There has been a lot of criticism against NCERT making changes in history textbooks, including in ThePrint. Most of it has focused on the organisation trying to reduce the coverage of the Mughals as being an anti-Muslim action. I would like to present a different take.
Let me start off by stating that I dislike the very existence of an acronym and the organisation called the NCERT. To me, it smacks of Stalinism. The very idea that some bureaucrats ensconced in Indraprastha (sorry—I know many readers call it Delhi) can tell the children of this large, complex, and puzzling country about their history seems a joke to me. The NCERT was set up in the heyday of our Gosplan-inspired socialist Permit Raj. It was used, or should I say, misused by Marxist and postmodernist charlatans (one can hardly call them scholars) to impose their partisan views on our children. I have written on this subject before. I wish that the Narendra Modi government had simply abolished the NCERT or sold it off like Air India. I have been assured that there would have been no buyers for the august, pompous Stalinist NCERT!
It is not nice to take names. But let me assure you that the NCERT authors and editors of our socialist era were a darn sight worse than British historians of India, who, even when imbued with racist prejudice, had respect for facts. Henry George Keene, for instance, argued that the ‘Pathan’ Sher Shah demonstrated more intelligence than British rulers of India. And virtually all British historians were admirers of the Maratha ruler Mahadaji Scindia and Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Punjab. Our indigenous Marxists loved and continue to love clever euphemisms. Bakhtiyar Khilji, the destroyer of Nalanda, was merely a Turko-Afghan capital-seeking marauder, not an Islamic zealot and iconoclast — and that is just one example.
Also read: Deleting history from NCERT textbooks is lying to children. It’s also betraying parents
Look beyond the Taj
In any event, let me get back to my main point. I don’t like the very existence of the NCERT. But given that by force, the taxes that I pay are being used for this unnecessary organisation, let me tell you that I am happy that they are reducing coverage of the Mughals. I grant you that the Mughals did build the Taj Mahal, and that surely deserves a page or two in the textbooks. But I think our children need to be taught that the Cholas, whose empire was pretty big (given the vagaries of records, one does not know if their empire was bigger or smaller than that of the Mughals) contributed something of immense value to humanity: Bronze statues.
The Cholas did not claim originality. The lost-wax process goes back to Harappan times, and the beauteous Dancing Girl was made by the same technique. The Chola bronze of Shiva as a cowherd in the Thanjavur Museum quite frankly ranks with the Mona Lisa in terms of global aesthetic importance. While our children should learn about the Taj, is it correct that they know nothing about Chola bronzes? Once again, the non-woke scientific community in foreign countries has lept ahead of our erstwhile Marxist NCERT editors. The scientists at the CERN Laboratory in Switzerland display a lost-wax Nataraja bronze as a symbol of the “eternal dance of energy”. The irony is that our children have today learned something about the Cholas from the Ponniyin Selvan and not from NCERT textbooks.
Let us get away from small art objects like bronze sculptures, even if their aesthetic value is immense. Let us talk about structures, and I use that word advisedly. While it is not my case that the Taj or the Qutub Minar or Humayun’s Tomb should be ignored, is it correct that our children stay unacquainted with the magnificent rock-cut Kailashanatha temple at Maharashtra’s Ellora ? This structure (it is not a building) has been sculpted out of rock and is as big as the Great Pyramid of Giza. Who sculpted it? Not the Mughals but the Rashtrakutas — again folks who had a big empire and were around for a few centuries.
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What NCERT didn’t tell us
Let us talk of something closer home, next-door. The awesome Mahesha Murti at the Elephanta Caves (trust me it is next-door) has to be one of the most splendid sculptures in the long history of humans. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru loved it. French intellectual Andre Malraux was gobsmacked by it. Let me tell you a secret. The Mughals did not create that one. It was put up by the Kalachuris, a dynasty that the NCERT has so far considered unimportant and quite frankly, irrelevant. But you know some of us in Bombay (sorry, Mumbai) beg to differ. Every time I go to Elephanta and look at the Mahesha Murti, I feel that I am in the presence of a transcendent genius. I compare myself to a contemporary Roman citizen, who, despite all the irksome current ailments, can go and look at the Pieta and get transported to another world.
And yet, our NCERT editors of yesteryear have not bothered to tell our children about this possibility of an epiphany. I hope today’s NCERT folks (before they dissolve themselves as I wish) will include a great deal on Elephanta, and, of course, on the Kalachuris. Reducing Mughal coverage is just half the job. Increasing coverage of some of the greatest achievers of our country is the second half.
And for those who keep looking at everything through a Hindu-Muslim lens, let me acquaint them with a few details that our Marxist NCERT charlatans of previous years never told them. The Adil Shahi Gol Gumbaz in Bijapur (sorry, Vijayapura) deserves to be something that our children should know about. It might just be the biggest dome in the world. And while every Indian schoolchild knows that Mir Jafar betrayed Siraj ud-Daulah in the Battle of Plassey, they are never told about Mir Sadiq who betrayed Tipu Sultan. Mysorean Muslims feel short-changed and rightly so. Incidentally, they should also be told that merely because Siraj and Tipu were anti-British, they don’t become great patriots. The two of them had many enemies among Indians, including Muslims. The Nizam of Hyderabad hated Tipu more than the British could begin to imagine.
These stories, which the NCERT has chosen to ignore/downplay/suppress while giving publicity to the Mughals and the Delhi Sultanate, though richly deserved, do not merit the numerous pages allotted to them.
The half-Mughals of the North
I have been thinking about why so many of my northern Indian friends are upset about the reduction of coverage of the Mughals. All of a sudden, I got the juices giving me the reason. These folks, who are elite English-speaking socialites today, are descendants of Persianate Indians who held posts and sinecures in Mughal courts and in their successor Nawabi courts. They don’t associate the Mughal rule with tyranny, rapacious taxation, or religious discrimination. They associate it with good times when their ancestors ate kebabs, biriyanis, and pulaos and drank sherbet and practised Farsi calligraphy, which benefited them. They are, therefore, half-Mughals, pretend-Mughals, or wannabe Mughals.
Any reduction in the coverage of the Mughals is almost a defenestration. But let me tell you — for some of us from peninsular India, where Mughal influence was not that great and who use a different lens, the current move to devalue the Mughals a little bit is quite ok. If you insist on making it a religious issue, then why not lobby for more publicity for Ibrahim Adil Shah or for Malik Ambar? Pre-dissolution NCERT bureaucrats, please note.
Jaithirth Rao is a retired businessperson who lives in Mumbai. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)