India set to cut Hindu bias from history books

SMH.com.au ^ | June 28, 2004 | SMH

[CarrotAndStick]

India's new government is poised to rewrite the history taught to schoolchildren after a panel of eminent historians recommended scrapping textbooks written by scholars hand-picked by the previous Hindu nationalist administration.

Hundreds of thousands of textbooks are likely to be dropped by the National Council of Educational Research and Training, the central government body that sets the national curriculum for students up to 18.

The move, one of the first made by the new Congress-led government, will strongly signal a departure from the program of its predecessor.

The "saffronisation" of history, critics of the last government say, depicted India's Muslim rulers as barbarous invaders and the medieval period as a dark age of Islamic colonial rule that snuffed out the glories of the Hindu empire that preceded it.

One textbook claimed that the Taj Mahal, the Qu'tb Minar and the Red Fort, three of India's outstanding examples of Islamic architecture, were designed and commissioned by Hindus. Most controversial was the book History of India, by the country's foremost historian, Romila Thapar. This concluded that the "Aryans", venerated by the Hindu right as indigenous geniuses who created the Indus Valley civilisation, were nomadic tribes who spread from the Middle East.

Advertisement Advertisement Ms Thapar was removed from the Indian Council for Historical Research less than three months after the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party took power in 1999.

There has also been much criticism of the way that the pernicious effects of the caste system had been played down or simply been erased from history books.

The three-member panel of historians examining the "inadequacies" of history textbooks recommended the "discontinuation" of their use in the national syllabus.

The Government will decide early next month to what extent it will accept the academics' verdict, but as it has stressed that it will seek to reach out to minorities, it is expected to implement the report in full.

Religious revivalists have wanted to emphasise the uniqueness of Hinduism and its resilience to "foreign" invasion. Many on the Hindu right are furious that their revisionist interpretation of history is now being revised, blaming the influence of "leftists and Marxists".

The Guardian

[cyborg]

ping for the history buffs

The "saffronisation" of history, critics of the last government say, depicted India's Muslim rulers as barbarous invaders and the medieval period as a dark age of Islamic colonial rule that snuffed out the glories of the Hindu empire that preceded...

***From what I read of past muslim invasions, I'd say they were barbarous but what invading force from anywhere wasn't barbarous?

[sc2_ct]

Great, so India, who has somehow managed to survive their Islamic neighbors, conquorers and warlords, is finally going to be done in by the intellectual elite "for the children". Touching.

[isrul]

Attention all Hindus: Mohammedan prayer rugs now on special in aisle five. Get ready to abandon you culture or your life.

[Aquinasfan]

Great, so India, who has somehow managed to survive their Islamic neighbors, conquorers and warlords, is finally going to be done in by the intellectual elite "for the children". Touching.

My feelings exactly.

[Cicero]

It would be good if they could eliminate the most egregious propaganda while avoiding the introduction of more propaganda of a different kind.

Sure, there were problems with Hinduism, including the Untouchable problem. The Caste system was much worse than any western Class system. But the Muslims were bloody invaders, who only managed to form a civilization insofar as they absorbed some of the ideas of the civilizations they invaded.

Muslim art, for instance. There is a lot of great Indian Muslim art. But it's not drawn from their Islamic heritage, which is rigidly iconoclastic.

[valkyrieanne]

The "saffronisation" of history, critics of the last government say, depicted India's Muslim rulers as barbarous invaders and the medieval period as a dark age of Islamic colonial rule that snuffed out the glories of the Hindu empire that preceded it.

And this is untrue because ...?

Actually, people upset by outsourcing should welcome these developments. (Neutrino: that's why I pinged you.) India is in the midst of an educational "revolution" right now, similar to what we went through in the 1960s, when our own educational system got radically dumbed down. Not only do the Indians want to censor their own history (just like liberals replaced US history with feely-good "social studies"), they want to redesign their whole educational system to make it more "sensitive," more "caring," more "culturally aware," and less focused on "drill" and "memorization."

IMO we should encourage them, because enough of that touchy-feely, "let's be sensitive" horse manure & their people won't be worth outsourcing to - even at bargain-basement rates.

