78 "Presenting" the Past
cal about what they read in the books. Politicization, on the other hand,
does not disguise personal viewpoints behind the mask of objectivity, but
encourages the quest for truth and reason through discussion of ideas.^9
Quite often the students are presented in textbooks with one version of
reality that "embodies certain interests, reifies certain interpretations and
value judgments and gives prominence to some pieces of knowledge while
rendering others invisible."^10 In nationalistic contexts, the goal of history
teaching is to present the history of the homeland and the nation's past to
strengthen the people's patriotic consciousness. The creative imaginings
of the dominant powers and the repeated recitals of those "facts" in the
so-called educational process have invariably left deleterious effects on
the society. India is no exception to this trend.
It was European writers who had compiled the history textbooks that
were used in the schools and colleges of India. They laid emphasis on
difference and portrayed Hindu-Muslim relations in the light of violence,
conquest, rapine, and religious bigotry. Hindus were made to believe that
the Muslim period of Indian history was a nightmare. Muslims, on the
other hand, fed their self-respect upon the deeds of conquest and ignored
the remoter past that molded their cultural milieu. B.N. Pande quotes
George Francis Hamilton, the secretary of state for India, writing to Cur-
zon, the governor general: "I think the real danger to our rule in India not
now but say 50 years hence is the gradual adoption and extension of West-
ern ideas of agitation, and, if we could break educated Indians into two
sections holding widely different views, we should, by such a division,
strengthen our position against the subtle and continuous attack which
the spread of education must make upon our system of Government. We
should so plan the educational text-books that the differences between
community and community are further strengthened." Building on this
British heritage of colonial education, the communalists have continued
self-colonization in full earnest by adding concoctions and falsehoods to
textbook writing. For instance, in 1928 Har Prashad Shastri claimed in a
Calcutta University history textbook that "three thousand Brahmins com-
mitted suicide as Tippu wanted to convert them forcibly into the fold of
Islam." On Pande's proving that it was a falsehood, the book was with-
drawn. However, the same suicide story reappeared in junior-high-school
textbooks in UP in 1972.^11
When the BJP came to power in four northern states in 1991, their gov-
ernment in UP added new chapters in history textbooks glorifying India's
cultural heritage and reiterating that the Aryans were the original inhabi-
tants of India and not immigrants. In MP they rewrote the entire textbooks
from nursery to the postgraduate level with a Hindu emphasis. History
books projected Hindu rulers such as Rana Pratap and Shivaji as heroes
and Muslim rulers such as Aurangzeb as villains. The Madhya Pradesh
State University Grants Commission introduced a new book, Bharat ki
Sanskritik Virasat (Cultural Heritage of India), in the foundation courses.