South Asian History and Culture Contesting Histories and Nationalist

Home , Abdul Hameed Nayyar, Megasthenes, Suniti Kumar Chatterji

This article was downloaded by: [Joshi, Sanjay] On: 23 June 2010 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 923263848] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37- 41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

South Asian History and Culture Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t911470578

Contesting histories and nationalist geographies: a comparison of school textbooks in India and Pakistan Sanjay Joshia a Department of History, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA

Online publication date: 22 June 2010

To cite this Article Joshi, Sanjay(2010) 'Contesting histories and nationalist geographies: a comparison of school textbooks in India and Pakistan', South Asian History and Culture, 1: 3, 357 — 377 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2010.485379 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2010.485379

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. South Asian History and Culture Vol. 1, No. 3, July 2010, 357–377

ContestingRSAC1947-24981947-2501South Asian History and Culture,Culture Vol. 1, No. 3, May 2010: pp. 0–0 histories and nationalist geographies: a comparison of school textbooks in India and Pakistan

SanjaySouthS. Joshi Asian History and Culture Joshi*

Department of History, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA

This article examines selected high school textbooks from India and Pakistan to see how they craft two different histories out of a shared past. Central to this endeavour, the article suggests, is the device of placing the two nations’ histories within differently imagined geographies. Indian textbooks represent the naturalness of India through a geography and cartography first created in the colonial era. Influences from outside of these ‘natural’ boundaries are deemed to be ‘foreign’ to Indian history or culture. Pakistan’s imagined geography is different. Underplaying subcontinental links, Pakistani textbooks stress the ‘natural’ affinities of Pakistan with the Islamic world. Ultimately, such nationalist geographies teach students in India and Pakistan – who may live no more than fifty miles away from each other and whose grandparents may well have lived together as neighbours – to imagine themselves as not only the inheritors of different pasts, but as inhabiting different geographical spaces. Keywords: India; Pakistan; history; textbooks; cartography

Cartography . . . provides some important clues as to how political, personal and psychological subjectivities are sensitive to cartographic endeavours and how changing the map of the world can change not only our modes of thought about that world but also our social behaviours and our sense of well-being.1

The territorial waters of India extend into the sea to a distance of twelve nautical miles measured from the appropriate baseline. – Surveyor General of India.2

Downloaded By: [Joshi, Sanjay] At: 04:30 23 June 2010 Nations, Benedict Anderson tells us, are communities imagined within specific geographic boundaries. Imaginations of the nation are also, for most part, inherently contradictory entities.3 Nations are imagined as both modern and primordial, as naturally, ‘always already’ present, yet also the products of a recorded and often recent history, in which foundational figures play a critical role. Such contradictions nationalists usually seek to paper over with narratives of history4 and, equally significantly, with imaginations of geography.5 This article examines the different representations of history and geography present in the history and social science textbooks used in school classrooms in India and Pakistan. The two contemporary nation states share a common past. India and Pakistan as separate entities date only to 1947. Competing nationalisms in the context of British colonialism led to the creation of two separate nation states in the subcontinent. Constituted in the midst of one of the modern world’s forgotten holocausts, and with continued political

*Email: [email protected]

tension since, it is no surprise that official narratives come to represent the pasts of the two nation states through very different histories. Textbooks from both countries have had their share of critical media attention in recent years. A considerable amount of scholarship has also focused attention on the different ways in which textbooks of the two countries have chosen to represent the history of their nations to schoolchildren. Given both its theoretical and political significance, it is disappointing to note the lack of attention by scholars or journalists to the very different imaginations of geography that these textbooks seek to conjure up in the classrooms of the two neighbouring countries. The work of geographers, and increasingly historians too, makes us realize that space or territory is much more than simply an inert site on which historical events occur. As David Harvey argues, ‘Space itself must be understood as dynamic and in motion, an active moment (rather than a passive frame) in the constitution of physical, ecological, social and political-economic life.’6 Regions, territories and nations are actively constituted through cultural and political interventions. After 1947, both India and Pakistan needed to actively define their space in ways that would be distinct from each other and from the colonial past. Arguing that ‘social spaces – colonial and national, political and economic, material and imagined – do not emerge from self-evident geographies’, Manu Goswami, among others, reveals the historical processes that created the idea of India. Her work emphasizes how pressures of the global capitalist economy, colonial governmentality as well as nationalist endeavours shaped the imagination and then the reality of a territorially bounded national entity called India.7 We know less about the way in which Pakistan came to be imagined, except that it could not as easily claim the naturalized geography of the ‘Himalayas to the seas’ that Indian nationalists were able to appropriate from colonial (and pre-colonial) geographical representations. This dissimilarity is most evident in the very different geographies that undergird the officially approved textbooks, used in Indian and Pakistani schools to relate their histories. The relationship between history textbooks and nationalisms appears to be universal and virtually axiomatic. Whether in the past or our own times, in South Asia or other parts of the world, texts aimed at schoolchildren have been a primary vehicle for normalizing the nation. It is no coincidence that the founders of one of the earliest states organized on nationalist principles were deeply concerned about the textbooks they would use to edu- cate their future citizens, and to create books that would not taint upcoming generations Downloaded By: [Joshi, Sanjay] At: 04:30 23 June 2010 with the dross of the old world.8 Crises (real or potential) threatening the status quo within a nation state – whether the Civil War in the United States or the partition of the Indian subcontinent – have been reflected in history textbooks.9 The events of 11 September 2001 led to a scramble among publishers in the United States to rewrite history textbooks to better ‘explain’ the events of that day.10 The reunification of Germany, for instance, created its own set of problems for authors of school textbooks.11 Crises can also be perceived when intellectual efforts or political demands from previously disenfranchised groups result in modifications to a well-established story of the nation. In different con- texts, both Lynne Cheney’s complaints about the National Standards for the Teaching of History in the United States and those of the ‘Orthodox History Group’ on self-hating Japanese liberal historians stem from perceived challenges to simple celebrations of the nation in their respective school curricula.12 Nor are these very different from the ‘history wars’ fought in Australia.13 The political edge to the history being taught in classrooms becomes even more apparent when the context is one of disputed borders, or indeed when the legitimacy of the nation state itself is being questioned.14 Not that other sort of borders and boundaries are any less disputed.15 Examining representations of history and geography in Indian and Pakistani textbooks reflects the highly contested vision of the nation South Asian History and Culture 359

which is so obvious in the controversies around school history textbooks across the world. It is also interesting to note that the state is an important actor in these controversies, even in political systems that celebrate the operation of the free market and favour decentralized educational policies.

Textbooks in India and Pakistan: some historical background Most media attention and even scholarly critique have been directed at recent textbooks produced in India and Pakistan. Textbooks produced under the Hindu nationalist government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and those produced in Pakistan under Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamization drive have been particular targets of popular and scholarly opprobrium. This article suggests, however, that these vilified textbooks in many ways share an approach with their better-regarded counterparts. To understand this we need to locate these textbooks not only in the context of immediate political concerns of the BJP or Zia, but in a larger and longer history of colonialism and contested nationalisms. Both India and Pakistan inherited a centralized and top-down apparatus for making decisions about education and the curriculum when power was transferred from the British to nationalist elites in the two countries.16 Along with some expansion of primary and secondary education, by the end of the nineteenth century the colonial state had also begun to implement in the educational system an exclusive reliance, for both the teacher and the student, upon the published textbook.17 The emergence of what Krishna Kumar has termed the ‘textbook culture’ in colonial India meant that the task of the teacher was often only to ensure that material in the officially approved textbook was covered in the class. The textbook virtually became the curriculum. So packed with the power of knowledge was the textbook perceived to be, that the more ambitious students even wished to ‘grind the texts into a pulp and extract the knowledge out of them and drink it’.18 Textbooks naturally became big business for publishers too. For instance, Newal Kishore, one of north India’s leading publishers, made a substantial portion of his profits from publishing textbooks.19 It should not be surprising either that textbooks representing Indian history became a particularly important site of the contestation between an emerging Indian nationalism and the colonial state.20 For instance, a textbook titled Itihasatimirnashak, written by the arch- Downloaded By: [Joshi, Sanjay] At: 04:30 23 June 2010 loyalist Raja Shiva Prasad (and translated into English by the then Director of Public Instruction), was the subject of severe criticism in a magazine brought out by Bharatendu Harishchandra of Banaras (now Varanasi).21 Critiques of misrepresentations of Indian history or religion in official textbooks often became the subjects of controversy in the emerging public sphere of colonial India.22 Major nationalist figures, including Gandhi, often commented on textbooks.23 Others, ‘crushed by the weight of English poetry’ as Sudhir Chandra so evocatively put it, took to writing alternative accounts of the past, in a variety of genres, whether conventionally historical or in the form of historical fiction.24 But, if imagining the nation while under colonial rule was a difficult undertaking, the task confronting the nationalist elites in the states of India and Pakistan became much more complicated after 1947 when two different national histories needed to be crafted out of the same past. In the First Educational Conference convened in Pakistan shortly after independence, the Minister for Education declared the state’s preference for an educational system that would stress the Islamic identity of the new nation state created as a homeland for the Muslims of the subcontinent.25 Despite many changes in governments and their ideologies since that time, this has remained a central plank of the school curriculum in Pakistan. The 360 S. Joshi

