Teaching History in Schools: The Politics of Textbooks in India

In 1961 a bright historian in her late twenties was asked by UNESCO to do a survey of the history textbooks taught in schools. This young historian, Romila Thapar, wrote a critique that was to become historically important. She suggested that the existing books circulating in the market were all of poor quality: they reproduced communal and colonial stereotypes and offered ideas and arguments that no professional historian would agree with. Some years later the education minister in the Indian cabinet, M. C. Chagla, requested Thapar to write textbooks on Ancient and Medieval Indian history for students in lower secondary schools.

Thapar's critique was part of a wider demand for the professionalization of history. Professional history writing had developed in India since the beginning of the twentieth century, but school textbooks continued to be written by non-professionals. What Thapar was demanding was that textbooks ought to reflect the best standards of the craft as well as the advances of historical knowledge at the time.

The demand for professionalization soon fused with a wider move for standardization. Soon after independence the government had set up the Secondary Education Commission to review the state of education and suggest concrete measures for improvement. Pointing to the importance of education in producing good citizens, the commission urged the need to improve standards of schooling and introduce a uniform system of examination. ¹ In 1961 the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) was established to oversee textbook production and produce model textbooks that could be prescribed all over the country. All citizens of India were henceforth to be offered the same syllabus, the same texts, the same narratives of the past, the same set of information.² The same process of unification and standardization was to be carried out within the provinces through the State Councils of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) that were subsequently set up. The examination system was unified first under the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and then under the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examination.

The will of the state to produce a unitary text – a text that symbolically expressed the unity of the nation and helped forge that unity – could never be realized in practice. The move to unify, standardize and homogenize came up against a series of barriers; it was subverted at various levels. Production of textbooks became a site of negotiation and political battles. Not all battles turned into public wars. Many were waged in silent ways, not scrutinized by the public, subverting the unifying logic of the new system without producing any public murmur. Unless we look at these molecular processes of negotiation and conflict we cannot understand the field of school education in India.

Through the 1960s and '70s NCERT produced a series of textbooks that set new standards. Written by some of the finest historians of the time (Bipan Chandra, Satish Chandra, R. S. Sharma, Romila Thapar), they offered a new way of looking at the past, critiqued colonial and communal stereotypes and presented a history that was secular and national. These texts were adopted by schools across the country. By the 1990s print runs for each book for senior classes went up every year, to 3-400,000. But this still constituted a small fragment of the market – possibly no more than ten per cent.

Once the syllabus was outlined, private publishers, big and small, produced their own texts, persuading local intellectuals and school teachers to write them and offering handsome royalties. Even big publishers like Oxford University Press and Orient Longman continue to survive on the booming textbook market – as education became an ideal of even the most deprived in society. These texts were never subjected to any scrutiny, any institutional standardization. Many schools prescribed the NCERT textbooks for public board examinations but used alternative textbooks in the other classes. The national was both accepted and rejected. Spaces of autonomy were carved out within the disciplinary regime of the state.

Over time the politics of representation began to question the unitary claims of a national history, creating new demands from...