| The
Nation |
 |
SHOWN THE RED CARD |
|
|
Some of the passages deleted by NCERT
"In 1675, Guru Tegh Bahadur was arrested ...
and executed. The official explanation for this ...
is that after his return from Assam, the Guru ... had
resorted to plundering and rapine, laying waste the
Punjab. According to Sikh tradition, the execution was
due to the intrigues of some members of his family who
disputed his succession ... Aurangzeb was annoyed because
the Guru had converted a few Muslims to Sikhism ...
For Aurangzeb, the execution of the Guru was only a
law and order question."
Medieval India, Satish Chandra
"If Mahavira is taken as the last or the 24th
Tirthankara, the origin of Jainism would be taken back
to the 9th century B.C. But since most of the earliest
teachers, up to the 15th one, were supposed to have
been born in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, their
historicity is extremely doubtful ... Obviously the
mythology of the Tirthankaras seems to have been created
to give antiquity to Jainism ... Mahavira kept on wandering
for 12 years from place to place ... During the course
of his long journey, it is said, he never changed his
clothes for 12 years."
Ancient India by R.S. Sharma
"Another power that arose in this period in the
region around Delhi, Agra and Mathura was that of the
Jats. They founded their state at Bharatpur wherefrom
they conducted plundering raids in the regions around
and participated in the court intrigues at Delhi."
Modern India by Arjun Dev and Indira
Arjun Dev
|
| MORE
BIZARRE STUFF |
|
|
Future battle zones for NCERT?
"Aurangzeb took a number of measures which
have been called puritanical, but many of which were
really of an economic and social character, and against
superstitious beliefs. Thus, he forbade singing in the
court and the official musicians were pensioned off.
Instrumental music and naubat (the royal band) were,
however, continued."
Medieval India by Satish Chandra
"Although Shivaji had assumed the title of 'Haindava-Dharmoddharak'
(Protector of the Hindu faith), he plundered mercilessly
the Hindu population of the area."
Medieval India by Satish Chandra
"Many brahmanas functioned as poets, and ...
were generously rewarded by the king. Karikala is said
to have given one poet 1,600,000 gold pieces but this
seems to be an exaggeration ... The poets or bards also
received cash, land, chariots, horses and even elephants.
The Tamil brahmanas took meat and wine."
Ancient India by R.S. Sharma
"In Britain itself, the common people, including
industrial workers who had emerged as a new social class,
had organised themselves and were demanding equal political
rights ...Their leaders supported the aims of the revolt
in (1857) ... and condemned atrocities committed by
the British troops ... It was their view that the British
domination of India benefited only the small upper sections
of British society against whom the common people of
Britain were themselves struggling."
Modern India by Arjun Dev and
Indira Arjun Dev
|
|
|
What makes
history such an arena for contemporary politics? In societies across the
world it has been a tool for nation building, for mobilisation, for manipulation.
In colleges and universities, it is the subject of dry analyses and tortuous
theories of economic determinism. At school, however, it was-and should-be
the stuff of romance and heroism, of narrative and good writing, of igniting
the child's imagination.
Those are all very noble and very cherished ideals, all very removed
from NCERT's bland, grammatically challenged textbooks. To disguise such
mediocrity as some sort of an edified ideological conflict is, frankly,
nonsense.
That doesn't stop Eduardo Faleiro, Congress Rajya Sabha member from Goa
and convener of a cross-parliamentary forum on education, from continuing
to see the NCERT circular as the only evil. He refers to the efforts of
the Bipin Chandra Committee, set up in 1991 to review school textbooks:
"It submitted two reports. The reports were sent to the state governments
... That is the civilised way of going about changing textbooks."
Chandra, former history professor at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University,
headed the committee that studied textbooks in various states, regional
languages, even RSS-affiliated Saraswati Sishu Mandirs. "We submitted
our first report in 1993," he says, "and second in 1996. We
were not allowed to submit our third in 1998."
On the other end of the history rainbow is Dinanath Batra, general secretary
of the Vidya Bharati Akhil Bharatiya Shiksha Sansthan and sworn enemy
of the unholy trinity of "Macaulay, Mark and Madrassahwadis (Islamists)".
Batra, said to be one of Rajput's inspirations, asserts, "History
books have been distorted by all state governments to suit their ideology.
Right now we are deleting some sentences that offend sensitivities of
certain communities." So it doesn't matter if the Jats sacked Delhi
or didn't, as long as the Jat vote in western Uttar Pradesh can be wooed
on the basis of changed textbooks.
It is not as if common ground cannot be reached in teaching the past.
Take the European Union, composed of nations that have routinely slaughtered
each other's people. The European Standing Conference of History Teachers'
Associations (EuroClio) "organises workshops to debate the teaching
of conflicting episodes and personalities of European history".
Can't this happen in India? It can, but that pre-supposes honest practitioners
of history and of education, not necessarily ones without opinions but
people with a clarity of thought and articulation. Till India returns
to that golden age of history teaching, Faleiro can keep screaming, Batra
can keep screeching, Rajput can keep looking for HRD ministers to get
close to -in the early 1990s, he was Arjun Singh's trusted aide. Oh yes,
your child can keep being bored brainless by his or her government-sponsored
history textbook.
-with Sharad Gupta
|
CURRENT
ISSUE DEC 10, 2001
){kind=link}