Rewriting ‘old history’ for a New India

News: Recently, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth, and Sports, tabled its Report on the Reforms in Content and Design of School Textbooks. The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) is in the process of formulating the new National Curriculum Framework. At the heart of this process is the rewriting of school textbooks.

Objective

It is to reduce the load on school students who have suffered a loss of learning due to novel coronavirus pandemic-induced lockdown.

What are the proposed series of curricular changes?

As per the Report, school textbooks share a single narrative across millions of students through the multitude of diversity. Therefore, it proposes to delete various facts. For example, to delete the history of the practices at the Akbar’s court like the translation of Sanskrit texts such as the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Rajatarangini into Persian, etc.

The government is working to rewrite history textbooks, to remove ‘un-historical facts and distortions about national heroes. It believes that the real story of India lies in the ancient period. It was, subsequently, changed by frequent invasions, battles, and bloodshed, which were mostly the Muslims

The proposals suggest that the use of audio-visual resources and digital content through QR codes would be promoted to make school textbooks interesting for students.

What are the issues with the proposed changes?

The changes made in the history textbooks specifically target certain areas of India’s past. Therefore, it will result in an ideological shift in history teaching at the school level.

India’s history is at the heart of the political discourse today. The majoritarian political rhetoric calls the Muslims of India ‘outsiders’ and ‘invaders. Therefore, it can lead to communal disharmony.

This is a limited and unimaginative approach to school education in general and history education in particular.

The present content of school textbooks involves pedagogic techniques. The students are challenged in the realm of ideas. This makes education more engaging and meaningful.

The changes would suspend critical thinking about the world around them and reduce the past to statist and static in their imagination.

The proposed changes in textbooks would not show the diversity in our past. It would reduce the space for exploring other histories, like that of inequality, whether of caste or gender, etc.

The Way Forward

The Historians of New India should rewrite histories that would create a ‘national community’, one which rose above all differences of community and caste, and where citizens were to be subject to national laws.

India’s past is very complex and diverse. It is unjust to fit it into simple accounts of the golden and dark ages.

Source: The post is based on an article “Rewriting ‘old history’ for a New India” published in the “The Hindu” on 27^th June 2022.