Author: Michel Danino
Publication: The New Indian Express
Date: October 18, 2010
URL: http://expressbuzz.com/states/tamilnadu/a-textbook-case-of-howlers/216023.html
Is a nation, we often take pride in our history,
yet in my decade-long interactions with Indian students and teachers, I have
rarely found any in love with the discipline. Rather, comments like "I
hate history" or "History is so boring" sum up the general
feeling. You are likely to share it if you open the latest history textbook
prescribed for Class VI in 2010-11 by the Tamil Nadu government under its
"common syllabus".
Let us begin with the Indus or Harappan civilization,
Chapter 2. On a map, an important Harappan site, Kalibangan, is shown inside
Pakistan instead of northern Rajasthan (has Pakistan encroached on Indian
land?); another site, Rupar, is placed right on the international border,
while it is close to Chandigarh. The text informs us that "Harappa in
Sindhi means 'Buried City'," even though Harappa is in Punjab, not Sindh,
and its etymology is unknown. Harappan cities were so sophisticated that they
boasted "street lights"-certainly a world first! Another gem: "The
terracotta planks discovered here were engraved with letters"-as a student
of archaeology, I confess my ignorance of what a "terracotta plank"
might be; perhaps this is a garbled reference to Dholavira's famous three-metre-long
inscription, consisting of crystalline material set in a long-vanished wooden
board. Curiously, Dholavira, one of the five largest Harappan cities, and
the second largest in India, figures nowhere. Apparently, our textbook writers
rarely believe in updating their knowledge.
Among the five reasons given for the decline
of this civilization, the first is nonsensical: "Wooden articles would
have got destroyed by fire," as if that could have finished a whole civilization.
The second is sheer fancy: "Rivalry because of the civil war." The
fourth -"The Aryans would have destroyed these towns in order to succeed"
(succeed whom or in what is unclear) - was rejected by archaeologists over
40 years ago, and so has the fifth: "The heap of bones discovered in
Mohenjo-daro is evidence of the invasion of the foreigners," especially
as there is no "heap of bones" anywhere, only a few scattered skeletons
which belong to different epochs. The third reason alone - a change in the
course of the Indus - is among the accepted factors, but is poorly expressed
and quite incomplete.
Let us turn to Chapter 4, "The Vedic
Period", which opens with the arrival of the Aryans around 1500 BCE-a
highly disputed colonial theory presented as hard fact. It adds piquant details:
Aryan men, besides dhotis and shawls, wore turbans and had "bands on
their foreheads", an awkward and wholly fictitious combination. The Congress
(I) will be delighted to learn that among other gods, the Aryans worshipped
"Indira" (instead of Indra; another is "Varna", instead
of Varuna). A table summarizes the "qualities of Dravidians and Aryans"
in two neat columns of nine points, the first of which attributes to Dravidians
"dark complexion, medium height, dark long hair", and to the Aryans
"fair, tall and brown hair". Clearly, we shall never move away from
the racial theories of the colonial era, even if they stand wholly discredited
in the light of modern anthropology and genetics.
The other eight points take it for granted
that the Dravidians were the authors of the Indus civilization, a theory that
has been around for decades but has few takers among archaeologists. That
the Dravidian/Aryan contrast is viewed as purely racial is confirmed by the
complete absence of a linguistic comparison, the only legitimate one today.
In fact, there is no mention of Sanskrit; our Class VI student shall never
learn that such a language existed, in conformity with the anti-Sanskrit stance
of the Dravidian movement.
Tamil, by contrast, receives much attention.
In fact, Chapter 3 on "Ancient Tamil Nadu", judiciously placed before
"The Vedic Period", presents as fact the legend of the Kumari Kandam,
a mythical land south of India, where the first two of the three Sangams flourished
before the land was swallowed by the sea (to appear more credible, the textbook
uses the word "tsunami", unaware of the fact that a tsunami swallows
no land). This occurred "before prehistoric period" and "this
land mass was eight to ten times bigger than South India," complete with
"wide ranges of mountains", "civilized people and efficient
kingdom" (excuse the broken English). So we had civilization even before
prehistory!
The textbook goes on to identify Kumari Kandam
with the equally mythical lost continent of Lemuria, and asserts that "conditions
were favourable for the growth of living organisms only at Cape Comorin which
was submerged after the tsunami... Because of this the evolution of man would
have taken place then. The language spoken by those people was the basic of
Tamil language." Humans thus evolved near Cape Comorin in Lemuria - not
in Africa as we thought - and spoke Tamil right from the beginning. I have
no problem with a mild dose of national or regional pride, but this planetary
jingoism boggles the mind.
There is more. Lemuria was a "big land
mass connecting Africa and Australia" and was so called after "the
monkey Lemur" - but lemurs are not monkeys. Never mind, "it was
believed that human beings evolved from the Lemurs. The language of the people
was ancient Tamil" - in case you had forgotten. As regards humans being
descended from Lemurs, this is a momentous discovery that will call for rewriting
textbooks on human evolution. On geology, too: the supercontinent of the Southern
hemisphere, which is thought to have included South America, Africa, the Indian
subcontinent, Australia and Antarctica, is called Gondwana - not Lemuria -
and broke up some 200 million years ago, according to current research. Compare
this with two million years of human evolution, and the absurdity of a Lemur-descended,
Tamil-speaking early humanity ought to be plain enough.
Legends and myths are wonderful windows on
the ancient mind in any culture. But to present the Kumari Kandam tradition
as a scientific finding (adding spicy details that figure nowhere in the Sangam
literature) would be like asserting that Rahu's swallowing of the sun during
eclipses is the latest in astronomy.
There are more howlers in following chapters
(we learn that "to attain the spiritual goal the Jains starved";
moreover, "they eliminated clothes"), but the above examples will
suffice to illustrate the abysmal incompetence of some of our textbook writers.
Remember, in most Tamil Nadu schools, students will not be allowed to move
on to the next class unless they have mugged up this farrago.
Better textbooks (such as those published
by NCERT) do exist, but are not free either from errors, confusion and lingering
colonial stereotypes. In this Internet age, perhaps it is time, as forward-looking
educationists suggest, to move beyond a textbook-centric education and make
creative use of a variety of materials. This may involve some trial and error,
but it cannot do worse than the above kind of disgraceful material.
- (The author is a lifelong student of Indian
civilization and culture; his latest book is The Lost River: On the Trail
of the Sarasvati (Penguin India, 2010))
micheldanino@gmail.com
