History writing, particularly for official purposes, has always had an extra-academic design, as history textbooks become one of the instruments through which a citizenry that is ideologically in sync with the establishment is sought to be fostered. It never happens that way, as people take their cues on the past more from popular memories than textbooks based on recorded sources, but that is a different matter.
However, the agenda of tweaking history to suit the present political establishment is always kept in wraps. Be it controversies over colonial textbooks that sought to project British rule as a blessing for India or post-independence textbooks that sought to project the broad umbrella worldview of the Congress as India’s authentic past – or, indeed, the debate on the present deletions from NCERT textbooks -- many government decisions in relation to history writing have been open to the criticism that ideology is the prism through which the past is presented to young minds. What is absent is a bipartisan professional admission of this on the part of official historians across the ideological divide.
There is concern among many observers that deleting a chapter, 'The Mughal Courts' from the NCERT Class-12 book --Themes in Indian History-Part II-- is less explained by the need to reduce burden on students – particularly when the pandemic is no longer the kind of threat it was a year or two ago – than to cut the Mughals to size. This leaves just one chapter with a mention of Mughals in the said textbook -- Peasants, Zamindars and the State: Agrarian Society and the Mughal Empire.
At the same time, some references to Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination have also reportedly been taken out, something that may not make sense either way as the debate is one that has been done and dusted several decades ago. If anything, NCERT could have added detail to the section. For, it is true that the RSS was banned after the assassination but it is also true that the ban was revoked a year later on the acceptance of some conditions. In fact, Sardar Patel had clearly written to Jawaharlal Nehru that an extremist wing of the Hindu Mahasabha and not the RSS was involved in the assassination. Putting the whole episode in perspective would have made more sense for the NCERT, as it is a fact that after the ban on the RSS being revoked, the Congress had even passed a resolution – which was reversed, perhaps on Nehru’s prodding, a month later – that RSS volunteers be allowed to join the Congress. Sardar Patel was in fact a votary of this view too. One can get great detail on this from BD Graham’s authoritative book on the Jana Sangh published by Cambridge University Press.
The tragedy of Indian history writing is that none will tell readers all the facts. Partial truths are dished out to tweak history just enough to justify the historian’s worldview.
Questions regarding a clear slant in textbooks aren’t new. Nationalist historiography had meticulously critiqued the colonial claim – also made through colonial textbooks – that British Rule was a boon for India and convincingly shown it to be exploitative. Decades later, with the rise of left historians through official patronage in the times of Indira Gandhi, when the CPI was her ally, history textbooks were written with a slant in the 1970s.
The class-12 textbook on modern India commissioned in the 1970s sought to argue that organisations like the Hindu Mahasabha or RSS could not be nationalist, something reserved for the Congress and perhaps some strands of the left. Nationalism, as per this text, must be ‘secular’ and ‘anti-imperialist’ and ‘communalism’ necessarily its other. However, this binary could not explain the fact that a number of Congress leaders, like Lala Lajpat Rai and Madan Mohan Malaviya, were also Hindu Mahasabha leaders.
It was only in 1937 that the Congress disallowed people from communitarian organisations from being part of Congress. Nor could this framework account for the fact that RSS founder KB Hedgewar was a Congress volunteer in Nagpur in his younger days and that what later became the RSS uniform was first used by him to lead volunteers to organise the Nagpur session of the Congress in 1920. Readers can see this discussed in John Zavos’ book The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India published by Oxford University Press.
The problematic secular-communal binary of the 1970s textbooks is unable to explain how a number of Hindu conservatives like PD Tandon were – marginalised by the first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru – Seth Govind Das, DP Mishra, Sampoornanand, KM Munshi, etc., were tall Congress leaders post-independence and had Hindu conservative leanings. The textbook sought to make its framework sound convincing by simply resorting to silence over problematic areas.
Another fact about the old books commissioned by the Indira Gandhi government was that they never discussed the internal disagreements within the freedom struggle, except perhaps for the moderate-extremist split of 1907. No student reading them would know, for instance, that Sardar Patel and Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose did not see eye to eye. Or even that Jaya Prakash Narayan did not like Patel.
