History At The
Madrasas
By Nita Kumar
India
Seminar
08 October, 2003
History
in Madrasa Jamia Irfaniya*: It is class 8, a class of some 40 young
men. They are sitting on benches and not on daris, only about four in
the stereotypical caps, all looking smart and modern. And they are open.
On my arrival, they get over their smiling and staring quickly and then
ignore me and get on with their work.
The teacher gives
them a brilliant lecture on the topic of the day, The Expansion
of British Rule in India, sub topic, Control by the English
over Bengal. A familiar narrative falls on my ears. Alivardi Khan
Companies
Calcutta
Chandernagore
fortifications
Mir Jafar
Treaty of Murshidabad
Battle of Plassey. The children
are listening enraptured. Naturally. He is telling it like a story,
like literature, even as he is peppering the blackboard
at odd angles with scribbled names and dates.
We come to the Treaty
of Allahabad, and the signing over of the lagan of Bengal, Bihar and
Orissa. At this point he alludes to the movie Lagaan. It is an appropriate
reference, in that it is one all the children, maybe the whole nation
would get. It is good technique. As an old-timer at developing techniques
for teaching history, I only wish the young teacher had not been so
unsure about his reference to a popular film, had not lowered his voice
and implied, This is a mere aside, you understand; not part of
my otherwise very serious history lesson.
This excepted, I
have no differences with him. He is spinning the same grand narrative
of modern India that is familiar to me and thousands of others from
school, college, university and our own work. He is a knowledgeable
historian and consults no notes. He is a fluent speaker and is narrating
at the level of the children. If I was a student in the class, I would
respect him involuntarily for being a strong authority figure, and for
opening up so effortlessly a window into this exciting world of adventures
for me.
But there is one
grave flaw in his narrative, which he shares with all other teachers
of history. He does not manage to communicate in any way, This
place was called Bengal, but was an incipient India. It is you, your
story. Alivardi Khan dressed like us, spoke like us. He was different
because he was a nawab and had his own calculations. Should we discuss
the priorities of a nawab? What is not taught effectively in Jamia
Irfaniya is not taught in any school in India: that a nation can have
immense convolutions and still emerge, injured and imperfect (as a kind
of miracle) a nation, which means (still more miraculously) that you
and I and everyone else who lived here past and present are one. That
we want to believe it and make it true. Let us jointly exercise our
imaginations to see what this idea could mean (and what it leaves out).
But the students,
as I said, are enraptured. Given the narrative as it stands, the teacher
is a talented performer. The class is successful. If there is a shortcoming
in the teaching of history in madrasas like Irfaniya, it is a shortcoming
shared by all the schools of the country.
This particular
teacher, Mr. Saiyad for convenience, also gives the explanation for
this shortcoming. The course to be covered in class 6, 7,
8 is huge: the whole of ancient India (including prehistory and early
man), medieval India and modern India, respectively, with a large dose
of civics in each textbook as well. Nothing is left out. The narrative
is more condensed than one would find at higher levels but is the same
compilation of facts. As Mr. Saiyad puts it, If you teach properly,
you cannot just mention an event, as the textbook does. You have to
explain it. You have to use five sentences instead of one. Then they
need to write everything. For them, nothing will be learnt if they do
not write. So, how to use the half hour period three times a week (the
other three go to geography)? Lecture? Have them read? Have them write?
Correct? Discuss?
It sounds impractical
to me to suggest map-work, classroom activity, or innovative methods
after this. In any case, no such methods have achieved legitimacy yet
in Indian schools. There are many problematizations of the writing of
history by sophisticated historians. They have no time for, and there
is no discussion by others of, alternative classroom techniques to the
present grand narrative delivered as boxed knowledge to empty receptacles.
Comparing this technique at its best, as at Irfaniya, and postmodern
history at its best, the moral I see is: A straight narrative is more
interesting for children than an ironic, reflexive, open-ended one not
at their level.
The nature of Jamia
Irfaniya: All this comprises history at the madrasas, but,
as the four white caps remind us, we must ask: what makes this specifically
a madrasa? Irfaniya is a modern building of three storeys, the rooms
built on three sides around a courtyard, a wall on the fourth. They
own a whole katra with some twenty shops. Their classrooms are large
and all open onto the central courtyard through verandahs and balconies,
as well as have windows on the opposite side, so are well lighted and
airy. Let us go to an Arabic lesson in class 1.
There are about
20 boys and 10 girls, all small and sweet. They wear an assortment of
clothes although some students appearance tells us that the uniform
is supposed to be white.
The little children
could look like an illustration in the entry Education of
the Dictionary of Islam by Thomas Patrick Hughes published in 1885 (repub.
Rupa, 1988). Children sit on a jute mat on the floor and recite loudly
to themselves. When bored by reciting, they talk among themselves. The
teacher says, Aiye! Sabak sikho! (Hey you! Learn your lessons!)
And the boys I am looking at suddenly seem to fall over, sideways. No,
they are beginning the recitation of their lessons. They sway and learn
some five lines each every day. During the reciting they look away into
the distance with glazed eyes.
The maulvi can call
them names, hit them or threaten them with a cane, and make them stand
up in awkward positions. He summons them one by one and hears the lines
they have learnt and gives them the next three or four lines
to learn up. They use the terms read, learn
and recite, but all the children are doing is deciphering
the Arabic alphabet to read the Quran line by line, with no understanding
of any word of its content. Separately, they learn at an elementary
level what the duties of a Muslim are, in subjects called by the equivalent
of Dini Talim, or, religious education.
The children could
look like a benign illustration, but our modern pedagogic sensitivities,
or mine at least, would question the validity of such rote learning
and abuse. I would consider it pain at two levels: at the
daily level of how children are treated, and at the long-term level
of their being denied choices in their future.
But this is a different
problem to that of history teaching. The primary schooling in madrasas
like Irfaniya, up to class 5, is in Urdu medium. They are moved in to
Hindi medium in class 6, 7 and 8, then go to high school elsewhere.
They have a platter full of languages: Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, English.
They are learning in the basic shiksha pattern and use all the basic
shiksha textbooks for all the subjects. Two extra languages and their
initial religious education aside, children who study in Jamia Irfaniya
are like children in other institutions. The history they learn is shared
by all children. Insofar as this history is inadequately conceptualised
and taught, all children, including those in the madrasa, are ill-fitted
to be part of India. The failure is one of historians who write textbooks,
administrators who design them and teachers who work out pedagogic strategies.
Madrasas: In the
archival records of the British colonial state, as well as in the private
records of members of the Indian intelligentsia, the indigenous school
of North India is referred to by the generic term madrasa.
There is no exclusive implication of this institution as Islamic. This
is close to the literal meaning of madrasa which is the
place of dars: dars being teaching, instruction, a lesson, or
lecture.
Today, the term
madrasa stands for Islam. It does so, moreover, not in a
neutral sense in which masjid still means place of congregation,
but rather in a heavily loaded sense of a place of biased and distorted
learning. It is regarded, loosely, as a hotbed of terrorism in Pakistan
and Afghanistan, and in India, of opposition to modernity and progress,
by which is consensually implied both western modernity and progress
as well as indigenous versions of the same. Close down the madrasas,
demands the popular press as part of its analysis of Islamic resurgence.
These institutions, funded by external sources is their
description by a certain kind of layperson, meaning, anti-national
external sources. Madrasas are treated as the index of backwardness
even by secular Muslim intellectuals. The curriculum is not supposed
to have changed from about the 13th century to the present.
In order to understand
the nature of history teaching in contemporary madrasas in India more
fully, we have to agree on the following: (i) Muslims are also heterogeneous,
with sects, schools, ideologies, classes, gender divisions, subcultures
and territorial and linguistic identities. One has to balance between
generalization which reveals patterns, and contextualizing which is
necessary for precision. (ii) There always exist several approaches
to history, as written, taught and passed on. To judge any of them as
right, wrong, correct, or false, we must specify for whom and according
to which criteria. (iii) Muslims are not otherwise nice people who have
somehow gone wrong on certain points. They must cease to be understood
as in opposition to something normative and better. They are just themselves.
Yes, to be oneself is to have an oppositional identity,
insofar as most identities, at all time, are articulated in opposition
to an other.
