By Archit 

The past few weeks of encampment at Jantar Mantar by the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) along with various Left organisations like SFI, AISA AND AISF, and nationwide protests, have shaken the power corridors of New Delhi and resulted in an unprecedented resignation of a cabinet minister for the first time since the victory of the Bhartiya Janata Party in 2014.

Education has become a live political fault line in India right now. While paper leaks and mismanagement have been the central taking point of the movement, Left groups have consistently pointed out the deeper embedded rot in the education system, where curriculum seems to have transformed into a frontier for the regime to establish its legitimacy and political-cultural world-view.

Nationalist projects also need a past, one which is comfortable for them to live with. However, the past on offer is very often inconvenient, ambiguous, or simply too complicated to serve present politics, a challenge that serves as catalyst for projects of remaking the past. Historian Eric Hobsbawm called this the invention of tradition, wherein there is a deliberate construction of a lineage or a set of origins along with a moral order and universe which is argued to be as ancient, pristine and beyond critical scrutiny given its sacred and unbroken continuity; even though much of it is in fact actually freshly assembled information arranged to the end of answering contemporary, modern needs.

Italian communist thinker Antonio Gramsci gave another name for the end product of such undertakings: common sense, the layer of belief which is so deeply absorbed and accepted that it ceases to be an argument at all, and instead it is the only way things obviously are. School textbooks are an important site where this common sense takes shape. The textbooks reach a child before she has the tools to question them, and they do it under the authority of the state and the discipline of history itself, which is precisely why regimes carry a relentless and compulsive drive to remake a nation’s self-understanding.

The Hindutva movement has pursued revision of history for a long time. Its account of the past rests on a few load-bearing claims: that Hindus are the original and continuous inhabitants of the subcontinent, stretching back to the first urbanisation and Harappan period; that the arrival of Islam had interrupted an otherwise harmonious civilisation and inflicted several centuries of unrelieved suffering on it; and the caste system, whatever its faults, is a secondary and largely colonial-era distortion rather than something woven into the fabric of the sub-continent’s religious and social life.

All these claims collapse against evidence, and cannot survive in the form the movement needs them to. Genetic and linguistic research supports migration into the subcontinent rather than an unbroken line running from Harappa to the Vedic age.

The five centuries of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal empire were, like every other period of subcontinental history, a mix of conquest, patronage, syncretism, and violence and cannot be categorised under a singular category of Dark Era. Caste hierarchies, far from being introduced by colonialism, have textual and social roots that predate colonialism by well over a thousand years, as generations of scholarship from Ambedkar onward have shown.

This story was originally published in newsclick.in. Read the full story here.