Ask any schoolchild which subject he or she finds formidably boring and, invariably, the answer is "History". For a country with a past as rich as India's, that is a shame. It is also the result, as the immediate week's Parliament-level slanging match made clear, the result of bad writing and worse politics.

As Murli Manohar Joshi and S. Nurul Hasan - education ministers present and past, living and dead, right and left-fight a proxy war, a noble subject suffers.



History's latest conflict began innocuously enough with the Delhi-based National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) - the premier, state-funded consultancy for school learning - issuing a circular. It asked the Central Board of Secondary Education to delete certain portions from NCERT certified textbooks.





A present tense...



As BJP HRD minister since 1998, Murli Manohar Joshi has sought to challenge the left hegemony; but with mediocrities.

While changing people and the odd textbook passage, Joshi has done precious little about the calibre of writers NCERT uses.

Rajput, now the NCERT director, was once an Arjun Singh favourite. Is he just brilliant or merely a time server? Joshi should know.

While criticising Macaulay's children and Marx's followers, Joshi's historians haven't produced rigorous scholarship. And a past imperfect



As Indira Gandhi's education minister between 1971 and 1977, S. Nurul Hasan married state patronage to leftist history writing.

The Marxist school of history controlled institutions, scholarships, key jobs. It arrogated unto itself the power to write textbooks.

Hasan's historians were hardly democratic. Worse, they were terribly poor writers. The books they wrote bored a generation.

In an attempt to protect shoddy textbooks, the Hasan-inspired brigade simply dismisses every criticism as "saffronisation".

To those who'd been following the controversy, much of what emerged was tiresomely old. The passages that had been objected to and finally bowdlerised had been the subject of an internal note written by Jagmohan Singh Rajput, NCERT's director, early this year.

The note pointed to allegedly derogatory references to key figures, ranging from Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur to Mahavira, the preceptor of Jainism. The buzz in "informed circles" at NCERT's sprawling south Delhi campus was that these segments "hurt minority communities".

There had, as Rajput argued, been complaints and even court cases against NCERT, particularly by Sikh groups, pertaining to the very sections. The books themselves were seen as slanted history, painting a partial picture and subscribing to the leftist proclivities of the writers.



The "leftist historians" - an admittedly broad categorisation that includes almost everybody who is somebody in the Indian History Congress - are in a sense proteges of the late Nurul Hasan, Indira Gandhi's education minister (1971-77). Venerable and genial as he was, Hasan happily arranged the marriage between Marxist social science and state patronage. It produced the sort of hagiography Indira Gandhi interred in her famous "time capsules".



Not till Joshi became the BJP's human resource development minister in 1998 did the hegemony - a delightful Gramscian expression the Marxists will know only too well - of the left face its first challenge. Since then, every difference of opinion on the teaching of history has been viewed in terms of "saffronisation".



It was so this past week as well, at least initially. CPI(M) MPs took up the NCERT's "censorship" in the Lok Sabha. Congress veterans Arjun Singh and Pranab Mukherjee breathed fire in the Rajya Sabha, even accusing the government of "Talibanisation" and causing a silly sideshow on whether that term was unparliamentary.



The removal of the references to Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ruling NDA said, was courtesy a unanimous resolution by the Congress-dominated Delhi Assembly. In September, at the initiative of Congress MLA Arvinder Singh Lovely, the Delhi legislature had demanded the purge that in effect gave NCERT its chance.



R.S. SHARMA, Historian

"They do not want the historicity of Rama and Krishna to be questioned. Therefore, they removed the passage."

J.S. RAJPUT, NCERT director

"Beef is discouraged... What purpose does it serve to inform children that in ancient times beef was eaten?"



Never sublime in the first place, matters now rapidly declined to ridiculous levels. BJP MP Sahib Singh Verma told the Lok Sabha that the deletion of certain references to Jats had redeemed his community's pride. Shivraj Patil, the Congress' deputy leader in the Lok Sabha, faced quite a predicament. He was urged by colleagues from Punjab - which faces an assembly election in three months - not to oppose the removal of negative references to Guru Tegh Bahadur.



So Patil ended up saying his party was not opposed to changes in textbooks, only to the method adopted. He went on to talk about how the Congress Government in Rajasthan had similarly "corrected" history books. Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pramod Mahajan spoke up for "people's sentiments". Avtar Singh Bhadana (Congress) complained about offensive references to his Gujjar community.

Slightly confused, the Left Front-notwithstanding its record of inflicting Marx and imagined class struggles on West Bengal's schoolchildren - walked out of the Lok Sabha. Even more confused, the Congress followed in the left's footsteps.

In the next few days, it began an elaborate process of retraction, which included Punjab MP Jagmeet Singh Brar explaining issues on Sonia Gandhi's behalf. What emerged was that there was near unanimity among political parties as to the right to doctor textbooks. The only quibbling was on the type of medicine to use.

