History writing must go beyond textbooks

The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has released the long-awaited social sciences textbook for Class 8, for a captive readership from Ladakh to Pondicherry.

- Narayani Gupta

Coming up with a textbook is a long haul. First, identify the author/authors. After a lot, of “research”, the book is drafted, approved, and published. Then, parents buy these and teachers select “important” sentences that the students commit to memory. At some stage, these will have to be regurgitated in the exams.

Why then so much discussion on the book, not by children, parents, or school teachers, but by university teachers and public intellectuals? Because groups of the latter on either side of the debate believe such books are endowed with the power to leave an imprint on readers’ minds. But, the power of a history textbook is not in the statistics relating to people killed in battles and buildings destroyed —it is in the manner in which change is conveyed. History is dauntingly difficult to write, unless you take refuge behind obscure abstractions.