Imagining history

In the second half of the 19th century, textbook transmission formed but one facet of the wider significance of print culture. We know, for example, how contestations over history reveal the part played by school textbooks as ideological tools in the Raj’s projection of itself through critical representations of pre-colonial past.

We also know how the British government carefully monitored, with the aid of an extensive bureaucratic network, what was to be included in, or left out from, the school or college curriculum. Thus, an elementary treatise on the art of writing the Persian characters was recommended by the Director of Public Instruction as ‘‘original and scholarly, and will be of use in schools’’. In another case, Munshi Zakaullah, headmaster of a school in Delhi, was rewarded ‘‘for the industry displayed in the preparation of this excellent series of scientific works, and for his public spirit in publishing them’’.

Indian historians during the colonial period were sensitive to the importance of writing textbooks in order to contest the colonial version of the past. Thus the Allahabad-based historian, Iswari Prasad, produced a History of Medireview India ‘‘to correct the common errors of history and to make the presentation of the subject as attractive as possible’’. He made clear, in 1925, that a historian was not a party politician or a political propagandist, and that his function was to state and interpret the facts without allowing his own prejudices to influence the discussion of his theme or warp his judgement.

The moral of the story is this: our historians possessed the skills and expertise to write textbooks and, after Independence, this task should have been left to individual writers and not undertaken by the government. Officially sponsored works run the risk of being withdrawn, as illustrated by the experience in 1977 and now, with a change in regime. Besides, writing textbooks at the behest of a government can turn messy in a society where the reading of the past is contested with unfailing regularity. Even where contestations are not so sharp, the norm is to encourage wide learning and not to prescribe a set of books produced by an official body.

Alas, we have paid little attention to the curriculum and the method of teaching in our schools. Krishna Kumar’s recent book — Prejudice and Pride: School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan — points to the poor quality of history teaching in schools and its indifference to the child’s intellectual development and interest in the past. History teaching, according to him, does not translate itself into a concern for the children who are at the receiving end.

In addition, history teaching serves as a means of ideological indoctrination. So that history’s role in arousing an interest in the past and respect for it gets totally sidelined. Both in India and Pakistan, history is pressed into service to promote the project of nation building. Consequently, the rival ideologies of nationalism are underlined not to heighten the critical faculties of our students but to create a sense of pride in their Indian or Pakistani citizenship. This being the case, the selective marshaling of intellectual resources reinforces not only stereotypes and prejudices, but also widens the existing rift between the people of India and Pakistan.

Doubtless, India and Pakistan are separate geographical entities. But, then, is it fair to deny to their school and college students their shared past and collective memories? The painful reality is that the project of history writing in Pakistan, more than in India, has been tailored to suit the ideologies of the ruling elites. As a result, our shared past is bruised and fragmented. Indian histories are being written, often untidily, by Indian historians; Pakistani historians are, at the same time, busy writing the history of Pakistan with little or no sense of the unities in their past. In this melee the historian of the subcontinent, without being rooted in his fatherland or motherland, turns into a comic figure. Asked to analyse an artificially contrived and divided past, his attempts to discern elements of unity, continuity and coherence invite rebuke and repudiation.

The state in Pakistan has invested a great deal to rationalise the two-nation theory. In India the eclecticism of the first generation of liberal and left-wing historians has given way to chauvinistic versions of the past. Instead of harnessing the creative energies of our students, their staple diet consists of an odd mixture of myths, mythologies, legends and modern-day fantasies. The arduous journey of a historian is, thus, wasted.

Authors of The History of the Freedom Movement in Pakistan and Struggle for Freedom (Vol. 11 of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan Series) had a common project — to undermine what was, in essence, the composite perspective on, and the pluralist interpretation of, Indian history. This convergence is not accidental, for Hindu and Muslim nationalists formulate their theories on the strength of separate religious communities plotting their destiny in a sharply defined Muslim or a Hindu universe. Their worldview on various other matters, nowadays projected in deciphering the past, has been largely shaped by much the same assumptions. Hence, the secular spokesman becomes their common enemy, and is designated as the intellectual terrorist.

Today, our students are exposed to another intellectual threat — attempts to design region, ethnicity or community-based curricula. If this trend continues in the form of pandering to Sikh or Jat sentiments for electoral reasons, we may soon find ourselves reading just the Jat, Sikh and Maratha histories. What will happen to Indian history is anybody’s guess.

History, stated R.C. Majumdar, co-author of a major textbook published in 1946, did not respect persons or communities; second, its aim is to find out the truth by following the canons commonly accepted as sound; finally, to express the findings irrespective of political considerations. If so, let us avoid playing politics with students, and let us also scrupulously refrain from invoking symbols of discord in order to legitimise our contemporary political concerns. Education has a vital role to play in helping India and Pakistan overcome the chronically unsettling effects of their interlocked frames of perception. Inculcating a respect for the past and the curiosity to make sense of it is a major educational challenge for societies where denial of the past and the urge to change it has enjoyed popular validity.

Hopefully, Kathmandu has shown the way. An India-Pakistan History Congress in Delhi or Lahore may well be the next step towards healing the wounds of the past. If not cricket, let the teaching of history be an instrument of peace in the subcontinent.

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