Edition 2: Exploring the Gaps in Learning History

This week, I continue my internal (and now externally voiced) grapple with history: I am particularly fascinated by different versions of the same lived history, taught, learnt, believed in South Asia – among India and her neighbours. We have rarely questioned the authorship of the dominant historical narratives taught in our schools; who writes our history text-books; who authorizes what children are taught; do we encourage critical thinking by introducing diverse points of view? We have also underestimated the deep impact of what is taught as history on the perspectives and world-view of the adults that these children become.  

MJ Akbar writes in Tinderbox, The Past and Future of Pakistan: “One of Zia’s[1] most important projects was an intensified conversion of school history into anti-Hindu and anti-India distortions …Zia’s manipulation of education, however, introduced deep, communal distortions from the primary-school level that no successor, civilian or military, has had the courage to correct.” 

Hand-on-heart, many of us will attest to a similar, but reverse “indoctrination”, the stories we were told, the myths that abounded for some of us who grew up in the sixties, the portraits that were drawn in our history text-books of national figures of the freedom struggle: Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Patel, Tilak and even Subhash Chandra Bose. 

Looking back, I also saw large gaps in the history I was taught. Indian history began with the Vedic Age, moved rapidly to the Indus Valley Civilization – Mohenjo Daro and Harappa which are modern-day Pakistan. From there, skipping a few thousand years, we were thrown into Mughal History with the arrival of Babar and the white-and-black figures of Akbar and Aurangzeb. And then the Independence Movement, ending with the assassination of Gandhi. References to the Persian and Greek influence much before the Mughals, Hindu dynasties like those of Chandragupta Maurya and Ashoka, the two world wars and their impact on colonialism and India’s independence; indeed, the gradual end of British imperialism across the world received but a passing mention. The stringing of history by joining the dots that represented important moments, some cataclysmic like the proverbial last straw (remember the great Archduke Ferdinand) to some gradual, perhaps hardly-felt yet crucial shifts (like the arrival of the seemingly benign East India Company on Indian soil in 1612 or so) is an art sadly, completely missing in the writers of our text-books.

My children (ages 24 and 19) learnt history across ICSE, IGCSE and IB curricula; it was mostly focused on World History: the American, French and Russian revolutions; the two World Wars and ending with the Cold War (history is generally meant to cover events at least 50 years old). I fear that urban, private school educated children in India have very little understanding of Indian history. I also dare suggest that modern Indian history (I love the term “modern history”) cannot be understood without understanding the history of the Indian sub-continent. This is where things start becoming edgy: can the history of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have different versions before August 15, 1947, August 14, 1947 and March 26, 1971 (August 14, 1947 as East Pakistan), respectively? Can the highly intertwined histories of the Indian sub-continent with Nepal[2] as a Hindu Kingdom and Sri Lanka[3] as the country with the longest continuous history of Buddhism really have different versions, each to suit prevailing political or religious dispensation?

Finally, I end this piece with an interesting and even amusing story about one of the central characters – Ravana – in the Hindu epic, the Ramayana. This story shows that even mythology has different versions, depending on who’s telling it, of course! In the Indian version of the Ramayana, Ravana abducts Sita, wife of Lord Rama (of Ayodhya fame!), imprisons her in his palace in Lanka (now Sri Lanka), until Lord Rama fights the good fight, kills Ravana and re-claims Sita as his wife. This is of course a much distilled, sanitized version. But one thing is undisputed: Rama is the good guy, Ravana is the bad guy. Not so for the Sri Lankans. Want to know more? Read this piece: https://www.srilanka.travel/ravana.

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References:

[1] For some of us who are too young to remember, Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq (1924 – 1988) was a Pakistani four-star general who became the sixth President of Pakistan after declaring martial law in 1977. He served as the head of state from 1978 until his death in 1988. He was killed along with several of his top military officials and two American diplomats in a mysterious plane crash near Bahawalpur in August 1988.  He remains the country’s longest-serving head of state.

 [2] The name "Nepal" is first recorded in texts from the Vedic period of the Indian subcontinent, the era in ancient India when Hinduism was founded, the predominant religion of the country. In the middle of the first millennium BCE, Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, was born in Lumbini in southern Nepal.

[3] Arahath Mahinda, son of Indian Buddhist emperor Ashoka, led the mission to Sri Lanka in 246 BCE when he converted the Sri Lankan king, Devanampiya Tissa, to Buddhism.