Learning hate through history -DAWN - Books and Authors; February 19, 2002
Learning hate through history
By Krishna Kumar
Krishna Kumar explains how the history texts in India and Pakistan are selective in their treatment of various events for narrow ideological and cultural reasons
During a discussion on this study at a workshop of history teachers of Central schools from all over India, I was asked: “Why should history be taught from a perspective of peace? Why shouldn’t it reflect the reality?” The question had arisen from the argument that the manner in which the freedom struggle is presented to children helps sustain the hostility one sees between India and Pakistan. The larger argument was that the paucity of communication noticeable between the two countries is at least partly related to the rival perceptions of the past that schools promote among the young.
In particular, the events leading to the Partition are represented in school texts used in the two countries in ways that do not encourage children to look at the past as past. Rather, the past becomes a resource for keeping misgivings and enmity alive. Instead of imparting respect for the past and a sense of curiosity about it, the teaching of history fosters a perpetual quarrel with the past in both countries.
In India, the narrative of freedom is structured around the tension between ‘secular’ and ‘communal’ forces. Since the tension is directly relevant to defining India’s national identity and its distinctiveness with regard to Pakistan, an account of the nationalist movement structured around this tension necessarily encourages a disapproving and suspicious view of Pakistan. On the other hand, school textbooks used in Pakistan present the political narrative of freedom in a cultural wrapping designed specifically to buttress the claim that the urge to create Pakistan arose out of certain irreconcilable differences between Hindus and Muslims.
It seemed an awkward question at the time, but I now find in it an appropriate concluding thought for this book. The teacher who asked the question apparently regards history as a settled matter, something that deals with facts which cannot be disputed. The conceptual ground on which this common perception of history is based is that the past is past — it cannot be changed. This view of the past carries the stamp of everyday wisdom which suggests that, compared to the present and the future, the past is fully ‘known’ to us. Indeed, this perception extends to regarding the past itself as a source of wisdom — similar to the sagacity that comes with personal experience.
Someone who disregards the past or does not show the willingness to learn from it is considered to be immature or irresponsible. Most of the time, the argument is made in reverse; that is, when someone meets an unpleasant situation, people remind him that he would have done better if he had cared to keep the past in mind. This kind of commonsense is apparently based on a romantic view of memory as a reliable record of experience. Since memory is intertwined with the notion of one’s own self, and has a powerful role in giving an identity to individuals as well as to collectivities, it seeks validity entirely from itself in preference to external sources like the memory of others and documentary evidence. For that reason, memory of the past is not about reality; rather it represents a reconstruction of past reality in ways that nourish the self.
This is not to deny the role that memory can play in enhancing our understanding of history. Recollection as a means of reconstructing the past has enabled recent historiography to step into several erstwhile neglected areas of study. Subaltern and women’s history, and the study of traumatic events like the Holocaust are examples of this development. Urvashi Butalia’s book, The other side of silence, is a stunning instance of the potential that individual memories offer us for constructing a holistic view of extraordinary political happenings, such as the Partition.
However, a serious problem arises if memory and history are regarded as one and if the everyday wisdom I have discussed above in the context of memory is directly applied to history. As Bentley says, “history is precisely non-memory, a systematic discipline which seeks to rely on mechanisms and controls quite different from those which memory triggers and often intended to give memory the lie”. The teacher who asked the question about history and peace was using her memory — which perhaps millions of others share — of Indo-Pakistan relations as evidence of her knowledge of ‘reality’.
Unless we challenge this memory-based view of history, we cannot hope to save history as a school subject from getting trivialized. Memory may be a useful resource, among others, to widen the scope of history teaching, but the idea that historical happenings can be explored and interpreted objectively must receive priority.
There may be limits to objectivity in the social sciences, but it is a value without which it is very difficult to define learning. As it is, the social sciences have a weak status in the school curriculum. The expectation that the teaching of history would benefit from its incorporation in ‘social studies’ has remained unfulfilled in both India and Pakistan. The new subject was supposed to build bridges between history, geography, civics and economics. What it did, instead was to burden students and teachers with the compartmentalized syllabi of its different components masked under a single label. The crowding of facts and information resulting from this kind of mechanical organization of social studies precipitated the dilution of the roles that its discrete components might serve in children’s intellectual development.
In Pakistan, ‘social studies’ was further diluted and distorted by the introduction of ‘Pakistan Studies’. In India, the teaching of social sciences at school has come under assault from conservative critics who want a Hindu-revivalist line to replace the pluralistic vision of society reflected so far in curriculum policy and textbooks. These elements have used the familiar cover of ‘value orientation’ for twisting the content of syllabi and textbooks in favour of a narrow, religious-cultural representation of Indian society and its past. In the context of pedagogy, as Sarangapani has explained, this ascendant conservative approach is as deeply indifferent to children and their ways of constructing knowledge as the earlier approach was, if not more so.
