This paper is a shorter version of 'Enemies Within and Enemies Without' which appeared as 'History, Social Studies, Civics and the Creation of Enemies' in a book edited by Akbar Zaidi, Social Sciences in the 1990s, (Islamabad: COSS, 2003). The section on India is based on a paper called 'Between the Sacred and Secular: Educational Debates in India and Pakistan’.

Knowledge Systems in Post-colonial Societies
Post-colonial societies and states tend to be caught in the tension between preservation and change. On the one hand, there is an ideological imperative to transmit the inherited culture and traditions to future generations as a way of maintaining continuity with the past. The urge to preserve a sense of collective identity in the face of change underpins a large segment of the social knowledge provided to children. On the other hand, most post-colonial states are under pressure to become modern, democratic and secular. The need to 'catch up' with the world and a fast-changing, globalised world, comes into conflict with the simultaneous desire to preserve the past along with a sense of difference as national identity.

The tension between preservation and change is most clearly reflected in educational discourse, theories, institutions and practices in the developing world. Usually, early educational experiences from the primary to the secondary levels are reserved essentially for preservation and continuity. In the initial stages of education, children are socialised into the dominant ideologies, values, beliefs, culture and practices of a society. Higher education is expected to provide the intellectual and ideological basis of change, innovation, novelty and development. New ideas and views of the world are considered the preserve of post-graduate studies.

Within educational theory and practice, social knowledge, in the form of social studies at the elementary levels and social sciences at the higher levels, is relied upon to provide cultural and social knowledge, values, beliefs and ideologies. The subjects of history, geography and civics, lumped together as social studies, are deeply implicated in the production of national identity. History produces the past and constructs national memory as the basis of national identity. It thus refers to the dimension of time in the creation of a collective sense of Self. Geography provides a sense of physical space and territory to the notion of identity. It tells us where we are located in relation to others with whom we share some characteristics and differ in others. Civics constructs the modern citizen for the nation-state by defining the relation of the citizen with the state. Civics refers to the dimension of political power and offers the future to the modern citizen1. Collective national identity, a requirement of modern nation-states in post-colonial societies, is thus created at the nexus of time, space and power.

The process of so-called 'nation-building' in post-colonial societies entailed the homogenisation of diverse social and cultural entities. Regional, parochial and provincial consciousness had to be rejected or denied in favour of national consciousness. While social knowledge, applied selectively and inconsistently, offered citizenship and national identity, the hard sciences offered the future to the newly constructed states and citizens. Apart from the imperative of national cohesion, the ideologies of modernisation and development were offered as the future to the new and homogenised citizenry. Science, technology and technical education were heralded as the motors of economic development and progress. Although not entirely devoid of ideology, science and technology, and in particular technical education, gained prominence and respect in the project of nation-building across the whole spectrum of developing societies. However, it is social knowledge that lends itself more easily to the production and manipulation of ideologies, values, beliefs and practices as it refers to collective human interactions, which are far more complex and infinitely less exact, predictable, verifiable, replicable and quantifiable as compared with inanimate matter with which the hard sciences work.

The social sciences have, therefore, been the major instruments deployed in the production and reproduction of hegemony. They are at the center of social conflicts and the expression of cultural power by competing groups and classes in society. Whose knowledge will ultimately become the dominant knowledge and be disseminated through the major ideological state apparatus of education, is a matter of which group or class is powerful in the perennial conflicts that characterise societies. Social knowledge is not neutral, impartial or objective as it is the expression of human labour, performed in the context of conflict between competing interests in society. For example, what may be true for a landlord may not be true for the peasant, what may be true for a Punjabi may not be true for a Baluch, what may be true for a Muslim may not be so for a Christian and what might be true for men may not be equally true for women. Truth is contested, contradictory and conflicted as different interests project their own truth on to the social realm. Social knowledge is always contested, forever arbitrary and permanently open to change. Depending on which group is socially and politically hegemonic, social knowledge accordingly changes. This process is evident in both India and Pakistan, where changes in political alignments and power have led to changes in the dominant knowledge designed to construct specific national narratives as the basis of specific identities.

