Teesta Setalvad on the history textbook controversy under the BJP government which raised issues of political control over historical interpretation, sectarian motives behind history writing and the marginalisation of local and regional histories.
Teesta Setalvad on the history textbook controversy under the BJP government which raised issues of political control over historical interpretation, sectarian motives behind history writing and the marginalisation of local and regional histories.
Indian history from the perspective of the Hindutva ideology reintroduces ideas that have long been discarded and are of little relevance to an understanding of the past. The way in which information is put together, and generalisations drawn from this, do not stand the test of analyses as used in the contemporary study of history. The rewriting of history according to these ideas is not to illumine the past but to allow an easier legitimation from the past for the political requirements of the present. The Hindutva obsession with identity is not a problem related to the early history of India but arises out of an attempt to manipulate identities in contemporary politics. Yet ironically, this can only be done if the existing interpretations of history are revised and forced into the Hindutva ideological mould. To go by present indications, this would imply a history based on dogma with formulaic answers, mono-causal explanations, and no intellectual explorations. Dogmatic assertions with no space for alternative ideas often arise from a sense of inferiority and the fear of debate. Hence the determination to prevent the publication of volumes on history which do not conform to Hindutva ideology.
The BJP is not only promoting a particular brand of prejudice. It is practising mis-education. We must ask: do we want our children to grow up as semi-literate philistines and as English-speaking Hindu Talibans? Or can we stop the BJP from wreaking havoc?
These two part articles were digitised for the sacw document archive from old papers of Praful Bidwai.
The founder of neo-classical economics, Alfred Marshal, defined economics as the study of man “ in the ordinary business of life†. It is not surprising that he should have referred to life as a business - his choice of phrase is but an example of the uncritical ideological reflexes of capitalist society which characterizes much of ‘social science’. When we are urged to “Be Indian, Buy Indian†, is not ‘being’ equated with ‘buying’? When state policy is proclaimed as being neither Right or Left, but merely ‘Good for India’ (all states exult in patriotic virtue), does not this mystical abstraction serve as an ideological cloak for the accumulation of capital, as a mode of representing the interest of a part of society as its collective interest? Does it not serve to remind us that the very notion of the Good is tending towards global uniformity and subject to IMF approval? Dominant trends in social science treat as axioms such phrases as “ the productivity of Capital†, the “Good for the Nation†, the “Greatest Good of the greatest number†, the “ Growth of the economy†, etc. all of which serve to obfuscate still further the object of their investigations.
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