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Teaching History in Schools: the Politics of Textbooks in India by Neeladri Bhattacharya In 1961 a bright historian in her late twenties was asked by UNESCO to do in schools. This young a survey of the history historian, Romila Thapar, wrote a critique that was to become historically important. She suggested that the existing books circulating in the market were all of poor quality: they reproduced communal and colonial stereo types and offered ideas and arguments that no professional historian would agree with. Some years later the education minister in the Indian cabinet, to write textbooks on Ancient and M. C. Chagla, requested Thapar Medieval Indian history for students in lower secondary schools. Thapar's critique was part of a wider demand for the professionalization of history. Professional history writing had developed in India since the beginning of the twentieth century, but school textbooks continued to be written by non-professionals. What Thapar was demanding was that textbooks ought to reflect the best standards of the craft as well as the advances of historical knowledge at the time. The demand for professionalization soon fused with a wider move for standardization. Soon after independence the government had set up the Secondary Education Commission to review the state of education and suggest concrete measures for improvement. Pointing to the importance of education in producing good citizens, the commission urged the need to improve standards of schooling and introduce a uniform system of exam ination. 1 In 1961 the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) was established to oversee textbook production and produce model textbooks that could be prescribed all over the country. All citizens of India were henceforth to be offered the same syllabus, the same texts, the same narratives of the past, the same set of information. 2 The same process of unification and standardization was to be carried out within the provinces through the State Councils of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) that were subsequently set up. The examination system was unified first under the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and then under the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examination. The will of the state to produce a unitary text - a text that symbolically expressed the unity of the nation and helped forge that unity - could never be realized in practice. The move to unify, standardize and homogenize came up against a series of barriers; it was subverted at various levels. Production of textbooks became a site of negotiation and political battles. Not all battles turned into public wars. Many were waged in silent ways, not scrutinized by the public, subverting the unifying logic of the new system without producing any public murmur. Unless we look at these molecular processes of negotiation and conflict we cannot understand the field of school education in India. Through the 1960s and '70s NCERT produced a series of textbooks that set new standards. Written by some of the finest historians of the time (Bipan Chandra, Satish Chandra, R. S. Sharma, Romila Thapar), they offered a new way of looking at the past, critiqued colonial and communal stereotypes and presented a history that was secular and national. These texts were adopted by schools across the country. By the 1990s print runs for each book for senior classes went up every year, to 3-400,000. But this still constituted a small fragment of the market - possibly no more than ten per cent. Once the syllabus was outlined, private publishers, big and small, produced their own texts, persuading local intellectuals and school teachers to write them and offering handsome royalties. Even big publishers like Oxford University Press and Orient Longman continue to survive on the booming textbook market - as education became an ideal of even the most deprived in society. These texts were never subjected to any scrutiny, any institutional standardization. Many schools prescribed the NCERT textbooks for public board examinations but used alternative textbooks in the other classes. The national was both accepted and rejected. Spaces of autonomy were carved out within the disciplinary regime of the state. Over time the politics of representation began to question the unitary claims of a national history, creating new demands from textbooks. Different regions, different states, different communities and groups wanted the particular histories of their locality or community represented in the NCERT texts. As these demands became louder, NCERT allowed all the states to introduce local history as a component, in additional chapters within the textbooks. The chapters inserted often did not jell with the rest of the text: their framing ideas were not the same, their operating categories were dissimilar. At times even the original authors were unaware of the changes that their texts were undergoing in the different regions of India. The educational councils in the different states (SCERTs) negotiated these opposing pressures for homogenization and representation in a variety of ways. Some states prescribed NCER T books, others produced their own, while others again amalgamated chapters of the NCER T books with those written by local authors. The NCERT texts were transformed in yet another way. This was through translation into regional languages. Translators inevitably integrated their own ideas, interpreted the texts in their own ways, introduced metaphors and added a colour that made sense to partic ular vernacular publics. As a consequence, the English texts appeared as the bearer of a democratic, secular and nationalist vision, while the translated texts were inscribed with the marks of local cultures and particularist visions. The act of translation, as we know, is always an act of transcultur ation. If the national sought to homogenize, erasing the particular and the This content downloaded from (cid:0)132.174.252.171 on Tue, 25 Jan 2022 20:39:50 UTC(cid:0) (cid:0) All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) History Textbooks in India 101 local in an effort to produce the trans-local, vernacularization reinscribed the particular on to the homogenous national, producing a hybrid text which reflected a range of conflicting pressures within society. Within the classroom, school teachers in different regions read the textbooks once again in their own ways, reworking their meanings, introducing their own inter pretations, eliminating chapters, adding anecdotes, and in the process transforming the texts. While the politics of textbooks unfolded at various levels, often in silent and invisible ways, the wars publicly waged were usually around the NCERT textbooks. Written by the finest historians of the time, teachers in leading universities of India, these textbooks acquired symbolic value. When textbooks are seen as influential and are read by students across the country, when they are recognized as authoritative and reliable, they become objects of public scrutiny. It was also as if, produced by national institutions, these textbooks had to be accountable to the public, to be evaluated in the court of public opinion - as if the authors had been charged with a public responsibility and the public had to judge whether they had discharged their public duties. Thapar's vision of the professionalized production of knowledge seemed to crumble as history books were burnt on the streets of Bihar and historians' effigies went up in flames on the parade grounds in Delhi. The public wars fought over the textbooks in the next thirty years were ultimately ideological, but beneath the larger political battles one question continued to be asked: who has the right to interpret the past? Even as historians expressed anxiety over the issue and claimed their right to write about the past, they could not get away from public debates, they could not possibly secure their claims over what they saw as their territory, and the prerogative of the profession as they defined it. With the growth of the institutional structures of democracy, individuals and communities expressed their ideas in public with passionate force, often doubting the truth of what was said by historians, and asserting the sanctity of what they believed to have happened in the past. Historians could try and shape popular imagina tion, countering inherited opinions and sedimented stereotypes, but they could not deny the right of citizens to express themselves in public, operating with their own sense of history. It is this right that defines the limits of the historian's territory and the historian's anxieties about such limits. * * * The new textbooks of the 1960s had two objectives.3 First: they sought to