The Case of India
In India the process of the communalisation of social studies textbooks is intertwined with political conflicts. The Indian National Congress, the party that led India to independence, propagated secularism as its defining ideology. In Indian textbooks of the earlier era, secular values are upheld while communalism is denigrated as a policy initiated by the British as a part of the doctrine of divide and rule. For example, a history textbook produced by the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) in 1989 warns children of Class VIII against communalism:

‘Formation of political organisations on the basis of religion is an unhealthy thing in the political life of a people. Such organisations are harmful because they create the belief that the interests of one or the other community are distinct and separate from those of the rest. This belief prevents people from realising that the interests of one community cannot be promoted unless the interests of the entire nation are promoted. The organisations promoting these beliefs are called communal organisations. They, directly or indirectly, create and promote hatred against other communities and thus stand in the way of national unity. People belonging to a nation may profess different faiths, but they enjoy equal rights. One s religion is a matter of each citizen s personal belief and this belief should not be mixed up with political activities, because political activities of the citizen s of a nation relate to common problems of all the people constituting a nation’2.

Most of the earlier history textbooks written by renowned historians such as Romila Thapar and Bipen Chandra carry an anti-communal message and criticise not only the Muslim League, but also the Hindu Mahasabha for their communal leanings. History was taught in India in terms of a secular versus communal debate3.

However, with the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the ascendancy of the right-wing Hindutva rhetoric of the Rashtriya Swaymisevak Sangh (RSS), there was a distinct and clear move by the government to create a Hindu India in opposition to Muslim Pakistan. The RSS is an alternative site of the production of historical knowledge laced with a right wing nationalist and religious ideology. As the ideological mentor of the ruling BJP, the RSS supplies the 'history' that is permeating the knowledge system of the erstwhile secular State. A steady communalisation of education was attempted in a series of moves by the Human Development Resource Ministry, run by the former minister, Murli Manohar Joshi since 1998.

The Sangh Parivar (a combination of right-wing organisations that propagate Hindutva ideology including the BJP, Vishwa Hindu Parishad and RSS) relied upon history to redraw the ideological map of the nation and state. This was done at many levels including changes in the institutions engaged in the production of historical knowledge, changes in textbooks, and significantly by taking refuge in the socially acceptable idea of values education. The prime institutions for the production and dissemination of historical and social knowledge in India include the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR), the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), the Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR) and the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies (IIAS). The vacant posts in these institutions were filled with dubious names of people with known Hindutva sympathies rather than outstanding accomplishments in historical or social research4. The University Grants Commission (UGC) had similarly been filled with Hindutva sympathisers. This infiltration by the right wing Hindu nationalists was designed to ensure long-term continuity and relative permanence of these changes. In the past, the research positions in these prestigious institutions were filled by world-renowned and highly respected scholars and historians. The move to change this allowed the Hindu nationalists to get a firm grip on the institutional sites of the production of historical knowledge, and by extension, over the process and content of the knowledge construction. Apart from these changes, the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT), the prime institution of the production of textbooks, was filled by people belonging to the right wing nationalist camp. The BJP and its ideological partners thus ensured control over the institutions of production as well as distribution of the new knowledge of the Indian past. The latter move would ensure that the new version of the past constructed by the Hindutva camp would enter the massive state schooling system, which has a wide outreach.

The former government, with Joshi at the helm of educational planning, aimed to homogenise the sites of knowledge production and dissemination by ignoring the diversity and multiplicity of India's culture, politics, class, religious, regional and gender interests. For example, the Goa School Education Advisory Board, which has deep rooted saffron leanings and links with the Hindutva supporter, Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar, made the controversial decision to hand over 51 government primary schools in rural Goa to the RSS Vidhya Bharati Educational Trust. About 30 per cent of Goa's population is Christian and parents feel that this move provides the RSS a backdoor entry into primary education. The schools have been allocated to local bodies, which act as fronts for the RSS. The parents complain that Parrikar and his appointees to the Board are trying to 'inculcate fascist ideology under the guise of protecting Marathi'5. Knowledge forms existing on the periphery of Indian society, and outside the state system, are slowly but surely making inroads into the mainstream knowledge economy of the country. The multiple sites of the production of knowledge about the state and nation has been homogenised and the space for an alternative discourse narrowed.