The heterogeneity
of madrasas: When students finish with class 8 in the madrasa described
above, they go to other high schools in the city and continue in the
same stream as in their middle school. I would call this a secular,
nationalist stream, in intention, with failures in both the secularism
and nationalism. Perhaps the biggest aspect of failure is that this
education is relatively meaningless in their lives and some 90% of them
drop out after class 8. Almost none of the students go on to Irfaniyas
own higher classes. The equivalent of high school, intermediate and
BA., are the munshi, maulvi, alim and fazil degrees awarded at two year
intervals. These classes are housed in a separate building, also called
Madrasa Irfaniya, under the administration of the same committee, with
a different principal and headmaster. This Madrasa Irfaniya is under
the Arabic and Persian Madrasa Board of U.P. (and in the respective
state, in each case). Such Boards run the four exams mentioned above,
as well as others such as Qamil and Mumtaz-ul-Muhadassin.
Madrasas belong
to a certain sect each, such as Barelwi, Deobandi, or Ahl-e-hadis. For
some, including among the madrasa administrators, the differences between
the sects is of utmost importance; for others it is trivial merging
on inconsequential. Anyone who walks around to observe classes in, say,
Madrasa Hamidia, Madrasa Dar-ul-Islam, or Madrasa Umahut-ul-uloom, each
of a different sect, cannot distinguish how the sectarian differences
play themselves out.
When asking about
the textbooks, one learns from some teachers that there is a difference
between Barelwi and Deobandi books, and from others that there is not;
and typically that the differences are minor ritualistic ones regarding
how to pray and whom to address. Reading the textbooks does not explicate
the differences either. There are good, better and worse textbooks,
independent of affiliation. They are written by diverse people, and
published differently, with Deobandi ones written and published from
Deoband (but also from Nadwa). Much as one would like a clear pattern
to emerge that would match sectarian loyalties, it does not.
In history teaching,
particularly, there is little chance of pinning down a Barelwi version
of history as distinct from a Deobandi one. While there certainly exist
claimants to a significant difference, the educators I personally have
met are mostly of the opinion that the differences are greatly exaggerated
and that the colonial state particularly distorted the relationship
between them by exaggerating differences.
The most startling
difference is not between the sects, which certainly do have separate
institutions and constituencies. It is between the madrasa which is
affiliated with the state board or the Basic Shiksha Parishad, and is
secular and nationalist (plus teaching the Quran on its own and using
Urdu as a medium at lower levels), and the madrasa which is affiliated
with the madrasa board, and is explicitly religious. When marking this
difference, we must also remember that for every hundred students educated
in the latter religious system, some one thousand are educated in the
secular, nationalist system. This may seem to mark the victory of the
nationalist over the religious sectarian, but if there are certain rewards
that come for students from such a victory, they are small and elusive.
Before discussing
this further, there is another important difference to be noted within
the catch-all term madrasa. Many children being educated
are taught only at home. Either in their own home or in anothers,
children ranging from three to twenty gather to learn the Quran from
a maulana or maulani, simply someone who has in turn read the Quran.
Again, these children are never explained, and never understand, a single
word of what they are reading. The tarjuma, or translation, of what
they are reading, can be pursued, according to their educators, when
they grow up if they wish.
What history do
these young students in domestic madrasas know? I tried to answer this
with a group of a dozen girls ranging from six to sixteen, from beginners
to those who had already read half the holy book. What we would consider
historical facts were unknown to them. They did not know who Babar was
or what he had done. They did not know when India became independent
(and if it had). Certainly, there is a gender difference too. Females
are a notch more ignorant than males of modern narratives and facts,
and no doubt more knowledgeable of histories of the family and community.
But, as my previous research revealed, boys are ignorant also, even
those who are in the primary sections of madrasas, and in such startling
ways that the notch they are higher becomes invisible.
There are other
children who do not study at all, neither at home nor outside, neither
the Quran nor secular subjects. They begin working early, and are among
some of the most cultured people otherwise. They go towards
forming, however, the vast pool of Indias illiterates. I mention
them here in the understanding that a question about madrasas is really
a question about Muslims, and the absence of madrasa education among
Muslims is also a statement about madrasas.
To end, the heterogeneous
nature of madrasa teaching is a product of class, sect and history.
The upper classes and socially mobile Muslims will ensure that their
children receive the best cosmopolitan kind of teaching beyond madrasas.
Provincial Muslims of almost all classes will choose from among a range
of madrasas, or of Muslim schools with no madrasa in their
name but with the same combination of national curriculum, Urdu and
religious education. Poorer Muslims may be satisfied with no other teaching
but the Quran at home. A very small number of the two classes above
may send their boys for the religious education necessary for a professional
religious career. The very poorest may dispense even with Quran learning
at home, but would certainly ensure that their children learn their
vocation.
