NEW DELHI: The recent removal of passages referring to the Mughal Empire from Indian schoolbooks has sparked outrage among academics in the country, who fear the move aims to erase from memory the significant role Muslims have played in the history of India.
The new textbooks on history and politics, especially for grade 12, or students aged 17-18, were released in early April in India, following last year’s decision by the country's National Council of Educational Research and Training to reduce the workload for students in over 20,000 public and private schools it oversees across the country.
The changes come with scrapped content on the Mughal dynasty, which ruled the subcontinent between the 16th and 19th centuries, marking the global revival of Islamic culture.
They also skip the 2002 riots in the Indian city of Gujarat that left hundreds of Muslims dead when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in charge of the state and remove links between Hindu extremism and the assassination of India’s most revered independence leader Mahatma Gandhi.
The Indian History Congress, the largest association of historians in South Asia, which has over 35,000 members, denounced the revisions earlier this week, saying they had introduced a “plainly prejudiced and irrational perception” of India’s past.
“It is an attempt to tailor the history as per wishes of the Hindu majoritarian agenda,” Prof. Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi, secretary of the congress, told Arab News.
Farhat Hasan, professor of medieval and early modern South Asian history at the University of Delhi, saw the textbook change as an attempt “to obliterate the cultural memory of the Mughals.”
A campaign to change the names of streets and cities of Mughal origin in India has already been underway since Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in 2014.
“The effort is to rewrite the history of India,” Hasan said, adding that it would undermine its syncretic character, in which Hindus, Muslims and members of other faiths have played significant roles.
“The Mughal heritage is immense and has shaped our culture in more ways than we recognize today. Our music, dance, architecture, culinary tastes and literature have been crucially shaped by the Mughals. They shaped the political culture of South Asia for more than four centuries,” Hasan said.
Aditya Mukherjee, professor of contemporary Indian history at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, said the textbook change was setting a “dangerous trend” and constituted an “attempt to erase the names of Muslims, erase their achievements, demonize and ghettoize them.”
With over 200 million Indians professing Islam, Hindu-majority India has the world’s largest Muslim-minority population. As Muslim achievements are being undermined, dark pages of Indian history related to the Hindu majority are being whitewashed.
“They are hiding the role of Hindu fanatics and communalists. They are hiding the links the RSS (right-wing paramilitary group) and other Hindu fanatic organizations have with Mahatma Gandhi’s killer,” Mukherjee said.
“This is very dangerous for a multi-religious country like ours.”
Dr. Archana Ojha, associate professor of history at Jawaharlal Nehru University, warned that the way in which textbooks have been abridged is unscientific and the harm that has been done in the process would affect the younger generation.
“History is narration and critical evaluation of past events based on gathered scientific evidence. The revision in history comes when new sources are analyzed, evaluated and corroborated by scholars,” she said.
“Deletions in history will only leave glaring gaps that students will find difficult to comprehend. We need to speak up, reason with those in power, make the sane voices heard in public and educate the masses before more harm is done.”