In the year 2000, the NCERT produced the highly controversial National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCF), which radically redefined the educational agenda of the State. The BJP set about changing national curricula in favour of the newly-constructed vision of a Hindu Rashtra. Since Article 28 of the Indian Constitution disallows the teaching of religion in institutions receiving state funds, recourse was taken to value education. In the name of teaching 'indigenous' and 'Indian' values to students, religious knowledge was inserted into the curriculum. It was claimed that education was being Indianised, spiritualised and nationalised in order to provide children with a set of values governing existence. According to the authors, 'the education system of the country has to be built on the firm ground of its own philosophical, cultural and sociological tradition and must respond to its needs and aspirations. Indigenousness of the curriculum, therefore, is being strongly recommended'6.

The National Curriculum Framework for School Education sees religion as a major source of values. Lamenting the decline of values and growing cynicism in society, the authors underscore the importance of value education by differentiating between teaching religion and teaching about religion7. Although this seems to be a valid distinction since teaching about religions is a part of history and sociology, nevertheless in the context of the contemporary Saffron agenda, the dominant religion of the majority is likely to become the source of values for everyone. This in effect would mean that non-Hindu citizens would be subjected to the values and beliefs of the Hindutva versions of Hinduism. Additionally, teaching about religion necessarily includes the bad parts and the oppression that can result in the name of religion. As early as November 1998, the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh, led by Kalyan Singh decreed that Vanday Mataram and Saraswati Vandana (song of the Hindu goddess of learning) would be sung in government funded schools before beginning classes. This idea resulted in vigorous protests and was finally abandoned, and no specifically Hindu rituals were allowed in the UP state schools. It is hard to believe that the BJP government was not aware of the communal implications of such measures, given that there were widespread protests against the Wardha (Vidya Mandir) scheme, a basic education program in pre-partition India, which also introduced similar rituals.

The NCF was adopted without consulting the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE), a body comprising 104 members including experts and Union ministers. The standard practice in the past has been to consult the ministers of states since education in India is a concurrent subject. The vast diversity of cultures demands an input into national educational goals and practices. According to several academics and activists, the process of consultation was shrouded in mystery and secrecy.8 Mere circulation of the text was declared to be consultation by the NCERT. Through a pretense of consultation, the Saffron agenda of the then political dispensation could be declared to have been widely approved by academics and educationists. As a result of the lack of consultation, several states refused to bow down before the central government's ideological onslaught. In August 2001 the governments of nine states (Delhi, West Bengal, Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Nagaland, Karnataka, Pondicherry, and Chhattisgarh) signed a statement rejecting the National Curriculum Framework, arguing that it was a 'blueprint for lowering the quality of school education… and giving it a narrow exclusivist, sectarian and obscurantist orientation’9.

Simultaneously, a rewriting of history textbooks began with selective deletions, excisions and additions aimed at constructing 'facts' and 'truths' that conjure up a pure, glorious and great Hindu nation, and repressing knowledge, facts and ideas that do not fit into the re-imagining of the nation as Hindu. One of the first tasks of cultural nationalism is to invoke the idea of cultural superiority of the race. The claim to superiority relies on the notion of time, and if a civilisation can stake a claim to antiquity, it can base its claim for moral and cultural superiority on the basis of being older and more ancient. This was done by claiming that the Harappan civilisation was the same as the Vedic age, and that ancient Hindus were Aryans, and the latter an indigenous people of the land. There is a rejection of the notion that the Aryans were invaders who subjugated the Dravidians and tribals, the indigenous inhabitants of India. The idea that the Aryans were a superior race was appropriated by Hindu nationalists by arguing that the Saraswati-Sindhu civilisation was Vedic civilisation. The following are excerpts from the High School Itihaas Bhaag:

‘With the finds of bones of horses; their toys and yajna alters; scholars are beginning to believe that the people of Harappa and Vedic Civilisation were the same’10.