One can argue that these are matters of nuance that are best left to the research level and not introduced in schools, but then one will also have to admit that history textbooks for school students are as much about what a regime feels desirable as about knowledge for its own sake. It is this that both camps are unwilling to admit in public, something akin to avoiding full disclosure. All that one reads about are accusations of distortion, as if there is a true, universal, history out there, waiting to be recovered.
When the BJP came to power under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, it replaced the textbooks in circulation since the 1970s. To be fair to the old textbooks, they were rich in detail even if they had a clear slant. The new textbooks commissioned by the Vajpayee government were criticised by Marxist historians and replaced after the UPA came to power by another set of textbooks that hit the stands in 2007. It is these textbooks – still in circulation after nine years of the Modi government being in power – that are in the eye of storm at present over deletions.
However, beyond condemnations and approbations, few have applied themselves to key questions: did the textbooks already suffer from shortcomings, can history indeed be objective, is this the first attempt at presenting history to students in a particular manner, and should students be exposed to key developments as ‘truth’ to become critical citizens or should some parts of the past be censored?
These key philosophical questions are avoided by both sides, as textbooks become a tug-of-war between neatly defined camps, something that is damaging to the project of education as a means of turning impressionable minds into open minds.
Let us first look at the Class-12 three-part series Themes in Indian History. There has been much criticism that the chapter The Mughal Courts has been deleted ostensibly in the name of rationalisation of syllabus but actually to obliterate the memory of the Mughals from young minds. The criticism is not without substance.
However, one sees very few historians shining the torch of their professional concerns on yawning thematic gaps in the same three-part textbook right from the beginning. Part-1 of same textbook series took a leap of 1200-1300 years right from the time it was commissioned: it jumped straight from the Harappan civilisation, placed between 2500 BC and 1800 BC, to the times of the Buddha and the second urbanisation, meaning 6th century BC onwards. In this inexplicable leap of faith, the textbook skipped the entire period of the Vedic literature – the Rig Vedic literature dated from 1500 BC to 1000 BC, and the later Vedic literature dated from 1000 BC to about 600 BC. Part-III of the Class-12 textbooks also rushed from the Revolt of 1857 and the rise of colonial cities to the coming of Mahatma Gandhi, reducing the moderate and extremist phases of the Congress to one paragraph.
In a world where rigours of the discipline of history outweighed narrow political posturing, these yawning gaps should have been debated and chapters on the Vedic literature and early decades of the Congress commissioned. For, a textbook for Class-12 has to be a comprehensive overview rather than a thematic collection of individual papers skipping as much as it discusses. One may pause to wonder why no professional historian, or even the NCERT, ever thought of raising a red flag on textbooks for Class-12 students – some of whom may go on to study history – skipping more than a thousand years of ancient history or a crucial formative stage of modern Indian nationalism altogether?
The present deletion of a chapter on Mughals does not make sense. But so was the skipping of a thousand years bereft of all sense. To be fair, the present deletion just renders a somewhat poor set of textbooks poorer.
The story of the competence of official Indian textbooks as authorised representations of the past for young minds is a story of a decline. From the 1970s to the early 2000s, we had detailed textbooks of history. The one on mediaeval India by Satish Chandra was, in fact, so detailed that students at the masters’ level would read it as a ready reckoner on their subject of study. The books by RS Sharma on ancient India and Bipan Chandra on modern India were also quite detailed. However, in a purported bid to make history more interesting, the present textbooks come across as collections of disconnected themes.
Unfortunately, the present heat generated over deletions from textbooks fails to shed much light on what ails Indian textbook writing as an enterprise. There have been ideological slants even if textbooks are written for a universal readership rather than for believers of one or the other worldview. To push one’s agenda in such a project is not professionally the best thing to do.
However, as said earlier, regimes often use textbooks as an instrument not just of knowledge dissemination but of ideological conversion. And no regime in the last several decades has been an exception to this rule. But when historians get divided so neatly into camps that they dare not tell the full story, history as a discipline and citizens as learners are the biggest losers.
—The author, Vikas Pathak, is a columnist who has a PhD in modern history from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has authored a book--‘Contesting Nationalisms’, published by Primus Books.
Read his previous article here
(Edited by : C H Unnikrishnan)
Check out our in-depth Market Coverage, Business News & get real-time Stock Market Updates on CNBC-TV18. Also, Watch our channels CNBC-TV18, CNBC Awaaz and CNBC Bajar Live on-the-go!