National Commission for Education established under General Ayub Khan in 1959 supposedly decentralized the responsibility for primary education to the provincial governments in Pakistan. The commission also removed history and other social sciences as separate subjects in the school curriculum, replacing them with ‘Social Studies’ for classes 1–8 and ‘Pakistan Studies’ for classes 9–12.26 Despite the putative decentralization, educational policy and curriculum remain under the direct supervision of the central or federal government in Pakistan. Textbooks, though, are prepared under the authority of provincial ‘textbook boards’. Yet these hardly allow for too much autonomy since, according to A.H. Nayyar and Ahmad Salim, they act as the ‘ideological gatekeepers, making sure that only what they see as ideologically acceptable gets into classrooms’.27 In India too, despite the fact that education is the responsibility of state governments under the Constitution, the central government has played a significant role in determining the secondary school curriculum. The priorities of the new nationalist elite in India were, however, made apparent by the fact that they appointed a commission to report on the state of Indian universities 4 years before they decided to appoint one to look into secondary education. Once appointed, though, the Education Commission of 1952 signalled that the central government was determined to play an important role in shaping the school curriculum. The members recognized that ‘secondary education is mainly the concern of the States but, in view of its impact on the life of the country as a whole, both in the field of culture and technical efficiency, the Central Government cannot divest itself of the responsibility to improve its standards and to relate it intelligently to the larger problems of national life’.28 Evidently, the states were seen as incapable of providing either the intelligence or the larger vision the central government deemed necessary. The National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) was set up as the apex advisory body to guide the Government of India on matters relating to school education in 1961, with ‘national development’ as a key component of its mission.29 Since then, the Council has outlined model national curricula, created syllabi for instruction of different subjects at government schools, and published model textbooks for use in the schools.30 In 1968, ‘national integration’ was added to the mission Indian textbooks were asked to promote.31 The liberal nationalist leadership of a recently independent and partitioned India wanted its schoolchildren to learn a history that explicitly rejected the idea of nations based on religious communities. The (by and large) secular nationalists of the Indian National Downloaded By: [Joshi, Sanjay] At: 04:30 23 June 2010 Congress party that controlled the Indian government until 1977 were particularly keen to project a history which on the one hand undermined the ‘two-nation theory’ that had been used to justify the creation of Pakistan as a homeland for Indian Muslims and at the same time stressed the tolerance and inclusivism that lay at the core of their vision of a plural India. It is not surprising, then, that the NCERT commissioned some of the brightest leftist historians of the 1970s to write their history textbooks. Despite their reservations about bourgeois nationalism, some of these authors, who had already made their secular creden- tials explicit in a pamphlet criticizing older sectarian approaches to the writing of Indian history, agreed to write the textbooks.32 These NCERT books had among their explicit objectives ‘combating superstition and obscurantism, and fostering a secular, humane, and forward-looking outlook’.33 Evidently different nationalist ideologies shape the message textbooks in India and Pakistan seek to convey to their future citizens. Based on the ideology of the anti-colonial struggle led by the Indian National Congress, Indian nationalism for the most part seeks to represent itself as championing a secular, plural and inclusive vision of India and its history. The creation of Pakistan, in this vision, was a tragedy, foisted upon an essentially united people by the machinations of the British and the greed of the leaders of the South Asian History and Culture 361

Muslim League. The very phrase used to describe the events of 1947 within Indian historiography – ‘the Partition’ – brings forth images of the vivisection of a naturally existing organic whole. Not surprisingly, Pakistani nationalists represent this story somewhat differently. Pakistani nationalism sees 1947 as the realization of an always-existing separate Muslim nation, struggling for self-realization against the British who often connived with a wily, Hindu-dominated Indian National Congress. In fact, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League and Pakistan’s first Governor-General, strongly protested the appropriation of the name ‘India’ by the new, Congress-led political entity that came into being along with Pakistan in 1947. The protests were ignored by the then British Viceroy.34 Pakistani textbooks and sections of the media, however, insist upon referring to their eastern neighbour as ‘Bharat’ (and ‘Hindustan’) rather than India. Of course Indians also use this term to describe their nation state, although usually only when using Hindi or other Indian languages. Despite evident ideological differences, the determination of the state to control school curriculum has allowed for some interesting parallels to emerge in the history of textbooks in both India and Pakistan. With political changes, acquisition of power by newer leaders and parties is often reflected in the books, particularly history books, which students read in India and Pakistan. The displacement of Iskander Mirza by General Ayub Khan in 1958 led to the creation of a new National Education Policy in Pakistan. Nonetheless, early textbooks in Pakistan did not completely ignore the pre-Islamic history of the subcontinent; some even included positive evaluations of the role of Mahatma Gandhi. The secession of East Pakistan and creation of Bangladesh after the war with India in 1971 brought Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto to power in Pakistan. According to Yvette Rosser’s study of Pakistani textbooks, the process of complete Islamization of textbooks, which was to reach its peak under his successor, had its origins under a politically weak Bhutto seeking the support of religious conservatives in Pakistan.35 It is to the 1977 coup by General Zia-ul-Haq that most critics trace the beginnings of the ‘degeneration’ of the school textbooks in Pakistan into much more obvious ideological propaganda, particularly after Zia’s New Education Policy made the inculcation of ‘a deep and abiding loyalty to Islam’ fundamental to the school curriculum.36 Zia’s legacy has remained a powerful one. Though Benazir Bhutto may not have shared Zia’s commitment to Islamize education, critics point out that like much else during her era, ‘attempts to undo the ideological content of education during her Downloaded By: [Joshi, Sanjay] At: 04:30 23 June 2010 two tenures were neither well-organised, given high priority, nor subject to scrutiny’.37 Ideologues entrenched in the system were able to resist any move to change the curriculum or the textbooks, and were then well supported by the Nawaz Sharif government’s explicit backing of the Islamization of the school curriculum. General Pervez Musharraf’s government promised an exhaustive overhaul of the education system. Yet, even his government relied on the long-term goals outlined in the Nawaz Sharif government’s National Education Policy, and effectively there was no exhaustive overhaul of the system that has produced the textbooks examined in this article.38 In India, irked by the evident bias of the Indian state towards Left and secular historians, Hindu right-wing members of the Janata Party (India’s first government not led by the Indian National Congress) unsuccessfully called for a ban on the NCERT textbooks in 1977.39 That this remained an important part of the agenda of the Hindu Right in India became evident once they gained control of the government in 1998–1999. One of the first tasks of this coalition government led by the Hindu nationalist BJP was to replace important personnel in educational policy making – including the NCERT – with those who were more sympathetic to their ideas. The new director of the NCERT assured the people of India that the new books would be vetted by ‘religious experts’.40 Older NCERT history 362 S. Joshi

textbooks were replaced with more ‘updated’ history texts which were rife with ideological biases of the Hindu right and peppered with factual errors and ungrammatical prose.41 The elections of 2004 brought the Indian National Congress back to power, and once again the leadership of the NCERT was one of the first to undergo change, leading to new questions about the controversial history textbooks introduced only 2 years earlier. The new leadership of the council appointed an expert committee of historians who reviewed and thoroughly con- demned the new history textbooks.42 This move in turn has drawn condemnations from Hindu right-wing politicians. Their representatives in the media establishment decry leftist histories as ‘a deliberate attempt to berate India, its civilization, religion, and culture’43 and, in complete disregard of historical irony, it seems, compare the recommendations of the 2004 panel of historians to the McCarthyite persecution of intellectuals in the United States.44

