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print versionGeorgetown Journal of International Affairs, 2009, 10(1).
by Kamala Visweswaran, Michael Witzel, Nandini Manjrenkar, Dipta Bhog, and Uma Chakravarti
"When Hindu nationalist (or Sangh Parivar) organizations in India came to power at the national level in 1998, one of the first things they did was to establish a National Curriculum Framework (NCF) to change textbook content. The 2000 NCF curriculum debate reflected the intense conflict between competing visions of national identity that had dominated India’s public and political discourse over the previous two decades. In a significant departure from earlier curriculum frameworks of 1972 and 1986, which stressed democratic values, social justice, and national integration through appreciation of the commonalities of different subcultures, the principal focus of the NCF was “value education.†1 The chief end of history, as of education as a whole, was presented as the development of a “national spirit†and “national consciousness†through generating pride in the younger generation regarding India’s past and its unique “religio-philosophical ethos, which was presented as primarily Hindu.†2 These actions were vociferously challenged by academics and progressive, secular, liberal, and left groups who decried the Sangh Parivar’s ideological efforts to recast history.
In the summer and fall months of 2005, U.S. “Hindu†organizations with Sanghties protested the California Board of Education, claiming that California textbooks discriminated against Hindus and presented a demeaning image of Hinduism. While there were indeed problems with the representation of Hinduism in the textbooks, the overall aim of the changes proposed by the Hindu Education Foundation and the Vedic Foundation was to propagate false notions of Indian history, such as that “Aryans†were the original or indigenous inhabitants of India, and that the core essence of Hinduism can be found in the Vedic religion of the Aryans.
We will argue that these textbook edits attempt to manufacture a majoritarian view of society in which the cultural and political space for minorities will progressively shrink. The ongoing violence against Muslims in Gujarat, where the Sangh Parivar’s political arm, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) first came into office in the mid-1990s, and elsewhere in India, suggests that such a curriculum creates a setting in which social intolerance and injustices against minorities can be justified. U.S. legislators, policy-makers, and educators must therefore be particularly vigilant about the transplantation of this ideology to the United States in a post-9/11 climate.3"
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Download and read full text here:
- The Hindutva View of History: Rewriting Textbooks in India and the United States
- by Kamala Visweswaran, Michael Witzel, Nandini Manjrenkar, Dipta Bhog, and Uma Chakravarti
Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, 2009, 10(1).
