I recently received information about a two-day national seminar organized by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) on the theme “The Continuity of Indian Knowledge Tradition.” I was asked to consider writing a paper on the subject. Initially, I was keen to do so, but upon reviewing the details, I noticed that the sub-themes did not include the role and contribution of Islam and Christianity, giving the impression that these religions are “foreign” to India.
It is worth noting that over 200 million Muslims and Christians have resided in India for centuries. They share a common culture with Hindus, work in the fields, and celebrate their festivals together. While Hindus are the majority in India, the combined population of Muslims and Christians is approximately four times greater than that of the United Kingdom, which ruled over India for two centuries.
Historical records show that Christianity’s presence in India dates back over two thousand years, and Islam reached India’s coastal areas centuries before the arrival of Muhammad ibn al-Qasim in Sindh in the 8th century. Yet Hindu-Right forces led by the RSS and the BJP are not willing to accept Christianity and Islam as part of the so-called “Indic” religion. However, they often define “Indic” in terms of elite Brahmin culture and exclude the cultural practices of the majority of Hindus as “impure.”
Continuing the communal approach to history, Hindu-Right forces have been spreading false narratives among the people that the original inhabitants of this country are only Hindus, while Muslims and Christians are “invaders.” Even though Brahminical literature and intellectuals are intolerant of the egalitarian principles of Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, they prefer not to outright reject them publicly for political reasons but to appropriate them slowly. The act of appropriation is not easy for them. The Hindu Right, in order to divert attention from the caste inequality within the Hindu fold, tries to demonize Islam and Christianity as “alien” to Indian tradition.
However, history is not with the RSS and the BJP. It tells us that two thousand years ago, the Christian society was established in India. Since ancient times, India’s relations with Arab, Jewish, and Roman traders have been strong. According to tradition, Saint Thomas, one of the 12 Apostles of Jesus, arrived in Kerala in the year 52 and founded Christianity. Two hundred years after this event, many Christians fled Syria and settled in India, later called Syrian Christians. It is a historical fact that Oriental and Syrian Christian communities have been living in India for thousands of years and have no connection with the imperialist countries of Europe. Their services are as much for the country as the majority, yet the RSS and the BJP continue to call these religions foreign.
Apart from Christians, the BJP and RSS have biases against Muslims. They are trying to erase Islamic culture from Indian history. The NCERT’s proposed seminar is part of the same ‘saffronisation’ project. This communal narrative demonizes the medieval period as a “dark” period for Hindus because Muslims became rulers. It is true that Muslim rulers exploited the working classes, both Hindus and Muslims, and lived on their taxes. Hindu rulers, too, were not lenient in their exploitation of Hindu and Muslim peasants and workers alike. However, during the medieval period, the process of intermingling various cultures intensified, and a refined form of composite culture emerged. Many popular Hindu texts were written in the medieval period, and many religious texts of Hindus were translated during the same period.
Credible historians do not agree with the narrative of the victimization of Hindus during the medieval period. For example, Prof. Romila Thapar has criticized the history-writing method of “RSS and Hindutva ideologues for whom the past has only to do with Hindu history of the early period and the victimization of Hindus under Muslim tyranny in the medieval period.” Prof. Thapar has shown the intellectual dishonesty of the Hindutva writers who are at the forefront of “speaking of Hindus being enslaved for a thousand years by Muslim rule” but are dead against any talk of how “caste Hindus” have “victimized the lower castes, Dalits, and Adivasis for two thousand or more years.” While Prof. Thapar rejects the communal narrative that Hindus were victimized by Muslim rulers, she has shown that the medieval period was a period of cultural intermingling when the Bhakti and Tantric traditions in India emerged in the north (On Nationalism, Aleph Book, New Delhi, 2016, pp. 11-16).
Moreover, the egalitarian ideas of Islam also confronted caste society and gave much relief to Dalits and lower castes. Historian Sulaiman Nadvi (1884–1953)—who was associated with the establishment of Jamia Millia Islamia—has shown that before the coming of Islam, education was denied to the lower castes, but things began to change under the egalitarian influence of Islam. Furthermore, the term “Hindu” has roots in Arabic and Persian, with hundreds of Persian and Arabic words integrated into everyday Indian language.