‘Aryan culture is the nucleus of Indian culture, and the Aryans were an indigenous race…the Aryans who were the builders of Bharatiya Sanskriti in Bharat and creators of the Vedas; this view is gaining strength among the scholars in the country that India itself was the original home of the Aryans’11.

Modern digital technology was deployed in the service of Hindutva ideology. According to Muralidharan, one of the new nominees to the Indian Council of Historical Research, N.S. Rajaram, an engineer from Bangalore, created the presence of a horse in the Harappan civilisation. The mythical unicorn on Harappan seals was digitally changed to look like a horse in order to prove that horses, usually associated with the Aryans, were indigenous to Vedic India12. Muralidharan further reveals that D.P. Sharma, Keeper in the National Museum, was grieved over the excision of certain sections of his book on Harappa, done with the intent to conform to Human Resource Development ministry's ideological slant. Deliberate and forced efforts were made to read the Harappan script from left to right to force fit it with the subsequently evolved Sanskrit script. This was a part of the effort to draw a direct line of descent between Harappan and Vedic civilisations akin to Rajaram's effort to engineer a horse image on a Harappan seal. The scholarly consensus on the script was that it was read right to left, but this was overlooked in the effort to weld the two civilisations into a unified whole13.

The Saraswati-Sindhu civilisation, that is, the Vedic Age in Hindutva discourse, was the Golden Age of Hindu culture. It was superior to all other cultures and civilisations which learned everything from it. India, according to the new history, was the oldest and greatest civilisation and the most ancient country in the world14. The first man on Earth was an Indian and the credit for lighting the lamp of culture in China goes to ancient Indians who were also the first to settle in Iran. Homer's Iliad was inspired by the Ramayan and the languages of native Americans, say the Hindutva historians, were derived from Indian languages. Jesus Christ himself roamed the Himalayas in search of Hindu wisdom from which he derived his ideas. The origin of Christianity is thus traced to ancient Hinduism. Textbooks filled with such 'facts' appear to conform to the objectives of the National Curriculum Framework according to which 'the school curriculum must inculcate and nurture a sense of pride in being an Indian through a conscious understanding of the growth of Indian civilisation and also contributions of India to the world civilisation and vice versa in thoughts and deeds'15.

Knowledge is stored in language whether written, visual or tactile. One of the ways to glorify an assumed golden and pristine past is to reclaim and preserve the language representing such a past. The National Curriculum Framework privileges the study of Sanskrit as the repository of a uniquely Hindu tradition and culture. According to the NCF, Sanskrit has a claim on the national system of education because it has been in India for thousands of years and 'is still inextricably linked with the life, rituals, ceremonies and festivals of vast Indian masses'16. However, the insidious way in which this was done led some university teachers to question the hiring of new Sanskrit teachers in the presence of the existing departments of Sanskrit at the Universities17. It was suspected that the University Grants Commission was hiring teachers of Hindutva persuasion in the guise of teaching Sanskrit. Reacting to an advertisement in August 2001 for hiring Sanskrit teachers without a transparent process, Uma Chakravarti and Kumkum Roy expressed the fear that teachers would be recruited from RSS cadres in the name of language teaching.

Although the study of ancient languages in which classical religious texts are represented, is by itself an innocent and even worthy endeavour, the accelerated Saffron agenda renders the whole enterprise suspicious. J. Sri Raman rightly argues that despite the fact that Sanskrit has come to symbolise a particular view of India's past and is juxtaposed to Urdu in a move mirroring Hindu nationalism with Muslim nationalism, its study should not be questioned simply because it has become part of a nefarious political agenda18. This is akin to the argument that it is not the rewriting of history that is by itself a problem. Nevertheless, it cannot be completely ruled out that the study of Sanskrit is likely to favour the privileged castes over the Shudras and Dalits who generally have less access to higher status knowledge. Rather, the real issue refers to the compulsions under which the rewriting is done. The issue really is: who is rewriting history, for whom and with what end in view? It is the politics of knowledge production and distribution that constitute the crux of the issue. Nonetheless, the renewed vigour with which Sanskrit is resurrected makes it one of the components of the Hinduisation and Saffronisation of education.

