Krishna Kumar, Prejudice and Pride: School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan. (Penguin, India) Price not mentioned.
For a long time, well-meaning people in both India and Pakistan have been concerned with the school textbooks in both countries. In Pakistan several scholars, including the historian K.K Aziz and the sociologist Rubina Saigol have pointed out that our textbooks are propagandist. These books distort facts to create hatred against India and the Hindus. They also attempt to brainwash children into supporting aggressive policies and glorify war and the military.
On the Indian side some scholars, including the famous historian Romila Thapar, have protested against the increasing ‘saffronisation’ ---that is, the rewriting of history from the point of view of the extremist Hindu lobby which results in creating hatred for Pakistan in particular and the Muslims in general. The ruling Bharatia Janata Party is said to support this project but the efforts of some scholars have impeded it.
The book under review is another such effort. But it is not an appeal to the government or the public to do this or that. It is a scholarly analysis of how history is represented in the school textbooks of Pakistan and India. From this, of course, we are meant to draw lessons and possibly make efforts to write different kind of textbooks. To understand what is wrong with the textbooks and why, this analysis, however, is necessary.
Krishna Kumar, a known scholar, is Professor of Education at Delhi University. He has already come up with insightful studies of violence and educational processes with special reference to India. In this book he compares the history textbooks of both Pakistan and India with focus on the freedom struggle and Kashmir.
He made students write essays on the same topics in both countries and also talked to school children while researching for the book. With this data base he uses the comparative method to find out what imperatives make the writers of textbooks focus upon some subjects and ignore others; look at the same events and interpret them differently; and, finally, how the pupils feel about these events.
First, he says, the school textbooks are not written so as to enhance historical understanding. Their function is to make the pupil a citizen. This means that the ‘Other’ must be created through a process of distortion and omission. As it happens, for Pakistan the ‘Other’ is India which is seen as ‘Hindu’ though, of course, it has a large number of Muslims and Sikhs as well. For India the ‘Other’ is Pakistan. Since this ‘Othering’ requires sharp stereotypes, it ignores complexities and concentrates on some essential points which may be highly distorted or simply untrue.
Krishna Kumar points out that India and Pakistan both have different narratives of the freedom movement which happen to be rival discourses. These narratives have three features: the politics of mention, the pacing and the conception of the end. The first feature refers to which event or personality is mentioned. While India’s textbooks name a certain set of events or personalities, Pakistan’s prefer another set. The choice of whom to include and whom to exclude is political in the sense that it is meant to serve the state’s ultimate political rationale -- that is, what kind of image it wants to project to the public and what reasons it offers for existing at all or being the state it says it is.
The term ‘pacing’, as used by the author, refers to the pace at which the book moves from event to event. This pace is generally fast but whether it is faster when moving away from events which do not fit in with one’s political rationale is the focus of investigation . In India it is generally 1947 when independence took place while in Pakistan the history of the new country is also included though other events are excluded.
After establishing the theoretical framework, Dr Kumar goes on to discuss the treatment of specific events (the anti-British uprising of 1857, the Khilafat Movement, the Congress ministries, riots and partition etc). He tells us that the tendency in both India and Pakistan is to call 1857 a 'war of independence’. This is done by suppressing many inconvenient facts: that most of the Indian rulers did not fight against the British, that many eminent Indians---including the poet Ghalib and the reformer Sir Syed Ahmed Khan---were against the anti-British fighting (they called it ‘ghadar’ the mutiny). For Pakistani textbook writers there is the further embarrassment of Punjab and the North West Frontier Province having sent soldiers to suppress the anti-British forces. But such facts are ignored, suppressed, rapidly paced over and very often changed in the process.
After this the Indian historians turn to constructing a composite Indian nationalism ignoring the dissident voices of the Muslim League which is mentioned in passing only when it becomes impossible to ignore it. The fact that many fighters against the British in 1857 were Hindus finds passing mention, if at all, in Pakistan texts.
Both Indian and Pakistani historians also have broad all-encompassing conspiracy theories about the freedom movement. Indian historians refer to the theory of ‘divide and rule’ which states that the British, in order to continue ruling over South Asia, divided the Hindus and the Muslims so that both would not combine to throw them out. A corollary of this theory is that the British favoured the Muslims finally, even dividing India to show their hatred for the Congress which had fought to throw them out. The Pakistani conspiracy theory is that the British and the Hindus conspired to deprive the Muslims of their legitimate share of resources, jobs and power. It is also taught in Pakistan that the Muslim League, under the leadership of Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, defeated this conspiracy and wrested Pakistan out of the British and the Hindu hands.
Most of the decisions of what to include, and what to exclude, and what pace to follow is ultimately controlled by these conspiracy theories which are part of the master narratives of both countries. This ensures that children in India do not understand the nature of the demands which makes for increased antagonism between the two countries.
Children’s essays included in chapter 11 reflect this antagonism. Kashmir is a greater issue for those children who believe that India is a Hindu and not a pluralist nation in both India and Pakistan. Others in India are disenchanted and weary, while Pakistanis from elitist English-medium institution are less hawkish (this, incidentally is confirmed by my survey of children’s opinions in my book Language, Ideology and Power (Oxford UP, Karachi, 2002). What is worrying is Krishna Kumar’s contention that college and university campuses have taken a rightward turn in both India and Pakistan since the 1980s.
The author ends the book by arguing that history be rewritten so that it should be a shared discourse. This is what the two countries need but I doubt whether this is possible for the majority of our children who are in state schools. The state in both Pakistan and India seems to need the ‘Other’ and history is used for this ‘Othering’. Thus, unless objective conditions change first, it does not seem likely that any substantial change will occur by merely changing some history books. Krishna Kumar is aware of this but he is right to have worked to provide us with such an excellent resource for those who want to know what is wrong with the teaching of history in India and Pakistan.