What makes history such an arena for contemporary politics? In societies across the world it has been a tool for nation building, for mobilisation, for manipulation. In colleges and universities, it is the subject of dry analyses and tortuous theories of economic determinism. At school, however, it was - and should - be the stuff of romance and heroism, of narrative and good writing, of igniting the child's imagination.



Those are all very noble and very cherished ideals, all very removed from NCERT's bland, grammatically challenged textbooks. To disguise such mediocrity as some sort of an edified ideological conflict is, frankly, nonsense.

Historian

"Our society has become so fractured and intolerant, you can't say anything unflattering about anybody."

RSS thinker

"History is never 100 per cent true. So protect our children from such misinformation."



That doesn't stop Eduardo Faleiro, Congress Rajya Sabha member from Goa and convener of a cross-parliamentary forum on education, from continuing to see the NCERT circular as the only evil. He refers to the efforts of the Bipin Chandra Committee, set up in 1991 to review school textbooks: "It submitted two reports. The reports were sent to the state governments... That is the civilised way of going about changing textbooks."



Chandra, former history professor at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University, headed the committee that studied textbooks in various states, regional languages, even RSS-affiliated Saraswati Sishu Mandirs. "We submitted our first report in 1993," he says, "and second in 1996. We were not allowed to submit our third in 1998." On the other end of the history rainbow is Dinanath Batra, general secretary of the Vidya Bharati Akhil criticism as "saffronisation"



Bharatiya Shiksha Sansthan and sworn enemy of the unholy trinity of "Macaulay, Mark and Madrassah-wadis (Islamists)". Batra, said to be one of Rajput's inspirations, asserts, "History books have been distorted by all state governments to suit their ideology. Right now we are deleting some sentences that offend sensitivities of certain communities." So it doesn't matter if the Jats sacked Delhi or didn't, as long as the Jat vote in western Uttar Pradesh can be wooed on the basis of changed textbooks.



It is not as if common ground cannot be reached in teaching the past. Take the European Union, composed of nations that have routinely slaughtered each other's people. The European Standing Conference of History Teachers' Associations (Euro-Clio) "organises workshops to debate the teaching of conflicting episodes and personalities of European history".



Can't this happen in India? It can, but that pre-supposes honest practitioners of history and of education, not necessarily ones without opinions but people with a clarity of thought and articulation. Till India returns to that golden age of history teaching, Faleiro can keep screaming, Batra can keep screeching, Rajput can keep looking for HRD ministers to get close to - in the early 1990s, he was Arjun Singh's trusted aide. Oh yes, your child can keep being bored brainless by his or her government-sponsored history textbook

SHOWN THE RED CARD

Some of the passages deleted by NCERT

"In 1675, Guru Tegh Bahadur was arrested... and executed. The official explanation for this... is that after his return from Assam, the Guru... had resorted to plundering and rapine, laying waste the Punjab. According to Sikh tradition, the execution was due to the intrigues of some members of his family who disputed his succession... Aurangzeb was annoyed because the Guru had converted a few Muslims to Sikhism... For Aurangzeb, the execution of the Guru was only a law and order question."

Medieval India, Satish Chandra



"If Mahavira is taken as the last or the 24th Tirthankara, the origin of Jainism would be taken back to the 9th century B.C. But since most of the earliest teachers, up to the 15th one, were supposed to have been born in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, their historicity is extremely doubtful... Obviously the mythology of the Tirthankaras seems to have been created to give antiquity to Jainism... Mahavira kept on wandering for 12 years from place to place... During the course of his long journey, it is said, he never changed his clothes for 12 years."

Ancient India by R.S. Sharma



"Another power that arose in this period in the region around Delhi, Agra and Mathura was that of the Jats. They founded their state at Bharatpur wherefrom they conducted plundering raids in the regions around and participated in the court intrigues at Delhi."

Modern India by Arjun Dev and Indira Arjun Dev MORE BIZARRE STUFF

Future battle zones for NCERT?

"Aurangzeb took a number of measures which have been called puritanical, but many of which were really of an economic and social character, and against superstitious beliefs. Thus, he forbade singing in the court and the official musicians were pensioned off. Instrumental music and naubat (the royal band) were, however, continued."

Medieval India by Satish Chandra



"Although Shivaji had assumed the title of 'Haindava-Dharmoddharak' (Protector of the Hindu faith), he plundered mercilessly the Hindu population of the area."

Medieval India by Satish Chandra



"Many brahmanas functioned as poets, and... were generously rewarded by the king. Karikala is said to have given one poet 1,600,000 gold pieces but this seems to be an exaggeration... The poets or bards also received cash, land, chariots, horses and even elephants. The Tamil brahmanas took meat and wine."

Ancient India by R.S. Sharma



"In Britain itself, the common people, including industrial workers who had emerged as a new social class, had organised themselves and were demanding equal political rights...Their leaders supported the aims of the revolt in (1857)... and condemned atrocities committed by the British troops... It was their view that the British domination of India benefited only the small upper sections of British society against whom the common people of Britain were themselves struggling."

Modern India by Arjun Dev and Indira Arjun Dev

-with Sharad Gupta