[neutrino]

Thanks for the ping, Valkyrieanne!

IMO we should encourage them, because enough of that touchy-feely, "let's be sensitive" horse manure & their people won't be worth outsourcing to - even at bargain-basement rates.

I agree! I wonder if we can get the NEA to help them with curriculum development? (Evil grin!)

[Cronos]

From what I read of past muslim invasions, I'd say they were barbarous but what invading force from anywhere wasn't barbarous?

WEll the majority were barbarous, but however the Mughals did usher in a lot of development. Though the first (and greatest Mughals) were secular.

[sukhoi-30mki]

Well actually the Hindu-muslim stuff isnt the only thing which was hotly disputed-SAMPLE what they thought bout Adolf Hitler(whom these hardline Hindus adore for his Aryan ideology)-HE restored German pride-made it a strong confident nation blah blah blah ,but not a word bout the Holocaust or his generous actions during the war.They even rubbished over the freedom struggle saying it was more due to international reasons&not due to the efforts of the people(led by Gandhi,Nehru etc)
While I understand&appreciate the hatred most folks here have for Islam- one should not blindly support similar forms of hate which border on Fascism towards everyone including Christians and others.It's much like writing a textbook in the US which says that the confederates were a great civilisation&people like Abraham Lincoln were all mere footnotes.

[SunkenCiv]

Most controversial was the book History of India, by the country's foremost historian, Romila Thapar. This concluded that the "Aryans", venerated by the Hindu right as indigenous geniuses who created the Indus Valley civilisation, were nomadic tribes who spread from the Middle East.

The current view, which I regard as pure poison (and generally I support Hindu movements because Islam is the common threat to all) is that the Aryans didn't enter India from elsewhere, that they were indigenous. That's just nationalistic, jingoistic, horse dung.

Parpula's two volumes of photographs covering the collections of India and Pakistan, which appeared in 1987 and 1991... and his 1994 sign list, containing 386 signs (as against Mahadevan's 419 signs), are generally recognized as fine achievements, not least by Mahadevan... This is a significant figure. It is too high for a syllabary like Linear B... and too low for a highly logographic script like Chinese. the nearest comparison... are probably the Hittite hieroglyphs with about 500 signs and Sumerian cuneiform with perhaps 600+ signs... Most scholars therefore agree that the Indus script is likely to be a logosyllabic script like its west Asian contemporaries. [pp 281-284]

These Dravidian speakers are presumably remnants of a once-widespread Dravidian culture submerged by encroaching Indo-Aryans in the 2nd millennium BC... The Indo-Aryan hymns, the Vedas... recount tales of conquest of the forts of the dark-skinned Dasa or Dasyu... the Vedas repeatedly mention the horse in their descriptions of warfare and sacrifice, and this animal was clearly a vital part of Indo-Aryan society... But there is not horse imagery at all in the Indus Valley civilization and virtually no horse remains have been found by archaeologists. Hence the Indus civilizations is unlikely to have been Indo-Aryan. [pp 290-291]

Robinson mentions "a substantial inscription found at Dholavira near the coast of Kutch in 1990, which appears to have been a kind of sign board for the city." [p 295]

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Lost Languages: The Enigma Of The World's Undeciphered Scripts by Andrew Robinson

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Uncracked Ancient Codes
(Lost Languages reviewed)
by William C. West

Sanskrit and early Dravidian, the ancient languages of India, seem to be the keys to deciphering the highly challenging script of the Indus Valley civilization of the third millennium b.c. in what is now Pakistan and northwest India. As with other languages, a photographic corpus of drawings, a sign list and a concordance must be compiled before decipherment will be possible. Work has proceeded along these lines for inscriptions on some 3,700 objects from the Indus Valley, most of them seal stones with very brief inscriptions (the longest has only 26 characters)... Robinson's descriptions of such analysis, and his accounts of both successful and unsuccessful decoding attempts, are clear, provocative and stimulating.

Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on, off, or alter the "Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list --
Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
The GGG Digest -- Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)

[expatguy]

Another victory for Islam.

[SunkenCiv]

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