Rewriting history: The BJP on a roll to make history its own

On June 10, Union Home Minister Amit Shah declared, not for the first time, that since we are now “independent, we can write our own history.” Shah claimed that our history books were disproportionately focused on the exploits of the Mughals and gave short shrift to such great dynasties of antiquity as the Mauryas, Guptas, Pandyas, Cholas, and so on.

This was a tad surprising since those of us who have gone through the Indian school system would recall that entire chapters are devoted to these dynasties and their important rulers. Be that as it may, Shah said that the imbalance needs to be rectified, and nothing can stop us from writing history the way we want to.

Evidently, that process is well under way. A series of reports published in The Indian Express, soon after the home minister made his remarks, point to the extensive changes that have recently been made to social sciences textbooks for Classes 6 to 12 under the “rationalisation” of school texts carried out by the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT).

These include dropping several pages on the history of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals and examples of the religious tolerance of some of them like Akbar, deleting references to the Godhra riots of 2002, removing chapters on social movements such as the Narmada Bachao Andolan, deleting chapters on ‘Democracy and Diversity’, and even a discussion on the arbitrariness of certain colonial laws like sedition. It comes as no surprise that the elements that have been excised or diluted — and there are many such — are those that are not in sync with the historical and cultural narrative propounded by the BJP’s Hindu nationalist government at the Centre.

The Sangh Parivar, to which the BJP belongs, has long been keen on rewriting India’s history, which it feels has been wrongly interpreted and chronicled by the British who colonised the country for 200 years. In 1938, MS Golwalkar, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief and the Hindu Right’s primary ideologue, wrote: “It is high time that we studied, understood and wrote our history ourselves and discarded such designed or undesigned distortions.” His words set the agenda for Hindutva groups to be on a perennial mission to alter Indian history and bring it in line with their own political and ideological narrative.

Historiography is, of course, an ongoing process, one that must be open to changes in interpretation as and when new findings, evidence and facts emerge. It is also true that history — to quote Winston Churchill — is written by the victors, and, hence, is often not free from bias. However, the modification and re-interpretation of history, if any, needs to be based on “facts” and academic rigour. They cannot be driven merely by ideological motivations and fantastical visions of the past predicated on the belief that the Indian civilisation of yore was so mighty and glorious that the Islamic invaders who rolled in throughout the middle ages and established their empires here, did not amount to much and may simply be ignored. To do the latter is not to correct the perceived distortions of history, but to pervert the truth and embrace a lie.

However, the Hindu Right has never been troubled by such compunctions. In fact, despite archaeological, linguistic and DNA evidence to the contrary, it passionately holds on to and propagates the notion that the Aryans were indigenous to this land, and that the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC) was part of the Hindu-Aryan-Vedic culture (when most scholarly opinion tends to the view that the IVC predates the Aryans, who came here from Central Asia.)

The effort to diminish and distort references to India’s Islamic rulers from school texts springs from the same impulse — the almost juvenile intolerance of the fact that the Tughlaqs, Khiljis, Lodis, Mughals did vanquish the locals and rule over large parts of this land. Some of them were bad, some good or middling, but the Hindutva view — which has been dominating the discourse since Narendra Modi came to power in 2014 — is that they must all be portrayed as unremittingly evil, and their role and place in Indian history all but obliterated.

Whether it is replacing Muslim names of cities and streets with Hindu names, or the effort to reclaim mosques as Hindu places of worship because several centuries ago a Muslim ruler may have demolished a temple and built a masjid in its place, or whether it is painting Tipu Sultan, a heroic figure who fought the British valiantly, as a bigot and oppressor of Hindus — the Hindu majoritarian project to deny and recast history has picked up pace in recent times.

And if you can alter one part of history, you can fictionalise and falsify other parts as well. Hence, the entire story of India’s past, right from antiquity down to the modern times, becomes open to brazen omissions and subversions of truth. History then leaves its ties to scientific enquiry and scholarship and becomes merely a propaganda vehicle for the powers that be. The deletion of references to the Godhra riots, which occurred under Narendra Modi’s watch in Gujarat, is a case in point.

The NCERT has claimed that the recent changes to school texts are aimed at reducing the load on students so they can learn quickly and make up for the time lost during the pandemic. Reportedly, more changes are on the way. The proposed revamp of the national school curriculum (National Curriculum Framework) will likely result in more revisions in NCERT textbooks.

It remains to be seen what other incremental changes are made to the narration of India’s history. But when pedagogy rides on propaganda, when the past is corrupted, the future, and the future of our young minds, too, seem blighted.

(Shuma Raha is a journalist and author)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.