During a current promotion for his movie Samrat Prithviraj, Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar kicked up a storm by commenting that rulers reminiscent of Prithviraj Chauhan “should be written about” in Indian historical past textbooks. “There were only three-four lines about Samrat Prithviraj in the history books that I read. Thanks to this film, I got to know so much about him. I don’t think anyone else also knew about him,” he mentioned throughout an interview, including, “When I was talking to my son about him (Prithviraj), he said, ‘I know about the British empire, Mughal empire, but who’s he?’ So, it’s a sad thing that we don’t know about our own kings. There were only a few lines about Rana Pratap, Rani of Jhansi. But there are a lot of chapters on Mughals.” He additionally appealed to the training ministry to “try and (bring about) balance and bring our culture, Hindu kings also in our textbooks”.
Kumar’s view discovered each takers and opponents, however the debate over the rewriting of historical past textbooks for political beneficial properties has been raging through the years, and successive governments at each the states and the Centre have usually been accused of selling their very own ideologies by them.
While historical past textbooks have usually come beneath the scanner for alterations in content material, what about kids’s and basic historical past books? Authors and publishers of such books—each fiction and non-fiction—say their problem is to not query historical past however to current it to children in a method that engages them.
Tina Narang, writer, HarperCollins Children’s Books, says: “For students, there is a certain comfort in knowing that what they have studied in subjects like history is not likely to change. History is based on facts and unless current research throws light on some unexplored aspects there is little scope to change it. That’s what makes it history. As publishers, our challenge is not to question history and its facts as set down in textbooks by subject experts but to present it to children in a way that engages them,” she says.
Narang suggests making historical past extra partaking by visually-driven codecs, a greater stability between textual content and visuals and utilizing the narrative non-fiction strategy to make historical past a topic that children wish to learn for causes different than simply writing an examination.
The curriculum debate
English novelist George Orwell had as soon as mentioned that “the most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history”. The quote might be considered within the mild of the current developments cooking up within the Indian historical past curriculum debate.
In current instances, ghosts of the previous have been resurrected many instances in debates and for political beneficial properties. BJP chief Nupur Sharma’s quote on Prophet Muhammad led to India being criticised by Islamic nations for insulting a spiritual chief, although the nationwide get together maintained its stance that it revered all religions.
In December 2021, the Delhi High Court refused to entertain a PIL demanding the removing of a paragraph within the Class XII textbook of historical past. The paragraph had talked about Mughal rulers like Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb giving grants for restore of temples. The excessive courtroom bench got here down closely on the petitioners for losing the courtroom’s time.
On Saturday, it was reported that the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) had eliminated parts on the 2002 Gujarat riots, the Emergency, Cold War, the Naxalite motion and Mughal courts from its textbooks of Class XII. The removing was acknowledged as a “syllabus rationalisation” train and NCERT cited causes reminiscent of “overlapping” and “irrelevant” for dropping the parts. Some of the modifications had been introduced earlier this 12 months when the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) had rationalised its syllabus.
Earlier in May, it was reported that a number of BJP-ruled states had been altering historical past textbooks just like the addition of some paragraphs in a Class IX historical past textbook by the Haryana authorities on Congress’ ‘appeasement policy’, and the Gujarat authorities’s addition of components of Bhagavad Gita within the Class VI-X syllabi. The Haryana Board of School Education (HBSE) was additionally within the information lately for its Class IX historical past textbooks that acknowledged that Congress’ greed of energy was the explanation behind India’s Partition in 1947.
Many states justified the current altering of historical past textbooks in accordance with the National Education Policy (NEP) to supply an India-centric training.
The altering of historical past with altering political regimes will not be a brand new reality. In the previous, the Atal Bihari Vajpayee authorities was in a spot for making an attempt to saffronise training and the Congress was blamed for placing an excessive amount of highlight on Mughal historical past.
However, authors and historians will agree that political involvement in designing curriculums might distort historic illustration. Tilottama Shome of Talking Cub, the youngsters’s imprint of unbiased publishing home Speaking Tiger, feels that political powers will need to have no function in designing curriculums. “History is a foundation on which a culture builds its future. And while history may be twisted by the powerful, it’s quite clear that it is possible to delve and find different versions of a story because stories get narrated over time.” She suggests that faculty textbooks must get the nod of students from numerous backgrounds to reach on the curriculum. “A country like ours that is diverse and historically an amalgamation of different influences needs to recognise all major influences and that should reflect in our textbooks,” Shome says. Her current books with Talking Cub embody Taj Mahal: The Story of a Wonder of the World and The Kailash Temple at Ellora: Magnificent Monuments of India.
What college students are fed by books turns into their studying and information and shapes their future. So, the essential questions stay: Who writes the historical past —the politicians or the historians? Should historical past be altered for one’s political beneficial properties? Who decides what to incorporate and what to delete from historical past?
A studying course of
As kids, one would learn storybooks of Akbar and Birbal, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which might be condensed and simplified variations of the heavy Indian epics and historical past. Such storybooks on historic figures and epics have in actual fact been mediums for early studying of Indian historical past and epics for youngsters.
Books by Amar Chitra Katha like Jataka, Panchtantra and Hitopadesha tales, and collections that narrate tales of varied essential historic figures have performed an essential function in introducing kids to the folks tales, epics and the cultural variety of India.
AdiDev Press, too, has revealed books like Service with Guru Nanak, Peace with Buddha, and My First Hanuman Chalisa to introduce the little ones to the religious leaders in a simple method.
Publishers really feel that they’ve an enormous duty in bringing to the fore numerous voices, tales and views which assist form mindsets and world views. Sohini Mitra, writer, kids’s division, Penguin Random House, says that their historical past books may act as dietary supplements to the training course of. “We have done some ground-breaking work in publishing books on history that could work as a supplement, offering an accessible and multi-dimensional frame of reference—in some way, food for thought to young minds. The best part is, that these books are written like stories and unlike textbooks, with anecdotes, fun trivia and little-known facts,” she says.
Mitra shares that their upcoming e-book sequence is on Mughal historical past and is illustrated and meticulously researched. It will give attention to the reign and character of the Mughal emperors, deviating from the biographical info and bringing alive fascinating sides of their life and instances.
Questions of what to show in historical past and easy methods to train it are sadly usually as a lot about political issues as pedagogical ones, says Ashwitha Jayakumar, creator of Incredible Indians: 75 People Who Shaped Modern India (revealed by HarperCollins). With regard to the present debate, she says, “The books in circulation do not actually dedicate an inordinate amount of space to the Mughals, to the best of my knowledge, so the debate seems to be on shaky ground to begin with.” She feels that the selections about what to incorporate in a historical past curriculum and what to maneuver to create space for one thing else needs to be arrived at by goal, neutral, scholarly dialogue, unbiased of a dominant political development or agenda.
For Narang of HarperCollins Children’s Books, the standard of what’s in Indian historical past textbooks issues greater than what number of chapters are devoted to which dynasty. She provides, “Most history textbooks are criminally boring, and reduce complex, multidimensional and diverse communities and people into lists of features and achievements to be memorised and regurgitated in an exam.”
Apeksha Rao, whose e-book Akbar-Birbal and the Haunted Gurukul by Puffin Books India, an imprint of Penguin Books India, is releasing this month (June-end), seconds Jayakumar and says that Mughal historical past is as a lot an integral a part of the distinctive heritage of our nation as the opposite dynasties. “Instead of erasing it from our textbooks, a more cohesive syllabus that talks about all the different rulers that ruled and moulded India and its people might give young minds a better insight into the colourful past of our country,” she provides.
If sure fragments of historical past are deleted, that might additionally imply a lack of know-how, in accordance with Chitwan Mittal, who has authored a number of kids’s books and is a founding father of unbiased publishing home for youngsters, AdiDev Press. She says that historical past is stuffed with nuance and interrelationships throughout time and geographies. One can’t perceive a interval with out understanding what occurred earlier than and after or what was occurring on the similar time internationally. She says, “To understand India fully, we must study all periods of our history.”
Further, she says that the instructing of historical past should transcend memorising dates. “We should make children explore human psychology through the teaching of history, which made people act the way they did. They could also interact with primary sources in museums and heritage sites, delving deeper into local histories,” she suggests.
Mamta Nainy, creator of 10 Indian Art Mysteries That Have Never Been Solved revealed by Duckbill Books, says that individuals in energy have all the time been rewriting historical past. What is essential although, in accordance with her, is to attract the eye of kids to the truth that our information of the previous is commonly restricted and never definitive in any respect. “History, when viewed from the lens of subjectivity, can lead to certain groups or individuals being overlooked due to their religion, gender, ethnicity, ideology or social standing, among other things. That being said, history is a discipline and a true historian needs to overcome these subjectivities to interpret history in the correct perspective,” she sums it up.
However, Gayathri Ponvannan, creator of 100 Great Chronicles of Indian History revealed by Hachette India, feels that whereas Mughal historical past is extraordinarily fascinating, the histories of their contemporaries, too, deserve higher focus. The Ahom dynasty of Assam, the Deccan sultanates, the Samoothiri /Zamorin of Kozhikode, the Madurai Nayaks (with their charismatic regent, Rani Mangammal) and the Thanjavur Marathas are however a few of the dynasties that simply discover passing point out in mainstream textbooks, and sometimes solely by way of their relations with the Mughals themselves, she says. “In my opinion, textbooks could be written with equal academic input from different regions of the country—this could help format historical accounts that include these fascinating histories too,” provides Ponvannan.
It is true that fragments of historical past can’t be deleted and altered and historical past should stay untouched in all its purity. As Paro Anand, a Sahitya Akademi and Bal Sahitya Award winner for her e-book, Wild Child, and winner of the Kalinga Karubaki Literary Award for Fearless Women Writers, places it, “Isn’t it amazing—the Red Fort and the Taj Mahal appeared out of thin air? The British never ruled India. And by the way, did cave men even exist? Why stop at deleting just Mughal history? Let’s wipe away our entire inconvenient past and teach our children the real truth. That we are not an ancient, multicultural, multi-faceted country. We are India shining very newly.”
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