Historical Pedagogy
Of The
Sangh Parivar
By Tanika Sarkar
India-Seminar.com
07 October, 2003
The
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is a cadre-based organisation with decided
hegemonic aims. It seeks to politically educate its chosen cadres so
that they can, in turn, disseminate select portions of the message among
the various mass fronts that they might work with: electoral constituencies,
students, women, tribals, slum dwellers, trade unions, religious bodies.
The cadres develop different addresses for the different fronts, the
accents and emphases varying considerably from the one to the other.
Cadres thus are, in relation to the mass fronts, teachers, and, indeed,
the affiliates of the Sangh call the Sangh itself their classroom. Teaching,
therefore, is crucial to the agenda, evident in the fact that the human
resources ministry is reserved for a RSS hardliner.
Fully trained cadres,
moreover, are the brahmans within the combine in functions and,
very often, in caste terms too. In any case, they are drawn from educated
middle class, upper caste areas, and RSS shakhas too are mostly concentrated
in similar spaces. The mass fronts, in contrast, are more diverse. They
came up only after independence and with the appearance of universal
adult franchise which necessitated a programme of going to the masses.
The bifurcation in levels of education and training, related closely
to caste and class divides, expresses a novel plan of hegemonic control,
modifying, but not entirely replacing, older Hindu structures of inherited
power and privilege. The older modes of leadership are now supplemented
with educated, trained cadres who derive their ascendancy from acquired
authority rather than from mere inherited status.
If pedagogy is crucial,
within it history commands a very special distinction. Almost all of
the Sanghs present politics uses images of the past as both referent
and justification: that is, most recommendations for present-day activity
are projected as responses, reactions to the past. Elements of the past
need to be recovered and applied, other elements need to be replaced,
while past events need to be revenged continuously. There seems to be,
thus, an unbroken, living dialogue with the past.
The intensity of
the engagement is, however, simulated as much as are the images of the
past. The whole purpose of the lived relationship with the past is to
overwrite an engagement with the present, especially with its problems
of Indian poverty, social oppression, popular resistance and neo-imperialism.
The past that is
constructed out of present interests and needs of the Sangh, the past
which is an instrument in its present politics must, therefore, be an
usable past rather than a real one, in so far as it is knowable through
serious investigative methods. In order to be usable, it needs to reorient
much of the knowledge of our past, as well as the epistemological and
methodological bases for the construction of knowledge. No wonder that
research organisations and teaching material are now controlled by Sangh-related
teachers and historians, sometimes by Sangh pracharaks.
It is by now abundantly
clear that the teaching of history is an arena of urgent concern and
anxiety. I would like to argue that the anxiety arises not only because
the educationists of Hindu rashtra must align their image of the past
to the politics of the present, but also because all known and accepted
disciplinary conventions create a tough impediment to that effort. What
is more of a problem for the Sangh is that most variants of historical
scholarship, the world over are, despite considerable internal differences,
concerned with understandings of various configurations of diverse kinds
of power: whether they are Marxists or post-structuralists, feminists
or new-historicists, they engage in unpacking class, caste, patriarchal,
colonial, post-colonial, discursive and cultural operations of power.
The Sangh is deeply
uncomfortable with the entire exercise, since the only operation of
power that it tries to identify is that of non-Hindus over Hindus
an identification that becomes untenable in the Indian situation where
the Hindu majority is overwhelming and the religious minorities vulnerable
in terms of material and political resources. The Sanghs relationship
with history is therefore particularly fraught. It needs to possess
the past, yet the accepted methods of representation are anathema to
it.
The Hindu rashtra
presupposes great excisions in collective memory as well as the production
of counterfeit historical memories: experiences of poverty and exploitation
to be overwritten by narratives of foreign conquests, military defeats
and the ills that rulers of a different faith had allegedly done to
Hindu temples, women and cows. Beyond a point, actual historical evidence
for all this is thin, patchy or absent. There is, on the other hand,
embarrassingly strong historical evidence to confirm the absence of
the Sangh from the ranks of anti-colonial movements, of transactions
with Italian fascism and self-modelling on the politics of Nazi genocides
which Golwalkar much admired. Professional expertise in historical investigations
thus becomes an area of acute suspicion, even as the historical past
becomes an essential commodity for possession.
