Textbook Troubles
By Siddhartha Deb
The Boston Globe
10 June , 2003Every nation imparts self-serving myths and legends to its young, but in recent years few countries have done so quite as avidly as India. In classrooms from Kashmir to Karnataka, a new history is being produced by a resurgent right-wing Hindu movement. One finds a number of curious stories being peddled to schoolchildren: Aryans sallying out from India to settle
Iran, Homer adapting ''The Iliad'' from the Ramayana, Christ roaming the Himalayas in search of Hindu wisdom. These claims will sound unlikely even to the hardened Indophile, but they are being promoted in government-sponsored textbooks, columns by right-wing journalists, and paintings commissioned to adorn public spaces. The Hindu fundamentalist vision of history presumes that the Indian subcontinent is an exclusive Aryan-Hindu preserve. Hindu ideologues dismiss strong historical evidence that the area once contained a mix of peoples, and that the Aryan people migrated there from central Asia. Their purist idea! of India has become visible even in America. On March 25, a vocal group of well-dressed Indian nationalists disrupted a Columbia University panel on India and Pakistan, forcing the moderator to abruptly halt the discussion.
In April, some 2000 signatures appeared on an online petition protesting the appointment of Romila Thapar, a secular scholar of ancient India, to a research chair at the Library of Congress.
Such incidents are old news in India, where liberal, secular, and left-wing historians have been under attack since the early 1990s, when the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) began its rise to power. The BJP originally focused its complaints on a 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya, a symbol to them of the long history of Muslim conquest and plunder. The BJP, along with its allied organizations the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) (known collectively as the ''Sangh family''), claimedthe mosque had been built on the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama.
Historical evidence was hard to come by, but the BJP leader L.K. Advani (who has since become deputy prime minister) gave public appearances as Rama riding his chariot. Subsequently, the mosque was demolished by Sangh cadres. In 1998, the BJP won national elections and began taking control of the country's leading scholarly bodies. A national curriculum for schools run by
the central government was proposed the same year, with the objective of replacing history textbooks by the country's most reputed scholars, many of whom have a secular or left-wing orientation.
In May 2002, the education ministers of 16 states walked out of a
conference to protest the right-wing bias of the new curriculum, while three leading scholar-activists filed a petition with the Supreme Court challenging the publication of new textbooks. The petition was turned down, however, and ''India and the World'' and ''Contemporary India'' made their appearance last year.
At first sight, the new textbooks seemed notable only for their bad
photographs, cluttered maps, occasional typos, and the insouciance of introductory statements like ''The twentieth century world witnessed umpteen developments of far reaching consequences.'' Once the liberal press had subjected the textbooks to close readings, however, a pattern emerged from
the ''umpteen developments'' left out.
The anti-left bias, as in the offhand description of Lenin as the leader of a ''coup,'' was expected. But some other distortions were less so. The Holocaust, for example, is significantly absent from the discussion of Nazi Germany in ''India and the World,'' and Gandhi's assassination by a right-wing Hindu isn't mentioned in ''Contemporary India.'' The books criticize German nationalism not for genocide, war, pogroms, and book-burning, but merely for a false superiority complex premised on ''so-called Aryan blood.'' The real Aryans, or Hindus, omnipresent in all aspects of the Indian subcontinent, are a different matter altogether. It doesn't take a reader of runes to trace the lineage of these omissions
and distortions. The Hindu right-wing vision of India was in large part imported from the West: Under British rule, the history books emphasized irreconcilable differences between Hindus and Muslims, largely as a justification for the British presence. These versions of history trickled down to the colonial-era figureheads of the Hindu right.The BJP, for instance, owes a great deal of its historical vision to Veer Savarkar, an Indian nationalist imprisoned by the British in the early 20th century. Although Savarkar turned informer in prison, the BJP recently installed his portrait in the Indian parliament. It was a loyal gesture, because Savarkar had articulated the view closest to the revised history being
shaped by the Sangh family, even coining the word they use to express their idea of Indian identity: ''Hindutva,'' or Hindu-ness. As Savarkar explained, ''Hindutva is not a word but a history. !
Hindutva embraces all the departments of thought and activity of the whole being of our Hindu race.'' Savarkar defined the Hindu race as those for whom the Indian subcontinent was their original ''fatherland,'' while M.S. Golwalkar, an early guiding light of the RSS, had written admiringly of the ''race pride'' of Nazi Germany. Taken together, they provide the perfect framework for a
constructed ''Aryan'' history whose key points fly in the face of mainstream historical consensus.
According to this revisionist history, the people commonly referred to as Aryans were native to the Indian subcontinent, not tribes who arrived from Central Asia around 1500 BC. The Harappan civilization that flourished in Western India and Eastern Pakistan from 3000 to 1500 BC were horse-riding Aryans, not the advanced urban population most historians say they were. The
period of Muslim Moghul role from the 11th to the 18th centuries AD was one of total religious persecution of the Hindu majority, not a time when Hindus played active roles in sustaining and challenging the Mughal empire. And finally, the BJP claim that independence from British rule was won by right-wing Hindus, when in fact such organizations had a shameful record of
collaboration with the British. In today's India, only 30 percent of
school children attend primary school, and far fewer reach the state-run secondary schools where the most controversial textbooks are likely to be used. It's significant ! that the new textbooks are aimed, most of all, at the children of India's
middle class, which embraces both the idea of a global economy and retrograde fantasies of ethnic purity. The Hindu nationalist middle class participated avidly in the looting that accompanied the massacre of an estimated 2,000 Muslims in the western state of Gujarat last year.What all this history effort produces, of course, is the worldview held by Praveen Togadia, the VHP's general secretary, who proclaimed Gujarat a ''laboratory'' for Hindutva in the wake of the killings. Togadia has demanded that Indian Muslims take blood tests to prove they are not of Arab descent. He was probably characterizing Islam as an Arab and foreign religion, and his message was clear: Non-Hindus are second-class citizens,
and anyone who knows India's history should know as much. To defeat Togadia's way of thinking will require Indians to remember precisely those pluralistic and tolerant aspects of their history that ! the new government-sponsored curriculums so eagerly erase.
Siddhartha Deb is an Indian writer whose reviews and articles have appeared in New Statesman, The Times Literary Supplement, and Legal Affairs.His novel ''The Point of Return'' was published recently by Ecco.Copyright
(c) 2003 Globe Newspaper Company