Perpetuation_of

According to the survey, the only reference in the Class 9 social studies textbook to the casteist bias indignities of the caste system as it exists today is through an attempt to blame the plight of untouchables on their own illiteracy and blind faith. The section, called "Problems of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (page 95)", reads: "Of course, their ignorance, illiteracy and blind faith are to be blamed for lack of progress because they still fail to realise importance of edu-cation in life. Therefore, there is large-scale illit-eracy among them and female illiteracy is a most striking fact."

- Gujarat textbooks betray casteist bias,Young Students Are Taught : A Crow Is A Safai Kamdar, All Brahmins are learned fellows, Harit Mehta, Times of India, 28/09/2004, /eldoc/n20_/28sep04toi1.pdf

Textbooks Communalisation of Education, Education and Social Change Good article

In short, the equality principle in any democracy simply must extend to education. In quantitative terms, this means the right of every Indian child to primary and secondary education. UNICEF figures shamefully record how we have failed, having as we do 370 million illiterates (1991), half a century after we became independent. But qualitatively, too, the equality principle within the Indian education syllabus, especial-ly related to history and social studies teaching, in state and central boards, is sorely wanting.

- How Textbooks Teach Prejudice, Teesta Setalvad, Social Action,01/10/2000, /eldoc/n00_/01oct00SOA2.pdf

Textbooks Communalisation/Politicization of Education
A new Washington-based study, "Confidence-building in South Asia", has said school textbooks and media
coverage in India and Pakistan perpetuate and sustain a negative image of relations between the two countries.

- Textbooks widen Indo-Pak gulf, Telegraph, 06/10/1995, /eldoc/n00_/06oct95tel1.pdf

Text Books
Differing with most authorities on ancient history, the NCERT textbook describes the Harappan civilization as "Harappan", "Indus", or "Indus-Saraswati" Civilization. "Apart from a few known pro-RSS historians, nobody accepts the theory of the Indus-Saraswati civilization,"remarks Professor Mukherjee.

Moreover, the textbook describes the area of the Harappan civilization as 12 times that of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations combined. However, renowned historian Professor Irfan Habib says that as per internationally accepted history, "It was less than double the area of Mesopotamia."In dealing with the economic life of the Vedic civilization, the reference to the cow being the most important animal is in bold letters. Also in bold letters is the punishment for injuring or killing a cow: by expulsion from the kingdom or the death penalty.

An apex body of historians, Aligarh Historians Society, has accused the books of being casteist in approach. "The textbooks black out the whole question of Dravidian participation in the Indus Civilization and of Dravidian influences on both Vedic life and later, on Sanskrit. Then, a neutral stance has been taken in the books over the caste system. It would appear as if Dalits were never a part of our society, and that the shudras never received any ill-treatment," states Professor Habib, who heads the society.

"The new NCERT textbooks are not about rewriting or updating history but communalising history. The authors are not using new methodologies but going by 19th century interpretations of history, where religion played a very important role," comments Professor Bipin Chandra, one of India's best-known historians.

Karnataka is one of the States which has strongly opposed the new curriculum framework. Yet it is apparent that the State has paid little heed to the situation in its own backyard. Although the textbooks conforming to the new guidelines are still being prepared, the books that are already in classroom use appear to conform fully to the letter and spirit of the very curriculum framework that the State government has so stridently criticised in public forums. Schoolchildren in Karnataka enter the exciting world of knowledge and learning armed with books that are replete with examples of communal bias, not to mention inexcusable errors of fact. Notions of nationalism which invoke a glorious though lost past of Hindu achievement and supremacy underpin many a chapter in the textbooks.
Thus for example, in the Social Studies textbook for Standard V, the "Indus Valley civilisation" has become the "Sindhu Civilisation" (chapter heading in Lesson 4). It is not clear what the rationale is for using the term Sindhu civilisation instead of the Indus or Harappan civilisation, which has been the term hitherto used. Apart from its historical importance, the Indus Valley civilisation, which flourished in the basin of the Indus and its great tributaries, is also a valued symbol of the shared historical legacy of the countries of the subcontinent. Hindutva historians have tried to lay a spurious nationalist claim to that legacy by arguing that a majority of the excavated sites of the Indus civilisation are within the borders of present-day India. These historians have in recent times used the phrase "Sindhu Civilisation" because the Rig Veda refers to the Indus as the Sindhu. But the use of the word "Sindhu" implies more than just an innocent return to linguistic purity. It represents an attempt to link the Rig Veda to the Harappan civilisation.

