With textbook changes, new ‘facts’ for a new nation, and a bid to control public memory

The National Council of Educational Research and Training has again ‘rationalised’ portions of its school textbooks, ostensibly to reduce workload on students. But let alone help nurture critical thinking with a less-is-more approach that aligns with the National Education Policy, it has – just like before – done little beyond the papering over of inconvenient political events.

In the class 11 and 12 political science textbooks, for example, most revisions this time are linked to the Babri Masjid, Manipur, Kashmir and the Gujarat pogrom. Last year, social science textbooks had dropped references to Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, the dislike he had invited from “Hindu extremists” for his “steadfast pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity”, and about the ban on the RSS. Chunks on Mughal history were also removed, and so were paragraphs pertaining to the Emergency and the misuse of powers by the government.

It’s not just about a power tussle. There have been several other serious challenges surrounding Indian school textbooks and quality of education.

Rote learning, cut-offs and the ‘rationalising’ of content 

The recent revisions have been justified by the initiatives that were taken to reduce workload on students during Covid-19 – a policy that spilled over into the National Educational Policy 2020 that emphasises the same. 

Having studied from the NCERT throughout my school years and written the class 12 board exams in March 2020, just before the nationwide lockdown for Covid was put in place, I empathise with this sentiment. These textbooks, many of which were written brilliantly by India’s top academics, had gradually become instruments to rote-learn for board exams. So much so that even the writers did not entirely agree with how students were tested on these. 

There have also been questions linked to evaluation and university admissions. 

I remember an academic who was part of NCERT for several years being dismayed on hearing that his students will be tested based on multiple choice questions in the board exams. “These books were not written for this kind of an examination,” I remember him saying.

In addition to this, the cut-off system to get into public universities based on this one examination was also heavily criticised. And rightly so. How could one expect students to get 100 percent across all their papers for admission? This was replaced by the new centralised exam called the CUCET, which, though sensible in theory, has been marked by major issues every year, with many students getting centres far away from their homes, only to be turned away because their name was not to be found on the list. This is not to mention the systemic inequalities this produced. By giving rise to preparation centres, it ended up easing admissions for those who could pay this additional amount. 

Though these aspects of the NCERT textbooks and board exams have been criticised time and again, the government’s response has been to ‘rationalise’ the content in textbooks, somehow always in ways that delete a line or two, or chapters, that are politically inconvenient. 

‘New facts’ for a ‘new nation’

The Babri Masjid’s ‘demolition’, which was mentioned in the earlier draft, has been erased entirely; instead, the students will now learn only about the ‘Ram Janmabhoomi temple movement’. One may disagree on the semantics of what happened, despite tons of comprehensive studies on the subject, but it is hard to make sense of how a temple movement rose to prominence in the first place if there was nothing prior to that. It fails to even refer to the most basic questions: what did the movement want, and what did it do? This is not just partial information, but in de-historicising what happened, promotes make-belief in the name of history. 

It is as if there is a concerted effort to forget and make forget about what led to the demolition by pinning it on the act’s spurious legitimacy given by the Supreme Court in its ruling. Earlier, the question that the textbook asked was about the ‘demolition’ of Babri Masjid, now it is about the Supreme Court judgement on the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. 

Another change is related to Manipur’s history of accession to the Indian Union. In two lines, the previous textbook mentioned how the Indian government ‘pressurised’ the Maharaja of Manipur into signing the Merger Agreement, and how this led to resentment among the people which has had continued repercussions till date. The new textbook keeps the first line, replacing pressurising with persuading, but entirely removes the second. 

Almost a year after the conflict between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo broke out to devastating impact, is there desperate hope that people will forget about historical tensions and the government’s inactions? This outright removal does not represent some new changes that had to be incorporated, nor was the line so onerous that students could not have understood how historical events lead to tensions now. So why remove it? 

It’s clear that the textbooks’ real attempt is not student-facing, but is to serve the government’s interests, towing the official narrative. What this is really is an attempt to play with people’s memory, and regulate the vocabulary and sentiment based on which they know and how they relate to it. 

This is done by stripping facts of their contexts, in the process creating new facts for a ‘new nation’. Forgetting here does not take place over time, but is immediate – with the immediate cutting of the umbilical cord that relates facts to contexts. Instead of forgetting over time, people are made to forget with the curricular changes in a way that if people express knowledge other than what is imparted to them, they can be punished. This focus on memory clearly shows how important ‘rationalisations’ are for the governing dispensation’s goals. If you cannot remember, you can be governed better because it means there will be lower scope for you to resist. 

This does not only have pedagogical impacts, limiting students’ actual learning, but sets a dangerous precedent, wherein education is not to impart knowledge or allow students to engage in critical thinking, but to limit what they know to what the government wants them to know. 

In the long run, it risks producing a citizenry that will stand in support of the status quo, believing that knowledge only flows from the government and what they say is true. This risks democracy itself because democracies are built over democratic sentiment, a sentiment of debating and resisting what is packaged as ‘true’ knowledge. A citizenry that cannot think critically about what they are told – because the scope of what they can know is limited by the state – cannot fully participate in democratic politics. 

The rationalising of textbooks in this manner is hence not just a concern of the students or teachers lecturing them, but one for all of us who care about India’s democratic ethos.

The writer is a Master’s student of South Asian studies at the University of Oxford.