What do the textbooks say? Given the history of state formation in the subcontinent, it should come as no surprise that history textbooks in India and Pakistan will differ in their interpretations of recent events, particularly those of the first half of the twentieth century. Krishna Kumar analysed in some detail how textbooks in the two countries disagree in their evaluation of colonialism and nationalism in the subcontinent.45 Thus, what is often described as ‘Muslim separatism’ in Indian textbooks is naturally represented very differently in the textbooks from Pakistan. The latter pay a great deal more attention to figures such as Muhammad Iqbal, who is represented in a heroic light, while Jawaharlal Nehru and the Indian National Congress occupy a place somewhat analogous to the representations of Jinnah and the Muslim League in Indian textbooks. Indian texts, for instance, Bipan Chandra’s Modern India, represent the actions of Jinnah and the League as examples of the unfortunate development of ‘communalism’. Equating the demand for Pakistan with the actions of Hindu communalists, the best of these textbooks (and Chandra’s is certainly amongst them) relate a history that poses ‘the freedom struggle’ as a stark contrast between a real nationalism represented by the Congress and the communalism of parochial or sectarian groups such as the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha. Narrow self-interest as well as active encouragement of British ‘divide and rule’ policies are shown to be the root cause of such political ideologies.46 Obviously, Pakistani textbooks have a different take on this history. M.D. Zafar’s Pakistan Studies, for instance, Downloaded By: [Joshi, Sanjay] At: 04:30 23 June 2010 naturalizes the ‘two-nation theory’, which claims that Hindus and Muslims always existed as separate nations in the subcontinent, to argue that ‘the Ideology of Pakistan which developed through a long period of 1000 years was materialized in 1947 when . . . a new Muslim State, Pakistan, appeared on the map of the world’.47 Reversing the insinuation that Muslim League demands were somehow favoured by the colonial administrators, Zafar represents the Congress and the British as being in cahoots to deny Pakistan its rightful place in the sun, a conspiracy only thwarted by ‘the grace of Allah [and] the wisdom and sagacity [of] Quaid- i-Azam [the title given to Jinnah in Pakistan] and his followers’.48 While the differences in interpretations of recent history are understandable, what is less so is the extent to which nationalist concerns have transformed the narration of events that occurred centuries, even millennia, ago. The Pakistani textbooks produced since 1977 (along with the ones produced during the BJP interregnum in India) have faced the most scathing criticism on this account. Under Zia, a hitherto obscure phrase, ‘the ideology of Pakistan’, was elevated to the central plank of the educational curriculum. Pakistani history, henceforth, was to be rewritten to suit this rather nebulous ideology.49 To narrate the story of an ever-present nation while telling the history of its creation is always a difficult endeavour, yet this is what most national history textbooks seek to accomplish across the South Asian History and Culture 363

world. It is inevitable that such narratives will be rife with inconsistencies. Post-Zia textbooks in Pakistan, however, have carried out this task in a particularly egregious fashion. K.K. Aziz undertook an extensive and scathing (though somewhat idiosyncratic) critique of the contents of a large number of textbooks used in Pakistani schools from the lowest grades to the highest levels of secondary education, and highlighted numerous factual inaccuracies, biases, lapses, and poor language to be found in these texts.50 The anti-Hindu orientation of Pakistani textbooks has been noted by a variety of commentators, and these texts have rightly been excoriated for their stereotypical depiction of the cunning and treacherous Hindu.51 Equally problematic are the clumsy production values of these books, manifest in poor spelling, grammar, and the use of very outdated terminology and concepts. There is, for instance, a chapter devoted to the ‘The Races of Mankind’ in a high school Social Studies textbook. ‘Negroes’, it points out, ‘can vary from a light chocolate to almost coal black.’ Hence, this textbook informs readers that ‘the texture of the hair provides a surer test of race’.52 Almost all critiques of the Pakistan Studies texts point to chronological gaps and anachronism. These errors result from the attempt to create a history of Pakistan that meets the official demand of highlighting Muslim nationhood, even as the books seek to appropriate to ‘Pakistani heritage’ the major sites of the Indus Valley civilization (IVC) dating at least to 2500 BCE. The strategy adopted by the Pakistan Studies books, almost uni- formly, has been to incorporate the Indus Civilization, as well as some aspects of Buddhist cultural production found in present-day Pakistan, as part of the nation’s ‘cultural heritage’. Real ‘history’ in these textbooks, however, begins with the Arab conquest of Sind in the eighth century by Muhammad Bin Qasim. Thus M.D. Zafar’s Pakistan Studies tells students that ‘Although Pakistan was created in August, 1947, yet, except for its name, the present-day Pakistan has existed, as more or less a single entity, for centuries.’53 The IVC figures prominently in explaining the millennia-old history of Pakistan. A little earlier though, the author says that Pakistan (with no qualifications this time!) was actually first established in 712 CE when bin Qasim, the nephew of Hajjaj-bun-Yusuf, Governor of Iraq, conquered Sind and Multan.54 With the gap of a few centuries, Zafar finds that under Ghaznavid rulers of the twelfth century, ‘the shape of Pakistan was more or less the same as it is today’.55 ‘Pakistan’ then continues to expand under various Muslim rulers until when, under the Mughals in the sixteenth century, ‘ “Hindustan” completely disappeared and Downloaded By: [Joshi, Sanjay] At: 04:30 23 June 2010 was completely absorbed in “Pakistan” ’.56 The critique of Indian textbooks has centred, for most part, on the actions of the national government led by the Hindu right-wing party, the BJP, between 1998 and 2004, and other BJP governments in various states of India. The desire of the Hindu Right to exercise control over the school history curriculum was apparent even when it was part of the Janata government between 1977 and 1979.57 An important component of the Hindu nationalist ideology is based on the claim that only those who regarded India as their fatherland and their holy land could be considered to be true patriots. These ideas derived from V.D. Savarkar’s 1923 pamphlet Hindutva, and serve to support the argument that India is a nation of and for Hindus alone.58 In addition to inculcating notions of an aggressive ‘Hindu pride’, a central plank of the Hindu nationalist ideology has rested on portraying Muslims as foreigners who remain loyal to an alien holy land. Under new management between 1998 and 2004, the NCERT first began to excise ‘objectionable’ content from older textbooks authored by ‘leftist’ historians, and then to replace them with newer books written by historians sympathetic to their view of Indian history and politics in line with their new ‘national curriculum framework’.59 Seeking, among other things, a larger role for religion as a source of ‘value education’, the new NCERT textbooks’ narratives were 364 S. Joshi

riddled with factual inaccuracies, even as they sought to promote a Hindu-centric history of India. Under the supervision of the BJP-controlled NCERT, the early 2002 saw the erasure from these textbooks any references to beef eating in ancient India, critical comments on the caste system, and a host of other major and minor elements that might under- mine notions of pride in a Hindu history. These changes, by the way, were undertaken without consulting with the original authors of these textbooks.60 Later that year, older, liberal textbooks were completely replaced by newer ones. The errors of fact, interpreta- tion and language in the newer textbooks have been widely covered in the Indian press and the international media, as well as in a variety of academic fora.61 The new textbooks issued by the BJP appointees to the NCERT in 2002 paralleled in interesting ways the texts that Pakistani authorities have been producing across the border since 1977. The clear bias against Muslim elements of the history of the subcontinent that appeared in the Indian books had a parallel in the Pakistani texts against Hindus. Contem- porary India, by Hari Om for use in Class IX, for instance, clearly blames only Muslims and the Muslim League for partition. Not only suggesting that the leaders of the League were in cahoots with the British, the book goes as far as to suggest that Muslims only par- ticipated in the first non-cooperation movement led by Gandhi in 1921 because they were ‘wedded to the idea of Pan-Islamism’.62 Only Muslims, moreover, are shown to be the aggressors in riots between Hindus and Muslims leading up to partition.63 On the other hand, the texts depict the activities of Hindu right-wing groups such as the Hindu Mahasabha in a positive light, while never mentioning their decision to cooperate with the administra- tion even as many other political groups in the country advocated otherwise. In fact, such is the felt need to airbrush inconvenient facts that Contemporary India forgets to mention that a Hindu right-wing fanatic, Nathuram Godse, was the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi. Also very much like their Pakistani counterparts, BJP-sponsored textbooks rewrote pre-modern history with a more than obvious political agenda. Makkhan Lal’s India and the World and Ancient India seek to show, contrary to accepted evidence, that the people who composed the Vedas were indigenous to India rather than migrants from Central Asia. Ignoring the prescriptions of ancient law texts, Lal insists that education was freely available to all and that up until the nineteenth century, ‘India had the highest literacy rate in comparison to other countries of the world’.64 The textbook for Class VII on medieval India and the world attributes most negative social practices, such as purdah or women’s Downloaded By: [Joshi, Sanjay] At: 04:30 23 June 2010 seclusion, to the influence of Islam, while characterizing the practice of sati (widow-burning) as ‘more prevalent’ because women wanted to ‘save themselves from falling into the hands of [Muslim] invaders’ (emphasis added).65 For a number of very legitimate reasons, the BJP textbooks from India and the post- Zia textbooks from Pakistan have been roundly criticized. Of course all history is political, but when such an exercise is carried out in a relatively unsophisticated manner, as has been the case in these textbooks, the results would be judged ludicrous if it were not for the potentially disastrous consequences they have for students compelled to read them. What this has meant, however, is that the older textbooks produced by the Indian NCERT have come to be remembered with a great deal of nostalgia. Bipan Chandra, himself one of the authors of the older NCERT textbooks, criticized the new NCERT textbooks by comparing them with the Pakistani ones. Chandra’s self-righteousness is apparent when he laments that ‘instead of Pakistan learning from our modern liberal ideas, it seems we are learning in the writing of textbooks from their obscurantism’.66 Yet, how different really are the apparent obscurantism of the Pakistani books and the self-proclaimed liberalism of their Indian counterparts when it comes to representations of national past? Just because the older textbooks were less objectionable to left-leaning historians it hardly means South Asian History and Culture 365

that they were free of the constraints of nationalist storytelling: a strategy that always relates the story of a nation state rather than of the people that inhabit it. How this was so becomes apparent once we compare the sort of geographic constructions that history textbooks, liberal and conservative, both Indian and Pakistani, have sought to impart to their respective students.