Recent events in
Gujarat well illustrate the Sangh methods of using and invoking the
past. Narendra Modis action-reaction thesis sought to legitimise
anti-Muslim carnage on the grounds of Godhra events which, moreover,
were ascribed to terrorists employed by Pakistan. However, Muslims who
were massacred were obviously Indians, most of them so far removed from
Godhra that they could not possibly have had a hand in those atrocities.
A very large number of them were, moreover, children and babies, even
unborn foetuses, not conceivably connected with Godhra, terrorism or
Pakistan. Shrines of Muslim poets and musicians of the past were obliterated
and desecrated, even though they too could not have contributed to Godhra.
Muslims of the present, past and future, therefore, become exchangeable
signs and anyone at any time can be seized upon in revenge for anything
that Muslims have done, are doing, or can do. Both revenge and Muslim
become mobile terms.
If the past, present
and future can freely change places, the very location and meaning of
the past has to change too from all its known uses and connotations.
The Sangh not only aspires to fill popular commonsense with its own
reading of history, it also desires to fill up academic historical productions
with methods and meanings that it generates. For, popular understanding
as hegemonised by the Sangh cannot afford to be interrogated by more
professional constructions, since the boundaries between professional
and popular are permeable and porous.
They break down
especially at the school level where students, carrying with them popular
legends and myths about the past from the media, family memories and
cultural representations are confronted with serious acadamic modes
of ascertaining past events and processes. This very age group, moreover,
is the primary target group of the ideological training that the shakhas
of the Sangh provide. Consequently, competing images of the past become
a risky venture since students are also taught to value a certain professionalism
and acadamic canon.
There is, moreover,
an organisational imperative conjoined to the ideological one. The Sangh,
as I remarked earlier, is itself structured as a teacher for a range
of mass fronts, electoral party and religious organizations that make
up the Sangh combine. It teaches all the leaders of the BJP, VHP and
Bajrang Dal. Its daily shakhas are meant for training in combat action
and ideological lessons. The message that it teaches to its cadres,
and to members of other fronts, is entirely a historical narration which
features only its own preferred version of ancient Hindu glories, Muslim
atrocities and Hindu suffering in later periods.
Equally significant
are the silences about internal power lines that run within the Hindu
community. Again, this narrative cannot afford to be entirely out of
sync with standard academic histories. If the latter proved inhospitable
to Sangh instructions, then state power now gives the Sangh the authority
to supplant the older acadamic canon with those of its own making; censoring
research publications and archival compilations, withdrawing textbooks
and ordering new history writing. In all the states where it has held
power, history teaching and textbooks have been altered dramatically.
How does the Sangh
propose the simultaneous demolition of accepted historical knowledge
and construct its own version as authentic scholarship? Above all, the
Sangh has founded schools. The first school emerged in a significant
context. It was during the partition riots and their aftermath that
the Sangh made its real breakthrough in North India. However, its rapid
expansion was briefly stalemated as it came under a cloud of suspicion
after the assassination of Gandhi. Moreover, independent India began
to function with universal adult suffrage, a development that the Sangh
regarded with dismay.
Golwalkar had been
brutally explicit in his condemnations of democracy and was especially
critical of the power it would provide to labourers and low castes.
Such frankness became muted as the Sangh too founded an electoral organ,
the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, to contest elections and woo mass constituencies
that would inevitably be made up of precisely those people. In the 1952
elections, however, the left emerged as the major parliamentary opposition
to the centrist politics of the Congress. At the national level of political
decision-making, the Sangh vision found little purchase.
To vault over the
impasse, the first thing that the Sangh did was to found a primary school
at Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh in 1952 which rapidly spawned other Saraswati
Shishu Mandirs in its wake. A Shishu Shiksha Parabandh Samiti was set
up to coordinate the primary schools while bal mandirs began to develop
for high school levels. The efforts were repeated in Delhi, Bihar, Madhya
Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh.
In 1977, Vidya Bharati
was institutionalised to coordinate schools at the all-India level.
