“Rationalising” history, national identity, and tolerance: A study of changes in Indian school textbooks

• In Event: The Politics of the Curriculum

Proposal

School curriculum plays a significant role in forming the idea of national identity and is an important tool for the “consolidation of a modern nation-state” (Durrani et al., 2020). In the decades after India gained independence from its British colonisers in 1947, political leaders and educationists modified history textbooks to shed their colonial colour, and to narrate the past in a way that would define what counts as “Indian” in the present and future (Thapar, 2009; Bryan & Vavrus, 2005). This process also involved defining what was not Indian, i.e., what was the “other” compared to the Indian “self” (Durrani et al., 2020; Naseem et al., 2010) to build a sense of belonging to the imagined community that Benedict Anderson (1991) calls “nation”. Post-independence, history books were rewritten adopting a more composite view of India’s past, a focus on India’s social and economic history, to lend credibility to a secular polity, and promote rationality and scientific thinking (Hasan, 2002). This was less palatable to Hindu ideologues and communal historians of the time, who wanted a “mono-causal religion-derived” history to base cultural uniformity (Thapar, 2009) as a foundation for Hindu nationhood. In 2023, under the second consecutive term of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) - a right-wing Hindu nationalist party - the debate over history school curricula has resurfaced. The BJP government is being accused of re-writing history textbooks to propagate a Hindu right-wing agenda under the guise of “rationalising” the curricula to reduce the workload on school students in accordance with the National Education Policy 2020 (NEP).

This study researches the effect of political polarisation on education in India through the revision of the history curricula, expressed in centrally edited history textbooks. Specifically, it investigates the relationship between history curricula in schools, considering recent changes in school textbooks, and national identity building and tolerance. The textbooks affected are published by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), an autonomous body set up in 1961 to advise the central and state governments on how to improve school education (NCERT: About Us, n.d.). Various social science textbooks across social sciences like history, geography, civics, as well as science disciplines have been “rationalised”.

While it is difficult to pinpoint the exact number of schools that prescribe NCERT books, those affiliated with the Central Board for Secondary Education (CBSE) – the only central government board in India – mostly do so. As of 2021-22, these constitute the largest proportion (19%) of India’s 1.48 million schools. Other private boards may also prescribe NCERT books. Additionally, state governments have their own education boards to which schools within their territory can be affiliated. Some schools may be affiliated with both, the state board and CBSE, however, about 18% of schools are affiliated with the state board alone at secondary and higher secondary levels (Ministry of Education, Government of India, 2021).

The changes in the history textbooks are happening in a highly politically polarised context in the country, marked by the immense popularity of Hindutva, characterised by the mobilisation of Hindu nationalism for a Hindu nation in contrast to a secular one (Sahoo, 2020), and increased violence against minorities, particularly Muslims, who constitute about 14% of the Indian population compared to the 80% Hindu majority (Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, 2015). Waikar (2018) notes that Hindutva is Islamophobic “by design” as it propagates Muslim histories in the Indian subcontinent as anchored in violence and oppression, and as driven by a Muslims’ desire to seize control of India. Subsequently, the deletion or de-prioritisation of the historical roots of religious or cultural diversity in India could lead students to regard those from other communities as “illegitimate” and “inauthentic” to the country (Durrani et al., 2020), constituting a form of “symbolic violence” that paves way for more explicit violence (Bryan & Vavrus, 2005). Hence, these changes can be seen as a threat to tolerance, which is argued to be the cornerstone of diverse, democratic societies, and investigate the possible use of education not as a medium to impart the tools of tolerance (Kuzmenko, 2020), but to legitimise inequalities (Bryan & Vavrus, 2005).

For instance, one of the changes we observed was the removal of objections to the varna system in the 2019-20 class 6 history book from its 2023-24 counterpart. Although many argue that it is erroneous (Jaiswal, 1991), the varnas are believed to be the basis of the persisting caste system in India, that divides people into rigid, birth-based categories. These are hierarchical, and affect the individuals’ privilege, social acceptance, opportunity, access, interactions, and marriage, among other aspects of daily life. The 2019-20 book states the categories under the varna system, the restrictions on women and lower varna persons against performing Hindu prayer rituals and reading scriptures, as well as the opposition to the system. However, the section is reduced to 53 words from 427 in the 2023-24 book, simply stating the categorisation of varnas as facts. This includes the removal of the prompt, “Why did people oppose the system of varnas?” Such changes have the potential to affect the legitimacy of future protests against social inequalities and impact tolerant attitudes towards dissent.

In this study, we employ Structural Topic Modelling (STM) to analyse the content of 44 NCERT history textbooks from academic years 2019-20 to 2023-24 for classes 6 to 12. STM, a text analysis technique, allows us to extract and categorise the topics present in the textbooks and estimate topic use per document. We use this approach to uncover trends in topic usage, while exploring the influence of textbook metadata such as year of publication and class level on the content of these textbooks. Specifically, we sought to understand the impact of the reported revisions in the NCERT curricula since 2019 on the “rationalisation” of history content. By employing STM, we are able to systematically examine how the topic content in the textbooks evolved through multiple revisions and assess the degree of changes in the content over time.

Authors

• Geetika Mantri, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford

• Filipe Recch, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford