Frontline
November 1998
Learning

History preaching

Ostensibly concerned with familiarising school–going children with their country’s rich and ancient civilisation, the champions of Hindutva in fact belittle it

Doesn’t every country or nation, society or civilisation have a need, an urge, a natural one if you like, to
glorify its past?

Haven’t we all been disillusioned in our youth, and faulted on valid grounds, the sanitised drudgery that was, and is, dished out to hungry, fresh and eager minds in the name of ‘education’?

Haven’t we all spoken of the urgent need to re–evaluate our institutions of learning? Haven’t we asked whether our schools are institutions that nurture, excite and stimulate the mind while simultaneously engendering notions of community, sharing and sisterhood?

Has there not been, for some decades now, an intense debate on the need to re–locate the mother tongue creatively in the learning/education process to enable the rich, emotional and creative growth of every child?

Has not the need been articulated time and again for a creative and rich sense and source of history — through exciting history textbooks, syllabi and the spoken word of the history teacher? So that the subject becomes a source of wonder and discovery of the past through which our visions of the present can coalesce and gel? So that future generations may well have pride, in our past, a pride deeply tempered with humility that critical insight and incessant questioning gives them?

The humility of knowledge with the rewarding realisation that any reading or understanding of events and periods, dynasties and the peoples who lived under them will always be guided, or driven, coloured or enriched by the perspectives, locations and ethical–value systems of the receiver of that knowledge.

And when we speak of India — the rich, the poor, the rural, the urban, the tribal, the non–tribal, the Dalit, the Hindu, the Muslim, the Christian, the Keralite, the UP–ite, the Gujarati, the Assamese — the task becomes even more awesome.

How does the student and the teacher of history reconcile the vastness of regional and linguistic distances and locations, the variety and contradictions in community lore and literatures, the differences of approach and nuance in varied religious traditions and their symbols? Put all of this together as the study of the one big whole: India and its history?

The excitement and the challenge can arise if we are able to preserve all these nuances and differences, the variations and the shifts, and gift to the young mind with its infinite capacity to wrangle with the multi–polar, varied senses of history. Not to be concerned, as the more rigid adult world always is, with offering certitudes but offer instead the ability to doubt, to question, to twist and turn things and beliefs on their head.

The legend of the Bhil tribal boy, Eklavya, may or may not have the same emotive appeal for a Muslim or Christian youth living on the margins of acceptability in a deeply polarised Indian polity. But as a profound comment on the denial of education to lower castes in a rigidly caste–ridden society and tradition, it surely has lessons for any student or teacher attempting to grapple with notions of social equity, justice and systemic deprivation in the days of yore?

The vivid account of Gandhari’s curse on Lord Krishna — the mythical image of a mere woman cursing a God — after the Great War (Mahabharata) that left millions, including her eldest son, dead, immortalised in Indian literature, may not have any significance to the blinkered follower of Hindutva. However, it cannot but have profound meaning for women today grappling with more and more indignities — familial and societal violence included — in a violent, modern world.

The history of the first Arab settlers on Kerala’s shores may or may not be perceived to be of interest to students of history in the rest of India. Nor the fascinating fact that 5,000 years ago this land that we now dub not just India but Hindu–sthan, gave the King of Persia a copy of the book Kalilavadamana that contained vital information on a medicine for immortality. But the business communications and trade links that this development lead to and the uniquely mixed communities that these associations engendered are critical in understanding the lives and cultures of these communities that dot our vast shores.

The near–mythical intellectual association of the Shaivite jogin Laleshwari, and the Sufi Sant Nooruddin have resonance through the folklore of Kashmir that both help and baffle us while grappling with the ethos of Kashmiriyat.

And the student and teacher of history in India, while looking at the Ramayana as a political epic, will need to grapple with and, thereafter, reconcile the fact that over 200 versions of the Ramlila – village-level performances of the epic – exist in this land. Each one as rich and contradictory. Where Ram is venerated by some and Ravana by others. If votaries of hegemonic history violently disrupt the Dussera celebrations in Tamil Nadu (as they did in October this year) where people have always burnt effigies of Ram, not Ravana, as part of "their" glorious past and tradition, Hindutva’s aim becomes clear. The project launched to Hinduise history is also a project aimed at stifling democracy, diversity and dissent in the rich area of culture and tradition and impose, in its stead, a set of "moral and religio-cultural dos and don’ts" in a land and culture that had hitherto defied such strait–laced nomenclatures.

Independent India’s textbooks and the approach to history teaching even before the onslaught of the saffron brigade were unimaginative, sanitised and prejudicial. The sangh parivar is intent on pursuing a narrow and dictatorial educational agenda that is defined in terms of addressing only a Hindu nation. But even before members of the sangh received political legitimacy, history was a most neglected subject for well nigh 50 years, and therefore the least liked. Besides, the content of history textbooks at many regional levels also reflects blatant biases.

Under saffron–ruled Hindu–sthan the distortion of history project has been sought to be pushed through much more aggressively through insistence on the study of a language, Sanskrit, and the trappings of other symbols (like the recitation of the Saraswati vandana) that have a singular upper caste Hindu bias. However, the project and its intent are not limited to that alone.

The ominous project for "Indianising, nationalising and spiritualising" Indian education that professor Murli Manohar Joshi and Uma Bharati have recently dished out has a specific import, coming as it does from champions of a sectarian and divisive vision of India not as a democratic, secular state but as a Hindu nation.

