“What we teach you in schools is not so much history as nation-building,” were the words of our much beloved history teacher to us, just before we were about to graduate and enter university. It shocked us because we had laboured under the illusion that for the last several years, we had indeed been studying history and not taking part in a nation-building project. Yet on deeper reflection our teacher’s words did speak to a deeper truth. The nation does need to produce what it regards as suitable citizens; and in a publicly funded and constructed schooling-system the teaching of history plays an important role in this. As anthropologists have commented both myths and history are ways of understanding the past and their separate treatment can be problematic; leading to struggles over how to study and to understand the past. The most recent revisions to the NCERT textbooks by the current government can be seen in this respect. The decision to remove much of the material on the Mughals and to alter references to Gandhi’s inclusive approach to different religious communities and excise mentions of the banning of the RSS and communalism; speaks to the broader project of cultural nationalism espoused by the Hindu Right. For if history teaching in schools is in large, a nation-building project; it raises two important questions: how is history to be taught and secondly what kind of citizens do societies want to produce?
The first question is a methodological one, which teaches students the difference between different types of historical sources: how to interpret these sources, the need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of different types of evidence and most importantly to recognise the biases contained within different types of sources and one’s own conscious and unconscious biases. By starting from wrong assumptions, misusing, and mis-presenting the evidence, confining and distorting the facts and by selectively omitting key periods and erasing inconvenient facts from the textbooks containing our modern and recent history; this regime would be limiting the critical ability to conceptualise how history is produced and studied all in the pursuit of their own narrow specific nation-building project.
The second question regarding what kind of citizens does society want to produce and by extension what kind nation is desirable; is a historiographical one — what kind of and interpretation of history needs to be taught towards achieving this end. Here the periodisation and categorisation of history by this regime shows an inability to steer a course between the Scylla of a reactionary indigenous essentialism and the Charybdis of an internalised Orientalism producing a very derivative discourse.
The search for an ‘’authentic’’ essentialist core that can provide a coherent, unifying national identity leads down some troubling rabbit holes. Hence the refusal to countenance that there was an Indo-Aryan migration and an insistence that Indians have always lived in India, springing autochthonously from the soil as it were. The search for a common core identity based on ascriptive elements such as ethnicity or language etc. is a doomed search for a Holy Grail that doesn’t exist and one that can only be created up by manipulating or fabricating historical evidence resulting in the words of The Economist “an abuse of history leading to fevered dreams” (13th April, 2023). As the French philosopher Ernst Renan commented; it’s a characteristic of new nations that they always like to present themselves as old ones. In his famous meditation on what constitutes a nation Renan further expanded that in the end it isn’t a common language, race or religion that makes a nation; as these ultimately prove insufficient to act as a national cement and cannot in effect be extended to include all within the polity of the nation; but rather a shared and common memory, usually one of shared grief and suffering.
The alterations in the NCERT textbooks seek to achieve this in a specific way; both by excising key periods of history, most notably that of Mughal rule and also, by it’s latent periodisation which repeats the old colonial trope of dividing Indian history into: an ancient Hindu Golden Age, followed by a Dark Age of Islamic incursions symbolised as Rajmohan Gandhi terms it in his popular history of India seen through the lens of revenge and reconciliation by: violence, temple destruction and forced conversion, followed by a period of recovery and reform under colonial rule. By replacing colonial era with independent India and hiding behind a cloak of decolonialising rhetoric, this reveals the underlying internalised Orientalism of Hindu Nationalism, which faithfully repeats the simplified and reductionist historiography of earlier European historiography.
Both these approaches not only misrepresent the past but are explicitly nation-building projects of a certain type — one which is highly conservative, anti-individualistic, uncritical of the process of identity and group-formation and which is fearful of change and unwilling to acknowledge that along with continuity, change plays an important and vital role understanding our past. This is in contrast to earlier historiography, which represented a rather different type of nation-building, perhaps best represented most famously by Nehru’s well-known metaphor of a palimpsest whereby different and successive waves of influences and peoples each left their unique mark to form a composite national Indian identity.
To combat these misrepresentations and misunderstandings of history; we need to accept that history cannot be understood as a Salvation History: cast as a fall from grace from an imaginary (mostly Hindu of course) Golden Age, to a Dark one foisted on us by villainous external forces (read Muslim), with redemption coming in the form of a masculinised and hyper-aggressive modern nationalism. Rather we should see it as more of a Nietzschean genealogy: full of breaks and discontinuities without any simple unilinear Whiggish progress to an idealised present or future nirvana. One where to discern any kind of pattern in the past is a process of painstaking study rather than nationalist imagination.
In a democratic age, a democratic society should produce a democratic history, as the prominent political philosopher and theorist of democracy Tocqueville propounded. A history that is not only empirically honest and methodologically sound but one which allows us to learn genuinely from the past and be challenged by it; in order that we can better understand who we are and how we got here. And one, where if we are to incorporate elements of nation-building and a common imaginary; which isn’t based on falsifying the historical record or a selective memory based on crude manipulations but which is multi-vocal and inclusive.
Conrad Barwa is a senior research analyst at a private think-tank, and a senior research associate at the Birmingham Business School
