The decision by the authorities to erase the Mughals from our textbooks has come too late to make my passage through history in school any easier. Had it been done in the 1970s, I wouldn’t have needed to memorise so many pages of history for the exams.
George Orwell saw it happening in his 1984, written many years before I was born: “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
Despite knowing this, my teachers in school insisted on pushing dates and events down our delicate throats on the ridiculous theory that history actually happened and can’t be wished away. Thus, by a tender age, we were taught about the Mughals, the Rashtrakutas, the Vijayanagar empire, the Cholas, Alaudin Khilji, Razia Sultan and Iltamush (the spelling of whose name kept changing, making it all very suspicious).
Today’s students (or more likely their parents) can go to the authorities and say, “My son can’t remember the terrible things Akbar did or the wonderful things Aurangzeb did (or vice versa), so can we erase them from the books?” And the authorities, always concerned about the happiness of their citizens (and their children), respond, like the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, “Off with their heads”, and they are gone!
When I was in school, we were told that the Indus Valley script hadn’t been deciphered. I prayed that at least till the exams were over, no one would decipher them. I also had issues with many southern and eastern kingdoms and the names of many rulers.
There was no authority those days one could take such grievances to who would kindly remove them from the textbooks. It would have been nice to have jumped from the first-ever man (an Indian) through Mowgli and Bagheera to the greatest-ever man (an Indian). Classes would be done in three minutes.
We had three textbooks in history, one of them world history, which included such nonsense as the French Revolution and the American War of Independence. The former had some French words, and the latter gave us the American president’s home address when he was living in Gettysburg. Totally unnecessary. Here’s a plea to the authorities on behalf of today’s students: please erase these two chapters too from the textbook.
Soon, if all goes well, our history books will be slim volumes of some 12 pages, all other pages and events having been excised. And if anyone objects to even that many, our entire history, Indian, world, everything can be written on a single sheet of paper, double-spaced. Wish I were a student today.
Two consequences, though. Librarians and bookstore owners will have a rough time for a while. A whole bunch of books on history will now have to be shifted to the fiction section. Scholars might suddenly have best-sellers on their hands.
Also, we can never ask anyone what they did yesterday because that is history, and as we know, all history is meant to be forgotten.
(Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu).