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Introduction
The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won the national elections in 1998, and again in 1999, as the largest party of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), and this alliance governed India until 2004. The BJP is a cultural nationalist party, which propagates the Hindu nature of India, and its ideology is known as Hindutva. As such, its view of the nation is different from the territorial and secular definition of nationhood that characterizes the modern Indian nation state.1 The BJP can also be construed as an identity political party, which seeks to establish the primacy of Hindu identity. The Hindus of India are divided along caste, regional, linguistic and to some extent religious lines as well; and a key challenge to the BJP has been to define a version of Hindu identity that appears relevant and familiar to most Hindus.
Because the BJP headed a large alliance of thirteen parties, it could not expect to implement its Hindutva ideas within all spheres of Indian society.2 However, within the field of education, the changes were many and substantial, and most of them were in line with the BJP’s Hindutva philosophy. The BJP took control over the Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD), under which education falls. In the HRD Ministry, the BJP had both the senior and junior ministers – Murli Manohar Joshi and Uma Bharti, respectively.3 Both were also known to be ideological hardliners with backgrounds from the Ayodhya movement.4 During Joshi’s six-year tenure as HRD Minister, he managed to initiate several controversial reforms – particularly of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). This institution is a core arena in India’s public education system. It advises both central and state governments on educational matters, and it provides curricular guidelines as well as model textbooks within different scholarly subjects.
This study is concerned with the four new history textbooks published by the NCERT in 2002. The textbooks in question are Ancient India and Medieval India for class XI, Contemporary India for class IX and India and the World for class VI. I examine these textbooks through the prism of identity politics and analyze how their narrative and explanatory frameworks defined and invoked Hindu identity. The publication of new history textbooks evoked critique from many Indian historians and politicians and received extensive media coverage.5 When the NDA lost the elections in 2004, it took only a month before the newly elected United Progressive Alliance government decided to withdraw the textbooks published under the NDA regime. Hence, there can be no doubt that both the BJP and the opposition led by the Congress ascribed a great deal of importance to history education in schools.
The BJP returned to power in 2014 after experiencing its most successful election to date. Unlike the elections in the 1990s, the party did not campaign on a Hindutva platform, but rather emphasized economic and bureaucratic reforms. Nevertheless, history continues to be important to the party, as attested by the recent reorganization of the Indian Council of Historical Research and HRD Minister Irani’s fierce response to the alleged anti-national attitudes characterizing the students’ protests at the Jawaharlal Nehru University.6 In addition, Irani has urged the prominent Indian Institutes of Technology to teach Sanskrit in order to facilitate the study of science and technology.7 Moreover, as I will return to below, whether or not the BJP chooses to again focus its attention on history textbooks depends on its relationship with the wider Hindu nationalist movement – particularly the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).8 The RSS has since the inception of the current BJP government urged the party to make substantial changes to the education system.9 It would come as no surprise if the textbooks analyzed in this study were placed on the curriculum again.
Key arguments
This study has two major objectives. It seeks to illuminate one arena in which the BJP sought to pursue its identity political aspirations in the aftermath of its involvement in the Ayodhya campaign. As I will outline below, towards the end of the 1990s, the BJP tried to overcome the traditional image of the party as representing the interests of North Indian upper castes. As such, the party aimed to widen its social and geographical appeal. It is my belief that the publication of new history textbooks has to be understood in light of this particular context. The textbooks in question all seem to operate with a vague sense of Hindu unity in order to appear relevant throughout heterogeneous India. As such, the study is firmly entrenched in research on Hindu nationalism.