Truncated debate
The public debate on school history has remained exclusively focused on its potential as a means of political socialization. Though the debate has served as a platform to articulate larger issues which have political and cultural significance, it has also contributed to the neglect of history as a school subject, particularly in terms of the pedagogical and examination practices associated with the teaching of history. It has encouraged text writers and teachers to overlook the pedagogic problems that arise out of the traditional role of writers of history texts as magicians who show students what all happened in the past but do not reveal the basis of their knowledge.
In India, the debate on history textbooks has been focused on the distinction between secular and communal perspectives, and in Pakistan, on the meaning of the ‘Pakistan ideology’. In neither country has the debate ever extended to questioning the quality of history teaching in schools. New Indian textbooks indicate that the writing of history — and consequently its teaching — may now become even more indifferent to children’s learning by absorbing the influence of the quiz culture associated with television.
The earlier trend of concentrating on ‘facts’ and ignoring evidence and argument takes a grimmer, extreme form in some of the recent textbooks published by provincial bodies. They follow the quiz approach which encourages children to regard the verbalization of the ‘right’ answer as the only competence that matters. The new ‘national curriculum framework’ gives us reason to suspect that the next generation of NCERT textbooks may also reflect this trivialization of history — that this may be the route that the politics of history now takes in order to let ideological indoctrination become the purpose of discussing the past.
In Pakistan, the textbooks used in state-run schools have been of this kind for well over a generation, and there is no sign yet to suggest that a serious rethinking is underway.
Instead of waiting
There is little reason to expect that the state policy in either India or Pakistan will remedy this situation in the foreseeable future. The zest for educational reform has never been high in either country; it is currently in a particularly low phase. In place of progressive reform, we are confronted in India with the prospect of retrograde measures like ‘value education’ — a device to mask the move to establish a wider scope for the inclusion of religious and mythological content. In Pakistan, the 1998 policy, with its thrust on the transmission of ideology, has little chance of being challenged or reversed in the immediate future.
In both countries, the atmosphere of political uncertainty is also likely to encourage the use of educational policy as a battleground for ideological debates. Aims and objectives will be hotly contested in these debates, while real schools, textbooks and teachers’ training programmes remain starved of attention. We can hardly imagine that the potential uses of history for promoting a sense of wonder and curiosity about the past and respect for it will receive official attention in either India or Pakistan, even if the two governments agree to engage in some sort of dialogue for achieving military peace.
Innovative enterprise, however, need not wait for systemic reform. A handful of schools in India and Pakistan can come together to design and offer a shared course of study of the modern period, including the freedom struggle. To begin with, such a course should provide for sufficient time to explore selected events in detail, training the students to assemble a scenario from a chosen vantage point. An exchange of students between participating schools could ensure that the process of scenario-building attempts to accommodate the rival national perspectives.
Similarly, an exchange of project reports prepared by Indian and Pakistani students would allow them to make sense of divergent perspectives. Use of biography, literature, and journalism to expand the scope of interpretation given in existing historical narratives must form a strong feature of this project. One of the objectives would be to encourage young students to probe controversies among historians by looking at the evidence cited or ignored by them. The controversy surrounding the 1857 revolt and the contested implications of the Nehru Report can serve as useful topics in this regard.
Application of analytical techniques and judgment is now a part of the curriculum for secondary classes in countries where a serious effort to reform the teaching of history has been made over the recent years. In Germany, for instance, secondary level students are required to probe the Holocaust by analyzing political, economic and cultural factors with the help of relevant material, including primary sources. In England, recent reforms in curricular practices have opened up the teaching of history to multiple forms of student inquiry, such as argument-building, appreciating ambiguity, and weighing rival judgements. Such ideas may look fanciful to us, given the poor state of history teaching we are used to in our schools, but the potential they have for enlivening the study of Indo-Pakistan history can hardly be denied.
Apart from bringing together teachers and students of the two countries, the project envisaged here might create an opportunity for professional historians of India and Pakistan to examine school textbooks in joint sessions. If that happens, it will inaugurate the lifting of what is arguably one of the thickest iron curtains in the present-day world, so far as the flow of ideas and scholarship is concerned. Popular music and cinema have served as a tunnel under this curtain, but pleasant tunes and faces cannot by themselves establish the basis for a peaceful and mature relationship.
Education has a vital role to play in helping India and Pakistan overcome the chronically unsettling effects of their interlocked frames of perception discussed in the first part of this book. The teaching of no other school subject has the same importance in this context as the teaching of history. Inculcating a respect for the past and the curiosity to make sense of it is a major educational challenge for societies where denial of the past and the urge to change it have enjoyed popular validity.
Excerpts from
Prejudice and pride: school histories of the freedom struggle in India and Pakistan
By Krishna Kumar
Penguin Books, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110017, India
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ISBN 0-67-004913-1
274pp. Indian Rs395