The whole period has been presented as a dull and dry history of dynasties, cluttered with the names and military conquests of kings, followed by brief acknowledgements of "social and cultural life", "art and architecture", "revenue administration", and so on. The entire Mughal period (1526-1707) is disposed of in six pages, ending with an explanation of the decline of the Mughal empire, a historical process attributed primarily to Aurangazeb's Islamic zeal.

Several chapters in the Mathematics text have box items which highlight the discovery of "Hindu" mathematicians, like the concept of zero, which has been described as "a jewel from the Hindu Mind". What is of concern is the celebratory tone in which these tidbits of information are presented, the thrust being on proving prior knowledge in Hindu society of concepts and theories that are popularly believed to be the contribution of "foreign" scientists. AISEC has drawn attention to this trend in its memorandum. It says: "But distortion of facts, by sieving out Indian achievements and projecting them, while minimising the Arabic and European contributions to knowledge, is tantamount to historical distortion which instills false pride in the past and an immature sense of nationalism. It impedes the development of a scientific temper and has to be strongly discouraged."

The legislative assembly of Delhi passed a resolution on October 29, 2001: "This House strongly condemns the attempt made to distort the history of the country and resolves to support the implementation of secular education policy based on the provisions of our Constitution." The House went on to recommend that on "page 328 of [the] 11th class NCERT curriculum book Madhyakalin Bharat, under the heading 'Sikh', appropriate amendment may be made and objectionable portions about Shri Guru Teg Bahadur Ji be removed. .. that book authored by individual writers containing objectionable comments about various religions including the book titled Ancient India be proscribed forthwith". By an order of the Delhi government (October 9, 2001), the portions containing derogatory reference to Guru Teg Bahadur were deleted.

...No one has yet provided an answer to the query: how can the recommendation of the Delhi government, which was secular and in the interest of history and the nation, become communal when NCERT just 'dittoed' it? Confusion in differentiating between 'reprint' and 'print' has been talked about. The book that was considered 'communal' was, in fact, in use for many decades.

The tragedy is that Sanghvi and his ilk ignore that completely A Class XI book declares that in ancient India "people certainly ate beef but did not take pork on any considerable scale" and that "the cattle wealth slowly decimated because the cows and bullocks were killed in numerous Vedic sacrifices". Read again and decipher whether it is history or politics that is being played out in textbooks?

- Is professionalism history? J S Rajput, Economic Times, 17/11/2004, /eldoc/n20_/17nov04et1.pdf

When people say that school history should offer nothing but facts, they reveal their ignorance of how a child's mind works and develops. Facts acquire mean-ing for a child when they carry a perspective. The usual way textbook authors understand perspective is in terms of ideology. But there are other ways to define perspective. If we take the child's perspective, our primary con-cern will be to explain how we know what we know about the past. Most textbook writers don't bother to tell children what the sources of historical knowledge are.

...In Germany, the teaching of history has been a matter of great national anxiety, specifically with reference to the treatment of the Nazi period. If you look at a German high school level textbook, you are struck by the variety of sources it introduces to chil-dren and also by the imagina-tive treatment it offers to the subject matter. For instance, a Class IX textbook asks children to analyse and compare the perspectives ref-lected in the editorials written ' by three major dailies on the day America entered World War II. In their exam too, children are given such material and asked to make judgements within given parameters. By the scale of this intellec-tually stimulating approach, our teaching of history looks unforgivably backward. We have been so obsessed with ideological issues in the teaching of history that we have just not bothered to look at pedagogy. What I find quite astonishing is that historians have not been disturbed by the common knowledge that children hate history. More disturbing is the fact that schools consider history and other subjects of the humanities stream fit only for the less bright. Indeed, some prestigious schools have scrapped the humanities sections altogether. If this becomes a trend, we will no longer need poorly written textbooks to create an unthinking public mind. Our educational policy needs drastic reform, but curriculum and textbook-related policies deserve subtler attention than we are used to giving. The challenge of protecting the young from indoctrination can only be met by encouraging them to think

Educationists have recently drawn attention to the fact that an obsessive Arjun-like concentration on the eye of the targeted-bird — in this case the Indian na-tion- state — in school books is to rob both the child and the discipline of history of an in-formative, yet critical perspective on the re-lationship between our past and our present. History text-book writers need to take all this into account. They might also like to mull over the forthright enunciation in December 1947 by professor Mohammad Habib, one of the doyens of Indian history: 'The writing of histories should not, as a rule, be directly subsidised by the state... Under the old regime we wrote in a spirit of constraint... Our national leaders should now be willing to pass on to us a fraction of the freedom they have obtained. A state-dominated interpretation of history is one of the most effective means of sabotaging democracy'.