In order to construct the new 'reality' as essentially Hindu, mythology and history are collapsed into one and Ram and Krishna are transformed from mythical to historical figures. As historical 'realities', they have birthplaces and there are 'real' dates and 'facts' that prove their existence. According to one version of 'mythistory', Ram was born nine hundred thousand years ago. The RSS and VHP claim that 174000 Hindus were killed during the demolition of the Ram temple, and subsequently in 77 battles 350000 Hindus were killed. Patwardhan rightly argues that numbers tend to give a feeling of exactness and precision and therefore truth to the narratives19. In giving exact dates and providing exact numbers, a kind of positivist notion of 'truth' is created and the narrative, thus scientised, seems to reflect reality rather than myth.

As a way to underline the fact that ancient Indian civilisation was highly advanced, it is claimed that the classic Vedic texts had foreseen the development of the binary system, which underlies computers. Books published by RSS claim that Indians discovered America because there are images of Indian art in the Aztec temples, that the theory of Pythagoras finds mention in ancient Indian texts, that houses covered with cow dung can withstand atomic radiation and that the concept of binary numbers used by computers existed in the Hindu scriptures because the binary format is either 1 or 0 and the Upanishads say that all creation is a combination of existence (1) or non-existence (0)20. Ideology is so enmeshed and tangled with 'facts' and numbers and 'proofs' that it is hard for students to challenge the positivist spin on religious belief. The latter tendency was illustrated by an incident involving 500 Vedic Pundits practicing Transcendental Meditation (TM) in Vedic City, Jefferson County. The Pundits, who have been brought to Jefferson County from India by the Maharishi University of Management, argued in response to a controversy about the use of tax funds for non-secular purposes, and the consequent undermining of Church-State separation, that TM is different from religion, and is a practice based on ‘scientifically researched and verified methods’ to create peace21. In this rhetoric, scientific methodology, with its credibility and respect, becomes the vehicle for the transmission of barely disguised, religiously laced knowledge.

The intermingling of mythology, belief, fact and history is also discernible from the introduction of the dubious notions of Vedic Mathematics and Vedic Astrology at the school and university levels respectively. The National Curriculum Framework refers to Vedic Mathematics and Astrology, Ayurveda and Yoga as 'living phenomena relevant to the general life needs of the people of India' and to the global attention now accorded this knowledge!22 Superstition and obscurantism are here defined as the general life needs of the people of India, possibly because the government finds itself unable to provide basic rights such as food, clothing and shelter to its poverty-stricken people. Filling their minds with Astrology and Karmakanda become substitutes for filling their bellies, when the state is unwilling to deliver real needs. Respected Indian mathematicians argue that Vedic Mathematics is not mathematics, but simply a series of tricks to perform computations quickly and easily, a skill more relevant to recreation than serious study, and not required in the age of computers23. A series of Hindu rituals, mythology, beliefs and practices, not necessarily always derived from reliable sources, are being promoted in the name of value education and spirituality.

The politics of knowledge do not reside merely in its construction and distribution, but also in the silences, gaps, elisions and absences. What is not said goes as much into the making of knowledge, as what is said. The silences are felt by their very absence. The repressed knowledge periodically rears its head and irrepressible truth tends often to break into consciousness. It requires that much more expenditure of energy to be suppressed and subjugated again and again. The repressed consists of precisely that which does not fit into the hegemonic construction of the pure, singular, unified nation. It is not compatible with what is fabricated, and therefore sits uncomfortably on the landscape of social and cultural consciousness, like an outsider who also belongs to the self.