By the early 1990s, it was running the second largest chain of schools
in the country, controlling about 4,000 schools, 40 colleges, a total
of 36,000 teachers and about ten lakh students. It developed the Haflong
Project for the North East where Christian educational consolidation
had blocked their spread. It also reached out beyond the regular school
and college circuit. There are shishu vatikas for pre-school infants,
to orient their physical, mental, social and spiritual qualities in
tune with Sangh sanskaras or dispositions.
The other project
is that of sanskar kendras in geographically remote or socially marginalised
areas; in tribal belts, rural pockets and urban slums. Here once-a-week
lessons are provided by single teachers to generate training in religion,
patriotism and Indian culture. Whereas in its regular schools,
middle class, upper caste children are given the full paraphernalia
of modern education along with Sangh values, for the socially marginalised,
Sangh values make up the entirety of educational efforts. While the
poor are ideologically coopted, they are not socially empowered through
a full-scale education.
Everywhere, teachers
are recruited from RSS families, thus creating employment prospects
for itself. To domesticate teachers who may come from other backgrounds,
there are training camps that are organised several times in the year,
widening the ideological net considerably. In general, the regular schools
are located in areas which have an RSS centre and a VHP-controlled temple,
usually attached to the school premises. There are evening and morning
shakhas that the RSS runs for local children. The school is thus embedded
within a tight and comprehensive range of institutions that would, in
calibration, coordinate the childs leisure, education, ideological
growth and religious understanding.
The cohesion is
further consolidated by the fact that the regular schools are founded
in neighbourhoods that share a fairly homogeneous caste-class and community
profile. The bonds are strengthened by the teachers who make a point
of regular home visits and dialogue with parents outside the school
premises. The boundaries between the school and the family, between
students and parents, are fluid, and Sangh teachers carry forward the
school pedagogy beyond the school into the familial space. The school
thus functions as a pivotal point within a larger envisioned community
that aligns neighbourhood ties to Sangh influence.
Sangh schools follow
the regular school board curricula and examination system, even using
the older NCERT history textbooks since no better alternative could
be found that would enable their children to compete with other schools.
Little wonder, then, that it sought to change the curricula and textbooks
for all schools as soon as it acquired state power: its own children
could not be protected from ideological contamination otherwise.
However, their schools
left their own distinctive inscription on education in a variety of
subtle ways. Significantly, an entire apparatus of audio-visual and
pedagogical operations was developed to intervene in remaking historical
understanding in opposition to older textbooks. First, the walls displayed
maps of undivided India as the true shape of the nation, imparting in
students a refusal of the historical reality of the Partition and visualising
the country as inclusive of the states of Pakistan and Bangladesh. The
refiguring of the map, moreover, requires explanations that inevitably
provide an opening for accounts of the Muslim League plan for partition,
of tales of Hindu sufferings in the holocaust, the mutilation of the
land all of which inculcate the desire for revenge.
The walls are also
festooned with pictures of Hindu heroes like Shivaji and Rana Pratap,
visually invoking legends of Muslim tyranny and Hindu royal-heroic resistance.
A continuous narrative of Muslim wrongdoing is immediately and imaginatively
disseminated while the idea of resistance is ineffably associated with
royal figures rather than with common people. Distinctive notions of
right and wrong, justice and injustice, enemies and defenders of faith
and nation are produced and instantaneously conjoined. In this Manichaean
world, Hindu princes appear noble saviours while Muslims defile country
and religion and this provides the only possible history of the country.
In school assemblies,
principals address students frequently on themes of Hindu patriotism,
Babur and his mosque that allegedly destroyed Rams temple, the
saga of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement and its martyrs. Many principals
had participated as karsevaks in the two attacks on the Babri mosque,
and those recollections are renewed routinely to link up with histories
of Rajput and Maratha wars against Mughals. The aim is to build an undying
thirst for revenge. A headmaster of a primary school related to me how
proud he felt when, in response to his description of the Babri Mosque
demolition, little children of five were inspired to clench their fists
and swear revenge.
To shortcircuit
the effects of the pre-BJP curriculum, schools provided a special course
on Bharatiya sanskriti which was graded according to classes. All students
of all classes have to study and pass examinations every year. The course
has a series of graded textbooks which have provided the model for the
revamped history syllabi in the BJP-ruled states, and are no doubt the
paradigm for the new NCERT syllabus that the BJP plans.
