Hijacking India's
History
By Kai Friese
While some of us lament the
repetition of history, the men who run India are busy rewriting it.
Their efforts, regrettably, will only be bolstered by the landslide
victory earlier this month of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Western
India state of Gujarat.
The B.J.P. has led this country's coalition government since 1999. But
India's Hindu nationalists have long had a quarrel with history. They
are unhappy with the notion that the most ancient texts of Hinduism
are associated with the arrival of the Vedic "Aryan" peoples
from the Northwest. They don't like the dates of 1500 to 1000 B.C. ascribed
by historians to the advent of the Vedic
peoples, the forebears of Hinduism, or the idea that the Indus Valley
civilization predates Vedic civilization. And they certainly can't stand
the implication that Hinduism, like the other religious traditions of
India, evolved through a mingling of cultures and peoples from different
lands.
Last month the National Council of Educational Research and Training,
the central government body that sets the national curriculum and oversees
education for students up to the 12th grade, released the first of its
new school textbooks for
social sciences and history. Teachers and academics protested loudly.
The schoolbooks are notable for their elision of many awkward facts,
like the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by a Hindu nationalist in 1948.
The authors of the textbook have promised to make revisions to the chapter
about Gandhi. But what is more remarkable is how they have added several
novel chapters to Indian history.
Thus we have a new civilization, the "Indus-Saraswati civilization"
in place of the well-known Indus Valley civilization, which is generally
agreed to have appeared around 4600 B.C. and to have lasted for about
2,000 years. (The all-important addition of "Saraswati," an
ancient river central to Hindu myth, is meant to show that Indus Valley
civilization was actually part of Vedic
civilization.) We have a chapter on "Vedic civilization" ?
the earliest recognizable "Hindu culture" in India and generally
acknowledged not to have appeared before about 1700 B.C. ? that appears
without a single date.
The council has also promised to test the "S.Q.," or "Spiritual
Quotient," of gifted students in addition to their I.Q. Details
of this plan are not elaborated upon; the council's National Curriculum
Framework for School Education says only that "a suitable mechanism
for locating the talented and the gifted will have to
be devised."
More recent history, of course, is not covered in school textbooks.
So we will have to wait to see how such books might treat this month's
elections in Gujarat. They were held in the wake of the brutal pogrom
of last February and March, in which more than 1,000 Muslims were murdered
and at least 100,000 more lost their homes and property. The chief minister
of Gujarat, who is among the leading lights of the B.J.P., justified
this atrocity as a "natural reaction" to an act of arson on
a train in the Gujarati town of Godhra, in which 59 Hindu pilgrims lost
their lives.
The ruling party's subsequent election campaign was conducted against
the rather literal backdrop of the Godhra incident: painted billboards
of the burning railway carriage. The murdered Muslims were not accorded
the same tragic status, although their pleas for justice created a backlash
that played neatly into the campaign theme of Hindu Pride. It was, of
course, a great success.
The carefully nurtured sense of Hindu grievance has been nursed rather
than sated by acts of mob violence: the destruction of the 15th-century
mosque in Ayodhya, for instance, or the persecution of Christians in
earlier pogroms in Gujarat's Dangs district. The B.J.P., along with
its Hindu-supremacist cohorts, the R.S.S.
(Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) and the V.H.P. (Vishwa Hindu Parishad),
has a seemingly irresistible will to power. (The R.S.S. and the V.H.P.
are not political parties but "social service organizations"
that have served as springboards to power for B.J.P. leaders like Narendra
Modi, chief minister of
Gujarat.)
In vanguard states like Gujarat, thousands of students follow the
uncompromisingly chauvinistic R.S.S. textbooks. They will learn that
"Aryan culture is the nucleus of Indian culture, and the Aryans
were an indigenous race . . . and creators of the Vedas" and that
"India itself was the original home of the Aryans." They will
learn that Indian Christians and Muslims are "foreigners."
But they still have much to learn. I once visited the bookshop at the
R.S.S. headquarters in Nagpur. On sale were books that show humankind
originated in the upper reaches of that mythical Indian river, the Saraswati,
and pamphlets that explain the mysterious Indus Valley seals, with their
indecipherable Harrapan
script: they are of Vedic origin.
After I visited the bookshop I stopped to talk to a group of young boys
who live together in an R.S.S. hostel. They were a sweet bunch of kids,
between 8 and 11 years old. They all wanted to grow up to be either
doctors or pilots. Very good, I said. And what did they learn in school?
Did they learn about religion? About
Hinduism, Christianity?
They were silent for a few seconds ? until their teacher nodded. A bespectacled
kid spoke up. "Christians burst into houses and make converts of
Hindus by bribing them or beating them."
He said it without malice, just a breathless eagerness, as if it were
something he had learned in social science class. Perhaps it was.
(Kai Friese is a journalist and magazine editor in New
Delhi.)