Title: Contesting histories and nationalist geographies: a comparison of school textbooks in India and Pakistan
Abstract: Abstract This article examines selected high school textbooks from India and Pakistan to see how they craft two different histories out of a shared past. Central to this endeavour, the article suggests, is the device of placing the two nations’ histories within differently imagined geographies. Indian textbooks represent the naturalness of India through a geography and cartography first created in the colonial era. Influences from outside of these ‘natural’ boundaries are deemed to be ‘foreign’ to Indian history or culture. Pakistan's imagined geography is different. Underplaying subcontinental links, Pakistani textbooks stress the ‘natural’ affinities of Pakistan with the Islamic world. Ultimately, such nationalist geographies teach students in India and Pakistan – who may live no more than fifty miles away from each other and whose grandparents may well have lived together as neighbours – to imagine themselves as not only the inheritors of different pasts, but as inhabiting different geographical spaces. Keywords: IndiaPakistanhistorytextbookscartography Acknowledgements I am very grateful to Zulfiqar Ahmad for obtaining the Pakistani textbooks I refer to in this article. A big thank you also to Judith Giesberg for pushing me to write a paper for her panel at the American Historical Association meetings in 2003 on the subject, and to Laura Hein and other commentators on that panel for their incisive comments and questions. Judy and Susan Deeds gave valuable editing advice. I am grateful for the comments of the anonymous readers for SAHC who gave valuable suggestions for improving this article. Finally, as always, nothing I write would ever be possible without the intellectual companionship and support of Sanjam Ahluwalia, nor would any writing be as satisfying if not repeatedly interrupted by our delightful daughter, Aeka. Notes 1. Harvey, ‘Cartographic Identities’, 221. 2. This phrase must legally accompany any map authorized by the Surveyor General of India. 3. Anderson, Imagined Communities. 4. Duara, Rescuing History. 5. Barrow, Making History; Ramaswamy, ‘Visualizing India's Geo-body’, 151–90; Winichakul, Siam Mapped. 6. Harvey, ‘Cartographic Identities’, 223. 7. Goswami, Producing India, 5. 8. Tyack, ‘Forming the National Character’. 9. Giesberg, ‘To Forget and Forgive’; Kumar, Prejudice and Pride; Moreau, Schoolbook Nation. 10. Toppo, ‘Changing History’. 11. Schnee, ‘Germany: Two Histories United’. 12. Cheney, ‘The End of History’; Hein and Seldon, Censoring History; also see Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me. 13. MacIntyre and Clark, The History Wars. 14. Podeh, ‘History and Memory in the Israeli Educational System’. 15. For some instances of how fiercely the adoption of textbooks are debated in the state of Texas in the United States, see Russel Shorto, ‘How Christian Were the Founders?’. 16. Kumar, Prejudice and Pride; Nayyar and Salim, The Subtle Subversion. 17. Kumar, ‘Origins of India's Textbook Culture’. 18. Prakash Tandon, cited in Kumar, Political Agenda of Education, 67. 19. ‘Newal Kishore is, first of all, a school book publisher’ wrote a contemporary observer, John Hurst, before going on to describe his vast publishing enterprise. Hurst, Indika, 604; Stark, An Empire of Books; also, Joshi, Fractured Modernity. 20. Kumar, Political Agenda of Education. 21. Chandra, The Oppressive Present. 22. For one example, see Indian Reformer October 10, 1895, citing the Paisa Akhbar of Lahore regarding the geography textbook used in Kapurthala. Selections from the Vernacular Newspapers of North India, October 30, 1895, 528. 23. Kumar, ‘Origins of India's Textbook Culture’. 24. Chandra, The Oppressive Present; Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness; Sharar, Paradise of the Assassins. 25. Nayyar and Salim, The Subtle Subversion. 26. Aziz, Murder of History; Nayyar and Salim, The Subtle Subversion. 27. Nayyar and Salim, The Subtle Subversion, 5. 28. Mudaliar, Report of the Secondary Education Commission, 1952. 29. NCERT, Memorandum of Association and Rules. 30. Kumar, Prejudice and Pride. 31. Wahi, ‘Textbooks, Politics and the Practice of History’. 32. See, Thapar, ‘The History Debate and School Textbooks in India’; also Bhattacharya, ‘Teaching History in Schools’. For the older pamphlet, see Thapar, Mukhia, and Chandra, Communalism and the Writing of Indian History. 33. Gopalan, Foreword to Medieval India, by Satish Chandra. 34. Rosser, ‘Contesting Historiographies in South Asia’. 35. Ibid. 36. Ali, ‘History, Ideology and Curriculum’; Aziz, Murder of History; Hoodhbhoy and Nayyar, ‘Rewriting the History of Pakistan’; Jalal, ‘Conjuring Pakistan’; Nayyar and Salim, The Subtle Subversion; Powell, ‘Perceptions of the South Asian Past’, 190–228; Rosser, ‘Contesting Historiographies in South Asia’. 37. Nayyar and Salim, The Subtle Subversion, 4. 38. Nayyar and Salim, The Subtle Subversion. 39. Lloyd Rudolph and Suzanne Rudolph, ‘Cultural Policy, the Textbook Controversy, and Indian Identity’. 40. Mridula Mukherjee and Aditya Mukherjee, ‘Communalization of Education’. 