Dr. M. Christhu Doss
Recently, the Department-related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth, and Sports has taken up for examination and consideration the subject: ‘Reforms in the Content and Design of School Text Books.
Since a considerable number of NCERT history textbooks that were written over the past few decades have been indicted of unhistorical facts, distortions, inadequate representations of individuals of national importance, negative stereotypes, and polemical depictions about India, a systematic rewriting of history becomes inescapable.
In postcolonial India, many attempts were made to fabricate, falsify, eulogize, and misrepresent the records of the past. The primary objective of such vindictive endeavors was to make history a tool of political propaganda. Most notably, the government in the postcolonial times had enjoyed every kind of power and control particularly about the exchange of historical knowledge through official and nonofficial organizations. How Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR), a government body, was used by the then ruling government and how ‘two leading Marxist historians’ in their ‘Towards Freedom’ volumes attempted to portray the cultural and political organizations like RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha reveal how the marginalization of history became a normalized phenomenon through political patronage.
Of course, it is the responsibility of the government, its people, and historians to put together their history, enhance it, and rewrite it to redeem Indian history from Eurocentric interpretations. Rewriting History itself is a continuous process. It helps historians to get exposure to new methodological insights. It also facilitates them to employ new analytical frameworks. Yet, rewriting history is not intended to validate references to unhistorical facts and distortions about India and its leaders. Secondly, rewriting is done largely to ensure equal and proportionate references to all periods of Indian History. Thirdly, it is the responsibility of the historians to make sure that emphasis is given to men and women of national repute in the writings.
Recently, the Department-related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth, and Sports has taken up for examination and consideration the subject: ‘Reforms in the Content and Design of School Text Books.’ It was intended to remove references to unhistorical facts and distortions about our Indian national heroes from the textbooks, ensure equal or proportionate references to all periods of Indian History, highlight the role of great historic women heroes, including Gargi, Maitreyi, or rulers like Rani of Jhansi, Rani Channamma, Chand Bibi, Zalkari Bai and so on. In this regard, students, teachers, and other experts, across the country, were expected to give their specific suggestions on the subject, either in English or Hindi before 15 July 2021.
The government’s initiative appears to be genuine, unpretentious, noble and reasonable. Through this notification, one gets the impression how tangible references to unhistorical facts, distortions about Indian national heroes, disproportionate references to some aspects of Indian history, and inadequate references to Indian women leaders continued to undercut the spirit, dynamism, and the essence of Indian history.
As a student of history, and as someone who values the multidimensional approach to the study of Indian history, I see no reason why the Indian History Congress (hereafter IHC) should be ‘disturbed’ with this simple, plain and straightforward notification issued by the government. The office-bearers of the IHA have contended that this notification did not come actually from any ‘expert’ body of ‘nationally’ and ‘internationally’ recognized historians. They claimed that this notification came from a ‘political position’ favored by non-academic votaries of prejudice. Though there are several professional historians in India, the IHC continues to eulogize some historians as the ‘tallest historians’ who alone would be able to advise the government and produce ‘scholarly’ books on in and about India.
It bears mentioning here that these scholars have a history of depicting India, and its culture in a controversial, contentious, and polemical manner. For example, historian R.S. Sharma, in one of his NCERT books made references to an Indian Sanskrit critic Rajendra Lal Mitra (1822–1891), who published some Vedic texts and wrote a book titled Indo-Aryans. R.S. Sharma made a highly polemical assertion that in ancient times people ate beef. He also depicted that the caste system was not essentially different from the class system based on the division of labor found in preindustrial and ancient societies of Europe.
Similarly, R.S. Sharma took a provocative take on Ramayana and Mahabharata saying that archaeological evidence should be considered far more important than long family trees given in Puranas. He denoted that the Puranic tradition could be used to date Rama of Ayodhya around 2000 B.C. but expressed his absolute skepticism that extensive explorations in Ayodhya would never show any settlement around that date. He was reproachful and censorious towards the authenticity of Krishna and Mahabharata. He argued that although Krishna played an important part in the Mahabharata, the earliest inscriptions and sculptural pieces found in Mathura between 200 B.C. and A.D. 300 did not attest to his presence at all. He also tried to ‘suggest’ that the ideas of an epic age based on the Ramayana and Mahabharata have to be ‘discarded’ due to its complexities and difficulties.
“In a similar vein, historian Romila Thapar in one of her NCERT textbooks advanced the idea that hunting was a common occupation in ancient India, and animals like elephants, buffaloes, antelopes, and boars were hunted. She specified that cows held pride of place among the animals because people were dependent on the produce of the cow. Nevertheless, her controversial, provocative, crude, and simplistic presumption that for ‘special guests beef was served as a mark of honor’ appears to be either a distortion of historical fact or magnification of isolated and insulated instances.”
Furthermore, historian Satish Chandra wrote in one of his textbooks that in 1675 Guru Tegh Bahadur was arrested and executed. The official explanation for this was that after his return from Assam, the Guru had ‘resorted to plundering and rapine, laying waste Punjab.’ According to Sikh tradition, the execution was due to the intrigues of some members of his family who disputed his succession. He also indicated that the Mughal ruler Aurangzeb was ‘annoyed’ because Guru had converted a few Muslims to Sikhism. He also commented that for Aurangzeb, the execution of the Guru was only a ‘law and order question.’ This remark created a series of reactionary responses from the Sikh community for a long time.
