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What separates a great idea from a lesser one is that once it is expressed it appears so obvious, so instantaneously appealing that you wonder why no one thought of it earlier. Prejudice and Pride is a great idea. Amid all the controversy regarding the writing of history, a comparison of Indian and Pakistani school textbooks on the subject should have been a natural project crafted long ago. But it needed eminent educationist Krishna Kumar to conceptualise and, what is more, to deliver it effectively.

PREJUDICE AND PRIDE By Krishna Kumar Viking Price: Rs 395 Pages: 274

After reading this book, it is rather satisfying to note that regardless of the many elisions and distortions in our textbooks, on the whole the presentation of history that our children get is superior to what their counterparts in Pakistan do. This is the difference, perhaps, between a nationalist and theocratic bias. A religious bias is far more damaging and intellectually crippling than a nationalist one. In fact, those engaged in rewriting history from a religious angle in India should read Kumar's work and realise that their efforts will only result in downgrading our intellectual gains and, hence, becoming a mirror image of Pakistan. Is that what we want?

Pakistani books project Mahatma Gandhi as a Hindu leader, do not mention Mangal Pandey or Rani Jhansi in the 1857 revolt, ignore the many areas of fruitful Hindu-Muslim collaboration in the freedom struggle and totally undermine the importance of the Civil Disobedience Movement. In India, we do not give enough attention to how the Muslim League's appeal grew and the many omissions and commissions of Congress leaders that helped to spread the two-nation theory that led to Partition.

The most interesting nugget Kumar provides is an examination of how the two countries look at Partition. Bipan Chandra said that it was wrong to believe they were both born of the same movement. There were two distinct mobilisations-one gave rise to Independent India and the other to Pakistan. This point is amplified convincingly in Kumar's painstaking work. Indian textbooks see the Partition as a sad, tragic and perhaps avoidable denouement. In Pakistani school texts, however, Partition was a grand event, the unfolding of a telos that was waiting for years to happen. In fact, there is also an attempt to see the 1857 revolt as a harbinger of the Partition that happened 90 years later.

If modern Indian history stops at 1947 and then gives way to civics, political science and so on, Pakistan history begins with the Partition. The textbooks essentialise Hindus as a manipulative and treacherous community (led by Gandhi) and that the Muslims had no option but to strive for Pakistan. To this end, Pakistani texts argue, the Muslims in India always kept their distinctive attributes alive, politically and culturally, and never compromised with the larger Hindu body that surrounded them.

This book also raises a larger issue that murmurs to the reader sotto voce. It is quite clear, as Croce had said years ago, that history is really an obsession with the present. Thus, no matter which route you take, it is difficult to come up with an unbiased history. From time to time, Kumar does his best to set the records right on both sides, but it is, in fact, nearly impossible to write a perfect history. And, if perchance, a perfect history were ever to be written, nobody would read it. History, no matter how balanced it might be, fares poorly against myths and old prejudices that are routinely handed down generations, and on which communities base their cultural markers.

The need of the hour then is to jettison the high pretences of history. It cannot be denied that history has been a burden for present generations, far outweighing whatever advantages that you can gain by delving into the past. The idea of reliving the past, going through agonising memories and only then being equipped for the present is an extension of psychoanalytical cathartic techniques which just do not work at the collective level.

If histories should be entertained at all, then they should lean towards recording mistakes, so that we are ashamed about the many ruthless brutalities that occurred in the past under some pretext. Milan Kundera argues that individuals repeat the same mistakes, that is their nature. But the bearable gravitas of being can be achieved at the societal plane if we realise that what unites us as one humankind is that we all have terrible pasts and unforgivable ancestors.

Kumar's book inspires us to think on a range of issues that go far beyond the purported title of the volume.