History must be taught through many lenses

In the early months of 2010, I had a brief stint with the editorial team of a Delhi-based private publishing house, which brought out school textbooks. Working in the social science section of the company, I found that a part of the job’s brief was to avoid references to what was seen as contentious or offering an alternate frame of looking at the subject of study. This meant that the end product had to be rinsed off of elements that didn’t align with the political common sense. As adjunct texts, the ‘political common sense’ found in these books was along the lines of the national curriculum. In the process, these books built their basic premises around the model textbooks published by the NCERT, a central government entity. More than other segments of social science, such an approach had its imprint on how history books unfolded the strands of narratives, eras, and developments in their pages.

This occurred to me then, and I remember discussing this with a colleague, that instead of guarding a particular frame of retelling of history, it would be better if students were exposed to multiple ways of looking at history at the same time. That, I argued, in addition to providing a general introduction to the subject, also lets them have a look at the past through the prisms of inquiry of different schools of historians. That may pave the way for nurturing interpretive curiosity early, rather than uncritical certitudes of the text.  Needless to say, such an argument didn’t have any chance beyond filling some time in the lunch break. 

That thought about the need for different lines of inquiry, however, never left me. And it has been finding reasons to resurface. In recent years, there have been regular debates, if not uproar, about attempts at reframing historical narratives in school textbooks. This has coincided with the advent of a markedly different ideological impetus of the BJP-led government at the centre and in many states. The latest debate comes in the wake of NCERT revisiting the medieval Indian history in its class 8 social science textbook, and registering episodes of brutality and vandalism by rulers of the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire. 

This has been a recurring theme in the right-of-centre historiography – the historical grievance regarding violence and destruction caused by foreign invaders and some leading figures of Muslim rule in the medieval period of Indian history. At the same time, this view of history argues that the acts of brutality and vandalism of places of worship like temples and centres of high learning like Nalanda University were neglected in school textbooks. Instead, they want to correct the earlier regime’s attempts at whitewashing these traumatic experiences in the longer arc of the country’s historical memory; in the latest controversy, such scars have been explained as “note on some darker periods in history”. 

This line of historical inquiry berates official amnesia about medieval plunder and destruction in the historical narrative. Such neglect was seen as a sign of acute lack of a sense of civilizational memory, even intellectual depletion, and this didn’t go unnoticed by even outside observers like writer VS Naipaul, who dwelt on the theme in his work  India: A Wounded Civilisation. “Ruin lies on ruin.. In the accounts of wars and conquests and plunder, the intellectual depletion passes unnoticed, the lesser intellectual life of a country whose contributions to civilization were made in the remote past. India absorbs and outlasts its conquerors, Indians say. But, I wondered whether intellectually India had always retreated before its conquerors,” he remarked.

Over the decades, a school of historiography that voiced concerns over such neglect felt cold-shouldered in the wake of the dominance of left-of-centre outlook in academic institutions and official narratives. Some even viewed it as a way of sanitising the hideous phases of the past for post-Independence nation-building. That meant that history became a tool to create a tentative secular consensus, as sociologist TN Madan saw this as forced insertion, a tendency of the post-Independence intellectual elite to “impose its will upon history”. 

This meant the post-Independence historical narrative in India and the emphasis of left-of-centre historians had other points of emphasis. In the process, the perception grew that the textbook history was squeamish about certain episodes of medieval history, and bent them to be seen in some restricted frame. Political commentator Kapil Komireddi, otherwise a critic of the current government at the centre, has reflected on this tendency, which implied having two different sets of yardsticks to measure the impact of two forms of imperialism in Indian history. 

“Imperialism, in other words, was destructive only when Europeans did it. When Asians did it, it was a cultural exchange programme,” he notes sarcastically in his work Malevolent Republic.  This also meant that in the later decades of the 20th century, the lens through which historians like RC Majumdar or Jadunath Sarkar viewed certain eras of history, mostly appropriated by right-of-centre school, got sidelined or even absent from dominant academic narratives of the time. 

In the last few years, the ascent of the BJP-led power system has split open this battle of historical narratives. That is not to say that there aren’t other ways of looking at history other than the left-right binary in historiography. But, for the purposes of the ideological worldview of two rival political formations in national politics, the imprint of these alternate voices has crept into the pages of school textbooks. 

As a function of legitimising force, historical narratives have for long been an ideological project for governments across the world. The official patronage to historians of a particular leaning, and by extension to the school of that line of historical inquiry, isn’t uncommon. Its influence could be well gauged by the fact that the well-known British historian EH Carr famously advised his readers to read the historian first before the history because he would write the history that he liked. Its utility in reaching out to school students in the formative years has also been realised for long. I remember that delivering a talk, a history professor in Delhi University recalled how post-revolution Lenin assembled the most well-known historian in erstwhile Soviet Union to write history textbooks for schools. 

As there is a degree of inevitability about such claims of power systems in historical narratives, the question before pedagogy should be how to equip school students to handle different interpretations. At the end of the day, the study of history should spur curiosity about the past, not alignment with one or other version of it. The first important step is not to infantilise secondary school students. At that age, the adolescent is cognitively well equipped to be exposed to the fact that historians have different prisms of looking at the past, which eventually lead to different schools of studying and interpreting history. 

If we can trust the students of that age to grasp concepts of algebra and geometry and inquire into complex scientific phenomena like light, sound, and the human body, why shouldn’t they be trusted to be familiar with different ways in which history is interpreted by scholars? In addition to broadening the historical understanding, such rudimentary exposure to schools of history will also enable them to wade through the politics of history writing in later years. A short chapter on schools of historiography was a part of the class 11 NCERT textbook on ancient India, though it had some subtle biases in how it presented those schools. Such chapters, minus the avoidable commentary on the relative merits of the schools, can be part of the textbooks much earlier. It sets off an early understanding of the frames for the students, and can even possibly enable the young learner to develop his or her own prism to look back at the past.

In the age of information highways, the paradox is that we can’t even agree on the details of what happened yesterday and debate the certitudes of how the past unfolded centuries ago. Such certitudes can be subjected to early scrutiny by school students if we let them have a hold of various ways in which they can look at the available details, or lack of details, of various facets of history. In doing so, the task of teaching history is more likely to meet and nurture its primary purpose – unalloyed curiosity, and can hope for a stronger footing to steer clear of ideological battlefields that abound in history textbooks. 

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