Teaching History in Schools: the Politics of Textbooks in India

Abstract

Within a decade after Independence, some of the finest historians in India got involved in writing new history textbooks for school children. As a new India began to dust off its colonial legacy, many historians felt the need to critique colonial perceptions of the past, rethink existing narratives of history, and develop a secular national imagination. Horrified by the violence of Partition, when thousands of Hindus and Muslims killed each other and many more left their homes in search of new places to live, historians turned to the past to build the premises of a humane and secular society. They questioned communal assumptions, critiqued sectarian stereotypes, and wrote secular histories for the children of the new independent nation. The secular-nationalist textbooks that were produced in the 1960s and 1970s were immediately attacked by the Hindu right, and for the subsequent three decades history textbooks became the site for a larger battle between secularism and communalism in India. The defence of these textbooks was seen as synonymous with the fight against anti-secular forces, and suggestions for any form of change inevitably provoked suspicion. Yet over these years, historians in India, as elsewhere, were opening their minds to new ideas, and posing issues in new ways. Gender histories made historians aware that all narratives need to be gendered; ecological histories made them see that that social lives are shaped by environment just as much as nature is transformed through human activity; cultural histories emphasized the importance of cultures in shaping people’s beliefs, perceptions and visions, even as people sought to make their own world of meanings. Histories from below and subaltern studies urged everyone to relocate the subjects of their enquiry, and see how subordinate groups make sense of their experience and constitute their lives. Critical theories stressed the need to rethink the words and terms through which the past was grasped and the tropes within which historical narratives were cast. Yet, till recently, none of these shifts in thinking about history was reflected in the textbooks that children read. This essay emphasizes that school textbooks need not be insulated from the critical traditions of our times. When conceptions of history change, when the past is looked at in new ways, should these ideas remain the preserve of academics alone? Focusing on the new set of history textbooks recently produced in India, the essay discusses what these new books seek to do, what pedagogic ideas underline their production, and how they differ from earlier textbooks.

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