NEW DELHI, INDIA, March 9, 2004: J.S. Rajput, director of India’s National Council of Educational Research and Training, published the following article in the Hindustan Times. The essay, reproduced here in full, is titled “Freedom for History” and is his defense of the various changes in India’s history school textbooks being made by the council:
The inventors of the controversy over the “communalisation” of Indian history are at it again. Since the early Seventies, they’ve been campaigning against historians who disagreed with the Leftist-Marxist view of India’s past, which, thanks to official patronage, became the dominant school of historiography. From the tenor and content of Romila Thapar’s articles (in the Times), Future of Indian past and One nation’s many pasts (March 1, 2), it’s clear that she wishes society to remain ideologically anchored to one of the most forgettable chapters in the history of Indian scholarship.
Since few students pursue history at a higher level, school history is about all that most educated Indians are ever exposed to. Across the world, school-level textbook writing is left to professionals. But the scheme of our “eminent historians” was not entirely didactic; it was about “mind control.”
Even today, many Indians believe that the Aryans were a foreign community of settlers in India, or that Guru Tegh Bahadur was nothing more than a brigand who got his “execution” orders from the “Moghal administration.” Aurangzeb, the “zinda pir,” was nowhere in the picture in this sordid act. To them, India was a backward civilization, a fragmented nation moving from the control of one invading party to another.
The publication of the new NCERT books was opposed by these historians. In fact, the first slogans against the “saffronisation of history” began long before the first new book was even commissioned. Under the banner of the Indian History Congress, they published a compendium of perceived “errors.” When the NCERT’s authors began to go over the allegations, they discovered that under the garb of presenting a “secular, scientific and liberal” history, the historians had presented generations of school-goers with textbooks that were long on rhetoric and short on facts. As Irfan Habib, the prime mover of the IHC project to defame the NCERT, acknowledged, much of what Thapar wrote in the old Class VI textbook was far from the truth.
Habib castigated the new NCERT author, Makkhan Lal, for “parivar writings” for suggesting that Asoka’s emphasis on building a moral and welfare-oriented State had adverse implications on Mauryan India’s security outlook. But that amounted to belittling Thapar’s Asoka and the decline of the Mauryas because this famous work formed the basis of Lal’s approach to the specific context. Elsewhere, Habib dismissed an observation on the art of growing silk and making paper in the 5th century AD. He claimed that these articles of daily life entered India via the Muslims (sic). But hadn’t Thapar written much the same in Early India? Till 1999, Thapar was telling her 12-year-old readers that the Aryans may have come from Central Asia or Europe. Not once did she mention the existence of a group of scholars who believed the Aryans had their home in India.
Moreover, this was in contrast to the position she herself had been taking in her more serious works for at least 15 years now. Is it not strange that a scholar who insists that history cannot be rewritten (on the basis of new facts, as the NCERT has steadfastly maintained), should abandon her old fundamental approach to the Aryan question? She rightly acknowledges the flaws in the old theory that the word “Aryan” represented an ethnic group and emphasizes now that it could have meant a family of languages. But when these omissions are juxtaposed with the general tendency of Marxists to downplay the scientific and philosophical breakthroughs achieved in ancient India, one begins to wonder if the allegations about the eminent historians” “hidden agenda” were right after all.
Also, their insistence on foregrounding the story of medieval India with the (mostly fabricated) salutary effects of foreign invasion was controversial. Why was it supposed that Muslim Indians would take offence at instances of iconoclasm or persecution of nonbelievers by dynasties of foreign origin which ruled in Delhi and other provinces for centuries before British domination? Does linking Muslim Indians to foreign marauders not constitute an insult to their patriotism? If the “secularism” token is advanced, should it not extend to Christian Indians too (after all, Clive and Curzon were Christians) and a basic overhaul be ordered into independent India”s analysis of British rule?
In totalitarian societies (Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia), books on history were banned if they questioned the official line. But linking the present Indian experience with those dark traditions is a figment of the imagination. Today, Thapar accuses the NCERT of not bothering to put its new books through committees. Not only is that untrue, but she unwittingly admits that earlier regimes tolerated only the presence of like-minded sycophants.
If anything, the NCERT has thrown open Indian history to scholars of all ideological hues. Independent scholars are breathing easier and the selection to major positions is no longer the prerogative of a select few. It is only through a free exchange of ideas that scholars can arrive at a consensual identification of facts and analyses. This would enable educationists to develop a new generation which is at once imbibed with the values of its ancient heritage as well as equipped with the faculties and commitment to face the realities of the age they live in.
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