Partition and a few flawed lessons

We live in an age when school children may be learning more from WhatsApp forwards and Instagram posts than their history textbooks. In Indiranagar, Bengaluru, some may even learn a ‘potted history’ from the ‘Freedom Wall’, a wall art project funded by the area’s BJP MLA, and executed in 58 images all along the students’ route to school. The wall, like so much else in our public life, speaks as much about what it excludes as what it chooses to include. Hence, V D Savarkar – who took little part in the Indian Freedom Movement – is chosen over Tipu Sultan – who died fighting the British on the battlefield.

All governments lay their heavy hand on the history textbook, because it is tied to an examination system that values ‘instant recall’, rather than critical and compassionate thinking. The Union government, which has been in the saddle for 11 years, has of late gone into overdrive in rewriting the history textbooks. Thus, the Std 8 textbook has taken care to insert A Note on History’s Darker Periods ahead of its discussion of the Sultanate and Mughal Period, the Marathas, and the colonial period. It tells the student that ‘it would be wrong to hold anyone today responsible’, but ‘understanding the historical origin of cruel violence, abusive misrule or misplaced ambitions of power is the best way to heal the past and build a future where, hopefully, they will have no place.’

Now, NCERT has added a module entitled ‘Partition Horrors Remembrance Day’ in keeping with the Prime Minister’s announcement a few years ago that it would be August 14. No marks for guessing that it is Pakistan’s Independence Day. But perhaps most don’t know that the actual partition map was drawn up only on August 17, and violence began and continued for many months thereafter.

Should such a module be introduced in Karnataka’s schools? Karnataka was one of the few states that had appointed a State Education Policy Commission to rethink the New Education Policy. It has, among other things, recommended a meaningful incorporation of constitutional values, compassion, and sensitivity as ethical learning outcomes.

So imagine the shock when a circular was issued a few days ago asking schools to teach the partition module: worse, schools were enjoined to show proof of compliance by uploading reports with photographs. Fortunately, the circular has been withdrawn.

Designed to inflame

Why is this module a problem? There is no doubt that Indian schoolchildren need to learn how to deal with conflictual pasts. But how does one produce compassion and empathy among students rather than a strident call for revenge? The partition module appears intended not to inform, but to inflame. It fails to acknowledge at least four decades of research that has detailed the difference between the experiences of partition in the east and in the west. We have learned from such research that the violence was not between one set of victims and one set of perpetrators. Victims could become perpetrators, and perpetrators could become victims.

But the module carefully avoids such uncomfortable ‘truths’. The newspaper cuttings included as historical proof are of violence against Hindus alone. Feminist historians who have talked of women being killed by their own families, for fear of ‘dishonour’, are barely mentioned. The harrowing experience of women, especially following the Abducted Person (Recovery and Restoration Act of 1949) in both India and Pakistan, has been conveniently ignored. The most important goal of this module is to malign the Congress, for ‘willingly hand[ing] over a vast part of the country permanently outside the national fold – along with tens of crores of its citizens – without even their consent’ or a war. And the Congress (mistakenly) ‘limited their discourse to a binary of “native vs. foreign”’ forgetting the historical ‘realities’ (presumably the more important enemy within, so useful to the current Union government).

There is silence on the Hindu Mahasabha’s role. Instead, there is a most tendentious suggestion that ‘Even though a separate country was created for Muslims, about 3.5 crores Muslims did not shift and continued to stay in India. Pakistan was demanded and created as a homeland for all Indian Muslims.
The entire calculation, political or territorial, was based on that assumption.’

Students are then asked to remember that ‘the actual forces that drive human behaviour [are] not any lofty ideals but ‘self-interest, greed, fear, hatred, anger, vengeance, etc.’ Karnataka’s government schools have, for now, been saved from such hateful propaganda. That it was so easily slipped in is still sobering.

(The writer, a retired
professor of History at the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU, has served as Member, Advisory
Committee, State Education Policy)