09-11-2006, 07:57 PM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Toxic history books </b>
The Pioneer Edit Desk
<b>Will NCERT heed High Court order?</b>
Those seeking to cleanse history textbooks of toxic 'secular' content have scored an important victory last week with NCERT being instructed by Delhi High Court to issue an advisory against three passages which council officials and their political patrons, displaying characteristic arrogance, refused to accept as constituting defamation against entire communities. These offending portions will now require excising, not by recalling books that have been issued but in the form of an advisory which the NCERT Director will send to all schools. The objectionable references in question are about Guru Govind Singh, Mughal Emperor Akbar and the ancient Indian astronomer, Aryabhatta, whose achievements have been belittled. This is not the first time that textbooks authored by Marxist 'historians' on the payroll of the Government have run into trouble and it is unlikely to be the last we have heard of the issue. In the mid-1990s, there was a messy wrangle over unseemly references to Guru Govind Singh. Despite the Punjab and Haryana High Court issuing strictures, NCERT fought tooth and nail against incorporating amendments. In 2001, when the same text was still in circulation, similar remarks about Guru Tegh Bahadur, Jats, Sikhs and Jains were brought to NCERT's notice. Unlike in the past, those at the helm of affairs then had the good sense to stress the importance of pedagogy in school history courses. The need for preserving national pride is paramount and history is a means of achieving that end. The problem with Marxist 'historians' is that they are constantly trying to import into this country a negativist line from the former Soviet Union where "catch-them-young" was the name of the game and the commissars brooked no resistance in their drive to steam-roll regional and religious sensitivities.
Objectivity and neutralism should be matched by pedagogy when packaging history for impressionable minds. This is standard practice all over the world. India, a country that has suffered foreign invasion and divisive tendencies for a millennium, should by now have developed a formula to balance its pluralist ideals with the necessity of preserving national integrity. Instead, short-term, vote-bank oriented historiography continues to be the practice. In fact, NCERT, despite repeated judicial strictures against its dogmatic stand, continues to display amazing tenacity. <b>For instance, a so-called "expert committee", constituted in response to an earlier Delhi High Court order, still refuses to acknowledge that the Aryan invasion theory is long dead and buried</b>. <b>It is high time this old debate is settled once for all because, from the nation building point of view, it is extremely important that future generations of Indians are liberated from the force-fed idea of inferiority that is implicit in the imperial theory, according to which the superior civilisation that prevailed in ancient India could not but be an import from the West. </b>
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The Pioneer Edit Desk
<b>Will NCERT heed High Court order?</b>
Those seeking to cleanse history textbooks of toxic 'secular' content have scored an important victory last week with NCERT being instructed by Delhi High Court to issue an advisory against three passages which council officials and their political patrons, displaying characteristic arrogance, refused to accept as constituting defamation against entire communities. These offending portions will now require excising, not by recalling books that have been issued but in the form of an advisory which the NCERT Director will send to all schools. The objectionable references in question are about Guru Govind Singh, Mughal Emperor Akbar and the ancient Indian astronomer, Aryabhatta, whose achievements have been belittled. This is not the first time that textbooks authored by Marxist 'historians' on the payroll of the Government have run into trouble and it is unlikely to be the last we have heard of the issue. In the mid-1990s, there was a messy wrangle over unseemly references to Guru Govind Singh. Despite the Punjab and Haryana High Court issuing strictures, NCERT fought tooth and nail against incorporating amendments. In 2001, when the same text was still in circulation, similar remarks about Guru Tegh Bahadur, Jats, Sikhs and Jains were brought to NCERT's notice. Unlike in the past, those at the helm of affairs then had the good sense to stress the importance of pedagogy in school history courses. The need for preserving national pride is paramount and history is a means of achieving that end. The problem with Marxist 'historians' is that they are constantly trying to import into this country a negativist line from the former Soviet Union where "catch-them-young" was the name of the game and the commissars brooked no resistance in their drive to steam-roll regional and religious sensitivities.
Objectivity and neutralism should be matched by pedagogy when packaging history for impressionable minds. This is standard practice all over the world. India, a country that has suffered foreign invasion and divisive tendencies for a millennium, should by now have developed a formula to balance its pluralist ideals with the necessity of preserving national integrity. Instead, short-term, vote-bank oriented historiography continues to be the practice. In fact, NCERT, despite repeated judicial strictures against its dogmatic stand, continues to display amazing tenacity. <b>For instance, a so-called "expert committee", constituted in response to an earlier Delhi High Court order, still refuses to acknowledge that the Aryan invasion theory is long dead and buried</b>. <b>It is high time this old debate is settled once for all because, from the nation building point of view, it is extremely important that future generations of Indians are liberated from the force-fed idea of inferiority that is implicit in the imperial theory, according to which the superior civilisation that prevailed in ancient India could not but be an import from the West. </b>
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