Sure, every culture, most civilisations, have an irresistible temptation, a human failing if you like, to pick and choose from the past, screen icons and symbols, selectively hark back to traditions from the days of yore before packaging this potent mix into syllabi building and history teaching. The moot question that needs to be asked is, which past, or which aspects of it, does the Hindutvawaadi agenda seek to glorify.

Is it the tradition that Jayabala and Gargi represented where they, as single women, held discourses on sophisticated intellectual issues of the day described in the Upanishads? Or is the practice of sati — the burning of a woman alive on the funeral pyre of her husband – to be defended as "part of our glorious, ancient tradition" as was done by the then vice president of the BJP, Vijayraje Scindia, did in 1987?

The need to incorporate in school curricula a study of the history and evolution of different religious faiths cannot be questioned. The proposed incorporation of the Vedas and Upanishads into basic curricula would hardly give commensurate space to the Koran, the Bible, the Puranas, the Guru Granth Sahib, Buddhist and Jain texts. Much less would such a project be concerned with the vigorous and energetic study of the contexts and conditions behind the birth of faiths, the sets of belief that went with the believers, changing through the generations, a study of the ‘History of God’ and man’s engagement with the divine, festivals and the forms that festivities took reflecting current day dominations and assertions.

Hedgewar, Golwalkar, Savarkar. We certainly cannot blot their presence from the historical landscape, there should be no attempt to do so. Generations must study them, just as students of history need to study Hitler and the ideology that he represented, Zionism and its impact on the minds of the Israeli people, the politics of exclusivism practised by votaries of both a Hindu (RSS, Hindu Mahasabha) and a Muslim nation (the Muslim League).

The Hindutva project, apart from stifling democracy, different and varied ways of thinking and approach, also sees Christians and Christianity, Muslims and Islam as alien and foreign, never mind that these faiths arrived on Indian shores about 1,000 and 2,000 years ago. The contributions of Persian and Arabic to Indian languages, the birth and life of Urdu as an indigenous language, the contributions of women and men of different faiths to the arts, the literature, the thought and culture of this land are disdained and excluded from this "Indianisation project" and hatred spewed on them in subtle and obtuse ways.

The exclusion of varied traditions from institutions of learning and the hate–mongering against certain "outsider" faiths have always formed the core of Hindutva ideology. But within this project to hegemonise and control the mind and impulse of future generations is also a repressive impulse against any social change and a vote for the status quo.

No proponent of Hindutva speaks for the alleviation of social inequities, poverty, discrimination in employment, free and fair access to education, for example. In its celebration of a selective and sectarian past, it is a project that denies the realities of history by exclusion and distorts the rest through blatant manipulation.

What the Hindutva project means for women also needs to be discerned. Quite apart from the "home–keeping" recommended as essential instruction to young girls in high schools, other outfits that are affiliated to the same ideology have in the past few days made threatening noises against women who are challenging brutal and violent treatment within the families by husbands. At a very recent meeting in Mumbai, the Purush Hakk Samiti (Committee for Men’s Rights) has resolved to threaten any woman who dares to register a complaint of domestic violence with the police — under section 498A of the IPC — with dire consequences!

Myths and traditions, images and perceptions. In the words of middle-eastern writer, Fouad Ajami, "a country’s myth can console and knit together men and women of different needs, carry them through different times, explain sorrow, defeat, locate them in the world. But the myth can also hide the country from itself, hide itself from scrutiny".

Many of us fall easy prey to the myth surrounding our glorious, golden, thousands–of–years–old Indian (read Hindu) civilisation. We believe, or would very much like to go on believing, that it is among other things one of the world’s most non-violent and tolerant civilisation. Do we, by this very assertion, hide ourselves from scrutiny?

There can be no doubt that myriad faiths, beliefs have woven their own traditions on Indian soil. Or that manifold people have found for themselves a home in this land. Various traditions touched this land, enmeshed, flowered, and have grown. Sometimes, they even flourished.

Yet Buddhism has almost vanished from the land of its birth. And of the traces that remain, the would-be architect of Hindu nation, Union home minister, L.K. Advani, would like to appropriate under the "all-Hindu" fold.

Inherent to the abhorrent notions of shudra and ati–shudra, menial castes whose status was supposed to be equal to that of women, is the "so impure as to be untouchable" concept. Do we really believe that there can be any other system of repression or discrimination more degrading and humiliating than this? A system that for generations now has successfully kept a whole strata of people – nearly 20 per cent of the total – on the very margins of society, granting them little or no means to livelihood, education and social upliftment?

In the reading of our past and our glorification of it, we must be careful not to let it befuddle an inquiring mind. History, the reading and studying of it, must above all, sharpen the mind’s ability to, look at the past and the present with a searching and curious mind that is forever poised to phrase that eternal last question.

The content and approach to not just history teaching, but all teaching under the Hindutva project is to dictate what should be learnt and what must be taught, outline the set of values germane to a "strong and unified nation", leave no space for the development of individual commitments, regional and linguistic variations, multi–polar religious and cultural influences. The project is nothing but a systematic and narrow attempt to regulate and control the mind. Limit its growth. Darken its spaces. And obliterate for a long time to come, that eternal last question.

Teesta Setalvad


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