Editorial: History with holes

NEW DELHI: The massive changes made to history, social studies, and economics textbooks come with an official statement by the NCERT about the motivation for that exercise. “Our aim,” it says, “has been to… avoid attempting to load the child with too much information...” However, the changes do nothing to address the information overload.

In fact, the purpose is obvious: the revisions bear the unmistakable imprint of the BJP’s nationalist project and amount to a rewriting of India’s past to align it with a Hindutva-based ideological vision.

The amendments made to Classes 7 and 8 textbooks seek to shift the emphasis towards ancient, pre-Islamic India. The epoch up to the Guptas is highlighted while the contributions made to India’s culture, politics, architecture and administration by the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal empire are minimised. British colonial rule is portrayed not just as an economic drain but as a concerted assault on India’s languages and religion, and its cultural, political, and educational institutions.

The underlying current is to extol the ancient past, leap over some 1,000 years to establish a continuity with today’s Hinduism, while at the same time cultivating self-pity on account of Islamic invasions and European colonialism. No surprises there. Ethnonationalist movements invariably follow this trajectory of elevating selective epochs and promoting a narrative of ancient glory and recent humiliation by foreigners.

The BJP’s project, in fact, mirrors China’s approach to nationalism. Just as China accentuates Han China as the Middle Kingdom and downplays the contributions of the non-Han dynasties, the BJP foregrounds the Hindu-centric past of Indo-Gangetic India while marginalising other important parts of the mosaic.

Modern Chinese nationalism feeds off the humiliation of the Nanjing Massacre to foment national solidarity through a lens of victimisation. Likewise, the NCERT revisions try to cultivate a sense of historical grievance and resilience to fuel the BJP’s Hindu nationalist ideology.

One striking feature of the BJP’s historical reset using the good offices of NCERT is the exaltation of Maratha history. Using Shivaji’s valour as a prop, the revisions posit Maratha regional pride as an assertion of Indian nationalism against the Mughals at first and then the British.

This manoeuvre serves interest groups within the RSS, mainly those from the Nagpur-Pune-Konkan belt, well. It appeases the fierce following the Chhatrapati has in Western India while also casting a soft glow on the Peshwas, thereby subtly shifting the locus of Indian nationalism away from the Gangetic provinces to somewhere nearer Pune.

By contrast, the South suffers from second-class treatment. Its ancient as well as modern contributions continue to be glossed over or invisibilised. The pre-Vedic, pre-Brahmanic cultural heritage of the peninsula, despite the rich archaeological evidence unearthed by the Keeladi excavations, is still subject to negotiation.

Although urban settlement in the South pushes back the antiquity of Tamil civilisation to pre-Buddhist times, the South struggles to find a rightful mention in textbooks. Even in the post-Independence period, its enormous contributions to the national economy receive only dismissive attention.

NCERT’s uneven rendering of history chips away at India’s pluralism. It’s a history with huge holes in it. Large themes are left out of it. And it will surely confuse the student studying it at an impressionable age. Where did Indo-Saracenic architecture come from then? And the music and the food? Textbooks must illuminate the child’s understanding of her country, not throw shadows upon it.