ideas that defy historical logic and are not backed by facts, conveying faulty notions of the past, in the new texts. An illustration of this is the glorification of the Vedic age when the text states that the Vedic people were familiar with the use of "zero", that "they also knew that the earth moved on its own axis and around the sun" and that "they also knew that the moon revolved around the sun". Apart from an intention to convey that the Vedic civilisation was a "superior" one (an idea inherent to the Sangh Parivar's view of history), the trouble in this context is that the same text, at a later stage, conveys that "zero" was "introduced in North India after the Mauryas and the Sungas". The text also contains passages that it was Aryabhatta who "suggested that the earth revolves around the sun and rotates on its axis". It is strange that the authors were unaware that Aryabhatta lived in the Fifth Century A.D. and hence several hundred years after the Vedic civilisation flourished. Now, a student in school is exposed to two contradictory suggestions (in two different contexts in the same text) regarding a fact about astronomy.

There are other infirmities too. The Social Science text dealing with contemporary Indian history (avowedly to inform the school-going students of the developments after Independence) does not mention anywhere the assassination of Gandhi! Similarly, the narrative on the Quit India movement states that "the only political elements who did not support the Quit India movement were the Indian communists and the followers of Jinnah". It is strange that the authors were unaware that Shyama Prasad Mookerjee (who founded the Bharathiya Jana Sangh in 1952) remained the Finance Minister of the Bengal Presidency (under Fazl-ul-Haq) for at least six months after August 9, 1942. Mookerjee was the leader of the Hindu Maha Sabha then. Another such distortion is in the section dealing with the last of the Maurya kings, Brihadratha, who was killed by his own army chief, Pushyamitra Sunga (in 187 B.C.); the authors state that "this is the only incident in the history of India till the Twelfth Century A.D.". Ancient texts, the Rajatharangini for example, will show a succession of patricides across the ancient kingdoms even before the Mauryan era. The intention is to convey that sons killing fathers (to capture the throne) was witnessed in the Indian kingdoms only after the invasion of Mohammed Ghazni. Such untruths have been the staple diet upon which the cadre of the Sangh Parivar has been brought up. But then, to introduce such false statements into the school curriculum is indeed a dangerous proposition. The havoc that indifferent scholarship combining with a distorting ideology could cause in school education is all too apparent.

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