The destiny of nations, it has been said, is shaped in their classrooms. That our country has schools without classrooms, colleges without libraries and a teaching community that is undervalued and underpaid, does not augur well for India’s destiny.
Since Hindu ritual and vedic astrology, rather than the improvement and extension of basic educational amenities, appear to be important priorities of the current decision makers in Indian education, it is also unlikely that India’s destiny will change in the near future.
For some time now, these priorities have been the focus of a bitter debate. The debate has been especially contentious from the time Murli Manohar Joshi began to preside over the process of revamping the education system. Some people have passionately supported this process of restructuring, but equally, this has been vociferously opposed by others.
The HRD minister has tried to dismiss all opposition by claiming that such protests have only emanated from a coterie of Leftists. This is wrong because among the people who have publicly voiced their concern are scholars who occupy the middle ground in Indian academia. There is, in fact, a very well grounded perception that government supported bodies that deal with education are being used to promote a larger political and social agenda which smacks of exclusions, erasures and distortions.
The use and abuse of history has figured prominently in this debate. The withdrawal of textbooks, the manner in which bodies like the Indian Council of Historical Research have acted, the ways in which history education is being politically managed, these questions and many more have figured prominently in the allegations and counter-allegations that have been levelled. What has been missing, though, is a frank public discussion about the history of such politicisation and I am writing this piece to draw attention to it.
My personal experience goes back to the Seventies when Indira Gandhi, in order to neutralise part of the old Congress leadership, sought the support of Left political groups and persons. During that phase, a history professor of Marxist leanings, the late Nurul Hasan, was given charge of education. He was an intellectual but, there are many who would agree with the assessment that “he acted as the patron saint of a wide variety of historians claiming ‘progressive’ political beliefs and hoping for a slice of the establishment cake”. ‘Progressive’ historians were those who were generally affiliated to Left parties or were professed Marxists.
Such historians, for a long time, dominated decision making bodies and, not surprisingly, they used to be viewed by the average history teacher as part of India’s ruling class. To their credit, several of them were learned and certainly, they were of better intellectual calibre than the people who make up the present, politically powerful, academic elite.
Several worthwhile history projects did get funded in those days and some young people who were not politically aligned were given jobs. I too was appointed as a lecturer in history at Hindu College in 1982, a mere six months after I finished my MA. The person who played a crucial role in my appointment, was a historian of ‘Left’ leanings, Professor D.N. Jha of Delhi University’s history department where I now teach.
But there were many others who did not get academic openings as easily as I did, even with the best of academic credentials. In fact, over the years, in universities and colleges all over India, and this includes the Left-ruled West Bengal, many third-rate and second-rate academics were appointed only because they had the right political connections.
One also remembers the unease and dissatisfaction that many of us used to feel about the discourses around ‘Ancient India’ in Delhi University. There were straitjacketed paradigms around which history was taught. For instance, the virile, horsebacked Aryans were quite important and constantly appeared to be colonising all kinds of peoples and cultures. Surely, there was more to Indian history than subjugation and incorporation.
Also central was the notion of a progressive journey with one phase of cultural evolution neatly dovetailing into the next. It seemed to us that once complex cultures developed in ancient India, other kinds of societies — hunters, gatherers, shifting cultivators and nomadic groups — only entered the picture in situations where they or their habitats were being incorporated into larger pan-regional processes.
We did not care to seriously read the works of older scholars, R.C. Majumdar for example, because it used to be fashionable to routinely dismiss them as ‘reactionary’. A studious silence was also maintained about scholarship that was contrary to the ideas of powerful ‘Left’ historians. None of us had any illusions that the history that we were taught as part of the official curriculum was tailored to a significant extent by larger agendas. Those agendas were certainly more progressive than the ones that one sees today but they spawned an exclusionary history.
This was unfortunate in more ways than one. When I began to research and write, I felt enormously handicapped because what I had been taught was grossly inadequate and ridden with jargon. With the benefit of retrospective appraisal, I can say that the labelling of perspectives as ‘secular’, ‘progressive’, ‘reactionary’, ‘nationalist, and so on, was and continues to be a regressive way of describing historical research. Debates around issues are foreclosed even before they can get under way.
More than a decade after my MA days, when my son was well into school, I was surprised to see that the reigning historians of my salad days were also the authors of the books that he was now using. The very people whose works I read in the Seventies were the authors of the books that school kids were using in the Nineties.
Some of the books contained information that was downright wrong. While I am shocked at the arrogant manner in which the NCERT has decided to do away with the ‘Ancient India’ textbook for Class VI, the book does have major flaws. The author, Romila Thapar, had not removed these at least till 1997 when I last saw the book.
Among the minor flaws are the descriptions of phases of early history. For instance, the book informs us that ‘Civilisation’ (p. 24) is that stage of the development of human culture when people looked for more than just satisfaction of material needs — as if people prior to the Indus civilisation were only preoccupied with filling their stomachs.
The major flaw is that Romila Thapar in this book is as myopically preoccupied with the Vedas as are many people today. This is evident from the fact that what she has to say about ancient India from 1500 to 600 BC, with the exception of one paragraph, only relates to the ‘Vedic Age’. This is notwithstanding the presence of prospering regional cultures that ‘archaeology’ has done so much to reveal. By and large, these regional cultures were beyond the pale of Vedic texts and have very little to do with the putative Aryans.
Why were prescribed textbooks not revised? Why did history scholarship give the impression of not having moved forward? Was there no other way of writing the history of a large chunk of ancient India except on the basis of religious literature? These were questions that one raised and these need to be addressed by scholars, including those who were the ‘establishment’ historians of the Seventies and Eighties. Above all, historians, more than anyone else, should provide a historical perspective on the process of the politicisation of history education in India.
Nothing can go forward if things are swept under the carpet on the plea that this would deflect the attack on the present education policy. What we see in a virulent form today in Joshi’s dangerous agenda has roots in the past and we should not shirk from initiating an open debate on it. Karl Marx put it rather well when he said: “Our task is ruthless criticism of everything that exists, ruthless in the sense that the criticism will not shrink either from its own conclusions or from conflict with the powers that be.”
(The writer is Reader, Department
of History, University of Delhi)