The heterogeneity
of history: There are two kinds of nationalist history. There could
perhaps be a good Indian nationalist history, but it does
not exist yet. It does not exist anywhere, and it does not exist in
the madrasas. The best that exists, as I see it, is articulated in a
textbook like Hamara Itihas aur Nagarik Jiwan (Basic Shiksha Parishad,
U.P., 2002). It could be taught excellently too, if used as a guide,
and followed in principle and not in letter. A good teacher like Mr
Saiyad dislikes this textbook because he does not find in it enough
of a clear and strong narrative, and finds it too much like literature.
He does a wonderful job of teaching it anyway because he in turn makes
history literature.
Apart from the general
problem that a nationalist history is a distorted and artificial one
if not cross questioned and related to actual peoples lives, this
history has specific problems. Aurangzeb is always vilified, Akbar celebrated,
heroes like Rana Pratap or Shivaji treated like saviours or martyrs,
rather than as complex personalities. The long-term damage of such distortions
is immeasurable. Children grow up into adults thirsting for some kind
of revenge because they actually believe that In 3000 years of
our history people from all over the world have come and invaded us,
captured our lands, conquered our minds
all of them came and looted
us, took over what was ours
1
The second kind
of nationalist history is a very weak version, where the teachers are
unenergetic and unsuccessful in communicating any sense of a nation,
including the elementary facts. All the teachers, including the good
ones like Mr Saiyad, consider this failure to be a function of the backwardness
of their students families. Families should not be so ignorant,
so uninterested in education, should somehow magically not be illiterate
and pre-modern themselves. The subtext here is that parents should be
able to help their children with homework and do their share of the
teaching as it is supposed to be divided between home and school.
There are two kinds
of non-nationalist histories. The first is that taught in munshi, maulvi,
alim and fazil sections. This is Tarikh-e-Islam, or The History of Islam,
such as written by Sheikh Moinuddin Nadavi, published by Darul Musannafin,
Azamgarh. Importantly, it is abridged by Asir Adravi from its original
four parts to four thin booklets of some seventy pages each. These are
the notes that students actually memorize for their exams.
It is consensually agreed that teachers do not need to explicitly teach
or explain this history. It is there in the notes, and students can
manage on their own.
There are several
versions of this history as written and published. In a Shia version,
the position of Hazrat Ali will be different to that in a Sunni version.
In Sunni sectarian versions there may be barely distinguishable differences,
although an institution might prefer to teach its own publication. One
version which is never taught in madrasas is the western version of
the Venture of Islam, or even the histories of Islam written
(in English) by western educated Indian or Asian scholars. These are
taught in the Arabic history courses of Indian universities, but not
in madrasas. One may question whether the History of Islam
as taught in board madrasas follows the norms of disciplinary history.
Like other textbooks,
it sounds biased in little ways. Its biggest bias is to speak, not objectively,
but as a concerned insider, thus: Before the coming of Islam,
there was no worship of the Supreme God anywhere. Another bias
could be that it is one-sided. This history concentrates on Arabia and
does not mention India at all. In justification of this and their total
course, board madrasas maintain a career orientation logic. Their students
are trained to preach and to teach, and all others can and do study
in other types of schools and madrasas.
The second type
of non-nationalist history is the local history not explicitly taught
anywhere but known and cherished by children as they grow into adults
in lieu of the teaching of other kinds of history. We should take this
history seriously, for two separate reasons. If we were worried about
a threat to nationalist history, we should know that it came from both
a sectarian history such as the History of Islam, and from a local history
that flourishes in the absence of deliberate nationalist teaching. If
we were worried about a threat from nationalist history, we should also
know that one of the ways to fashion a more humane, imaginative and
correct history in the future would be to take seriously these local
histories at present confined to the illiterate.
The oppositionality
of madrasas: There is an immense variety of positions from within those
who grapple with the question of the appropriate education for Muslims.
We can barely touch on a few. The question, according to Dr Muqtada
Hasan Mohammad Yasin Azhari, the Rector of Jamia Salfia, is not one
of East versus West or Islam versus the West, but of what is practical
and desirable. Those structures which are practical and useful are taken
over by Muslims regardless of whether they originate in the West or
not, such as written exams. Muslims open the institutions needed by
them.