As the authentic
history of Indian civilization, such textbooks are faithful to Savarkars
definition: Hindutva, as a continuous, historically stable cultural
essence, unifies India. All those who live outside its orbits
Indian Muslims and Christians, for instance are non-Indians,
enemies. The very land, in these books, is defined by a Hindu essence.
There are no mountains or rivers as such, but all geographical features
are depicted as objects of Hindu worship. Place names are fleshed out
by pointing out their contiguity to Hindu pilgrimages, to sites where
Hindu heroes fought against Muslims. Modern or medieval cities are identified
by their ancient names. All past achievements literary, artistic,
architectural, musical, spiritual and scientific are referred
back to ancient, pre-Islamic eras.
The landscape is
bereft of all Muslim or Christian cultural or religious presence. Nor
do they figure as historical actors except as fifth-columnists for foreign
powers or as invaders. There is a significant economy in the narration.
History is shown to develop around a single axis which neatly bifurcates
Indian people into true Indians and alien, as Hindus and others, as
victims and tyrants, as invaders and vanquished.
The past, moreover,
is used not as process, overdetermined and multifaceted with internal
dialectical contradictions, nor does it have a synchronic unity or connectivity.
It is a whirling pool of images and allegories, and events and figures
can be pulled out of it at random, violating historical sequences at
will to illustrate the same point across time and space. This methodological
violence is imperative if a present politics has to convince people
that Ram, an epic hero, was humiliated by Babur, a medieval emperor,
and that present-day Muslims must be killed and humiliated to avenge
that past.
Muslims and Christians
are not simply invaders and conquerors of the past, they are fixed in
eternal postures of aggression which, today, translates as insidious
and covert gestures of hidden expansionism and conquest, carried on
through conversion and terrorism. Histories of communities are not just
unchanging and repetitive, they are, moreover, singular. History becomes
emblematic, congealed into an array of postures, each summing up a whole
community across the ages. The past is a museum of a few signs.
While ancient Indian
glories are iconised, little is made available from the rich classical
sources. The school hymns and mantras, invoking a militant and militarised
nation worship, are modern ones, though composed in Sanskrit, and Sanskrit
lessons teach spoken and modernised Sanskrit, not the literary or religious
texts of classical Sanskrit. Even the devotional music that is taught
is modern Hindi and Sanskrit hymns rather than the classical traditions.
There is little actual knowledge of ancient Indian history or conditions,
which are congealed into stylised icons.
Myths, epics and
select fragments of historical episodes are joined together, again traversing
chronological sequences freely and obliterating generic boundaries.
Babur becomes the enemy of Ram, displacing Ravana, and the history of
the demolition of the Babri Mosque is attached, with illustrations,
to form a sequel to legends of Rajput and Maratha valour against Mughals.
Demons and Mughals flow into each other and the Muslim becomes a free-floating
signifier completely detached from concrete historical contexts. Patriotism,
is entirely identified with hatred and revenge, the country with threatened
borders. People, land, water and air, their survival and their welfare,
do not form any part of patriotism. Nation figures as death the
courting of it, the infliction of it.
The silences are
resounding. There is no analysis of caste, poverty, gender abuses, no
mention of what Hindus have done to Hindus. Nor, for that matter, of
what Muslim emperors have done to Muslim peasants. Power, historically,
seems to generate from Muslims as a homogeneous bloc directed at a seamless
mass of Hindus. So students are not insulated from violence; rather
they are flooded with a surfeit of violent tales, demanding violent
reflexes in response. But anger or even critical introspection into
histories of internal, social violence is carefully excised.
Finally, a word
about the Sanghs pedagogical methods in conveying a sense of the
past at shakhas and schools. It uses to a large extent oral tellings
and the story format. This is a peculiarly effective mode, making as
it does the past vivid, colourful, immediate, full of human interest
and possibilities of emotional identification and imaginative participation.
As a pedagogical tool, especially for very small children, its value
is great and we all need to use it more, to integrate it with dry factual
accounts or analysis.
