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"Freedom for history" by J.S. Rajput

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>[manthan] "Freedom for history" by J.S. Rajput

>Thu, 11 Mar 2004 06:45:20 -0800 (PST)

>

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>Title: Freedom for history

>Author: J.S. Rajput

>Publication: Hindustan Times

>March 10, 2004

>URL: http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_608645,00120002.htm

>

>Freedom for history

>J.S. Rajput

>10 March

>

>The inventors of the controversy over the communalisation of Indian

>history are at it again. Since the early Seventies, theyve been

>campaigning against historians who disagreed with the Leftist-Marxist view

>of Indias past, which, thanks to official patronage, became the dominant

>school of historiography.

>

>From the tenor and content of Romila Thapars articles, Future of Indian

>past and One nations many pasts (March 1, 2), its clear that she wishes

>society to remain ideologically anchored to one of the most forgettable

>chapters in the history of Indian scholarship.

>

>Since few students pursue history at a higher level, school history is

>about all that most educated Indians are ever exposed to. Across the

>world, school-level textbook writing is left to professionals. But the

>scheme of our eminent historians was not entirely didactic; it was about

>mind control.

>

>Even today, many Indians believe that the Aryans were a foreign community

>of settlers in India, or that Guru Tegh Bahadur was nothing more than a

>brigand who got his execution orders from the Moghal administration.

>Aurangzeb, the zinda pir, was nowhere in the picture in this sordid act.

>To them, India was a backward civilisation, a fragmented nation moving

>from the control of one invading party to another.

>

>The publication of the new NCERT books was opposed by these historians. In

>fact, the first slogans against the saffronisation of history began long

>before the first new book was even commissioned. Under the banner of the

>Indian History Congress, they published a compendium of perceived errors.

>When the NCERTs authors began to go over the allegations, they discovered

>that under the garb of presenting a secular, scientific and liberal

>history, the historians had presented generations of school-goers with

>textbooks that were long on rhetoric and short on facts. As Irfan Habib,

>the prime mover of the IHC project to defame the NCERT, acknowledged, much

>of what Thapar wrote in the old Class VI textbook was far from the truth.

>

>Habib castigated the new NCERT author, Makkhan Lal, for parivar writings

>for suggesting that Asokas emphasis on building a moral and

>welfare-oriented State had adverse implications on Mauryan Indias security

>outlook. But that amounted to belittling Thapars Asoka and the decline of

>the Mauryas because this famous work formed the basis of Lals approach to

>the specific context. Elsewhere, Habib dismissed an observation on the art

>of growing silk and making paper in the 5th century AD. He claimed that

>these articles of daily life entered India via the Muslims (sic). But

>hadnt Thapar written much the same in Early India? Till 1999, Thapar was

>telling her 12-year-old readers that the Aryans may have come from Central

>Asia or Europe. Not once did she mention the existence of a group of

>scholars who believed the Aryans had their home in India.

>

>Moreover, this was in contrast to the position she herself had been taking

>in her more serious works for at least 15 years now. Is it not strange

>that a scholar who insists that history cannot be rewritten (on the basis

>of new facts, as the NCERT has steadfastly maintained), should abandon her

>old fundamental approach to the Aryan question? She rightly acknowledges

>the flaws in the old theory that the word Aryan represented an ethnic

>group and emphasises now that it could have meant a family of languages.

>But when these omissions are juxtaposed with the general tendency of

>Marxists to downplay the scientific and philosophical breakthroughs

>achieved in ancient India, one begins to wonder if the allegations about

>the eminent historians hidden agenda were right after all.

>

>Also, their insistence on foregrounding the story of medieval India with

>the (mostly fabricated) salutary effects of foreign invasion was

>controversial. Why was it supposed that Muslim Indians would take offence

>at instances of iconoclasm or persecution of non-believers by dynasties of

>foreign origin which ruled in Delhi and other provinces for centuries

>before British domination? Does linking Muslim Indians to foreign

>marauders not constitute an insult to their patriotism? If the secularism

>token is advanced, should it not extend to Christian Indians too (after

>all Clive and Curzon were Christians) and a basic overhaul be ordered into

>independent Indias analysis of British rule?

>

>In totalitarian societies (Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia), books on history

>were banned if they questioned the official line. But linking the present

>Indian experience with those dark traditions is a figment of the

>imagination. Today, Thapar accuses the NCERT of not bothering to put its

>new books through committees. Not only is that untrue, but she unwittingly

>admits that earlier regimes tolerated only the presence of like-minded

>sycophants .

>

>If anything, the NCERT has thrown open Indian history to scholars of all

>ideological hues. Independent scholars are breathing easier and the

>selection to major positions is no longer the prerogative of a select few.

>It is only through a free exchange of ideas that scholars can arrive at a

>consensual identification of facts and analyses. This would enable

>educationists to develop a new generation which is at once imbibed with

>the values of its ancient heritage as well as equipped with the faculties

>and commitment to face the realities of the age they live in.

>

>(The writer is Director, NCERT)

>

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