Communalising history textbooks

“Of all the social sciences, it is history which rouses the greatest interest in the minds of the politicians. Gopal, ‘The Fear of History’, Seminar, 1978 More than 40 years ago, the debate about what kind of history should be presented in school textbooks emerged in the public domain when the Janata Party-led government appeared to be bending under pressure to remove textbooks authored by Romila Thapar and Bipan Chandra that were introduced for classes VI and VII and XII. Romila Thapar’s “The Past and Prejudice”, delivered as the prestigious Sardar Patel Memorial Lecture, sought to counter some popular misconceptions about the past that stemmed from colonial prejudices, that were carried over in certain nationalist interpretations of Indian history, particularly relating to indigeneity and Indian identity. The attacks on textbooks in the Indian context since the late 1960s have more or less been from the same quarter, with difference only in detail with regard to two major points raised: that indigenous Aryans and the foundations of Hindu identity may be located in ancient Indian history, and that the medieval period marked the beginning of foreign rule in India. In the final analysis, a curious inversion of reality may be seen in these recent as well as past attacks on history textbooks in India, where those engaged in distorting Indian history seek to use textbooks to push their political agenda on the basis of identity politics towards the creation of a Hindu nation.