In the name of rationalizing school curriculum…

 

In the name of rationalizing school curriculum…

The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has recently released the revised textbooks of CBSE schools. Many vital chapters from the textbooks of social sciences are deleted for what it calls ‘rationalization’ of curriculum to reduce the ‘burden’ on students. The textbooks were earlier revised in 2017and 2019 as well. The textbooks are extensively researched and written by a panel of eminent scholars in respective subjects. And their contents can’t be deleted selectively and arbitrarily.

 

The following lines, inter alia, from the chapter on Politics in Indian Since Independence, sub-title ‘Mahatma Gandhi’s Sacrifice’ of Class 12 political science textbook are deleted: “He was particularly disliked by those who wanted Hindus to take revenge or who wanted India to become a country for the Hindus, just as Pakistan was for Muslims. They accused Gandhiji of acting in the interest of the Muslims and Pakistan. Gandhiji thought that these people were misguided. He was convinced that any attempt to make India into a country only for the Hindus would destroy India. His steadfast pursuit of Hindu -Muslim unity provoked Hindu extremists so much that they made several attempts to assassinate Gandhiji” (IE 5/4/23).  Also removed from the textbook, the banning of the RSS, following the assassination of the Mahatma.

 

All references to the Gujarat riots of 2002 are dropped from class 11 sociology textbook. The deleted paragraph reads: “Where and how people will live in cities is a question that is also filtered through socio-cultural identities. Residential areas in cities all over the world are almost always segregated by class, and often also by race, ethnicity, religion and other such variables. Tensions between such identities both cause these segregation patterns and are also a consequence. For example, in India, communal tensions between religious communities, most commonly Hindus and Muslims, result in the conversion of mixed neighborhoods into single community ones. This in turn gives a specific spatial pattern to communal violence whenever it erupts., which again furthers the ghettoization process. This has happened in many cities in India most recently in Gujarat following the riots of 2002.”  The famous remark of Prime Minister Atal Bihar Vajpayee made in Ahmedabad in March 2002 at a press conference that Chief Minister Narendra Modi ‘should follow Raj dharma’, and that a ‘ruler should not make any discrimination between his subjects on the basis of caste, creed and religion’ has also been removed from Class 12 political science textbook.  

 

The content on the Mughal era and Muslim rulers of India has suffered deep cuts. Several pages on Delhi Sultanate, rule by many dynasties, including the Mamluks, Tughlaqs, Khiljis and Lodis, and the Mughal empire, and the milestones and achievements of Mughal Emperors such as Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb have been removed from the Class 7 history textbook.  In the Class 12 history textbook, the entire chapter The Mughal Courts dealing with the Mughal-era manuscripts - Akbar Nama and Badshah Nama and how these chronicle the history of Mughals- was deleted. These are only few examples of several deletions of important topics, including secularism and challenges to democracy.

  

There is a patter in all this.  The revision of history textbooks is politically motivated, which underlines the ideological unease of Hindutva with Mughal rule.   As Prof Hilal Ahmed of CSDS says, “the removal of references related to Mughal India in NCERT textbooks is linked to a much wider politics of deletion that is committed to produce a politically driven narrative of fragmented history…based on a negative perception of India’s past and present. It recognizes deletion as the only possible mode to appropriate the past as history” (TOI 10/4).  Students are denied the right to have a comprehensive study of their country’s history in an objective and dispassionate manner so as to drawn the right lessons. The chapter on Mughal courts provides students foundation to make sense of the historical realties of medical India.

 

In his article Empire-builders of medieval India in The Hindu (9/4/23), Ziya Us Salam has this to say about the Moghul Empire: “It’s hard to understand the history of modern India without the contribution of the Mughals-Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb- were all born in undivided India; and were buried here. None of them ever left the country, not even to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca.” It is not right to treat them as invaders and outsiders.  And “Is there anything in India today which does not owe to the Mughals”, asks Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi, Secretary, Indian History Congress. “From legal system to legal jargon…Words like vakalatnama, kacheri, durbar, we owe them all to the Mughals…Tulsidas wrote his version of Ramayana during the Mughal period…Vrindavan developed thanks to Chaitanya saints who were given grants by Akbar, Jahangir and Shahjahan, and helped Vrindavan and Mathura emerge as key centres of Krishna Bhakti...the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Upanishads were translated during the Mughal era.”

 

And the first translations of the text of epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in any language from Sanskrit was done under the Mughals. Dara Shikoh- the eldest son of Shah Jahan- translated the Upanishads into Persian.  He was a Sunni Muslim associated closely with Hindu philosophers and Christian priests. Shikoh was deeply imbued with the pantheistic mysticism of the Sufis. He inherited all this from Akbar, the Emperor who built Ibadat Khana where scholarly debates were held between Brahmins, Christians, Jain, Buddhist and Islamic scholars.

 

 In Mughal India, Hindus and Muslims lived cheek-by-jowl in the same locality. By the end of the reign of Akbar, the population of the Mughal Kingdom exceeded that of entire Europe, and the Mughal wealth unmatched. Today, there is talk of Akhand Bharat. This was a reality under the Mughals who controlled the entire subcontinent comprising parts of modern Afghanistan, the entire Pakistan, Bangladesh and part of Myanmar.  It is preposterous to delete from the textbooks such a rich heritage of Indian history. How will students make sense of the present India without understanding the social, cultural and economic context of the Mughal and other Muslim rulers and their role and contribution to India’s history, particularly that of the Hindi heartland, which was the nucleus of the Mughal empire. 

 

Some 250 academics and historians, including Romila Thapar, Jayati Gosh, Mridula Mukherjee, Apoorva Nada, Irfan Habib, and Upinder Singh, from Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jamia Millia Islamia, Aligarh Muslim University, and Ambedkar University, among others, in a statement on 7 April, have alleged that the move has been “guided by a divisive and partisan agenda” and demanded “the deletions be immediately withdrawn.” Their statement reads: “We are appalled by the decision of the NCERT to remove chapters and statements from the history textbooks…The decision of the NCERT is guided by divisive motives. It is a decision which goes against the constitutional ethos and composite culture of the Indian subcontinent...The selective dropping of NCERT book chapters which do not fit into the larger ideological orientation of the present ruling dispensation exposes the non-academic, partisan agenda of the regime…”

In the name of rationalizing school curriculum, what is done is erasing the chapters of history and presenting a falsified distorted fragmented history. And the social science textbooks are mutilated beyond recognition. There are innumerable and irrational cuts and large deletions without any attempts to fill the gaps created, making the textbooks academically dysfunctional, quelling the spirit of critique and questioning among students.