Imagined geographies An early attempt to rewrite Indian history textbooks from a Hindu nationalist perspective came in 1992 when the BJP gained power through elections in India’s most populous state and undertook to revise the history taught in high schools. The new text, High School Iti- haas, was widely criticized in the liberal media of the time.67 It begins by stating that a ‘greater India’ (Vishaal Bharat) was fashioned by nature. It then goes on to mourn the fact that despite being ‘geographically one’ our country is today divided into three political units – India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.68 A similar idea of the ‘natural nation’ pervades Pakistan Studies texts too. M.D. Zafar, in a volume of Pakistan Studies for higher levels, tells students that although the modern state of Pakistan came into being in 1947, the ‘spirit’ of Pakistan existed ‘for centuries’.69 Or that, ‘Pakistan wasn’t . . . born on August 14, 1947. It is as old as history. Nature has endowed it with a unique unity.’70 But this belief in the nation as a primordial entity produced by nature is not limited to obscurantist, illiberal histories. That the Himalayas to the north and the seas to the south give India its ‘natural’ boundaries is a ‘truism’ repeated in almost every textbook that I grew up reading. Moreover, the notion that the entire subcontinent is a united whole equally informs the historiography of R.S. Sharma, author of Ancient India, published by the NCERT during the zenith of its liberalism. Outlining for students the ‘importance of Ancient Indian history’, Sharma argues:

The ancients strove for unity. They looked upon this vast subcontinent as one land. . . . Our ancient poets, philosophers and writers viewed the country as an integral unit. . . . The kings who tried to establish their authority from the Himalayas to the Cape Comorin and from the valley of the Brahmaputra to the land beyond the river Indus in the west were universally praised.71 Downloaded By: [Joshi, Sanjay] At: 04:30 23 June 2010

The effect of this discourse on unity is undermined somewhat when Sharma reveals in the next sentence that in the three to four thousand years of history covered by his book, political unity approximating the subcontinent was only achieved twice. However, that does not deter Sharma from averring in the very next page: ‘The idea that India constituted one single geographical unit persisted in the minds of the conquerors and cultural leaders. . . . The unity of India was also recognized by foreigners’.72 Nothing illustrates this ‘always already’ India better than the maps used in R.S. Sharma’s Ancient India (Figure 1), which superimpose the boundaries of the contemporary Indian state on maps depicting an era that existed a good two to three thousand years before the present day.73 Pointing to anachronism in Sharma’s textbook does not mean to suggest that notions of territoriality did not exist in the region before the British, but rather that this cartographical imagination of India is one clearly derived from colonial constructions. Historians of India, past and present, have made great efforts to refute the claim that the British somehow ‘created’ India. Radhakumud Mookerji created an exhaustive list of citations (primarily from old Sanskrit texts) which express a territorial notion of Bharatvarsha or Aryavarta in his Fundamental Unity of India.74 The central argument of this pamphlet, originally delivered as a 366 S. Joshi Downloaded By: [Joshi, Sanjay] At: 04:30 23 June 2010

Figure 1. Map of Ashoka’s Empire: From R.S. Sharma, Ancient India: A Textbook for Class XI, (Delhi: NCERT, 1977), 89.

lecture in 1909, aims to refute the notion that India is a product entirely of British colonialism, and suggests that India’s ‘fundamental unity is much older than British rule, that it is not a recent growth or discovery but has a history running back to a remote antiquity’.75 Mookerji’s arguments were taken to their next logical level by the intellectuals associated with the Calcutta-based Greater India Society (which included among its members the well-known historian R.C. Majumdar as well as the philologist Suniti Kumar Chatterji (1890–1977)).76 More recently, Amartya Sen made a spirited rebuttal of the charge that he used an anachronistic notion of India in his book The Argumentative Indian. Citing data ranging from Megasthenes’ Indika of the third-century BCE, through the eleventh-century Ta’rikh al-Hind of Alberuni, to the ideas of the sixteenth-century emperor Akbar, Sen also argued for a longer genealogy for the idea of India.77 Yet, there is clearly a difference South Asian History and Culture 367

between the notion of a territorial entity called Indika, Bharatvarsha or Al Hind, and the modern, cartographically delimited nation state. Recent years have seen a great deal of scholarly work on the subject of cartography in colonial India. The East India Company, particularly after it became a major political player in the Indian politics in the eighteenth century, brought new cartographic imperatives to the mapping of India. While maps had been prized in Mughal India too, the company created maps for much more utilitarian purposes, including the demarcation of clear political boundaries.78 Using a variety of new scientific techniques, the colonial state sought to know, possess and eventually legitimize its control over India through the use of maps.79 Textbooks used in the schools of colonial India became one way to naturalize this new cartographical imagination of the territory.80 While colonial cartography and education may have routinized the peninsular shape of ‘India’ to its presently recognized one, nationalism did not blindly appropriate a colonial construct. Only by imbuing the imper- sonal map with affective content, such as identifying the image produced by colonial cartography with Bharat Mata (‘mother India’), did nationalist leaders make this map into something for which patriots were expected to lay down their lives.81 They were able to do this, Sumathi Ramaswamy argues, in part because this idea of a territory from the seas to the mountains resonated with older Puranic terminologies. Yet, as she is also careful to point out, both the scientific maps as well as those laden with nationalist sentiments, both the enchanted and disenchanted visions of India, were very much modern constructs and the products of different but equally modern needs of colonialism and nationalism. For Indian nationalists, certainly, the cartographic image ‘revealing’ a single nation shaped by nature from the mountains to the seas became crucial for justifying their efforts to create an independent India. It is interesting to note that Radhakumud Mookerji, who otherwise sought to validate his claim based primarily on evidence of the territorial integrity of ‘India’ found in ancient Hindu texts, clinches his arguments by asking readers to look at the ultimate source of authority, the map:

And besides, is not this unity apparent on the map? . . . The great barrier of the north formed by the Himalayas, which may be easily rendered impregnable, effectually isolates the country from the rest of Asia . . . while towards the south the advantages of an insular position are secured by the sea. Thus, sea-girt and mountain guarded India is indisputably a geograph- Downloaded By: [Joshi, Sanjay] At: 04:30 23 June 2010 ical unit.82

It should hardly be surprising, either, that a phrase dating back to the Puranas, ‘Â Setu Himachalam’ (referring to land between the Himalayas and the bridge supposedly constructed between Rameshwaram at the southern tip of the subcontinent and Sri Lanka in the epic Ramayana),83 came to be emblazoned on the logo of the post-independence Survey of India, the body which today authorizes all maps of the country. So central did this idea of a ‘natural’ or geographical entity become that nationalists found it difficult to think otherwise even after partition had created within its boundaries a separate and sover- eign country in 1947. At the same time, as they had done through much of the national movement (and perhaps continue to do to date!), Indian nationalists ignored the sovereignty of Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan, entities in the region that they took to represent ‘India’.84 Pakistan, and the trauma accompanying its creation, however, was too palpable to ignore in the same fashion. The strategy adopted by Indian nationalists was thus the one that we see reflected in the textbooks; they never abandoned the idea of India as a naturally forming nation. Even today, most representations of India depict an organic entity, whose integrity was marred by the ‘tragedy’ of partition. 368 S. Joshi

Given the burgeoning recent scholarship on colonial cartography and the ‘production’ of India, it is somewhat surprising that so little of it refers to the creation of Pakistan. These studies have certainly alerted us to consider how the territorial construction of India derived largely from Hindu sources.85 While this construction of a Hinduized India undoubtedly contributed to the demand for a separate Muslim homeland, we know little about how and if colonial constructions of territoriality influenced the imagination of Pakistan. Examining the representations of Pakistan’s geography in school textbooks throws some light on the subject, although this is a topic that evidently deserves much more and detailed attention. If we look at textbooks from Pakistan, what is quite apparent is the effort to craft a ‘regionality’ distinct from India’s appropriation of the grand narrative of the natural geographical unity of the subcontinent. Given that stressing an Islamic identity became central to the educational curriculum in Pakistan fairly early, it is hardly surprising that students were also expected to see its geography as predominantly connected to the Muslim world. This element became an even more overwhelming concern in the textbooks produced in the Zia-ul-Haq era. A Social Studies book for Class Six opened with a chapter ‘Location of Pakistan’ by stating: ‘Pakistan enjoys a very important position in South Asia.’86 However, other than a brief reference to India, China and Russia as Pakistan’s neighbours, this chapter has virtually nothing about the region we understand to be South Asia. Almost the entire chapter is aimed at locating Pakistan only in the context of the Islamic world. The next book in the series, by the same author, begins with a chapter titled ‘Pakistan and the Muslim World’. Among the six subsequent chapter titles we find ‘Phys- ical Features of the Muslim World’, ‘Climate of the Muslim World’, ‘Conditions of Soci- ety before the Advent of Islam & Influence of Islam on Society’ and ‘Awakening of the Muslims’.87 Muhammad Arshad’s introductory textbook on Pakistan Studies describes Pakistan’s geography as follows:

Bharat lies on Pakistan’s eastern border . . . . to its east is another chain of Muslim countries, Bangla Desh [sic], Malaysia, and Indonesia . . . . further West, Pakistan is linked with the Mid- dle East countries. To the West of these countries are situated the Arab countries of Arabia. This group of Muslim countries form a continuous Muslim block.88

Downloaded By: [Joshi, Sanjay] At: 04:30 23 June 2010 While none of this is inaccurate, the geopolitical implications of such descriptions are not hard to perceive, especially as the textbook quickly goes on to say that, because of its location, ‘Pakistan enjoys a central position among the Muslim countries of South East and South West Asia. Hence Pakistan can play a great role in solving the political issues of the Muslim World.’89 Very evidently, the connections to other Muslim countries and people, in other words the connections with ‘spiritual’ rather than geographic neighbours, are deemed to be important. ‘Bharat’ does figure prominently in discussions of Pakistan’s present but inevitably as an antagonist. The section ‘Pakistan’s Relation with Bharat’ begins with the following statement: ‘After independence, Pakistan’s greatest danger came from Bharat.’90 If we accept David Harvey’s notion that ideas about territory and region are ‘central to consciousness and identity formation and to political subjectivity’, then the differences in the imagination of the ‘geo-body’ (I take the phrase from Thongchai Winichakul) in Indian and Pakistani textbooks have some important implications.91 Examining the history presented in Pakistan Studies textbooks through the lens of geography makes it apparent that their attempt is to highlight the connections between the early history (the pre-history?) of Pakistan and the area that is today part of the Muslim world. When this is not possible, South Asian History and Culture 369

the books make an effort to write a history which separates the history of Pakistan from that of Bharat. This geographical imagination may well facilitate the teaching of a history assailed by critics for huge lapses in chronological continuity. For, once Pakistan is understood only in the context of a regionality defined by the Muslim world, erasing other closer geographic connections, it is much easier to teach a history that excludes non-Islamic elements.92 In a textbook whose telos is to understand only the making of Pakistan, M.D. Zafar is compelled to move directly from the IVC of c.2500 BCE to the Gandhara Civilization of c.500 BCE in the space of a few lines, because both are located within the bounds of present-day Pakistan.93 His narrative compels Zafar to appropriate a much older history, including that of the IVC, as part of pre-history of Pakistan.94 Yet it is even more interesting to note the sort of geographical connections that are both forged and ignored in this textbook. Zafar, for instance, highlights the connections between the IVC and Mesopota- mia (present-day Iraq), the conquest of the Indus region by the Persian empire and even the connections of the region with the Bactrian Greeks. Briefly mentioning the control of the Indus basin by the Mauryan empire as the handiwork of a ‘Taxila trained prince’ (Taxila is in present-day Pakistan, though the core of the Mauryan empire was in eastern India), Zafar avers that ‘[S]oon Pakistan re-established its link with the Bactrian Greeks in Cen- tral Asia’.95 Most Pakistan Studies textbooks fail to account for any history from roughly the fourth and third-century BCE to the eighth-century, because in this period the region comprising modern-day Pakistan was intimately connected to what is today India. History is thus put to work to reinforce the notion of an always-separate Pakistan and Bharat. Referring a little later in the textbook to the influx of nomads from Central Asia c.1500 BCE who produced the Vedas (one of the major components of Hindu religious literature), Zafar points out that by the sixth-century BCE the Vedic people moved eastward and established themselves in Bharatavarsha (present-day India) around the river Ganges. ‘A notable feature of this period’, he says, ‘was that it consolidated the separate identity of the Indus Zone from Bharatavarsha, while on the other hand, it developed close relations between Pakistan and Iran’.96 For Zafar to maintain this, he has to ignore the history of the early territorial states in the subcontinent and of the relations between them. He has to overlook, for instance, texts such as the Mahabharata in which one of the central characters is Gandhari, or the queen from Gandhara, who marries into the clan of the Kurus settled in the Gangetic basin. Downloaded By: [Joshi, Sanjay] At: 04:30 23 June 2010 By the same token, appropriating the grand narrative of a natural geographical unity of the subcontinent, although it suits the logic of Indian nationalism, also leads to historical tunnel vision and a remarkably similar effect of appropriating, erasing or negating well- known historical connections for the sake of political ideology. To start with the most obvious example, the IVC is today so totally appropriated to Indian history, that when products of the school system (including myself) first encounter the title of Mortimer Wheeler’s 1950 book, Five Thousand Years of Pakistan, their response is either incredu- lousness or merriment. On closer reflection, of course, there is no doubt that given that the major part of the river valley of the Indus is in Pakistan, and the most significant excavation sites of the IVC, including Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, are firmly located within its boundaries, Pakistan has a ‘better’ case for claiming the IVC to its history. Yet, the entire IVC is conveniently appropriated to the history of a naturalized India. But not all great civilizations are so easily appropriated. In such cases, Indian textbook writers have chosen to either ignore or minimize. For long periods of time, ‘Indian’ history was closely connected with the histories of other parts of the world. However, textbooks on the history of India take nationalist constructions of a naturally existing India so much to heart that they tend to ignore the influences 370 S. Joshi

of events outside the ‘natural’ boundaries. At best, such influences are discussed only in the way they contribute to the Indic world. The Persian empire existed on the borders of what textbooks represent as Ancient India, but R.S. Sharma’s book hardly refers to it. The empire of Ashoka transcended the boundaries of present-day India. However, students learn little about happenings outside the limits of the imagined ‘India’. The Kushans connected the Indian subcontinent to a larger Central and East Asian world for a hundred and fifty years. But, references to individual emperors apart, Indian students learn little about these relations from their textbooks – in large measure simply because they do not corre- spond to the entity that is defined as India. Richard Eaton’s recent work emphasizes the continuous set of historical ties between regions we today think of as separate – India and Iran.97 These connections, of course, ran right through what is today Pakistan. Eaton argues that from the time of Alexander the Great in the fourth-century BCE to the failed British attempts to annex Afghanistan to their Indian imperial possessions, there was only a brief period, from the thirteenth to the early sixteenth centuries, in which regions on both sides of the passes connecting the Iranian plateau to the Indus Valley were not controlled by a single political power. The constant movement of people, animals, and goods across these passes made them of crucial strategic and economic importance. Citing the work of Scott Levi, Eaton points out that in one year, 1639, about 65 camels reached Iran from India, each day, carrying about 30,000 lb of Indian textiles.98 In Indian textbooks, however, even when this history does deal with connections between the subcontinent and other parts of Asia, for instance in the chapters of R.S. Sharma’s book, it is rendered in completely Indocentric terms. Thus Sharma’s textbook tells students that Ashoka ‘brought about the political unification of the country’.99 However, the same textbook labels Iranians, Greeks, Bactrians, Scythians, Kushans and a host of other groups with origins outside of the subcontinent – all of whom made important contributions to ‘Indian’ culture and certainly to the Indian genetic pool – as ‘invaders’.100 The idea of a world comprised only of territorially demarcated nation states represented on maps obstructs any understanding of a past characterized by a much more mobile history and geography. Contemporary maps, David Ludden argues, ‘now control history, using scientific cartography to bury old mobile spaces by putting all of their evidence in the proper place, inside national maps, like a primitive archeologist ripping artifacts out of context to store neatly in a museum’.101 Like museums, these representations seek to tell a Downloaded By: [Joshi, Sanjay] At: 04:30 23 June 2010 very limited story, that of the modern nation state. So, while Pakistani textbooks are will- ing to acknowledge the westward connection of their history in the name of Islamic solid- arity, we get from them no sense at all of the historical links of present-day Pakistan to a larger regional pattern that included the Indian subcontinent. Similarly, Indian history textbooks are more or less blind to the connections between India and the larger Central and West Asian region of which it was a part. In this, Indian historiography obviously takes its cue from what Eaton says were British decisions to isolate the Punjab entirely, ‘politically, militarily, and conceptually’, from Afghanistan after their military failures there.102 Nationalist textbooks in Pakistan encourage their students to believe that they have historical connections only with a larger Muslim world. Even more significantly, perhaps, by locating their history with respect to a certain geography, these textbooks teach readers that they do not share historical experience with their eastern neighbour. On the other side of the border, the entrenched idea of a naturally formed nation produces a completely blinkered vision of a past, which too excludes any larger regional or global vision of history. Just as all maps authorized by the Survey of India are required to spec- ify, it appears that nationalist imperatives also limit Indian historical narratives to ‘twelve nautical miles measured from the appropriate baseline’. South Asian History and Culture 371

Concluding remarks While deriving its argument from school texts, this article does not in any way represent an exhaustive survey of textbooks across India and Pakistan. I am aware that even the NCERT texts, for instance, reach only a small proportion of students in Indian schools.103 Others have pointed to the much more insidious agenda of textbooks used in institutions run by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.104 At the same time, many private schools probably use extremely outdated history textbooks, perhaps because they believe that history never changes! For instance, some of the history books used in South Point School in Calcutta in the 1980s (then recognized as the largest school in the world by the Guinness Book of World Records) had evidently been written for British students living in the age when Brit- ain still had an empire. Students in 1984 Calcutta were reading about the Greeks and their colonies, and how ‘we the British people . . . too have a little Mother country and big new daughter countries across the seas’.105 Finally, as Sumit Sarkar pointed out recently, the real problem with textbooks is not limited to their cultural or political relevance. Text- books, and this is particularly true of those used in Indian and Pakistani schools, need to be better written and illustrated to challenge their readers and make the stories of the past seem relevant and interesting to them. Without that, students will simply remain alienated from whatever kind of history they are taught, as, unfortunately, too many are already.106 All the textbooks examined in this article have been authorized by their respective states. The trauma that accompanied the creation of borders in 1947, the wars that have been fought to maintain or transform them since, and the continued disputes around the borders of Kashmir, among other things, make both states touchy about borders and maps. The fact that, despite strict institutional separation, the borders remain more porous and fluid than either state would prefer generates ‘cartographic anxiety’, as Sankaran Krishna has discussed in a fascinating essay.107 One could argue that nationalist textbook projects are yet another way of dealing with that anxiety. After the creation of two separate nation states in 1947, India and Pakistan needed to craft different histories out of a shared past. But how does one do that? Much of the scholarship that has examined this subject in the context of textbooks in India and Pakistan focuses on different interpretations of key historical figures or important historical moments.108 This article suggests that constructions of geography are equally critical in this regard. David

Downloaded By: [Joshi, Sanjay] At: 04:30 23 June 2010 Harvey reminds us that ‘regions are “made” or “constructed” as much in imagination as in material form’.109 Pakistan and India chose to imagine their histories in the context of appar- ently diverse regions. These different ‘geoscapes’ in turn facilitate the slippages and anachronism that characterize the historical narratives that one finds in the textbooks of both countries. Imagining Pakistan exclusively in terms of the ‘Islamic world’ makes it possible for Pakistani history to ignore large periods when its past was inextricably linked with what is today India or Bharat. Similarly, without the naturalization of the boundaries of India, it would not be possible for Indian textbooks to treat the creation of Pakistan as the tragic vivisection of an organic entity, ignoring the large periods of history when a plurality of states characterized the political status of the subcontinent. The nationalist geographies within which students are taught to locate their histories not only limit what students learn about the past but actually encourage students from India and Pakistan to believe that they belong to different worlds. By placing the two nations’ histories within differently imagined geographies, school texts enable, even foment, the writing of different histories out of a shared past. The real tragedy perhaps is that the books seek to teach youth who are studying, say in Lahore and Amritsar – no more than fifty miles away from each other – to imagine themselves not only as the inheritors of different pasts but also as inhabiting different worlds. 372 S. Joshi

Acknowledgements I am very grateful to Zulfiqar Ahmad for obtaining the Pakistani textbooks I refer to in this article. A big thank you also to Judith Giesberg for pushing me to write a paper for her panel at the American Historical Association meetings in 2003 on the subject, and to Laura Hein and other commentators on that panel for their incisive comments and questions. Judy and Susan Deeds gave valuable editing advice. I am grateful for the comments of the anonymous readers for SAHC who gave valuable sug- gestions for improving this article. Finally, as always, nothing I write would ever be possible without the intellectual companionship and support of Sanjam Ahluwalia, nor would any writing be as satis- fying if not repeatedly interrupted by our delightful daughter, Aeka.

Notes 1. Harvey, ‘Cartographic Identities’, 221. 2. This phrase must legally accompany any map authorized by the Surveyor General of India. 3. Anderson, Imagined Communities. 4. Duara, Rescuing History. 5. Barrow, Making History; Ramaswamy, ‘Visualizing India’s Geo-body’, 151–90; Winichakul, Siam Mapped. 6. Harvey, ‘Cartographic Identities’, 223. 7. Goswami, Producing India, 5. 8. Tyack, ‘Forming the National Character’. 9. Giesberg, ‘To Forget and Forgive’; Kumar, Prejudice and Pride; Moreau, Schoolbook Nation. 10. Toppo, ‘Changing History’. 11. Schnee, ‘Germany: Two Histories United’. 12. Cheney, ‘The End of History’; Hein and Seldon, Censoring History; also see Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me. 13. MacIntyre and Clark, The History Wars. 14. Podeh, ‘History and Memory in the Israeli Educational System’. 15. For some instances of how fiercely the adoption of textbooks are debated in the state of Texas in the United States, see Russel Shorto, ‘How Christian Were the Founders?’. 16. Kumar, Prejudice and Pride; Nayyar and Salim, The Subtle Subversion. 17. Kumar, ‘Origins of India’s Textbook Culture’. 18. Prakash Tandon, cited in Kumar, Political Agenda of Education, 67. 19. ‘Newal Kishore is, first of all, a school book publisher’ wrote a contemporary observer, John Hurst, before going on to describe his vast publishing enterprise. Hurst, Indika, 604; Stark, An Empire of Books; also, Joshi, Fractured Modernity. 20. Kumar, Political Agenda of Education. Downloaded By: [Joshi, Sanjay] At: 04:30 23 June 2010 21. Chandra, The Oppressive Present. 22. For one example, see Indian Reformer October 10, 1895, citing the Paisa Akhbar of Lahore regarding the geography textbook used in Kapurthala. Selections from the Vernacular News- papers of North India, October 30, 1895, 528. 23. Kumar, ‘Origins of India’s Textbook Culture’. 24. Chandra, The Oppressive Present; Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness; Sharar, Paradise of the Assassins. 25. Nayyar and Salim, The Subtle Subversion. 26. Aziz, Murder of History; Nayyar and Salim, The Subtle Subversion. 27. Nayyar and Salim, The Subtle Subversion, 5. 28. Mudaliar, Report of the Secondary Education Commission, 1952. 29. NCERT, Memorandum of Association and Rules. 30. Kumar, Prejudice and Pride. 31. Wahi, ‘Textbooks, Politics and the Practice of History’. 32. See, Thapar, ‘The History Debate and School Textbooks in India’; also Bhattacharya, ‘Teach- ing History in Schools’. For the older pamphlet, see Thapar, Mukhia, and Chandra, Commu- nalism and the Writing of Indian History. 33. Gopalan, Foreword to Medieval India, by Satish Chandra. 34. Rosser, ‘Contesting Historiographies in South Asia’. 35. Ibid. South Asian History and Culture 373

36. Ali, ‘History, Ideology and Curriculum’; Aziz, Murder of History; Hoodhbhoy and Nayyar, ‘Rewriting the History of Pakistan’; Jalal, ‘Conjuring Pakistan’; Nayyar and Salim, The Subtle Subversion; Powell, ‘Perceptions of the South Asian Past’, 190–228; Rosser, ‘Contesting His- toriographies in South Asia’. 37. Nayyar and Salim, The Subtle Subversion, 4. 38. Nayyar and Salim, The Subtle Subversion. 39. Lloyd Rudolph and Suzanne Rudolph, ‘Cultural Policy, the Textbook Controversy, and Indian Identity’. 40. Mridula Mukherjee and Aditya Mukherjee, ‘Communalization of Education’. 41. Dev, ‘Mind Games, NCERT Style’; Kaur, ‘History and Sensibilities’; Report of the Panel of Historians; Vanaik, ‘The Textbook Controversy’. 42. Report of the Panel of Historians. 43. Mitra, ‘The Purpose of History’. 44. Mitra, ‘What’s It about History?’. 45. Kumar, Prejudice and Pride. 46. Chandra, Modern India. 47. Zafar, Pakistan Studies, 37. 48. Ibid., 40. 49. Hoodhbhoy and Nayyar, ‘Rewriting the History of Pakistan’. 50. Aziz, Murder of History. 51. Hoodhbhoy and Nayyar, ‘Rewriting the History of Pakistan’, 175; also see Ali, ‘History, Ideology and Curriculum’; Jalal, ‘Conjuring Pakistan’; Nayyar and Salim, The Subtle Subversion; Powell, ‘Perceptions of the South Asian Past’; Rosser, ‘Contesting Historiographies in South Asia’. 52. Arshad, Social Studies for Class VIII, 53. 53. Zafar, Pakistan Studies, 23. 54. Ibid., 4. 55. Ibid., 5. 56. Ibid., 6–7. 57. Lloyd Rudolph and Suzanne Rudolph, ‘Cultural Policy, the Textbook Controversy, and Indian Identity’. 58. Savarkar, Hindutva. 59. Jha, ‘A New Brand of History’. 60. Ibid.; Kaur, ‘History and Sensibilities’. 61. Friese, ‘Hijacking India’s History’; Habib, Jaiswal, and Mukherjee, ‘History in the New NCERT Textbooks’; Jha, ‘A New Brand of History’; Report of the Panel of Historians; Sullivan, ‘India Textbooks May Cut Gandhi Assassination’; Vanaik, ‘The Textbook Controversy’. 62. Om, Contemporary India, 34. 63. Ibid., 36, 57. Downloaded By: [Joshi, Sanjay] At: 04:30 23 June 2010 64. Lal, Ancient India, 232; Lal et al., India and the World. 65. Report of the Panel of Historians. 66. Chandra, ‘Texts Were Rewritten in Nazi Germany, Pak’. Interview. 67. Kumar, ‘History at the Crossroads’. 68. Chaturvedi et al., High School Itihaas, 7–8. 69. Zafar, Pakistan Studies, 23. 70. Ibid., 35. 71. Sharma, Ancient India, 1. 72. Ibid., 2. 73. Sharma, Ancient India, 1, 35, 53, 70, 79. 74. The Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan text I possess spells his last name as ‘Mukherji’ on the spine, though continues to use ‘Mookerji’ in the main text, which is the spelling used in the original 1914 edition of this text, and the one I employ in this article. 75. Mookerji, The Fundamental Unity of India, 24. 76. For a very interesting study of the Greater India Society, see Bayly, ‘Imagining “Greater India” ’. Unlike the argument for a geographically naturalized India, these intellectuals saw India as the metropolitan centre of a larger Indian imperial formation. Bayly also notes the association of the Greater India Society intellectuals with contemporary Hindu nationalists, their contribution to the historical vision of secular nationalists such as Nehru as well as the appropriation of their legacy by contemporary advocates of Hindutva. 374 S. Joshi

77. Sen, ‘Our Past and Our Present’, 4884–5. 78. Sen, Distant Sovereignty. 79. Barrow, Making History, Drawing Territory; Edney, Mapping an Empire; Scott, Seeing Like a State. 80. Goswami, Producing India. 81. Ramaswamy, ‘Visualizing India’s Geo-body’. 82. Mookerji, The Fundamental Unity of India, 92. 83. I am grateful to Sumathi Ramaswamy and to Bruce Sullivan for helping me with the translation of this phrase. My gloss remains somewhat simplistic, and requires more research. I look forward to reading Sumathi Ramaswamy’s forthcoming work on geographic logos used by the Indian state, including this one. 84. Joshi, ‘Colonial Notions of South Asia’. 85. Goswami, Producing India; Ramaswamy, ‘Visualizing India’s Geo-body’. 86. Khan, Social Studies for Class VI, 7. 87. Khan, Social Studies for Class VII. 88. Arshad, Social Studies for Class VIII, 55–6. 89. Ibid., 56. 90. Ibid., 136; also see, Powell, ‘Perceptions of the South Asian Past’; Rosser, ‘Contesting Histo- riographies in South Asia’. 91. Harvey, ‘Cartographic Identities’, 225. 92. In a similar manner, as Yvette Rosser recounts, early revisions of history textbooks in a then newly created Bangladesh emphasized a history that was centred on the region, and a Bengali rather than a Muslim identity. Rosser, ‘Curriculum as Destiny’, chap. 4. 93. Zafar, Pakistan Studies, 157. 94. This was obviously a somewhat different project from the one celebrating ‘thousands of years’ of Pakistani history. Mortimer Wheeler’s Five Thousand Years of Pakistan was an important text for the latter project. Manan Ahmed has recently written about this in his blog ‘Chapati Mystery’. See, http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/thousands_of_ years.html. 95. Zafar, Pakistan Studies, 165. 96. Ibid., 164. 97. Eaton, ‘Mapping Persia, India, and Asia’. 98. Ibid. 99. Sharma, Ancient India, 91. 100. Ibid., 75, 100, 102–8. 101. Ludden, ‘Presidential Address: Maps of the Mind’, 1062. 102. Eaton, ‘Mapping Persia, India, and Asia’. 103. Bhattacharya, ‘The Problem’; also see, Bhattacharya, ‘Teaching History in Schools’. Downloaded By: [Joshi, Sanjay] At: 04:30 23 June 2010 104. Sarkar, ‘Historical Pedagogy of the Sangh Parivar’. 105. Joshi, ‘Be Indian the British Way’. 106. Sarkar, ‘History Textbooks: The Need to Move Forward’. 107. Krishna, ‘Cartographic Anxiety’. 108. Aziz, Murder of History; Jalal, ‘Conjuring Pakistan’; Kumar, Prejudice and Pride; Report of the Panel of Historians. 109. Harvey, ‘Cartographic Identities’, 225.

Bibliography Ali, Mubarak. ‘History, Ideology and Curriculum’. Economic and Political Weekly 37, no. 44/45 (November 2, 2002): 4530–1. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Arshad, Mohammad. Introduction to Pakistan Studies for IX Class. Karachi: Ghazali Publishing House, n.d. Arshad, M. Social Studies for Class VIII for English Medium Schools. Karachi: Scientific Publica- tions, n.d. Aziz, K.K. Murder of History: A Critique of History Textbooks Used in Pakistan. Lahore: Vanguard, 1993. South Asian History and Culture 375

Barrow, Ian J. Making History, Drawing Territory: British Mapping in India, c. 1756–1905. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003. Bayly, Susan. ‘Imagining “Greater India”: French and Indian Visions of Colonialism in the Indic Mode’. Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 3 (July 2004): 703–44. Bhattacharya, Neeladri. ‘The Problem’. Seminar 522 (February 2003) Rewriting History. http:// www.india-seminar.com/2003/522/522%20the%20problem.htm (accessed May 21, 2010). Bhattacharya, Neeladri. ‘Teaching History in Schools: The Politics of Textbooks in India’. History Workshop Journal 67, no. 1 (2009): 99–110. Chandra, Bipan. Modern India. New Delhi: National Council of Educational Research and Training, 1971. Chandra, Bipan. ‘Texts Were Rewritten in Nazi Germany, Pak’. Interview. Indian Express, October 6, 2002. Chandra, Sudhir. The Oppressive Present: Literature and Social Consciousness in Colonial India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992. Chaturvedi, Shail Nath, Om Prakash, K.K. Thapaliyal, Avyaktaram Misra, Rasik Bihari Dixit, Gauri Shankar Kedariya, Kishore Lal Sharma, and Raghuraj Singh (assistant editor). High School Itihaas, Bhaag 1. Lucknow: Government of Uttar Pradesh, revised edition, 1992. Cheney, Lynne. ‘The End of History’. Wall Street Journal, October 20, 1994. Dev, Arjun. ‘Mind Games, NCERT Style’. Hindustan Times, July 30, 2002. Duara, Prasenjit. Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Eaton, Richard M. ‘Mapping Persia, India, and Asia: 750–1750: From Alexander the Great to Alexander Cunningham’. Paper presented at the Association of Asian Studies meeting, New York, March 28, 2003. Edney, Matthew H. Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. Fitzgerald, Frances. America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Friese, Kai. ‘Hijacking India’s History’. New York Times, December 29, 2002. Giesberg, Judith Ann. ‘ “To Forget and Forgive”: Reconstructing the Nation in the Post-Civil War Classroom’. Civil War History LII, no. 3 (September 2006): 282–302. Gopalan, K. Foreword to Medieval India: A History Textbook for Class XI, by Satish Chandra. Delhi: NCERT, 1978. Goswami, Manu. Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004. Habib, Irfan, Suvira Jaiswal, and Aditya Mukherjee. History in the New NCERT Textbooks: A Report and an Index of Errors. Kolkata: Indian History Congress, 2003. Harley, J.B. The New Nature of Maps. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Harvey, David. ‘Cartographic Identities: Geographical Knowledges under Globalization’. In Spaces Downloaded By: [Joshi, Sanjay] At: 04:30 23 June 2010 of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography, ed. David Harvey. New York: Routledge, 2001. Hein, Laura and Mark, Selden, eds. Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2000. Hoodhbhoy, Pervez Amirali and Abdul Hameed Nayyar. ‘Rewriting the History of Pakistan’. In Islam, Politics and the State: The Pakistan Experience, ed. Mohammad Asghar Khan. London: Zed Books, 1985. Hurst, John Fletcher. Indika. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1891. Jalal, Ayesha. ‘Conjuring Pakistan: History as Official Imagining’. International Journal of Middle East Studies 27, no. 1 (February 1995): 73–89. Jha, Vishwa Mohan. ‘A New Brand of History’. Frontline, February 15–28, March 1–14, 2003. Joshi, Sanjay. ‘Be Indian the British Way’. The Telegraph (Calcutta), July 22, 1984. Joshi, Sanjay. ‘Colonial Notions of South Asia’. South Asian Journal 1, no. 1 (August–September 2003): 6–9. Joshi, Sanjay. Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001. Kaur, Naunidhi. ‘History and Sensibilities’. Frontline 18–22, October 27–November 9, 2001. Kaviraj, Sudipto. The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. Khan, Qutubuddin. Social Studies for Class VI. Karachi: Rehbar Publishers, n.d. Khan, Qutubuddin. Social Studies for Class VII. Karachi: Rehbar Publishers, n.d. 376 S. Joshi

