Ramarajya: Envisioning the Future and Entrenching the Past 77of political socialization are identified: the manifest or direct socialization,
which takes place in an open and direct fashion, and the latent or autono-
mous socialization, which is a more subtle acquisition of political values, atti-
tudes, and identities through various activities. These processes may range
from school textbooks and print and electronic media to gossip and rumor,
from everyday exposure to government in action to accounts of the glori-
ous days of, say, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The latent socialization
processes assume an even greater role, as the state's political-socialization
efforts do not stop with schools or universities but permeate every sphere
of life. Furthermore, other sources of political socialization, such as political
parties, mass media, and institutions of worship willingly collaborate with
the state in the perpetuation of national identity. Schwartz and Mannella
point out that "if people learn anything about politics, or relevant to politics,
from the songs they listen to and sing, the books and magazines they read,
the movies and television they watch, the jokes they laugh at, the rumors
they hear and spread—if the stimuli of everyday life have any significant
effect on people's politics—we do not seem to know very much about it or
to care very much about it in the study of political socialization."^5
An important inspiration for political socialization all through human
life is the question of "who we are." This collective political self, accord-
ing to Dawson and Prewitt, includes feelings such as political attachments
and loyalties that are directed toward the nation and its symbols. Such a
political self is made and not born.^6 It is made in many ways, and chief
among them is the constant rewriting and retelling of national history that
socializes everyone in the society—young and old, literate and illiterate,
or peasants and professionals.
Schooling is particularly a strong political tool in this process for the
powers that be. Modern education was brought to countries such as India
as a mechanism "by which colonialism has sought to render itself effec-
tively permanent, creating the conditions by which the colonized could
be made essentially self-colonizing, eternally subjugated in psychic and
intellectual terms and thus eternally self-subordinating in economic and
political terms."^7 The influence of colonial education has promoted the
"textbook culture" that has invested the teacher with authority on "offi-
cial knowledge." The textual practices of textbooks may vary from hiding
to highlighting, adding to avoiding, casual sloppiness to calculated slips,
factual errors to political slanting. These are nothing but documented per-
ceptions of bias or subtle bias. History programs certainly contain a lot of
mythical, victimological, and banal information.^8
The content and form of textbooks could be either indoctrinating or
politicizing. Magnus Haavelsrud sees a radical content and method as
politicization, and a reactionary content and method as indoctrination.
Indoctrination may involve disguising subjective viewpoints as objective
truth, exclusion of opposing causal explanations, and problematization of
tactics and strategies. The students are not asked or encouraged to be criti-