A sane society requires an open and democratic culture of learning. It requires the ability of the learner to dissent, question the established truth and see beyond. But then, the CBSE, it appears, is determined to kill this emancipatory ideal of education. It is tragic and dangerous that this otherwise prestigious board of education has begun to dictate the contents of learning as well as the mode of teaching. For example, all CBSE schools have been asked to delete from history textbooks all that does not fit well into the paradigm of an ‘ideal’ Hindu society.

As the CBSE circular suggests, the students should not study or even discuss, say, what Romila Thapar has written about beef eating in ancient India, or what Arjun Dev has written about the Jats and their plundering riots when they established a state in Bharatpur! Possibly this taboo on historical insights is yet another effort towards what many would like to regard as the saffronisation (or Talibanisation) of education. Even if one does not indulge in this ‘political rhetoric’, it is difficult to
overlook the damaging consequences of this closed/exclusivist pedagogy. The ruling establishment does not seem to be happy with Romila Thapar, Arjun Dev and Bipan Chandra. But then, these are great names whose contributions to the development of our historical imagination cannot be denied. This is not to suggest that they are infallible. It is possible to find sharp critiques of their historical perspectives and findings.

It seeks to censure and repress whatever does not please the ruling establishment. None is denying that history texts - even when written by eminent scholars - may be incomplete and one-sided. But banning or repression is no answer to this ideological character of knowledge.

A child may be born in a conservative/caste/Hindu society; but a democratic classroom and a lesson in the history of protest as launched by Phule and Ambedkar or Buddha and Kabir might enable her to look at the world from the perspective of the ‘other’. Likewise, a child may came from an utterly anglicised/elitist family, but a decolonised classroom milieu might inspire her to see the cultural capital of an Upanishadic sage, a bhakti poet, or a rural peasant of Champaran who contributed to the making of Gandhi.

All these wonders are possible only if we respect the creative potential of the teacher and the critical faculty of the learner. And this requires not authoritarianism, but sustained efforts to attract the finest minds (as teachers, writers and planners) to the domain of education.

- CBSE AND POVERTY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: Need to educate the educators, AVIJIT PATHAK, Deccan Herald, 10/01/2002 N20 /eldoc/n20_/10JAN02DH5.htm

...our historians possessed the skills and expertise to write textbooks and, after Independence, this task should have been left to individual writers and not undertaken by the government. Officially sponsored works run the risk of being withdrawn, as illustrated by the experience in 1977 and now, with a change in regime. Besides, writing textbooks at the behest of a government can turn messy in a society where the reading of the past is contested with unfailing regularity. Even where contestations are not so sharp, the norm is to encourage wide learning and not to prescribe a set of books produced by an official body.

...history teaching serves as a means of ideological indoctrination. So that history’s role in arousing an interest in the past and respect for it gets totally sidelined. Both in India and Pakistan, history is pressed into service to promote the project of nation building. Consequently, the rival ideologies of nationalism are underlined not to heighten the critical faculties of our students but to create a sense of pride in their Indian or Pakistani citizenship.

- The deafening clash of myth and fact, MUSHIRUL HASSAN, Indian Express, 10/01/2002, /eldoc/n20_/10jan02nib.htm

British colonial writing never conceived India as a nation but instead saw it as an adhoc conglomeration of several discrete
communities. In addition, these communities were seen not as rational agents but only as subjects of feelings. Individuals, on this view, saw themselves solely as members of sentimental communities, with no reflective powers to distance themselves from their community or be able to challenge practices they found unbearable. The NCERT replicates this Orientalist view and simply grafts it on to modern India today. It thereby perpetuates a deeply offensive picture of India self-consciously and painstakingly fought against by the movement for Independence. More importantly, this picture is plainly wrong. I doubt that a society has ever existed in which all its members defined themselves exclusively in terms of the community to which they were attached.