At the same time,
the mode cuts both ways. While it makes the past interesting, it also
compels imaginative partisanship with figures and events which are part-invented,
filled with vicious political values. Again, its dominance as a tool
helps fore-close critical enquiry into the source, provenance, motivation,
mode of construction of the narrated tales. Stories demand a suspension
of critical faculties, demand a reception that is warm, partisan, accepting
of the narrative thrust. Before they can be opened up to re-reading,
re-evaluation, a search for elements that are suppressed or distorted,
the communal message has settled and struck roots, creating imaginative
reflexes in lieu of critical rethinking.
The historical tales,
moreover, are subtly assembled. They are often made up of fragments
from myths, genuine historical accounts, popular memories that are restricted
and one-sided in their scope, for they ignore other memories. As part
myths they command sacred meanings; as snatches of history they can
be verified and authenticated; as memory they impel immediate recognition
and acceptance. So, as a totality, they acquire multiple authorisation.
There are often
strong anti-communal temptations to counter the plundering of genuine
historical accounts by the Sangh in ways that certainly oppose the ultimate
communal message, but which nonetheless replicate Sangh methods and
attitudes towards history. One very obvious response is to fill up the
crucial gaps left in historical memory by Sangh narrations, but then
refuse to go beyond providing counters. For instance, manufactured tales
of Muslim tyranny or exaggerated and partial narratives of Muslim separatism
and violence may be countered by accounts of tolerant Muslim emperors,
of Hindu Mahasabha espousal of the two-nation theory, or of Hindu violence
in Partition riots. This is an absolutely necessary endeavour, urgent
today as never before, since these facts will now face official suppression.
At the same time,
while they may balance the perspective, trim off exaggerations, correct
distortions, it is dangerous to reduce secular history to rebuttals
and rejoinders to Sangh historical claims: to get trapped eternally
into a closed circle of charges and counter charges, for that forces
history into the crude and empty polemical slot where the Sangh has
placed it. There is a similar Manichaean divide into good and bad, authentic
and inauthentic, black and white, the same disregard for an understanding
of internal contradictions, and impatience for ambivalences, ambiguities,
complications.
Again, the urgency
of building up counters to the Sangh entails the construction of alternative
histories that the Sangh cannot accommodate, that provide the vital
lie to the Sanghs monochromatic narrative of Hindu community and
its others. We can and we ought to build up narratives
of other struggles that will empower subaltern agency so that it will
not be coopted by the Sanghs communalism and will recognise the
crucial importance of histories of power in the realms of class, caste
and gender. Yet, the very desire to have empowering narratives that
celebrate subaltern agency can leave gaps and steamroller complexities
in the interests of easy and simple celebrations.
The very burden
of historical narration and its real interest and excitement
lies in that it must acknowledge a past that does not always
yield up edifying tales, a past that is difficult and painful for us
because we find in it not merely Hitlers but also Stalin, not simply
peasant resistance but also peasant patriarchy, or working class racism.
This perpetual shock treatment may stimulate a kind of despair that
dismantles the very desire for historical truth claims as old-fashioned
positivism, scientism. The disavowal of the historical truth claim or
truth aspiration simplifies the rich difficulties of serious investigation
and narration.
We engage in such
debunking of serious history, however, only when we are ignorant of
the practice of history, of the spectrum of theoretical debates that
emerge from an experience of that practice and which place historians
within a creative and complex ambiguity that grapples with the inherent
limitations and provisionality of the truth claim and the necessary
discipline that still compels us towards accuracy and precision in investigation.
It is out of this continuous, painful and necessary tension that rich
historical understanding and thick descriptions emerge.
More than a commitment
to the subject itself, it is also politically urgent to refuse to replace
communal fables with anti-communal ones, or with tales that empower
the right kinds of agencies. It is precisely in these times that we
need to desperately assert the importance of being true to ascertained,
verified, cross-checked evidence, academic and professional training,
accountability and openness, that distinguish serious history from nice
stories. It is precisely in these times when the VHP thunders that faith
is higher than serious accounts of what actually happened, that we need
to proclaim that we search for the latter, knowing its ultimate elusiveness
in any closed, final sense, and knowing the constructed nature of our
own accounts.
We need to court
the label of being dated, unusable brands in the marketplace of saleable
ideas to make that claim, knowing all its methodological risks and limits.
It is a fidelity to what actually happened in Gujarat that makes our
accounts of Gujarats recent past different from Sangh histories.
(Tanika Sarkar
is Professor of History, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi)