California schools to teach fiction as history?
School history textbooks in California are sought to be revised by pressure groups to accommodate and extol the “hindutva” view of Indian history, says Romila Thaper, Professor of History of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Michael Witzel Professor of Sanskrit of Harvard University, in an article published in today’s (March 9, 2006) edition of the Times of India, New Delhi..
The California State Board of Education (CSBE) is currently seeking community suggestions in regard to the updating of school textbooks. This has been seized by the American Hindutva lobby, the American arm of the rabidly Hindu communal organization, the RSS, as an opportunity to propagate and inculcate its distorted views about ancient India as history. When the Hindu communal Party, the BJP, was in power in India, the history textbooks in the schools were rewritten to suit their views; but these are being set right now.
The RSS and the BJP, under the Hindutuva theology, have claimed (with no evidence at all) that “the first Indian civilization is 1900 million years old, the Ramayana and Mahabharata are historical texts to be understood literally, and ancient Hindu scriptures contain precise calculations of the speed of light and exact distances planets in the solar system”. These, undoubtedly would be some of the gems of ancient Indian history, along with a dose of
Vedic mathematics, that would be in the revised textbooks in California, if the Hindutuva lobby has its say accepted
The Term Paper on Proposition 13 and the California School System
To understand the effects of Proposition 13 on the California school system, we must first understand what Proposition 13 is. We must also briefly glance at the events leading up to Proposition 13, also known as the Jarvis-Gann initiative. Proposition 13, adopted on June 16, 1978, is an amendment to the Constitution of California. It forever changed Californian property laws and sent massive shock ...
The authors say that “California has a large Indian American population and one of the largest school systems in the country. Changes made there have immediate repercussions for school systems across the whole country”.
The authors go on to narrate how the Hindutva lobby gained such a strategic position in the CSEB revision program. “When the California textbooks came up for review, a former (largely unknown) California Professor of history and Hindutva sympathizer was approached by a Hindutva foundation and later was appointed to an expert advisory panel serving CSBE.” He did not disclose his Hindutva relationship.
When word leaked out about the proposed revision of ancient Indian history, many scholars, both in India and America were shocked and objected to the many historical inaccuracies. This strong objection made CSBE to pause to reconsider their course of action. Professor Michael Witzel, one of the authors of the article was invited in February to debate the issue with Shiva Bajpai, the Hindutva leaning expert of the CSBE. This expert was like the ‘village school master’ in Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, in that “even though defeated, he could argue still”. But his argument, according to the authors, consisted of “contradictory slurs such as “Nazi”, “Racist”, “Marxist”, “Communist”, “Hindu hater”, “Race Traitor”, “Missionary”, “Creationist”, etc. all familiar epithets from the dictionary of the Hindutva disciples.
The authors feel that the Hindutva lobbyists will undoubtedly persist even if they are stopped in California. In order to counter this threat, an international council of scholars called The Academic Indology Advisory Council now offers its expertise to school boards and publishers.
The authors are of the view that “Hindu nationalists have a legitimate right to pursue their political agenda in India. Hindu Americans have a legitimate right to a fair and culturally sensitive representation in public school curricula. However, no one has a right to distort the truth and push their political agendas at the expense of school children”.