41. Dev, ‘Mind Games, NCERT Style’; Kaur, ‘History and Sensibilities’; Report of the Panel of Historians; Vanaik, ‘The Textbook Controversy’. 42. Report of the Panel of Historians. 43. Mitra, ‘The Purpose of History’. 44. Mitra, ‘What's It about History?’. 45. Kumar, Prejudice and Pride. 46. Chandra, Modern India. 47. Zafar, Pakistan Studies, 37. 48. Ibid., 40. 49. Hoodhbhoy and Nayyar, ‘Rewriting the History of Pakistan’. 50. Aziz, Murder of History. 51. Hoodhbhoy and Nayyar, ‘Rewriting the History of Pakistan’, 175; also see Ali, ‘History, Ideology and Curriculum’; Jalal, ‘Conjuring Pakistan’; Nayyar and Salim, The Subtle Subversion; Powell, ‘Perceptions of the South Asian Past’; Rosser, ‘Contesting Historiographies in South Asia’. 52. Arshad, Social Studies for Class VIII, 53. 53. Zafar, Pakistan Studies, 23. 54. Ibid., 4. 55. Ibid., 5. 56. Ibid., 6–7. 57. Lloyd Rudolph and Suzanne Rudolph, ‘Cultural Policy, the Textbook Controversy, and Indian Identity’. 58. Savarkar, Hindutva. 59. Jha, ‘A New Brand of History’. 60. Ibid.; Kaur, ‘History and Sensibilities’. 61. Friese, ‘Hijacking India's History’; Habib, Jaiswal, and Mukherjee, ‘History in the New NCERT Textbooks’; Jha, ‘A New Brand of History’; Report of the Panel of Historians; Sullivan, ‘India Textbooks May Cut Gandhi Assassination’; Vanaik, ‘The Textbook Controversy’. 62. Om, Contemporary India, 34. 63. Ibid., 36, 57. 64. Lal, Ancient India, 232; Lal et al., India and the World. 65. Report of the Panel of Historians. 66. Chandra, ‘Texts Were Rewritten in Nazi Germany, Pak’. Interview. 67. Kumar, ‘History at the Crossroads’. 68. Chaturvedi et al., High School Itihaas, 7–8. 69. Zafar, Pakistan Studies, 23. 70. Ibid., 35. 71. Sharma, Ancient India, 1. 72. Ibid., 2. 73. Sharma, Ancient India, 1, 35, 53, 70, 79. 74. The Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan text I possess spells his last name as ‘Mukherji’ on the spine, though continues to use ‘Mookerji’ in the main text, which is the spelling used in the original 1914 edition of this text, and the one I employ in this article. 75. Mookerji, The Fundamental Unity of India, 24. 76. For a very interesting study of the Greater India Society, see Bayly, ‘Imagining “Greater India” ’. Unlike the argument for a geographically naturalized India, these intellectuals saw India as the metropolitan centre of a larger Indian imperial formation. Bayly also notes the association of the Greater India Society intellectuals with contemporary Hindu nationalists, their contribution to the historical vision of secular nationalists such as Nehru as well as the appropriation of their legacy by contemporary advocates of Hindutva. 77. Sen, ‘Our Past and Our Present’, 4884–5. 78. Sen, Distant Sovereignty. 79. Barrow, Making History, Drawing Territory; Edney, Mapping an Empire; Scott, Seeing Like a State. 80. Goswami, Producing India. 81. Ramaswamy, ‘Visualizing India's Geo-body’. 82. Mookerji, The Fundamental Unity of India, 92. 83. I am grateful to Sumathi Ramaswamy and to Bruce Sullivanfor helping me with the translation of this phrase. My gloss remains somewhat simplistic, and requires more research. I look forward to reading Sumathi Ramaswamy's forthcoming work on geographic logos used by the Indian state, including this one. 84. Joshi, ‘Colonial Notions of South Asia’. 85. Goswami, Producing India; Ramaswamy, ‘Visualizing India's Geo-body’. 86. Khan, Social Studies for Class VI, 7. 87. Khan, Social Studies for Class VII. 88. Arshad, Social Studies for Class VIII, 55–6. 89. Ibid., 56. 90. Ibid., 136; also see, Powell, ‘Perceptions of the South Asian Past’; Rosser, ‘Contesting Historiographies in South Asia’. 91. Harvey, ‘Cartographic Identities’, 225. 92. In a similar manner, as Yvette Rosser recounts, early revisions of history textbooks in a then newly created Bangladesh emphasized a history that was centred on the region, and a Bengali rather than a Muslim identity. Rosser, ‘Curriculum as Destiny’, chap. 4. 93. Zafar, Pakistan Studies, 157. 94. This was obviously a somewhat different project from the one celebrating ‘thousands of years’ of Pakistani history. Mortimer Wheeler's Five Thousand Years of Pakistan was an important text for the latter project. Manan Ahmed has recently written about this in his blog ‘Chapati Mystery’. See, http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/thousands_of_ years.html. 95. Zafar, Pakistan Studies, 165. 96. Ibid., 164. 97. Eaton, ‘Mapping Persia, India, and Asia’. 98. Ibid. 99. Sharma, Ancient India, 91. 100. Ibid., 75, 100, 102–8. 101. Ludden, ‘Presidential Address: Maps of the Mind’, 1062. 102. Eaton, ‘Mapping Persia, India, and Asia’. 103. Bhattacharya, ‘The Problem’; also see, Bhattacharya, ‘Teaching History in Schools’. 104. Sarkar, ‘Historical Pedagogy of the Sangh Parivar’. 105. Joshi, ‘Be Indian the British Way’. 106. Sarkar, ‘History Textbooks: The Need to Move Forward’. 107. Krishna, ‘Cartographic Anxiety’. 108. Aziz, Murder of History; Jalal, ‘Conjuring Pakistan’; Kumar, Prejudice and Pride; Report of the Panel of Historians. 109. Harvey, ‘Cartographic Identities’, 225.
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-06-25
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 15
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