Secondly, I seek to establish and discuss theoretical aspects of what might be termed culturalist perceptions of national history. In what ways can the past, in its diverse and heterogeneous manifestations, be utilized in order to promote and invoke a culturally defined national identity? Hence, this objective relates to the relationship between identity construction and historical narration. I employ a heuristic set of questions developed by the cultural historian Peter Burke in order to illuminate this aspect. When approaching various utilizations of the past, Burke argues that one needs to ask, ‘Who wants whom to remember what and why?’10 And similarly, ‘Who wants whom to forget what and why?’11
While awaiting the publication of the new set of textbooks, the BJP decided to continue with the existing textbook set – however, with omissions of certain sections. The deleted sections dealt with the antiquity of Hindu epics, the position of the priestly Brahmin caste within the hierarchical varna system and the violent raids conducted by the Hindu Jat community.12 These deletions give certain hints concerning the answers to Burke’s questions above, and as I will show, the textbooks under study emphasize the antiquity of Hindu civilization, as well as the existence of unity, prosperity and tolerance within the Hindu community. I would, however, like to stress that constructing coherent historical narratives is rather different from merely omitting sections that do not fit into the narrative framework the BJP wanted to promote.
I argue that the history textbooks published in 2002 are structured according to notions of Hindu cultural similarity, in that they emphasize deep-rooted cultural solidarities among Hindus in the past. Moreover, I argue that these textbooks are characterized by what I refer to as culture-driven narratives, since they argue that Indians experienced unity through their association with a common Hindu cultural ethos. However, my contention is that the questions put forth by Burke need to be supplemented by a ‘How?’ Through what kind of discursive mechanisms are certain themes, events and agents emphasized and remembered and others ignored and forgotten? This leads on to a second major argument of this study. I intend to show that the textbooks under study are characterized by decontextualized versions of the past in order to construct coherent narratives structured according to Hindu cultural similarity. I will elaborate this concept in detail in the next chapter. For now, it is sufficient to say that decontextualization denotes historical narratives that lack a proper contextualization. This is visible when temporal and geographical contexts appear vague, when relevant contextual factors are backgrounded or omitted from a narrative or when agency is not accurately defined. As such, decontextualized narratives highlight the abstract, coherent and timeless aspects of the past, rather than its diverse and heterogeneous manifestations. Such narratives in many ways transcend the historicity of the past.
It is important to underline that I do not set out to examine the actual transmission or reception of the contents in these textbooks. I view the reforms as expressions of deliberate and strategic decisions on the part of the BJP. I will also show that there is a high degree of congruence among the different agents involved in this issue, from HRD Minister Joshi at the political level, to the institutional level represented by NCERT and its Director J. S. Rajput and the authors of the four textbooks under study, Makkhan Lal, Meenakshi Jain and Hari Om. In this way, I will bring out the intimate relationship between the BJP’s political visions and certain conceptions of a shared national past. In order to fully grasp the significance of this issue, I first set out to outline the ideological underpinnings of Hindu nationalism, as well as the recent history of the BJP – including the various challenges facing its political appeals to Hindu identity.
Hindu nationalism: ideology and identity
Hindu nationalism constitutes a form of cultural nationalism, although religious values and traditions are key features. In many ways, Hinduism differs from institutionalized religions such as Christianity, Islam and Judaism. It contains a wide variety of different religious traditions, and the corpus of Vedic literature contains not only religious texts, but philosophy, geometry and other branches of knowledge. When discussing Hindu nationalism in relation to history and religion, Partha Chatterjee argues that ‘the notion of “Hinduness” in this historical conception cannot be, and need not be, defined by any religious criteria at all. There are no specific beliefs or practices which characterize this “Hindu” and the many doctrinal or sectarian differences among Hindus are irrelevant to this concept.’13 The fuzzy boundaries between religion and culture also characterize the historical development of Hindu nationalist ideology. The roots of Hindu nationalism can be traced back to the Hindu revivalist movements of the late nineteenth century. European scholars as well as Indian intellectuals – namely Brahmins – tried to identify the authentic and true religious texts and philosophical systems in the vast and heterogeneous Hindu tradition.14 This effort was also inspired by monotheistic ideas, with the aim of creating a more unified Hindu religion.15 Another important aspect in this period was the so-called cow-protection movement. This movement tried to unify those who revered the cow, and as such also externalized those not sharing this reverence.
The 1920s represent a landmark in the development of Hindu nationalism, in terms of both ideology and organizational structure. In 1923, Veer Savarkar published his influential Hindutva, and two years later, the RSS was founded. This period also saw the formation of the Hindu Mahas...
