‘The Govt should stop appointing historians, sponsoring textbooks’

Who, then, should undertake the review of textbooks or school curricula?

THE NCERT should limit itself to giving broad guidelines. The rest should be left to professionals and the market. The government should give up the job of appointing historians and writers and sponsoring textbooks. Textbooks need to be reviewed every five years or so and no author should have a monopoly. But this can done in an unobtrusive, routine, rigorous manner by professionals. School textbooks cannot be the issue of a national or political debate.

Didn’t previous governments have the same policy?

I AM not picking on particular governments. My point is, the State should desist from sponsoring or publishing textbooks or hiring historians to write them. When a government is involved, it’s difficult to make it an objective exercise. I was part of the earlier NCERT committee that had chosen R.S.

Sharma, Satish Chandra, Bipin Chandra…the best known historians in the field, with many publications to their credit. Even so, they were made to write and rewrite the text several times. It took them 3-4 years each and still those were not perfect textbooks. I did differ on specific interpretations. But if those had to be replaced, it called for an exercise of matching rigour. Writing textbooks is not child’s play, it’s a most difficult job.

What about historical research? Should the State ‘disinvest’ here also?

OF course, the government has to support historical research. It is entirely another matter to decide as a state policy what knowledge is to be disseminated to school children. Here, controversy is unavoidable, especially in Indian history where opinion is so divided. It is impossible to satisfy every school of opinion. History is not merely a professional subject but something that interests all sections of the population. In a textbook, you can’t write your own view: there has to be a consensus.

Were you, as ICHR chairman, consulted by the NCERT at any point?

I WAS invited to a seminar before the syllabus was framed. The ideas I had given were all accepted.

You said you had differences with interpretations given by the earlier authors…

I’M not interested in the political debate.

Do elaborate.

SATISH Chandra’s take on Sikhism had an ideological slant. He was trying to project the Mughal political view against the Sikh gurus. He used a 100-year-old, pro-Mughal text to establish his thesis on Guru Tegh Bahadur’s assassination.

The Left historians too have a clear bias against the Vedic culture. Their whole view on Buddhism too is faulty.

India had no such thing as the Buddhist religion. It is a Semitic view of culture that’s been imposed on us. Buddha never propagated any religion. There were no conversion rules. There was no Buddhist laity—only orders of monkhood. The Marxists made Asoka out to be the great Buddhist convert! Where is the proof? All his edicts talk as much about respect to the Brahmana as the Buddhist monk.

Do you also support the view that the Harappan and Vedic cultures overlapped?

UNLESS the Harappan script is deciphered, nothing definitive can be said. Chennai-based scholar Iravathan Mahadevan prepared the first concordance of the script. He was behind the theory that it was proto-Dravidian. He later wrote that some seals have symbols of Vedic sacrifices.

A host of European scholars-Gurov of Russia, the Scandinavian Asko Parpola-favoured the non-Aryan theory but gave it up. Even Max Mueller, who introduced the Aryan invasion theory, later gave up on it-saying there was no Aryan race, only a way of life, a language.

But the Marxists rigidly stick to his earlier stand. The nature of the Harappan civilisation is still a mystery. Just like there is no clinching evidence on when the Vedas were written.

How can Harappa, with its script, and the Aryan/Vedic culture which was dependent on oral traditions be a seamless whole?

THERE’S a difference between the Rig Veda and the oral texts, like Ramayana and Mahabharata. The Rig Veda was codified. They had a strict set of rules to resist interpolations. It has been more or less preserved in pristine form.

What about the new textbooks? How about South India, which was supposed to get a better deal this time?

THE ancient Tamil epics, Cilappadikaram and Manimekalai, still find no place. They should’ve been considered alongside Ramayana and Mahabharata. It is almost sacrilegious for us, but north Indian historians have always displayed remarkable ignorance about the South.

Even Tirukkural, a philosophical text revered by Tamils as the Fifth Veda, isn’t mentioned. The great Chola emperors of the 10th century are mentioned in the (ancient) Sangam age! But this is not new, it’s an old weakness with north Indian historians.