History textbooks and their tryst with truth

Until recently, professional historians and history departments in universities broadly recognised Indian history as divided between the Ancient, Medieval and Modern periods.

- Janaki Nair

The more contentious colonial division of Indian history into Hindu, Muslim and British periods was thus displaced. There have been some adaptations of the three terms, as in the use of Early India (rather than Ancient India), Early Modern (to refer to the 16th and 17th centuries as times when lively exchanges and experiments occurred). The Kerala government's social studies textbook discusses the medieval period as the “era of exchanges” between the East and the West.

These re-periodisations of history have been enabled by historians going beyond political and diplomatic histories to include social and economic structures, the lives of ordinary people (including those long neglected by the textbooks), histories of technologies and objects, and the histories of stable geographical elements — rivers, oceans and seas.

Butnow, under the guidance of Michel Danino, the NCERT social science textbooks have announced a new phase of historical writing which transcends known periods and historical methods (which may earlier have been powered by nationalist, Marxist, or Annales frameworks). He has ushered in, he modestly says, a period of “honest history — based on the data available — where weaim to do justice to the past”. Now, this approach immediately thrusts the sophisticated productions of three generations of post-Independence historians in the dubious category of being dishonest — sanitised, or produced under political pressure. Danino has distanced himself from these stains: “No political leader came to us saying, You have to include this, or mention this particular figure or fact”.