Likewise, historians Arjun Dev and Indira Arjun Dev stated that the Jats played a crucial role as a community in Delhi, Agra, and Mathura. The historians added that the Jats were able to establish their state at Bharatpur in Rajasthan wherefrom they conducted ‘plundering raids’ in the regions around and participated in the court conspiracies. This controversial remark also generated resentment among the community.
What one infers from these remarks, distortions, and misgivings is that these historians appear to have a particular ideological leaning, which, in turn, underpins their (mis) understanding of Indian society. Possibly, they try to interpret Indian history largely through what is commonly called an ethnocentric lens. These historians continue to hold powerful positions in the premier professional body of historians—IHC.
As Ashok Malik and Lakshmi Iyer commented: “the ‘leftist historians,’ an admittedly broad categorization that includes almost everybody who is ‘somebody’ in the Indian History Congress—are in a sense protégés of the late Nurul Hasan, Indira Gandhi’s education minister (1971-77). Malik and Iyer added that venerable and genial as he was, Hasan happily arranged the ‘marriage between Marxist social science and state patronage.’ It produced the sort of hagiography Indira Gandhi interred in her famous ‘time capsules.’”
It is, in this context, is the responsibility and obligations of the government to be proactive and productive. Those who have a passion for unbiased history would think that most of the history written about India does not do justice both to the very idea of India, Indians, and Indianness as most of these writings were ‘written’ either to appease political masters or centered on ethnocentric British point of view or ‘engraved’ with an attitude of deifying other foreign invaders. Similarly, the history of the Indian freedom struggle and contemporary India has a tangible Congress bias since they were in power for decades.
The textbooks that the Congress government-produced hardly paid adequate attention to nationalist leaders like V.D. Savarkar, Lala Lajpat Rai, Subhash Chandra Bose, and Bhagat Singh, to name a few. These textbooks continued to depict aggressors, intruders, and communalists as ‘heroes.’ Those kings, who were responsible for the mass genocide and atrocities on their supposedly ‘Hindu subjects’ were portrayed as ‘great rulers’ and ‘benevolent despots.’
It is clear that the textbooks had conveniently buried what the then British Prime Minister Clement Atlee, specified in 1947 regarding why the British had to leave India. He conceded that the main reason for the weakening of the basic foundation of the British in India was the formation of the Indian National Army, the revolt of Royal Indian Navy mutiny in 1946, and the indomitable spirit exhibited by individuals like Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose.
One gets the impression that these historical facts have not been adequately mentioned in textbooks due to political and ideological impulses. It is argued that the medieval, modern, and contemporary history of India, is justly well chronicled and documented, but ancient Indian history from an Indian perspective appears to be inadequate, and hence the need for this reform. When compared to Jawaharlal Nehru and Gandhiji, the contribution of Sardar Patel and a host of other nationalists have often been abated. The authors of these textbooks left no stone unturned to inter the follies of the Congress government either consciously or deliberately.
Most importantly, the people of India are expecting from the government that it should address some of their serious concerns. First of all, how students are pushed down the throat to study a controversial painter M.F. Husain, who was indicted of endorsing obscenity and outraging religious sentiments, would be an incongruous attempt as it could demoralize the young Indian minds. Secondly, how the textbooks make explicit references to the fact that rulers in medieval India adopted a ‘flexible policy’ towards their Hindu subjects by ‘giving grants to repair temples damaged during the war’ would be an indication of an absolute deification of alien intruders with a tinge of an attitude of pacification, without any critical scrutiny. Thirdly, the writings in the textbooks that ‘priests in ancient India had divided people’ into four Varna based on birth could perhaps promote resentment and enmity among people.
All these issues and challenges indicate that postcolonial India is yet to recover from the severe damages caused through unhistorical facts and distortions propagated in and through textbooks during the 1960s and 1990s. Though these textbooks, ‘written’ through a particular ideology, during these times, generated a range of controversies and reactions among the people, the IHC, a premier professional body of historians, appears to be busy and diligent in its customary and humdrum ‘politicization’ ‘saffronisation’ and ‘communization rhetorics.
The time has come. Organizations like IHC should begin to think out of the box. Those historians who have ‘contributed immensely’ to history writings should remove the beam out of their own eyes first before attempting to remove the imaginary speck from their government’s eye. Their continued attempts to thwart the government and its genuine endeavors to create an adequate space for some forgotten, disregarded, and neglected Indian national heroes in the textbooks would do more harm than good to the very idea of the history of India in general and the unpretentious professional historians in particular. As a professional historian, I don’t wish to see budding historians remarking the IHC as the long arm of the Marxist/ Congress ideology. I am not at all interested to see the IHC as a proxy of the ruling dispensation either.
As an American polymath Claude G. Bowers argued convincingly, ‘history is the torch that illuminates the past and to guard us against the repetition of our mistakes of other days. We cannot join in the rewriting of history to make it conform to our comfort and convenience.’
The author is an Assistant Professor in History from the University of Delhi.
