Maharana Pratap has defeated a Mughal emperor in Haldighati with generous help from politicians whose love for history is never innocent
Indian politicians love their history. They may not be diligent students of the subject. But such is their enthusiasm for the past that like impish children dismantling their favourite toy, politicians cannot help taking history apart, twisting it out of shape, presenting colourful and distorted versions of events to suit ideology and agenda. Members of the Bharatiya Janata Party and supporters of Hindu nationalist outfits appear to be especially gifted in this respect. The prime minister had shown the way, blurring the lines between myth and reality by suggesting, for example, that plastic surgery existed in ancient India. Ganesh's head is illustration of this. Recently, in Rajasthan, believers in Padmavati's chastity assaulted a film director for - the irony is unmistakable - 'distorting' facts regarding the mythical queen's life. Now three senior ministers from the same state - one of them was formerly in charge of higher education - have supported a proposal by a BJP legislator to amend Rajasthan university's history curriculum to suggest that Maharana Pratap, a Rajput king, had won the Battle of Haldighati against the forces of the Mughal emperor, Akbar.
It is not as if the proponents of Hindutva alone take pleasure in mauling history. In Bihar, the coalition government opposed to the BJP declared that Ashoka, the Mauryan monarch, shares his birthday with B.R. Ambedkar. Karnataka, under the rule of the Congress, has now launched an exercise to 'sanitize' school textbooks to rid them of the content introduced by the BJP when it was in power. The politicians' admiration for Clio is never innocent. Their interventions are usually systematic attempts to indoctrinate minds and institutions. The chilling result is the onset of collective amnesia. The BJP, it is alleged, would like the country, and now the world, to forget India's inclusive, pluralistic roots. As a result, Muslim rulers are projected as outsiders, or, still better, as the vanquished in their conflicts with Hindu adversaries. Political meddling to turn fact into fiction has sinister implications other than polarizing society. It smothers the spirit of objective enquiry, turning students and citizens into passive consumers of a discourse that is perverse and exclusionary. The current tendency is to turn away from rationality towards myth and speculation. Yet independent India began with a prime minister who called dams and factories the modern temples and firmly believed that government offices should not have anything to do with religion.
Those elevated standards need to be re-established. But this is not possible unless there is debate - and consensus - on how to look at not just the past but also at pedagogy and the education system as a whole with a neutral, unprejudiced eye. The knowledge produced by dogma can be fatal to a nation's past as well as its future.