Krishna, Sankaran. ‘Cartographic Anxiety: Mapping the Body Politic in India’. In Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities, ed. Michael J. Shapiro and Wayward R. Alker. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Kumar, Krishna. ‘Origins of India’s Textbook Culture’. In Textbooks in the Third World: Policy, Content and Context, ed. Philip G. Altbach and Gail P. Kelly, 97–112. New York: Garland, 1988. Kumar, Krishna. Political Agenda of Education: A Study of Colonialist and Nationalist Ideas. Delhi: Sage Publications, 1991. Kumar, Krishna. Prejudice and Pride: School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan. Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2001. Kumar, Kuldeep. ‘History at the Crossroads’. Pioneer on Sunday, September 27, 1992. Lal, Makkhan. Ancient India (for Class XI). Delhi: NCERT, 2002. Lal, Makkhan, Sima Yadav, B.K. Banerjee, and M. Akhtar Hussain. India and the World: Social Sciences Book for Class VI. Delhi: NCERT, 2002. Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: Touchstone, 1995. Ludden, David. Contesting the Nation: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Ludden, David. ‘Presidential Address: Maps of the Mind and the Mobility of Asia’. The Journal of Asian Studies 62, no. 4 (November 2003): 1057–78. MacIntyre, Stuart and Anna Clark. The History Wars. Carlton: Melbourne University Publishing, 2003. Menon, Ritu. ‘Cartographies of Nations and Identities: A Post-partition Perspective’. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 1, no. 2 (1999): 157–66. Mitra, Chandan. ‘The Purpose of History’. The Pioneer, June 6, 2004. Mitra, Chandan. ‘What’s It about History?’. The Pioneer, August 1, 2004. Mookerji, Radhakumud. The Fundamental Unity of India. Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1991. Reprint, original publication, London: Green and Co., 1914. Moreau, Joseph. Schoolbook Nation: Conflicts over American History Textbooks from the Civil War to the Present. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Mudaliar, A. Lakshmanswami, Chairman. Report of the Secondary Education Commission, 1952. Government of India. http://www.education.nic.in/cd50years/q/3C/3U/Toc.htm (accessed November 25, 2006; the web page incorrectly identifies the document as the Report of the 1972 Education Commission). Mukherjee, Mridula and Aditya Mukherjee. ‘Communalization of Education, The History Textbook Controversy: An Overview’. South Asia Citizen’s Web. http://www.sacw.net/HateEducation/ MridulaAditya122001.html Nayyar, A.H., and Ahmad Salim, eds. The Subtle Subversion: The State of Curricula and Textbooks Downloaded By: [Joshi, Sanjay] At: 04:30 23 June 2010 in Pakistan. Islamabad: Sustainable Development Policy Institute, c.2002–2003. http:// www.sdpi.org/whats_new/reporton/State%20of%20Curr&TextBooks.pdf NCERT. Memorandum of Association and Rules. Delhi: NCERT, 1961. http://www.ncert.nic.in/ memo.htm (accessed September 5, 2004). Nehru, Jawaharlal. The Discovery of India. Calcutta: Signet Press, 1946. Reprinted, Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Trust and Oxford University Press, 1981. Om, Hari, Savita Sinha, Das Supta, and Neerja Rashmi. Contemporary India: Textbook in Social Sciences for Class IX. Delhi: NCERT, 2002. Pipes, Daniel. ‘Books: Should American Kids Be Reading Houghton Mifflin’s Textbook on the History of Islam and the West?’ History News Network. http://historynewsnetwork.com/articles/582.html Podeh, Elie. ‘History and Memory in the Israeli Educational System: The Portrayal of the Arab–Israeli Conflict in History Textbooks (1948–2000)’. History and Memory 12, no. 1 (2000): 65–100. Powell, Avril. ‘Perceptions of the South Asian Past: Ideology, Nationalism and School Textbooks’. In Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia: Essays on Education, Religion, History, and Poli- tics, ed. Nigel Crook. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996. Ramaswamy, Sumathi, ed. ‘Visualizing India’s Geo-body: Globes, Maps, Bodyscapes’. In Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India. Delhi: Sage, 2003. Report of the Panel of Historians Submitted to the Human Resources Ministry on the NCERT Social Studies and History Textbooks. Government of India. http://education.nic.in/historian_ panel_report.pdf South Asian History and Culture 377

Rosser, Yvette C. ‘Contesting Historiographies in South Asia: The Islamization of Pakistani Social Studies Textbooks’. In Religious Fundamentalism in the Contemporary World: Critical Social and Political Issues, ed. Santosh C. Saha. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003. Rosser, Yvette C. ‘Curriculum as Destiny: Forging National Identity in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh’. PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, August 2003. Rudolph, Lloyd, and Suzanne Rudolph. ‘Cultural Policy, the Textbook Controversy, and Indian Identity’. In The States of South Asia: Problems of National Integration, Essays in Honour of W.H. Morris-Jones, ed. A.J. Wilson and D. Dalton. London: C. Hurst, 1989. Sarkar, Sumit. ‘History Textbooks: The Need to Move Forward’. The Hindu, July 5, 2005. Sarkar, Tanika. ‘Historical Pedagogy of the Sangh Parivar’. Seminar 522 (February 2003) Rewriting History. http://www.india-seminar.com/2003/522/522%20tanika%20sarkar.htm (accessed May 21, 2010). Savarkar, V.D. Hindutva. Poona: S. R. Date, 1942. Reprint, original 1923. Schnee, Thomas. ‘Germany: Two Histories United’. The UNESCO Courier, November 2001. http:// www.unesco.org/courier/2001_11/uk/education2.htm Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Selections from the Vernacular Newspapers of North India (SVN). Indian Reformer October 10, 1895, citing the Paisa Akhbar of Lahore regarding the geography textbook used in Kapurthala. SVN, October 30, 1895, 528. Sen, Amartya. ‘Our Past and Our Present’. Economic and Political Weekly of India 41, no. 47 (November–December 2006): 4877–86. Sen, Sudipta. Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India. New York: Routledge, 2002. Sharar, Abdul Halim. Paradise of the Assassins, trans. Tariq Mahmud, ed. Amina Azfar. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2005. Sharma, Ram Sharan. Ancient India: A Textbook for Class XI. Delhi: NCERT, 1977. Shorto, Russell. ‘How Christian Were the Founders?’. The New York Times, February 14, 2010, magazine section. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14texbooks-t.html Stark, Ulrike. An Empire of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007. Sullivan, Michael. ‘India Textbooks May Cut Gandhi Assassination’. National Public Radio, Morn- ing Edition, December 10, 2002. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=872595 Thapar, Romila, Harbans Mukhia, and Bipan Chandra. Communalism and the Writing of Indian History. Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1969. Thapar, Romila. ‘The History Debate and School Textbooks in India: A Personal Memoir’. History Workshop Journal 67, no. 1 (2009): 87–98. Toppo, Gary. ‘Changing History’. CBS News, October 22, 2001. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/ Downloaded By: [Joshi, Sanjay] At: 04:30 23 June 2010 2001/10/22/archive/main315367.shtml (accessed October 2, 2006). Tyack, David. ‘Forming the National Character: Paradox in the Thought of the Revolutionary Generation’. Harvard Educational Review 36, no. 1 (Winter 1966): 29–41. Vanaik, Achin. ‘The Textbook Controversy’. The Hindu, December 5, 2001. Wahi, Tripta. ‘Textbooks, Politics and the Practice of History’. Revolutionary Democracy IX, no. 2 (September 2003). http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv9n2/textbook.htm Wheeler, Mortimer. Five Thousand Years of Pakistan: An Archaeological Outline. London: Royal India & Pakistan Society, 1950. Winichakul, Thongchai. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Honolulu: Univer- sity of Hawaii Press, 1994. Zafar, M.D. Pakistan Studies for F.A., F.Sc., and Commerce. Lahore: Aziz Publishers, 1989.