In Hindutva versions of the story of the nation, some facts are written out as much as others are forcibly written in. One of the most glaring examples of this kind of omission is the assassination of Mahatama Gandhi by Nathuram Godse, an RSS worker, and the fact that the RSS was banned for a few years following the murder of Gandhi. In a new textbook on contemporary India for Class XI, produced under the guidance of Joshi's Ministry, the assassination of Gandhi has been omitted. The reason given is that there is a need to lessen the burden on children and the history curriculum needs to be curtailed in order to meet space constraints. It was claimed that the font size did not allow this piece of information to fit into the textbook. However, as Amulya Ganguli rightly remarks, if the assassin had been a Muslim instead of a member of the Saffron brigade, no amount of space constraint or font size would have deterred the authors from expounding at length upon the incident24. The fact that Gandhi was murdered by a man who shared the worldview of Hindutva, is incompatible with the idea of a great Hindu nation, as conceived by the new alignment of political and social forces. The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) issued a directive that there should be no discussion on the deleted portions of the textbooks25. The silencing is not merely metaphorical, but is executed by direct command.

The construction of a pristine and golden period of Hinduism requires the suppression of knowledge that fractures the narrative of pure nationhood. In a Brahmanical world, ancient India, which is considered Hindu India, cannot be allowed to eat beef. Passages in textbooks that referred to beef eating in ancient India have been deleted to purify the picture of the pure nation, uncontaminated by beef-gorging Muslims. Scholarly works on the subject have been suppressed and Professor's D.N. Jha's book on beef eating in ancient India was banned. The Sangh Parivar has tried to establish that only the lower castes ate beef thereby rendering them impure and outside the pale of authentic nationhood. The reason given for this deletion was that the idea of beef eating among In his view, this idea homogenises the community overriding the differences that necessarily characterise all communities, and fixes the community within a singular religious identity. Communities have other identities that compete with the religious one and not all the members are necessarily offended. Rather, it is the upper caste politically motivated leaders who take umbrage. Furthermore, he argues that just because someone's sentiments may be injured, does not mean that sentiments are immune to rational judgment, evaluation and change. However, Rajeev Bhargava challenges the idea that knowledge should be subject to a community's sentiments26.

Another thing that does not fit into the re-imagined Hindu Rashtra is the presence of religious minorities. India is a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious society. However, the homogenisation of the state and citizen as Hindu makes it difficult to incorporate religiously different citizens into the reformulated nation. These outsiders within have to be exterminated physically or obliterated from the pages of history, as well as from the ideological landscape. If they are acknowledged at all it is as foreigners and invaders who do not belong, or as Golwalkar suggested, they must live in subordination to the real citizens who are Hindus. The new textbooks present Muslims only as conquerors and invaders, their other roles as traders, travellers and saints being written out of Hindutva versions of history. Presenting them as conquerors and marauders incites the sentiments of hate and revenge that are required for actions such as razing of the Babri Masjid and the Gujarat massacre of 2002. The following are some examples of how the 'others' of the Brahmin Hindu nation are constructed in books produced by the Sangh Parivar and used in the parallel education system run by right wing Hindu organisations:
‘Our land has always been seen with greedy eyes by the marauders, barbarous invaders and oppressive rulers. This story of invasion and resistance is our 3000 year long Gaurav Gatha’ (GG).

‘for our ancestors these marauders were like mosquitoes and flies who were crushed’ (p. 8 GG).

‘The preaching of ahimsa had weakened North India. Lakhs of foreigners came during these thousands of years…but they all suffered humiliating defeat….There were some whom we digested…when we were disunited, we failed to recognise who were our own and who were foreigners, then we were not able to digest them’. (Itihaas Ga Ra Hai, Class V, Shishu Mandir Schools)

‘Islam spread in India solely by way of the sword. The Muslims came to India ‘with the sword in one hand and the Qoran in the other’ ‘Numberless Hindus were forcibly converted to Islam on the point of the sword. This struggle for freedom became a religious war, Numerous sacrifices were made in the name of religion. We went on winning one battle after another. We did not let the foreign rulers settle down to rule, but we were not able to reconvert the separated brothers to Hinduism’. (Itithaas Ga Raha Hai)

‘Arabs (barbarians) came to convert people to their religion. Wherever they went, they had a sword in their hand. Their army went like a storm in all the four directions. Any country that came in their way was destroyed, Houses of prayers and universities were destroyed. Libraries were burnt..