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IN DEPTH:
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Hindutva goes to school
Yes, and that too
in California where Sangh Parivar fanatics are hell-bent on replicating
the saffronisation of the history project, despite strong protests by
historians and scholars
By Shalini Gera and Girish Agrawal
January 28, 2006
School textbooks are making news again. Indian history is again being
hotly debated. The actors are strikingly familiar: Hindutva groups
aggressively pushing their own version of ‘glorious India’,
and historians, linguists, scholars, dalits and community groups
outraged by this attempted revision of history. Only the scene has
changed — from the corridors of NCERT in Delhi to the offices of
the California State Board of Education in the US.
California? Yes. Early last year, two groups, the Vedic Foundation and
Hindu Educational Foundation, took it upon themselves to submit
recommendations for revisions to the California textbooks and their
treatment of ancient Indian history. At first, it did not seem like a
bad idea — these textbooks were replete with stereotypes,
misrepresentations, exoticised allusions to monkey-kings and howlers
such as the one informing 12-year-olds that Hindi is written in the
Arabic script with 18 letters. It soon became apparent that the two
groups did not restrict themselves to deleting references to
monkey-kings and correcting factual errors, they also inserted several
inaccurate, ideological, and highly contentious changes. This is not
surprising. The two groups have close connections to the global Sangh
Parivar: the Hindu Education Foundation is a project of the Hindu
Swayamsevak Sangh, and the Vedic Foundation has a long history of
collaboration with the vhp of America.
When news leaked out, scholars of ancient Indian history, led by
Michael Witzel, Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard, including
Romila Thapar, India’s most respected historian, sent a letter to
the state board cautioning them against accepting the proposed edits
without a scholarly review. The letter was signed by a Who’s-Who
of Indologists from around the world. Another group of over 100
faculty, primarily of South Asian origin, who teach and do research
about South Asia at universities in the US, requested that a panel of
three Indologists be allowed to review the changes proposed by the
Vedic Foundation and the Hindu Education Foundation.
The Curriculum Commission, an advisory body to the state board, came
under intense pressure from the Hindutva groups as their supporters
bombarded them with letters, phone calls and e-mails, and then, turned
up in large numbers at the review meeting. As a result, the commission
accepted many of the Hindutva changes, much to the horror of the
scholars asking for careful review. However, the board, alerted to the
political nature of the edits, has stalled giving these edits the final
stamp of approval. In an unprecedented move, during its meeting on
January 12, 2006, the board announced that it is investigating whether
the commission took factual accuracy into account when making its
recommendations. Thus raising the hopes of scholars and community
groups that the Hindutva edits may not get accepted.
The contentious changes pushed by the Hindutva groups serve three purposes:
- Sanitise
Indian history of its gross inequities. Talk about caste only in the
past tense, remove anything suggesting that caste still determines the
status of people in Indian society, and say that men did not have
“more” rights than women, they just had
“different” rights.
- Portray
Hinduism as very similar to Judaism and Christianity — the
politically dominant religions in the US. Erase references to plurality
in Hinduism by tricks such as replacing “Hindu gods” with
“the Hindu God”, and deleting text that says Hinduism
comprises “many beliefs, many forms of worship, and many
gods”.
- India
as “Pitribhumi” only for Hindus. Delete references to a
possible non-indigenous origin of the Indo-Aryans and move the origins
of Hinduism back in time, making ‘foreigners’ of all
non-Hindu Indians.
Why
did the Curriculum Commission accept these ridiculous changes? Largely
because the US Sangh Parivar convinced it that to do otherwise would
hurt the feelings of Hindus all over the world, and would be akin to
the sins of slavery and colonialism. Scholars opposing these changes
are being attacked through vicious smear campaigns and labelled as
anti-Hindu and racist. Dalit groups arguing against the sanitisation of
casteism are being vilified as anti-Indian terrorists. Community
members working to educate the board are being harassed, deluged with
hate mail, threatened, and put on Hindutva hit-lists. Hindutva
opponents are being labelled as anti-India, anti-Hindu,
“communist” — the last a pathetic attempt to appeal
to the supposedly communist-phobic mainstream America.
None of this is new, neither this attempt to saffronise textbooks, nor
the creation of a brand new past consistent with their political
project — not even the attacks on scholars and others opposing
their agenda. But seeing this as a re-run of an old reel does injustice
to the complexity of Indian-American politics. What gives this story
its unique flavour is the context of immigrant politics. Where Hindutva
proudly espouses majority fascism in India, in the US it hobbles along
as a me-too junior partner of an arrogant Judaeo-Christian State. Where
Hindutva in India menacingly brandishes its muscle to elicit fearful
compliance from the minorities, in the US it uses the subdued
vocabulary of plurality, multiculturalism and “hurt
feelings” to plead for incorporation into the mainstream. And it
is in investigating these shades of difference between desi and yankee
versions of Hindutva that we learn most about the insidious appeal of
‘Hindu Nationalism’ being repackaged as ‘Hindu
Minority Rights’.
Yankee Hindutva depends upon the subtext of everyday racism for its
very existence. Every person of colour in the US has had some brush
with marginalisation, alienation, some experience where power is
wielded in racial terms. Hindutva cynically manipulates the hurt and
anger of marginalisation into narrow, chauvinistic community pride.
Where the response to racism could act as the unifying glue between
various communities of colour to question power structures, the quest
for affirmation of a community’s pride neatly chops up the
minority landscape into distinct ethnicities, with each community
jostling against the other to occupy a place of prominence in the
national imagination.
The California textbook controversy is a classic example of this
pattern. The textbooks are terrible, but instead of engaging with the
inherent racism and exoticisation of the ‘other’ in the
books, Hindutva groups are converting history books into cheery
propaganda tracts as reassurance that Hindus are the same as white
Christians and Jews and fully deserving of the most-favoured minority
group status. And the changes come attractively wrapped in the language
of rights and equality.
When challenged in public fora, Hindutva apologists insist that they
are not denying the ills of caste and patriarchy, just questioning any
need to talk about them. A Hindutva activist stoutly defended the
changes: “Hindus are only asking for parity, which is in
accordance with the guidelines of the California board. If the sins of
Islam and Christianity are whitewashed, so must the sins of
Hinduism.” Suhag Shukla, a lawyer for Hindu American Foundation,
said: “In terms of men and women, I think, first of all if you
look at Christianity or Judaism or Islam, nowhere in the textbooks is
there any discussion on women’s rights. Then to pull it in for
Hinduism is a different treatment of Hinduism.” And the reason
for insisting upon capital G for Hindu gods? Because that is the way it
is written in the texts for other religions. No matter that other
religions are adamantly monotheistic to polytheistic Hinduism.
“Equality” for Yankee Hindutva is a disembodied,
decontextualised notion — independent of any connection to
concepts of freedom or justice. While mouthing the language of
equality, Hindutva does not even pretend to challenge any underlying
structural inequities — either in American society where it only
seeks to rub shoulders with the rich and powerful, or in India with its
deep-seated antagonism towards the lower castes. ‘Hindu Human
Rights’ are never invoked when Indians get thrown off airplanes
for ‘looking suspicious’, or when immigrant taxi drivers
are harassed by the police. ‘Hindu Human Rights’ are
apparently only violated when beer bottles have pictures of Lord
Ganesha or when caste is talked about in classrooms.
[Shalini Gera is with the
Coalition Against Communalism, San Francisco Bay Area. Girish Agrawal
is an engineer involved in South Asian causes, based in California.]
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