Thus, for Salfia,
it was necessary to have an educational institution where together
with a high-level study of Quran and hadis, there would be higher study
of Arabic language and literature, and there would be also the work
of writing and publishing books, where books of hadis would be written
and distributed
(Tarjuman, Delhi, 1 January 1964, p. 10,
quoted in Jamia Salfia Markazi Darul Ulum ka Sankshipt Parichay, Varanasi:
Salfia, 1998, p. 30.)
This is a fair description
of the identity of a Madrasa Board madrasa. It is criticised by many
educated people such as Masooda Khan, the Principal of Umahut-ul-uloom,
who is against religious education. She considered other cities more
forward than the provincial one she lives in, with its preponderance
of traditional cottage industry. Although not said by her
openly, I understand that she is a pathan, or an ashraf of some kind
and she considers weavers who do not value modern education backward.
She is vehement in denouncing those who behave like frogs in a well,
who provide services only to train maulvis, and who make religion the
staple and be-all of their lives.
On my part I would
like to separate the Arabic madrasas as specialised vocational institutions
comparable to other narrow training institutions. Then I would propose
we understand the bulk of madrasas in the larger context of schooling
in India and modernity in India. In this perspective, I see schools
in India as covering some five parts of a range of schools, each fading
into the other. At one extreme, the institution with the weakest link
to modernity is the municipal or mahapalika school. It has all the paraphernalia
of a modern school except the teaching. It also has a colonial attitude
in its core distinction between us, the enlightened, and them, the ignorant.
Next to it comes the local English medium school, which
has all the same structural features such as age-graded classes, as
well as furniture for children and the requirement of uniforms. Neither
the students nor their guardians, nor the teachers nor the administrators,
fathom the meaning behind the modernist features they live out, but
compared to the first kind of school they live more of them out and
more strictly so.
Next in the range
comes the madrasa. Yes, it is indeed more modern than the mahapalika
and the neighbourhood convent school. On the face of it it is nothing
but traditional. In the lower classes boys all wear caps, girls all
cover their heads. All learn the Quran. But their buildings are cleaner
and more solid, the classrooms better laid out, the books less in tatters,
students and teachers more in harmony. The rote learning of the Quran
with swaying of the upper body and recitation at an undecodable speed
finishes off in the first years. Then there is the execution of the
modern requirements of the writing of questions and answers, the preparation
for exams and revision, and the grappling with several subjects in an
age-graded way.
And, just to complete
the argument, the next two phases are the imitation convent schools,
and then the actual missionary and public schools. The history taught
here is the same as in the others. Only its facts are better memorised
by students and they are taught how to be more adept at spinning out
narratives. The best cases aside, one could argue that these schools,
for all their liberalism, are more violent towards the child than the
madrasa and more successful in transforming his being according to external
ideological formulations.
A madrasa can be
of many kinds; its history teaching of many kinds. When it is Islamic,
it is geared to a profession. When it is secular, it is nationalist
in the way prescribed by various Boards and common to all schools. This
history is inadequately taught almost everywhere and is also faulty
in its layout. If our aim is to have a successful teaching of secular
and nationalist history, the madrasas are not the main defaulters at
all. Insofar as they offer free or subsidised teaching to children,
try to preserve a continuity between home and school and invest in most
of the paraphernalia of modern schooling, they are indeed institutions
to be emulated. Their teaching of history is not as bad as in our municipal
schools and little private schools, and sometimes as good or better
than in our grand private schools. It can certainly be improved in numerous
ways, but none of these ways would be specific to the madrasa and would
apply equally to the large variety of institutions and children in India.
Footnotes:
* The name of this madrasa and most others, unless in a citation, has
been changed.
1. Speech by the President of India, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, in Hyderabad,
July 2002, for which I presume his speechwriters should be held responsible.
References:
Dr Fahimuddin, Globalization and Growth of Madrasas in India,
Occasional Paper, Giri Institute of Development Studies, Lucknow.
Nita Kumar, Lessons from Schools: The History of Education in Banaras,
Sage, Delhi, 2000.
Nita Kumar, Children and the Partition: History for Citizenship,
in Suvir Kaul (ed), The Partition of Memory, Permanent Black, Delhi,
2001.
David Lelyveld, Aligarhs First Generation: Muslim Solidarity
in British India, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1978.
Barbara Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: 1860-1900, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, 1982.
(Nita Kumar,
Center for Post-colonial Education, Varanasi; and Visiting Professor,
university of Michigan, USA )