Spurious Textbooks
By Suvi Dogra
09 June, 2007
Combat LawIndia has, indeed, been pushed to a stage where schools are no longer untouched by political battles. Shrewd attempts are on to mobilise future generations for a particular brand of politics. Since late 1990s, education has been becoming quite a contentious issue. The heat generated by this has come to blur the priorities that the nation had once set – to achieve an emancipated, forward looking, knowledgeable and egalitarian society.
Today, the knowledge system is being deeply interwoven with politics of power. How can textbooks be deployed as a tool to legitimise ideology of the government in power and work towards creating hegemony? Change in the content of textbooks, on the pretext of preserving culture and national identity, can be dangerous as it has the potential to polarise the nation. Cultural constructs that give precedence to Hindu culture can lead to hate and ire against the ‘other’. Falsification and distortion of Indian history is another outcome of this zeal to paint the society as a monolithic entity.
A Delhi based NGO, Nirnatar’s research project on school textbooks in Rajasthan highlights the misuse of textbooks for propagating religion-based ideology. Schools or Hate-Labs, is an analysis of the school textbooks of Rajasthan by Apoorvanand.
The book traces a bit of the history of textbook writing and refers to the recent debates around NCERT textbooks. Exploring the concept of ‘cultural nationalism’, the author finds that it is turning out to be a subtle way of propagating the RSS concept of a Hindu nation since it is finding its way in the textbooks being taught in the schools of Rajasthan.
The book has quoted many examples from the textbooks to drive home the point that with such textbooks the entire classrooms can be turned into virtual ‘hate-labs.’ The textbooks, according to the study, are often flawed in terms of facts, content and interpretations of historical events. Apparent instances of political bias further degrade the credibility of the books and their authors.
Many examples from the sociology and political science textbooks of class IX to class XI have been cited which try to convey the idea that Hindu religion is far more ‘Indian’ than other faiths can be. The sociology book for Class XI titled ‘Indian social institutions: Religion, education and law’ reasserts the superiority of Hindu religion and equates ‘Hindu’ with ‘Indian’. The basic premise behind all these textbooks is that Aryan culture is synonymous with Indian culture.
The Sanskrit textbook of class X seems to draw from the attempts of the RSS to train young minds with its ideology for VD Savarkar is presented in the Sanskrit reader as a national icon from the days of our freedom struggle. Similarly, various other textbooks too try to project the RSS as a great and only nationalist organisation.
Sadly, for the first generation schoolgoers there is no other option but to accept such state-supplied books. The tragedy is that the education system is solely based on arriving at answers using the prescribed books. Thus, the students are compelled to depend on information that may or may not be true.
The books of Rajasthan for 2006 from the Secondary Education Board do not fulfil the basic requisite of a school textbook. Instead, they pose a moral question before the educationists and politicians of the country — Why do the scales of power govern what the children and their impressionable minds should learn? These textbooks are outright regressive as they fail to imbibe the true democratic and secular values. Will children continue to be inflicted with crude distortion of facts on the pretext of being provided knowledge by the schools?
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