CALIFORNIA, USA, April 27, 2016 (by Aseem Shukla, Religion News Service): An open letter to the California Department of Education, signed by a group of academics, many of whom are sympathetic to the Indian left, is threatening to downgrade, and in many cases remove, the terms India and Hinduism from schoolbooks.Two years ago, Hindu and Indian-American groups began working with the department’s Instructional Quality Commission to ensure a culturally competent and accurate curriculum framework to be passed on to teachers and textbook publishers of sixth and seventh grade world history. In collaboration with leading historians and religious studies professors, the Hindu American Foundation and other advocacy groups submitted several recommendations that would give Hinduism accurate and equitable in comparison to other religious traditions. Many of the Hindu American Foundation’s suggestions were incorporated, but the process was interrupted with the zero-hour arrival of said open letter by academics collectivized under the rubric of South Asia Faculty Group.
Many of these scholars offering alterations focusing on Hinduism, ironically include specialists in Islamic studies, such as Asad Q. Ahmad, Shahzad Bashir and Chris Chekuri, as well as prominent Indian Americans of the Indian left, such as Kamala Viswesaran, amongst others. The demands in their letter were breathtaking: Replace mentions of ancient India with the nebulous “South Asia”; replace “Hinduism” with “ancient religion(s) of India”; remove several favorable references to Hinduism; and unequivocally locate the horrendous practice of caste-based discrimination as an integral part of the practice of Hinduism. Reducing ancient India to the anodyne “South Asia” may be geographically accurate, but scholars know that there was never an entity called “Ancient South Asia.” Ruins of the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations exist in Libya, Israel, Jordan and Turkey, among many other countries, but the names of the civilizations have not been replaced.
Why would the professors delete the word “Hinduism,” which a billion people in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and elsewhere call their own — and 3 million Americans embrace — and replace it with a host of terms that have no use in common parlance? Why try so hard to erase India (the Hindu American Foundation launched #donteraseindia to counter precisely that)? And why would the faculty group preserve “Hinduism” only to link it to caste? The politics behind these changes are complex, but what is clear is that such deletions and substitutions bear no relevance to actual practitioners of Hinduism. And while academics today are eager to engage in contentious socio-political causes, they must not use the privilege of their position to impose campus politics on a middle school curriculum. Because what matters is that erasing Hinduism from texts does not erase bullying that Hindu and Indian-American children face stemming from ignorance arising from such deletions.
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