http://abcnews.go.com/International/CSM/story?id=1534056
India history spat hits US
Educators in California have unleashed debate by revising textbooks.
By Scott Baldauf
NEW DELHI - In the halls of Sacramento, a special commission is
rewriting Indian history: debating whether Aryan invaders conquered
the subcontinent, whether Brahman priests had more rights than
untouchables, and even whether ancient Indians ate beef.
That this seemingly arcane Indian debate has spilled over into
California's board of education is a sign of the growing political
muscle of Indian immigrants and the rising American interest in Asia.
The foes - who include established historians and Hindu nationalist
revisionists - are familiar to each other in India. But America may
increasingly become their new battlefield as other US states follow
California in rewriting their own textbooks to bone up on Asian
history.
At stake, say scholars who include some of the most elite historians
on India, may be a truthful picture of one of the world's emerging
powers - one arrived at by academic standards of proof rather than
assertions of national or religious pride.
"Some of the groups involved here are not qualified to write
textbooks, they do not draw lines between myth and history," says Anu
Mandavilli, an Indian doctoral candidate at the University of Southern
California, and activist against the Hindu right. Speaking of one of
the groups, the Vedic Foundation in Austin, Texas, she adds, "On their
website, they claim that Hindu civilization started 111.5 trillion
years ago. That makes Hinduism billions of years older than the Big
Bang." (The assertion has since been pulled from the site.)
"It would be ridiculous if it weren't so dangerous."
Revisionist debates hot in many nations
Communities use history to define themselves - their core ideals,
achievements, and grudges. Small wonder, then, that history is
frequently reevaluated as political pendulums shift, or as
long-oppressed minority groups finally get their say. History, and
efforts to revise it, have touched off recent controversies between
Japan and its neighbors over its World War II past, as well as between
France and its former colonies over the portrayal of imperialism.
Here in India, Hindu nationalists have pushed forcefully for
revisionism after what they see as centuries of cultural domination by
the British Raj and Muslim Mogul Empire.
Instigating the California debate were two US-based Hindu groups with
long ties to Hindu nationalist parties in India. One, the Vedic
Foundation, is a small Hindu sect that aims at simplifying Hinduism to
the worship of one god, Vishnu. The other, the Hindu Education
Foundation (HEF), was founded in 2004 by a branch of the right-wing
Indian group the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
This year, as California's Board of Education commissioned and put up
for review textbooks to be used in its 6th-grade classrooms, these two
groups came forward with demands for substantial changes.
Textbooks did have glaring mistakes
Some of the changes were no-brainers. One section said, incorrectly,
that the Hindi language is written in Arabic script. One photo caption
misidentified a Muslim as a Brahman priest.
But instead of focusing on such errors, the groups took steps to add
their own nationalist imprint to Indian history.
In one edit, the HEF asked the textbook publisher to change a sentence
describing discrimination against women in ancient society to the
following: "Men had different duties (dharma) as well as rights than
women."
In another edit, the HEF objected to a sentence that said that Aryan
rulers had "created a caste system" in India that kept groups
separated according to their jobs. The HEF asked this to be changed to
the following: "During Vedic times, people were divided into different
social groups (varnas) based on their capacity to undertake a
particular profession."
The hottest debate centered on when Indian civilization began, and by
whom. For the past 150 years, most historical, linguistic, and
archaeological research has dated India's earliest settlements to
around 2600 BC. And most established historical research contends that
the cornerstone of Indian civilization - the practice of Hindu
religion - was codified by people who came from outside India,
specifically Aryan language speakers from the steppes of Central Asia.
Many Hindu nationalists are upset by the notion that Hinduism could be
yet another religion, like Islam and Christianity, with foreign roots.
The HEF and Vedic Foundation both lobbied hard to change the wording
of California's textbooks so that Hinduism would be described as
purely home grown.
"Textbooks must mention that none of the [ancient] texts, nor any
Indian tradition, has a recollection of any Aryan invasion or
migration," writes S. Kalyanaraman, an engineer and prominent
pro-Hindu activist, in an e-mail to this reporter. He and other
revisionists refer to recent studies that don't support an Aryan
migration, including skeletal anthropology research that claims to
show a continuity of record from Neolithic times. Such research has
not convinced top Indologists to abandon the Aryan theory, however.
The final changes in California's textbooks are expected in the next
few weeks, but in the meantime, mainstream academics, both in America
and abroad, are setting off alarm bells.
"It was a whitewash," says Michael Witzel, a Harvard University
Sanskrit scholar and Indologist, who testified before the commission
in Sacramento. "The textbooks before were not very good, but at least
they were more or less presentable. Now, it is completely incorrect."
Aryan invasion a British-era theory
Early proponents of the "Aryan Invasion Theory" proposed in 1850 by
philologist Max Mueller may have had political agendas to justify the
subjugation of the subcontinent, Mr. Witzel says, but the
preponderance of evidence shows that Aryans came to India, with their
horses, their chariots, and their religious beliefs, from outside.
"Unquestionably, all sides of Indian history must be repeatedly
re-examined," wrote Witzel and comparative historian Steve Farmer, in
an influential article in the Indian magazine Frontline in 2000. "But
any massive revisions must arise from the discovery of new evidence,
not from desires to boost national or sectarian pride at any cost."
On the other side of the debate, the historian Meenakshi Jain, a
self-described nationalist, says that history is meant to be
rewritten, depending on the perspective and needs of the present time.
"Indic civilization has been a big victim of misrepresentation and
belittling of our culture," says Ms. Jain, a historian at Delhi
University and author of a high school history textbook accepted by
India's previous government, led by the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata
Party.
Pride has its place in history?
Like many Hindus, Jain is proud of the accomplishments of Indian
history, such as the fact that three small Hindu kingdoms - Kabul,
Zabul, and Sindh - were able to hold off invading Muslim armies for
400 years. She also thinks that students should learn that some of
India's most famous temples were commissioned not by upper caste Hindu
kings but by aboriginal tribes, who in modern times have been
relegated to "backward status."
"There is no such thing as an objective history," Jain says. "So when
we write a textbook, we should make students aware of the status of
current research of leading scholars in the field. It should not shut
out a love for motherland, a pride in your past. If you teach that
your country is backward, that it has no redeeming features in our
civilization, it can damage a young perspective."
But no matter which version of Indian history California adopts for
its 6th graders, it is bound to aggravate someone. The Board of
Education has already heard from South Indians who argued that the HEF
and Vedic Foundation represent a North Indian upper-caste perspective.
"We were saying, 'These groups don't speak for us,' " says Anu
Mandavilli, herself a South Indian. When groups like the Vedic
Foundation try to simplify Hinduism as the worship of a single god,
"they have their own agendas."
--
"Bart! With $10,000 we'd be millionaires! We could buy all kinds of
useful things... like love." -- Homer J. Simpson