Hence the nation is imagined a prior culmination and this enervates any attempts to rigorously understand aspects of our past outside the framework of the nation. Local histories, its culture, its people’s specific position vis a vis the freedom struggle and other struggles and movements in post independent India, that might make more sense to students studying in CBSE schools in moffusal centres of India are ignored and indeed even frowned upon. By concretising nation and centring nation as the fulcrum of debate, where the nation is also seen to be part of its people’s ‘common sense,’ we permit easy co-option and appropriation by its more chauvinistic proponents (read Hindutva). We all know that the nation building process is far from over and the problems posed by caste, religious and regional feuds themselves are to be seen as problems where a nation is attempting to come to grips with itself. Such a dialectical and tension ridden approach between the region and (the category of) the Indian nation should inform the writing of our new history textbooks and not presented as resolved issues or as undermining the Indian State.

IF Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi has his way, our children and grandchildren will grow up believing that "Hindu culture", as the Sangh Parivar defines it, is the sole influence that has shaped India since the Vedic times. ... Among the other "truths" and "values" that textbooks will teach our schoolchildren:

*The Aryans were India's original inhab-itants; they never displaced or colonised Dravidians or indigenous tribal people
and forest-dwellers.

*According to the Ramayana legend, Sri Lanka was an opulent "city". It had "excellent houses, decorated with won-derful... jewels, golden archways, pearls, diamonds, gems, silver, etc.." But it was not "cultured". In "refreshing contrast, Ayodhya was both civilised and cultured. People were learned, free from greed, truthful and with no proclivity towards stealing or petty-mindedness"...

*"Our concept of the joint family is a unique contri-bution in the history of mankind. Generation after generation we have developed it." The break-up or some or the oppres-sive structures of the joint family is thus not progressive, but a set-back!...

*"Bharatiya culture is the only culture which has understood the life problems (sic) in their totality and has made a con-tinuous effort to solve them. In the his-tory of the world, it is the only effort to see the science, philosophy, religion, psy-chology and social life in an integrated form." (sic)

Today in most of the schools we find pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses and slokas from Hindu scriptures. Recently I visited a school run by Mumbai Municipal Corporation and found entire atmosphere suffused with of Hindu religion. There was no representation of any other religion at all. Not a single picture or quotation from Bible or Qur'an or Sikhism. This obviously discourages children of other communities to study n such atmosphere where they feel totally alienated.

- EDUCATION, SECULARISM AND HUMAN VALUES, Asghar Ali Engineer, Secular Perspective, 01/10/2004, N00, /eldoc/n00_/01oct04sep1.html

Anti secular

Baring a very few private schools,education in modern India was an arid rationalist's domain. Jesuit schools still taught the Bible to its Christian pupils. Madarsas taught the Koran, but the gov-ernment schools had no religious educa-tion for the Hindus majority. For the young Hindu, God became an old joke.
Today, when a Hindu professes his religion he tacitly endorses the BJP. How many of us draw a Lakshman rekha between Hinduism and the Sangh Parivar? Let us remember, the two aren't the same thing. One is the essence of tolerance, the other is just the opposite.

- Expelling God, Ramesh Menon, /eldoc/n00_/19nov95ie1.pdf

Communalisation of Education/ philosophies
The privileging of the narrative of nation-as-history in post-modern historiography has overshadowed how people conceive time in terms other than nation.

- History Outside the Nation, Nira Wickramasinghe, Economic & Political Weekly, 01/07/1995, /eldoc/n00_/01jul95EPW2.pdf

Communalisation of education

- Text-Books, Politics and the Practice of History, Tripta Wahi, www.revolutionarydemocracy.org, /eldoc/n21_/textbooks_politics.html

Communalisation of Education

- De-saffronise school books: Academics, Rema Nagarajan, Hindustan Times, /eldoc/n21_/de-saffronise_books.html

Communalisation of Education GS
A controversial decision to make primary students fill in a village-wise religion-based questionnaire has raised suspicions about the Gujarat government’s “hidden agenda”.

The Opposition Congress has dubbed the census in rural areas as the BJP’s “attempt to disturb communal harmony”.

Education minister Anandiben Patel denied any religion-based survey in village schools. She, however, admitted students are being asked to fill in a questionnaire, but argued the exercise is aimed at making them aware of their social and cultural surroundings.

The four-page questionnaire seeks to find out how many people belong to which religion in a village, the festivals that are celebrated, the number of religious places and their historical importance.

The survey is being conducted as part of the government’s district primary education project’s documentation exercise in each of the state’s 18,000 villages. District education officials have been directed to send the details in the form of a “village diary”.