Even the claim of Hindus being the authentic people of India is historically untenable. Prof. Romila Thapar has shown that the process of unification and homogenization of the “Hindu” religious community took place in the modern period. As she put it, “There were in pre-modern times a conglomerate of communities, identified by language, caste and ritual, occasionally overlapping in one or the other of these features but rarely presenting a uniform, universalising form. What is often mistaken for uniformity, namely Brahminical culture, was only the culture of the elite” (The Politics of Religious Communities in Cultural Past: Essays in Early Indian History, Oxford University Press, 2000, New Delhi, p. 1097).
To associate India with any particular religion or culture is highly problematic. In everyday life, the influence of Christianity and Islam can be seen in various aspects of Indian life, including language, customs, rituals, food habits, education systems, agriculture, architecture, music, technology, and philosophy. Calling Hindus an “indigenous” community in opposition to Christians and Muslims is highly problematic. Yet, public institutions such as NCERT continue to propagate such a communal narrative.
Despite this deep influence, the sub-themes of the seminar overlooked the substantial impact of Christianity and Islam. It is concerning that a premier educational body like NCERT, responsible for textbooks from class one to twelve, continues to display such bias and myopia in its approach. This biased perspective is indicative of the influence of right-wing forces in our public institutions.
If one goes through the brochure of the NCERT, the tone and tenor are coloured by self-glorification and jingoism. “India’s talent is capable and sufficient for running the entire world.” It further says that the purpose of such a seminar is to instil a sense of pride in the youth and act accordingly so that India again becomes a “world leader” (Vishwa Guru). Our criticism of such an approach does not mean that we are not recognizing the positive contribution of Indians, but it does not serve any purpose if it is over-hyped. The democratic approach is to work in cooperation and with an egalitarian spirit, rather than leading others or being led by them. The concept of master (Guru) and disciple (Chela) is mediated through power. The history of any invention and tradition would reveal that it has been shaped by many forces. It carries the stamps of different traditions and regions. Nothing is born in isolation, nor does it grow in isolation. Yet, the RSS and the BJP are adamant about proving that the “pure” Indic tradition remains “untouched” by the “foreign” and “corrupt” influence of Christianity and Islam.
The NCERT brochure continues to make unsubstantiated claims. For example, it asks researchers to explore writing papers on how “India’s knowledge tradition and its implementation” have been successful during the COVID [pandemic]. The brochure claims that “India has come forward for the welfare of the entire world.” Let the people living in foreign countries testify how far the Indian government came to their help. We living in India can speak for ourselves. For example, I myself heard cases of people running for medicine and oxygen cylinders in the national capital New Delhi, not to talk of the remote areas where health facilities are worse.
During the coronavirus pandemic, the extent to which migrant laborers, mostly coming from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, and West Bengal, suffered cannot be expressed in words. In the absence of public transport, Adivasi workers left for their homes running along the railway tracks. However, some of them could not meet their family members and got crushed by the running trains. The plights of workers have not found a place in the themes of NCERT’s national seminar.
Worse still, during the coronavirus pandemic, minority Muslims were demonized for spreading coronavirus by the establishment-backed Hindu right forces. As a result, hundreds of Muslims, on charges of being members of Tablighi Jamaat, were arrested across the country. Are these not examples of mismanagement and the failure of the governments to stand with the people, who have elected them to power for their own welfare? According to a report by the World Health Organization (WHO), 4.7 million people died in India during the coronavirus pandemic, ten times more than the official data. Yet, the organizers of the seminar are inviting the participants to praise their political masters for “leading the welfare work” across the world. Can such a politically designed and communally oriented meeting contribute to knowledge formation? I leave this question to you.
While Islam was excluded from the themes of the seminar, the organizers were happy to quote a few lines from the famous Tarana-e-Hindi penned by the eminent Urdu poet and philosopher Allama Iqbal. In Tarana-e-Hindi, the nationalist poet-philosopher Iqbal defended and praised Indian civilization, which was demonized by the colonizers. But see the irony: while the Hindu Right is fond of quoting Iqbal when he showers praises on Indian Civilization and calls Lord Rama Imam-e-Hind (Leader of India), they have not spared the same Iqbal and removed a theme from the political science syllabus of Delhi University. Justifying the erasure of poet-philosopher Iqbal, they have called him a “fanatic” Muslim and “the Father of Pakistan.” Look at the narrow-mindedness of Hindu Right forces. While the RSS and the BJP want to become “Vishwa Guru” in knowledge, they are tearing off the chapter on Iqbal from the syllabus, about whom the whole world is curious to do further research.
Rejecting the Indian tradition in toto is as harmful as celebrating it uncritically. If one reads the brochure of the NCERT seminar, one is misled to believe that everything great and positive in the world that has happened has taken place in Indic tradition, particularly in the ancient period. The communal approach to history has divided Indian history into three parts and called the ancient period the Hindu period and the medieval period the Muslim period. Such a communal construction was done by colonial historians, including James Mill. The RSS and the BJP, which call themselves nationalist forces, have often been at the forefront of upholding and carrying forward the communal narrative. The RSS and the BJP are not comfortable talking about deep social inequality in the ancient period because it pricks their narrative of the glorious Hindu period. In the NCERT brochure, there was no reference to caste-based discrimination. Similarly, there was no talk of gender disparity. The division of Hindu society into varnas and castes and how the working-class Shudras were not only exploited but also demonized in subsequent literature are all missing in the brochure. The conflicts between Buddhism and Brahminism and Devas and Asuras have been erased too.
For quite some time, NCERT has been in the news for toeing the establishment line and making decisions under political pressure. Intellectuals have often alleged that it works under RSS and BJP pressure. Last year in June, Professor Suhas Palshikar and Professor Yogendra Yadav, the chief advisors of the political science book, sent a letter to the NCERT director calling the changes in the NCERT books “arbitrary” acts. They wrote a letter after NCERT deleted several progressive contents without consulting them. The list of deleted items from the NCERT textbooks is long, but here are some of them: a few lines from the political science book that discuss the 2002 Gujarat Violence have been deleted; similarly, the report by the Human Rights Commission on it and then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s call to the Gujarat government to follow “raj dharma” without discriminating people based on caste and religion, have been removed; the reference to Gandhi being disliked by Hindu extremists and the identity of his assassin Nathuram Godse as a Brahmin have been erased as well. Even the references to ghettoization as a result of anti-Muslim Gujarat violence have been deleted from NCERT sociology books. The chapters on the Mughal Court, Central Islamic Lands, the Cold War, and the era of one-party dominance discussing the early phase of the Congress party have been torn off.
According to a recent report in The Indian Express (June 16, 2024), the Class 12 political science book of NCERT erased the references to the 16th-century old Babri Masjid, which was illegally demolished in broad daylight on December 6, 1992, by Hindu Right forces. The newly printed textbook calls Babri Masjid “the three-dome structure,” which was built “at the site of Shri Ram’s birthplace in 1528.” It was also written in the new chapter that the structure has “visible displays of Hindu symbols and relics in its interior as well as its exterior portions.” However, no historian with any credible record of research can uphold these communal fabrications, which are being injected into our children.
In light of these concerns, intellectuals should express dissent against the communal conceptualization of the NCERT seminar and call upon members of civil society to raise their voices in protest as a demonstration of our intellectual integrity. Please remember that the penetration of the communal forces is fast taking place at other institutes as well. Therefore, a collective fight needs to be waged to uphold India’s pluralism, secularism, and social justice. Upholding such values and rejecting sectarian approaches is not just essential but also our Constitutional duty. Such a communal approach to Indian tradition is not only an act of intellectual dishonesty but also a conspiracy to weaken people’s solidarity.
(Dr. Abhay Kumar earned a PhD in Modern History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is working on a book about Muslim Personal Law. Contact: debatingissues@gmail.com)